The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

I didn’t bother to examine the room to see where the cameras might be. 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.

don’t actually value intelligence that much in a person. Intelligence can be artificial, but charm is always real,

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 didn’t want to cook dinner. I wanted to sit with the girls, and play with someone’s hair, and have someone play with mine.

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.

“The desert is cruel, but it’s beautiful.