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.

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

It is life in slow motion,

it’s the heart in reverse, it’s a hope-and-a-half: too much and too little at once. It’s a train that suddenly stops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and, leaning out the carriage door, we vainly contemplate a wind we feel that stirs the blooming meadows, the meadows made imaginary by this stop.

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.

I wanted to know that he wouldn’t grow bored and find someone else. I thought, in a brief moment of unease, about the trampoline that I had wanted so desperately as a child—that maddening, all-consuming desire to possess something that I didn’t have—and how quickly I had tired of it, how soon after I was looking for something new to covet.

Reality had become a slippery thing: I wasn’t certain on what part of my life I was an active part of, and what was a result of the machinations around me. But that, to me at least, felt no different from how it had been on the outside.

“It’s no worse than what’s out there! Is that what you want to go back to? Constantly living on the periphery of disaster, just waiting and waiting and waiting for it to finally reach us, doing stupid, dull work to pass the days until then? We’re safe here—we’re removed from all of it.” “It’s still there, Lily. It’s still happening. You think that because we can’t see it, it’s not going on?”