The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

I’ve always been a passive kind of person; it is both my worst quality and the thing that people like most about me.

“I like boys who are driven,” she said. “A man who knows himself. That’s what I want.”

There were several rules at the compound. The first was that it was forbidden to discuss that the show was in fact a show, or that we had seen the show before. It ruined the experience for the viewer and the participants, we had been told. The second was that we couldn’t discuss our life outside of the compound unless we had been instructed to do so. The third was that it was forbidden to harm another resident. There were other rules, but they wouldn’t come into effect until the boys arrived. We all understood that if we broke any of these rules we would be punished.

I more or less acted as I had on the outside—with the assumption that we were all being watched in some way or another.

Within minutes of speaking to the girls, I knew that I was one of the most beautiful, and one of the least interesting.

Intelligence can be artificial, but charm is always real, and Susie had that in spades.

I had already known the answer: it was the same every year. I only asked out of my old habit of prompting people to explain things to me even when I knew the answer. When I was a child, I found that it would make people more likely to want to help me, and it served me just as well as an adult.

They didn’t know beauty, these boys. They saw blurred outlines and thought they knew the picture.

I thought that we had lost some crucial bit of power, not from the act of being judged, but by showing that it meant something to us.

“I’m sorry, Becca,” Tom said, stony-faced and somber. Becca stared at him, taking great gulps of air. “I’ll say that you did it willingly. That way, you won’t be a target. Otherwise, they’ll pick you out as the weak one.”

I HAAAAAATE HIM

When I glanced up, I was startled to see Tom back in his seat.

Ew ew ew ew ew

What did it matter to wake up at the same time every morning and wear the same clothes and try to eat more protein but less sugar, when an earthquake or a tsunami or a bomb might end it all at any minute? Or maybe we would all continue to boil, slowly but surely, in the mess that we pretended was an acceptable place to live.

How can you go on living like this? Pretending that everything is okay?” “Isn’t that what we were doing before, on the outside?” “But on the outside it was real! It mattered what we did—we weren’t just…entertainment! There’s no point,” he said. “No point in being here.”

He put his arm around Becca’s shoulders and walked her out of the room. There was no time for a goodbye, though I wasn’t sure if she would have wanted one.

Hey this was crazy