Shymers (4 page)

“I take i
t
Shymer
s
aren’t welcome here?” I say to the girl.

Her eyes open even wider. “You mean you really don’t know? Haven’t you ever been in Society before?”

“Not since I was little,” I mumble in response.

I catch her gaze first questioning my hair, then my choice of clothing. I am dressed in the pink top my mother gave me for my sixteenth birthday and a pair of faded denim shorts. Just before entering the hallway, I had gathered my wild blond hair into a cluster behind my head to stay cool. Do I look unusual to her? Is that why everyone is watching me and whispering behind my back?

“I’m Bree,” she tells me brightly.

“I’m Olive,” I answer.

“Where is your first class?”

I tip my head to where the blondes stand. “There.”

Bree looks back to where the girls still whisper furiously. She laughs in her high voice and places her slender fingers on my arm. “Me, too. C’mon, I’ll walk you in. You’ll get used to it. Whatever you do, just don’t talk to them unless they ask you something.”

I frown at her. “Why?”

She shakes her head, a small grin playing on her lips. “You’ll just have to trust me. I will try to explain everything later.”

I follow her to the classroom, focusing on the tan sandals covering her small feet. They are well worn and the strap on one side is being held in place with a piece of brown string. I wonder what Bree’s story is. Could she possibly be one of those I had seen sleeping at the orphanage?

Like the hallway, everything in the room is white—the floors, the walls, even the dozens of metal chairs in the middle of the room. A row of small windows are covered with white fabric on the far wall. A majority of the chairs are already filled with students who gape at me as I trail behind Bree.

Others like Bree are easy to spot and seem to be well within the minority. A dozen boys and girls sit off to the side of the room, separated from the rest of the class by the only row of empty seats. Their clothing is simple and worn, similar to Bree’s. They all wear their hair long and loose around their faces—even the boys. Their expressions all reflect the same sad, hopeless look that morphs into something else the second they see me. Whether it’s rote interest or maybe even something hopeful, I can’t decide.

“Over here,” Bree calls to me quietly, putting enough pressure on my back that I follow her to where the misfits are seated. A few of them—boys and girls alike—throw me a terse smile. Bree and I sit just before a loud buzzer sounds. I am jolted by the strange noise while everyone around me is still.

When the instructor enters, the hum of conversation stops and everyone sits at attention. The woman is small and pretty, reminding me of my mother. Like the girls I saw in the hallway, however, she wears a heavy coloring on her eyelids that takes away from the natural beauty of her brown gaze. Her dark brown hair is bound tight to the back of her head and she wears a long, colorful skirt that flows around her ankles with a bright red blouse. She stands rigid in front of the class.

“Good morning, students.” Her light and airy voice echoes through the high ceilings. Her dialect is unlike anything I’ve heard. Taylor told me that in the old world, there was a time when people would come to our country from other places, hoping to find a better life. They would even try to sneak their families across the border and take low paying jobs with the goal of one day becoming a citizen. But as soon as it became necessary to know your DOD, they stopped coming.

Bree whispers my name. I turn to find her pushing on the screen of her tablet with her fingers and notice the others doing the same. I look down at my own tablet and tap my finger against the screen. Nothing happens.

From the corner of my eye, I catch some of the perfect students laughing and thrashing around in their seats. When I turn to face them, one of the girls points at me. Every single one of them—even the boys—is blond-haired and blue-eyed. They each have a perfect slope to their nose, full shape to their lips, and just the right angle to their jawline. The boys wear their hair short and neat while the girls have gathered their locks in different styles behind their heads. Overall, their similar appearance is jus
t
eeri
e
.

“Everyone, settle down,” the instructor commands. She faces the perfect blondes, as if our less desirable group is invisible. The blondes finally pull their attention away from me. Bree’s hand darts out to press a button on my tablet. It begins flashing words and pictures across the screen. Pages flip past in a blur until it finally settles on one. When I turn to thank Bree, she gives a small shake of her head.

The instructor continues to address the others the rest of the hour. We study the effects of global warming on the earth and how our land has evolved over the decades because of it. I already know some of this from the lessons with my parents.

There used to be a time in which frozen water would fall from the sky and people would all but freeze to death from cold temperatures. A lot of it could be traced to the burning of fossil fuels people once filled their cars with, before they ran strictly on electricity. Children would play in the white fluffy stuff they calle
d
sno
w
and take flat pieces of plastic to tumble down hills at quick speeds. Although the freezing cold part sounds a bit extreme, the relief from our unrelenting heat sounds wonderful.

Fortunately, the tablet does everything on its own. It changes pages and highlights certain phrases or pictures. After a few minutes pass I decide it is working in accordance to the instructor’s voice.

During the lesson, I steal glances at the other students in the room. The blondes have a slight bump just behind their ear where their communicators are lodged underneath their skin. In the old world there was something called
a
phon
e
that would allow people to type in a number on a device and talk to others from far away. When communicators were invented, the phones disappeared.

My parents each had a scar where their communicators had been, and we fled Society long before mine was to be installed at the age of ten. I fear I will stand out even more in this school for not having one.

Another loud buzzer rings, and I jump in my seat again. The perfect blondes laugh loudly at this, of course. Bree’s hand is suddenly under my arm, guiding me out of the classroom.

“What’s with the matching hair and eyes back there?” I ask once we are through the door. “Are they all related?”

A few of them pass us by in a rush, seeming to purposely allow their shoulders to roughly bump into me. When standing to watch them disappear into the crowd of others filling the hallway, I discover nearly everyone has a bright shade of blond hair. The hard, beautiful eyes all looking at me from perfectly symmetrical faces chills me.

Bree’s eyes narrow with her confusion. “You mean the Futures?”

An uneasy sensation settles in the pit of my stomach. Although I have not heard of people being calle
d
Future
s
o
r
Shymer
s
until now, I get the dreadful feeling that I know what they stand for. Still, I am not able to turn away from the similar faces as they come at us.

“Why do they all look the same?” I whisper.

“You mean you really don’t know?” When my face remains stoic, Bree lets out a sound that is a mixture of a sigh and a grunt. She removes the tablet from my hands and taps the screen with her finger a couple of times before handing it back to me. “Just leave your tablet on and it will do the rest. You have science next. I’ll walk you to your classroom—it’s on the way to mine. I’ll come get you for morning break and hopefully teach you a thing or two about this place.”

My insides twist with this unsettling reality I have been thrown into. Why Bree has decided to show me kindness, I don’t know, but I’m grateful. Maybe I have found someone who could someday be as good of a friend to me as Taylor had once been.

* * *

Behind the school, a wall of hulking wind turbines faces the building, turning in unison. They are majestic and striking to take in up close, something I had never done in the Free Lands. I had only seen the very tops of these machines from across the border when Taylor and I would spy on the guards.

Bree notices the way I stare at the white canopies that stretch overhead, covering most of the schoolyard. “The government declared the sun to be too intense for any human to take in directly,” she explains gently. “You have to stay under them.”

The afternoon air is insufferably warm and stale. For the most part, my body is used to such intolerable temperatures since it has been this way for as long as I can remember. But it’s even warmer here than in the forest where we had trees for cover, and I have yet to see any kind of plant or vegetation here. The sight of the sun at full strength is unsettling.

Bree continues leading me under the canopies with our trays of food in hand. “We eat out here and the Futures eat inside so we won’t disturb them.”

Shymers are spread out everywhere in different gatherings. Bree stops in front of a smaller group sitting in a lop-sided circle on the grass, picking at their meals. I recognize two of the girls from some of my lessons—one because of her unusual size. In general everyone at this school has fit bodies with toned muscle, like most of the people I have seen in my lifetime. But this girl is twice the size of anyone else. She appears to have more than one chin, and her stomach is swelled to the size to that of a woman expecting a child.

Four boys sit together off to the side. My eye catches the one who looks to be the oldest of the group, as he stands out from the rest as being exceptionally handsome. His soulful, deep blue eyes fall on me, causing a wave of a million butterflies to pass through the pit of my stomach.
 

Strangely enough, he looks more like the blondes with perfectly sculptured features and hair the color of white sand, although he wears his in a longer fashion like the rest of the Shymer boys. Unlike the others, however, he doesn’t smile back at me. He only watches quietly, his expression curious.

“Has everyone already met Olive?” Bree asks, motioning to me with a flick of her wrist. Most of them nod. She names off each of the other kids far too quickly for me to remember, although I do catch the name of the cute boy—Harrison. I don’t ask Bree to repeat the names as I am already overly aware of how they are all staring at me. My lips jerk into an exaggerated smile as my nerves get the better of me.

“So where did you come from?” the girl named Kai asks. She is very petite with a heart-shaped face and her dark black hair cut shorter in the back, unlike the others who wear their hair long all over. Something metal sticks out of her eyebrow and sparkles in the intense sunlight.

“The Free Lands,” I say.

One of the girls gasps at my answer.

Kai shifts her head to one side, studying me. “What would a Shymer be doing in the Free Lands? Are you sure you’re not a Rebel?”

“I’m not completely sure what a Shymer is,” I answer quietly.

They throw each other perplexed gazes. Will every answer I give surprise them?

Bree nudges me with her shoulder. “Shymers are kids with a DOD under eighteen.”

A quiet wince passes through me. In this world, people are treated differently according to how much time they have left to live. Throughout the day I began to suspect something was terribly wrong, but I didn’t know exactl
y
wha
t
. Seeing all the faces in this group an
d
knowin
g
none of them will live to see eighteen makes the knot coiled at the pit of my stomach stir even more. I haven’t asked Bree how old she is. She doesn’t look like she could be a day over fifteen. How much longer does she have?

My mother taught me about manners and what she calle
d
pryin
g
, but I don’t know any of the rules here. What is considered rude in Society? I don’t know what to say or do.

I try to swallow through the tight lump in my throat. “So all of you…yo
u
kno
w
? You’ve all been given your DOD already?”

“How could yo
u
no
t
know?” Kai asks with a bit of a smirk.

No matter how hard I try not to stare at Harrison, my eyes keep finding him. His head is tipped to the side and his eyes are narrowed as he watches me. Strangely enough, his gaze makes my toes tingle.

“Of course we know,” Bree answers. “Why do you think we’re all out here and not inside, eating lunch with the Futures?” Her voice is flat, as if the question doesn’t bother her.

Catching my breath, I look back at each of them. How can they just sit here and act casual through this conversation, like they’re not on any kind of timeline? How can they be okay with knowing every second of their life has already been accounted for? And why should they be treated any differently than the Futures?

Harrison’s eyebrows are drawn together into a deep crease. I want to ask about each of their DODs—especially his. Would they consider it offensive? These may be the only people I have a chance at forming a friendship with. I can’t risk making them angry.