First to Dance (2 page)

“What
do you suppose it was like here a thousand years ago?”  Ayita asked them.

Her father almost choked on his food.
He looked nervous. Her mother smirked, and almost laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t alive then.”

“Why don’t we learn about that stuff in class?”

“Why would we want to?” Taya scoffed. She was about to say something hurtful, but her husband interrupted before she could continue.

“I think it’s a fair question,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t
have an answer I can give you.”

After that, Ayita’s parents stopped talking and there were several minutes of silence before
Taya restarted their previous conversation. Ayita kindly excused herself.

As she stood from her chair
, the power went out and the entire house was completely black.  Ayita opened the front door to let in some light until the power came back on.  The doors of neighboring homes were being opened as well. She thought again about the houses on Earth and how they had windows.
It makes so much more sense,
she thought, but she didn’t tell anyone. She stood in the doorway awhile, admiring the deep blue of the sky and all the bright stars speckled across it.  Was it really so hard to believe that there might be something else out there? A faint noise came from the distance and Ayita stepped closer to watch as a small round object, probably miles away, made its way to the stars.  Her parents were soon standing behind her, and they all watched the distant sphere shrink as it sped away until it was no longer visible.

“What was it?” Ayita asked, knowing they couldn't tell her.  Her parents looked to one another.

“I don’t know,” said her mother.  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

2

Ayita walked in and sat down just before class started.  Something seemed different about the room this morning, and it took her a moment to realize that one girl wasn’t there.  Everyone was silent, and the empty chair stuck out as a sore reminder to all of them. All it took were a few repeated mistakes, and any of them might be next to drop out.  Their class of hundreds slowly became the twenty-seven that were now left, and no one wanted to be the student who made that number twenty-six.

The sound of the door captured their attention, and their instructor entered the room to sit at the long gray desk beside the door.  “Section one
begin,” she said.

Ayita opened the book in front of her and started to read.  For two
hours she read fact after fact.  Ayita was silent and focused as she read.  The entire room was silent.  Silence was key to learning, they said.  It was the first fact in every book.  The objective was to memorize every fact.  There were no presentations, and no class discussions. Hands weren’t raised, questions weren’t asked, and the instructor’s only interaction with her room full of students was to tell them when to start reading, and when to stop.

Today’s lesson was
broken up into two units. The first unit was on partial fraction integration and the second unit had to do with applying the laws of thermodynamics in regards to thermal equilibrium between multiple objects. Ayita breezed through the lesson, quickly memorizing it all as she went and then turned the ideas over in her head until she was sure she understood them.

The reading period lasted two hours, and then the instructor stated loudly,
“Section one complete.  Close your books and proceed to the exam room.”  The students all stood simultaneously and walked single file into the adjacent room.  There were computers along each wall, and Ayita sat at the one assigned to her.  The test started, and she had thirty minutes to finish. Each test was a combination of word-for-word memory, comprehension, and application.

O
nly one mistake on the test was permissible.  Two or more mistakes meant a repeat of the section and the test retaken that same day.  The students could take the section up to four times, but after failing the same section a fourth time one was asked not to come to class anymore. After dropping out, students were assigned a job, and when they were old enough, a spouse and home according to their job district. Five or six years ago, dropping out for Ayita would have meant working in the fields or delivering the weekly grocery boxes to each household. Now it would mean a hands-on internship leading to a more high-profile and envied position in a wealthy district, such as where she lived now. If she made it through the next three years in class she could eventually receive a top position in government or be on the committee that decided which facts were taught to the people and when. In a way, Ayita was as afraid of success as she was of failure. The better she did, the more eyes there would be on her, but at the same time, she would have a better platform to possibly make some changes. Ayita didn’t have to worry about failure, though, because she passed every test on the first try.

Ayita stepped out of class and started walking home. She went straight ahead after leaving the school building, which sat between the wealthier half of town and the poorer half. Money wasn’t really a concept for the people on Zozeis, but those who lived in the wealthy district had nicer houses and received nicer clothes. Their part of town was surrounded on three sides by forest, with the school building acting as a fourth wall along the south border. Down past the school building was the poorer half of town, and everything else: the hospital, the farms, the government buildings, the cotton mill, and a handful of office buildings where various other jobs were performed. Ayita’s father worked in one of the office buildings. It was his job to oversee the production and maintenance of the town’s solar panels and electrical lines.

Moving
down past the school building and heading westward around the forest, one would eventually come to that place which no one spoke of: the secondary school. The forest was much thinner on the western side, but very thick on the east. It was said that many people trying to avoid their fate at the secondary school had run through the forest eastward to hide, but it seemed they were always caught at some point after coming back near town, presumably to steal food. It was assumed that they ran away and found nothing, so they had to come back to survive.

Ayita walked up the street to her home. She washed that morning’s dishes, started a load of laundry and ate a quick lunch. Then she went straight downstairs to the cellar, as she’d done every day now for several weeks since discovering the books.
She moved the stack of boxes in the corner toward the center of the wall, revealing the door.  Other people couldn’t see it, but she could.  Her parents must have looked at this wall ten thousand times, but somehow they didn’t seem to notice the small crease in the paint where the wall opened.  It was easy for them to overlook, but Ayita knew early on that this wall held a secret. Her imagination wouldn't allow her to ignore the subtle signs.

Behind the door was a thin crawlspace, and through there a slightly wider room with an old black curtain that had tinged gray over the years.  There was
enough space for her to lie down comfortably, and Ayita fell asleep in the room a few times, on days when she was more careless.  Thankfully, curiosity was rare, and her parents never asked what she did in all her spare time between class and dinner. 

One wall
of the hidden room was bare, but three of the walls were covered in bookshelves from floor to ceiling, all containing books about the mysterious and distant planet Earth.  Ayita frequently wondered where they came from and why they were here.  They were books that Aira would tell her were books of lies.  Anyone who saw them would say that, but Ayita wondered if perhaps these were the only books of truth. She doubted many of the facts she read in class. She memorized them, but she doubted them.

M
any of the books had brittle pages that were difficult to handle without them tearing, but some were still in good enough condition that she could read them with ease. Ayita wondered how old the books were, but the dates in them meant nothing to her. Years weren’t numbered on Zozeis, but were tracked instead by the alphabetical naming of children.

Ayita
reached for one of the larger books on the shelf, which so far she found to be the most intriguing. On the front cover it read, “
Intro to Psychology
.”  She set it open on her lap and resumed reading where she’d left off the day before.  This book challenged everything she was taught to believe about humanity, and for that she was captivated. Specifically, the chapters on learning cast doubts in her mind about what she learned in class. “Silence is the key to learning,” they said, but according to this book people could be auditory learners. She wondered briefly how many students had dropped out of class because reading in silence didn’t fit their natural learning style. Would they still be succeeding if the lessons were taught in a different manner?

Ayita paged through
the book awhile, looking most at the pictures and diagrams.  There was a photograph of a classroom on Earth, and the students were looking forward at their instructor instead of down at their books. Two of the students had their hands raised high above their heads.  A second picture showed a young student painting at an easel. She wondered why there weren’t pictures anymore, why there weren’t paintings, or drawings.  She wondered why it was that no one here seemed to have any desire to do such things.  Ayita briefly pondered her ability to create a picture, and then remembered that somewhere they had several paint cans which were originally used to paint their home. 

Ayita set the book down and shut off the light, leaving the crawlspace.  After closing the doorway she started opening
and moving the boxes on the basement floor, digging through them, looking for the old paint cans.  She finally found them in a corner behind a box of old shoes. She studied them for a moment in silent admiration. These paint cans had been purchased for humble and lowly uses, but they were filled with a potential for greatness.

The sea-foam green was once used to paint their bathroom. The light blue and dark blue were used in her parent’s bedroom: light blue for the walls and dark blue for the baseboards and door frame. A cheerful yellow was used to paint their living room and hallway walls.
Red and black were used on the old storage shed outside. Lastly, there was the dull white paint used for Ayita’s bedroom and the kitchen.

Alone, they made plain-looking walls
of one color or another, but together, they could make portraits and murals of magnificent design. Ayita wondered what these paints might have been used for if they were in the hands of a great artist from Earth. She brought all of them into her secret room and started to experiment by finger-painting on the one wall that had no bookshelves. Soon she was laughing, and crying, smiling, and sighing. She felt immense pleasure and joy in painting an image with her fingertips, and yet, she had no one to share this joy with. She wished that Aira could be here, smiling and painting along beside her. Maybe someday she would be.

When Ayita was finished, she studied her painting for a long time. It was plain to see that this was her first attempt at creating a picture, but to her it was an original masterpiece. She’d painted a large window, outlined in black, and through the window there were painted hills and a deep blue lake. The sun shone in the sky, and in the distance was a small green and blue sphere—the planet Earth. All that was missing was a woman to dance on the hills and swim in the sea
—a woman to fly back and forth to Earth, leaving with questions and returning with answers. But Ayita didn’t think she could paint such a woman.

Ayita rushed upstairs to wash her hands and change her clothes before her parents returned home.
She smiled at the rainbow of colored water that flowed down the drain as she gently scrubbed her fingers clean, and looked lovingly at the dots of paint that speckled her cotton pants. She looked in the mirror and saw a happy face smiling back. She didn’t think she’d ever seen herself so happy. Ayita took a moment to memorize the way her face looked. She wanted to see that look again. With her hands clean, she put on a fresh pair of pants and walked briskly to the kitchen to set the table. Her parents walked through the door just at that moment, and she smiled at them.

Her father returned her smile,
then asked her, as always, “How many sections today?”

“
Only one,” she said.

“Of course,
” he responded. He nodded his head and his smile widened a bit. He was so proud of her.  She never failed to be perfect. She was everything anyone would want in a daughter, he thought. He asked her this question every day, already knowing the answer, but still asking because it was the one piece of joy he could always count on.  He wanted to give her a hug. He even wanted to cry a little bit, he was so happy, but he never did.  He simply smiled at her and then silently helped prepare dinner.