To Ed Tristan and Everyone Else Who Ruined My Life.

By:  Alex, 7^th grade

I never forgot. I am eighty-five years old and cannot even begin to forget the twelve years I spent at drill camp. My name is Natalie Sherman, and I was one of them. One of the children you destroyed because of your evil, selfish ways.

If there was one thing I learned from your ‘camp’, it was not to become attached to anything, for before you know it, it’ll be gone. That happened to me, on more than one occasion. The first time was when my best friend Eleanor died of pneumonia one winter. The second was when the only person that meant more to me than Eleanor, our teacher, Miss Brunswick, was taken away. I would like to relay to you exactly what happened when the person who had been like a mother to every single child in that camp was snatched away from us all, and tell you how we all felt, and the most I can do is hope in the very least that it makes as much an impact on your life as it has on mine.

I remember the camp, exactly what it looked like, cursed as I am with this photographic memory. Its gray walls displayed the words ‘drill camp’ in big, bold, black letters, a constant reminder of where I was. No one smiled, no one laughed. Big guards swarmed the place, carrying guns. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot if they caught you somewhere where you weren’t supposed to be.

The place was filled with a stiff sort of sadness, and it was constantly cold. No one ever bothered to light a fire, and loads of people got pneumonia and died every winter. No one had even a faint memory of life outside, having been pulled out of orphanages around the country at two, the oldest they would take, and it showed.

Everyone marched around in boring uniforms that exactly matched the gray walls. Four hundred boys, four hundred girls, all organized and referred to by the numbers sewn on the uniform sleeves. We were taught to be quiet, aggressive, and fiercely loyal to Commander Tristan and the staff.

The only escape from this was one hour a day, in the only place that had color, the only place that was warm. The classroom, with its bright-green walls. That’s where we learned everything that didn’t have to do with warfare. And the teacher, Miss Brunswick. She was the only person who really cared about us.

It was in the classroom where my story begins. It was in the classroom where we first learned about the Plan. Both of them.

Miss Brunswick leaned out the door, and slammed it shut very tightly. Everyone was quiet. Miss Brunswick only shut the door when there was something that Contradicted the ways of the Commander that she had to tell us.

“Boys and girls,” she said very softly, “there is something I have to tell you.”

We all leaned in close.

“You may not know where you will be going after you finish the drill camp,” she said. Everyone nodded.

“I have been told not to tell you, but it is too urgent.”

I started to feel extremely uncomfortable. This was bad.

“After you complete the camp, they plan to sell you to the national military for a very high price. None of you stand a chance, and I am willing to bet that you wouldn’t last five minutes in a real conflict.”

The room went deadly silent.

“Yet, I have a plan of my own. Every time the moon cycles to the new moon phase, I will be smuggling one of you out of here. I will have to take you to one of the other orphanages that don’t supply the camp, yet you will be far away from this place. And this entire plan relies on your silence. I want you all to swear to me that you won’t breathe a word to anybody about this, most especially the guards and the Commander.”

“But all of us have grown up here. I don’t see why we should leave.” A boy’s voice came from directly behind me. We all looked at him.

“Julius, do you understand what I am saying?”

Miss Brunswick was sounding urgent and desperate now. “They have been raising you like pigs for slaughter. They have been ensuring your deaths each and every day you remain here!”

Julius was quiet.

“So, what do you all think about my plan?”

Slowly, people started to nod. I looked to my left, at the empty seat that had once been filled by Eleanor, and I agreed.

A year went by. Fourteen people were gone, and Miss Brunswick’s plan was working beautifully. The guards and Commander Tristan got angrier and angrier with each disappearance. No one’s quarters went unsearched, no one went unquestioned. No one thought to suspect Miss Brunswick.

It kept us going, that Plan did. We all knew that one day, we would be gone too, gone from all of this.

Until the night it all ended. The night she got caught.

I lay awake that night, unable to sleep on the rocky bed. I saw a dark figure tiptoe past the sleeping guards, slink to the boys’ half of the dormitory. I knew it was Miss Brunswick. I recognized the figure of a boy named Zacharias following her out again. Suddenly, a light flared on, revealing Zacharias and Miss Brunswick standing next to the door. One girl screamed.

The guards snatched them and hauled them both roughly out of the room. A silence followed. No one moved, until one of the very little children started to cry. They hadn’t really bothered to turn off the lights, so I looked around.  Every face I saw was traced with fear.

“Will Miss Brunswick be okay?” squeaked one of the younger girls. I gathered her into my lap.

“Yes, she’ll be alright,” I murmured softly into her ear. “She’ll be back soon, I’m sure of it.”

Though, I didn’t know how much of that was true.

Miss Brunswick wasn’t back the next day, or the next week. There were no classes for anybody. Twelve hours away from the warmth and light of the classroom suddenly seemed colder.

Several kids in my level were starting to get scared. Zacharias hadn’t come back, and it had already been a week. Rumors were starting to fly, rumors that Zacharias was at the detention center.

Another three days after the incident, it turned out that there was someone who actually knew where Miss Brunswick and Zacharias were. Guard 402, the short, squat man who kept watch over the dormitory, knew. So during the free hour we now all had, we gathered in little bunches around the door, while Guard 402 told us what he knew.

“Please, sir, please tell us!” I pleaded.

“No. It ain’t your business and it never will be.”

He didn’t want to tell us, apparently. It was only after a significant amount of begging from a few of us did he give in.

“Alright, this here’s only what I know,” he said, “so don’t go telling people I told you, ‘specially not Commander Tristan.”

We all nodded.
“On June the second, Mariah was caught sneaking into the dormitory to kidnap a boy whose name was Zacharias, if I’m not mistaken, who was immediately transported to the detention center. The Night Patrol apprehended her at twelve-hundred hours, fourteen minutes.”

“Mariah?” a voice called from the middle of the room. We’d never heard of a Mariah before.

“Miss Brunswick to you,” he replied.

“Where is she? And why do you talk about Zacharias in the past tense?” I asked. I knew I wasn’t allowed to ask questions unless an adult allowed me to, and absolutely no one was allowed to interrupt an adult, but the question just spilled from my mouth before I could stop it. And, now that I thought about it, that was a particularly disrespectful question.

“Impertinent,” he muttered, “but oh well. Mariah has been sent to the labor camp. And I did not mean to say ‘was’.”

“Miss Brunswick got sent to the labor camp?”

Julius was behind me. His face was white, and I knew why.

“Yes, Julius, Mariah is at the labor camp.”

“They can’t have done!” I exclaimed angrily. Then I realized that was absolutely Contradicting, and that in itself was enough to get me sent to the detention center.

“They can, Nat, and they have.”

The labor camp… Ever since I had been four years old, I remembered hearing horrible rumors about that place. It was said to be worse than the detention center, which was pretty bad, and no one ever came back from it.

“Can she- will she come back?” I asked.

Guard 402 stroked his beard thoughtfully.

“It cannot be said yet, Nat,” he said. I thought I could detect a hint of pity in his voice. “I daresay you will have your teacher back after a couple of months.”

“Months? She’ll be dead if they keep her there for a couple of months!” I was shouting now. I didn’t mean to shout, but it just sort of happened. Then I remembered that shouting at an adult was pretty much illegal here.

“Nat, I must ask you to keep your voice down.”

I shut my mouth immediately. Guard 402 was always the fastest to report us to the Commander the second we broke a rule, but so far I had blasted half a dozen rules into piece and he hadn’t done a thing. Odd.

“I know you all are worried, but don’t. Mariah will return to you perfectly fine.”

We found him hard to believe when his own voice was edged clearly with worry.

At that moment, the dinner bell rang, and Guard 402 slipped back into his usual behavior.

“Alright, you nosy kids, get in line!” he said sharply, and we did so immediately. I was still really scared, but there wasn’t time to be scared if Miss Brunswick really was at the labor camp.

Julius looked just as frightened as me, maybe more. He kept asking me if Miss Brunswick was going to be okay, and I kept telling him that I didn’t know. I was starting to get suspicious. Finally, one day, I asked him.

“Julius, why are you so anxious?”

He didn’t say anything, just became very interested in the fingernails of his left hand. I gasped softly.

“You told Commander Tristan?”

He nodded sadly.

“Nat, oh, I’m sorry now that I did it, I was just scared. If they had found out we were involved, we would’ve been in so much trouble, all of us.” Julius looked sincerely sorry.

“That’s understandable,” I told him, “but someday, you were going to be the one she was sneaking out, and I was too. Everyone would eventually be gone.”

“I didn’t know exactly how much trouble she’d be in, and Zacharias… oh, man, the detention center. Nat, what was I thinking?”

I shook my head. “It’ll be okay, Julius. You were scared. It’s understandable, and I’m sure Miss Brunswick and Zacharias will forgive you.”

“That’s the trouble. I don’t know if they’re going to make it.” He started to sniffle.

“Nat! Julius! Break it up over there!” a guard yelled at us. He came over. “I been yelling for the past three minutes.”

I immediately started to apologize.

“Shut it,” he said, and drew back his fist. Before I knew it, my left eye was swelling. I quickly moved away from Julius.

The next day, I talked to Guard 402 in our free hour. I talked him into leaving the window open. I told him that I was going to make an attempt to rescue Zacharias and Miss Brunswick, and he agreed wholeheartedly.

At sundown, when we went to bed, I didn’t go to sleep like I usually did. Instead, I waited half an hour, and then climbed slowly out of bed. I tiptoed to the window, climbed out, and hit the ground below. Then I was running, faster than I’d ever run in a drill, faster than I could ever remember running. I sprinted away from the big, shadowy building, down the street to the harbor.

The signs directed me to go northeast. I did so. There was the labor camp, a big field with dead grass covering it, and a building standing in the middle. I didn’t want to chance going in right now, so I huddled in a nearby bush to wait.

When morning came, hordes of people swarmed out of the building. I couldn’t see Miss Brunswick yet, but I decided to sneak out of the bushes. I was tall for my age, so I blended in easily with all the adults.

“Nat!”

A familiar voice cut through the still morning air, and reached my ears. I turned to see Miss Brunswick running toward me from the large crowd of people. I took in her tall, pinched figure and her face, covered in bloody gashes and dirt.

“Nat, what on earth-” she gasped.

I cut across her.  “Trying to rescue you.”

Miss Brunswick looked horrified at the thought. “Nat, do you know exactly how much trouble you’ll be in if you’re caught?”

I nodded. “You risked more than that, everything, for us. It’s the least I could do. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? I’ll just get sent to the detention center, and even that’s not that bad, is it?”

Miss Brunswick shook her head. “Nat, dear, the stories they tell about the detention center aren’t true at all. There isn’t one. Zacharias, well, he’s dead. They shot him a couple of days ago. That’s why no one ever comes back.”

I knew what she was thinking. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “You tried to save us. That’s what matters. And you were like a mother to every single child I knew. They all loved you. I have to get you back to us. They’re going to kill you here, and we can’t let that happen.”

She looked at me, and I could see tears dripping down her face.

“Thank you for saying so, Nat,” she said. “How did you know where I was?”

“Guard 402 told us. He told us all.”

Miss Brunswick nodded. “Nat, you have to be very careful. The guards are perfectly willing, more than willing, to shoot if they see you. They’ve done it before. Poor Zacharias.”

I tugged at her hand. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I told her urgently. “There’s a back entrance we can use.”

Miss Brunswick didn’t hesitate to follow. I could only reason that she was too glad to get away.

We stopped halfway between the drill camp and the labor camp, at a little cave I had picked out.

“In here.”

We ducked inside the low entrance of the cave, and I lit a fire. Miss Brunswick warmed her hands by it, and I could see that they also were covered in bloody, half-healed cuts and dirt.

“You look horrible,” I told her. “What have they been doing?”

“Oh, you mean this? Never mind me, that’s nothing. But look at you, Nat.”

My hand self-consciously found the swollen eye.

“It’s not bad at all.”

Miss Brunswick had carefully replaced her hands in her lap, trying hard not to let me see them. But I did, and I winced.

“You’re sure that you’re fine?” I asked, and she nodded her head quite firmly. So I dropped the subject.

It wasn’t long before people came looking for us. We evacuated the cave as quickly as was possible, and started walking hills and the countryside, trying to find someplace to spend each night. Miss Brunswick was in charge of finding the place, and I was designated to disguise us while we were there. I saw how real people lived. I saw how life was away from camp, and was amazed by how rambunctious the children were; how healthy they all looked. Not a single person we came across had that lingering, haunted look in their eyes that years at a drill camp could leave you with.

Miss Brunswick was guiding us further and further from town. I didn’t question her guidance at first, but after a few days of going in the completely wrong direction, I asked.

“Why aren’t we going back into town?” I asked. “The camp is that way.” I pointed over my shoulder up the bank.

Miss Brunswick didn’t answer right away. “We aren’t going to go back,” she said simply.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not going back.”

I shrugged. “We can’t go back… or we won’t?”

This time, she didn’t answer at all.

After a little while, we were running out of places to stay. There was a five-state alarm out for the two escaped tenants of the drill and labor camps, and we dared not show our faces in any houses, for fear of being reported. Miss Brunswick was starting to show some strain. A limp that I hadn’t seen before was starting to become more and more pronounced. I was worried. Yet, the entire time, she was only worried about me.

We were crossing into the woods one night when something horrible happened. I was walking as quietly as I could behind Miss Brunswick, carefully picking my way around the dead leaves on the ground. The woods nearby looked dark and deserted. We planned on spending a couple of days in them.

As we reached the first tree, I heard a faint rustle. I grabbed Miss Brunswick’s hand as an alarm, and she stopped. Then I heard a twig snap, and started to back slowly out of the woods. Miss Brunswick shook her head, holding a finger to her lips. We both stayed perfectly still, and then it happened. A light flared, illuminating us. It was a pair of police officers. Just our luck. Miss Brunswick straightened up, and jerked her head forward.

“Nat, stay behind me,” she whispered, so softly I could barely hear her. I started to move slightly backwards, and the man holding the light yelled,

“Don’t move!”

Now that I had looked properly, I could see he had a gun, and was pointing it straight at us. I stopped and raised my hands in the air.

“Good.” The two policemen moved quickly towards us. The one with the light grabbed Miss Brunswick’s arm, and motioned with his free hand. Soon we were surrounded by ten guards. They had circled around me. Apparently I wasn’t much of a threat. Now two people had hold of Miss Brunswick. She wasn’t struggling at all. They started to try and lead her towards a wagon they had waiting. The eight people surrounding me started to push me forward too. Suddenly, as still more jumped out of the wagon, Miss Brunswick made her move. She kicked one of the men holding her to the ground, and wrenched her arm out of the other’s grasp. Then she bolted towards me. Half the people had gone to help the injured man, and the other half simply ran back to the wagon. I followed my teacher deeper and deeper into the woods.

We weren’t ambushed by anyone else again. I felt like we were lucky to have escaped, but Miss Brunswick waved the feat off.

“It was them that were lucky,” she said.

“How so?”

“They were lucky more of them weren’t injured.”

I laughed at that, for the first time in years. It felt good to be able to laugh freely, though we weren’t out of trouble yet. Far from it. Miss Brunswick managed a smile.

“I know it’s funny, Nat, but I don’t think we should celebrate until we’ve shaken everyone off,” she said. Though I knew she probably hadn’t smiled in awhile either.

Neither of us smiled or laughed for awhile after that. I was accustomed to the dull stiffness that commonly settled over a conversation, but Miss Brunswick, I knew, hadn’t grown up in a place that practically forbade happiness.

One day, we stopped after jumping a fence. Miss Brunswick didn’t seem very athletic, but she was good at getting over--or under-- fences if necessary. That particular fence was a barbed-wire fence, but Miss Brunswick motioned for me to help her dig under it, and we crawled through the hole. I got a lot of dirt in my hair, but it was already filled with mud anyway.

“We stop here,” she said. I looked around, bewildered. This wasn’t the Department of Child Protection. This wasn’t the Department of Military Services. In fact, this didn’t look like a Department at all. It was a field. A big, empty field.

“Uh, Miss Brunswick,” I said, “I’m thrilled that we’re out of trouble, but this doesn’t look like a very secure place.”

Miss Brunswick smiled, a real one this time. “Exactly! There’s almost no one to chase us here.”

I figured that Miss Brunswick was probably going nuts, but I followed her down a steep hill anyway. She led me through the field in a zigzag pattern, “just in case.” We frequently stopped and ducked behind shrubs or trees, as if someone were following us. I was getting so sick and tired of running away from everyone and everything as if they were threats, which of course they were, but I didn’t say anything.

“Here we are!” she said after three long days and three long nights walking across flat terrain. We had arrived at a small brick building that was bright and colorful, bearing the words POLICE STATION across the side in big green letters.

“Are we going inside?” I asked. Miss Brunswick nodded.

“And you’re certain it’s safe to?”

She shrugged at this. “It’s a bit of a gamble, well, more than a bit,” she added when she saw my surprised face, “but it’s one we’ll have to take.”

And as I held my breath, she reached up, and rang the bell. A grumpy-looking police officer inside motioned for us to come in without paying any attention to who it was. Once we had gone through the glass door, he looked up and scrambled as fast as he could toward the phone on his desk.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Miss Brunswick said in her quietest, gentlest tone. “Please just listen to what we have to say.”

The man didn’t respond, so Miss Brunswick told our story.

“…so we’re here now, and we need help,” she finished. “Both of us need medical assistance.”

I nodded when she said this, though it was suddenly an enormous effort, as my head felt like it weighed forty pounds. The office was spinning, blue walls whirling around me. I fell to the floor, and everything went black.

I woke up in the warmest, softest bed I’d ever been in, covered by the warmest blanket I’d ever seen. I sat up, and pushed the blanket away. The bed was in an unfamiliar room with white, sparkling clean walls and floor. I made to get out of bed, and a nurse wearing a starched white uniform hurried over to me.

“What is it, sweetie?” she asked, in a tone that wasn’t quite the sticky-sweet voice that irritated adults generally adopted when annoying children were around.

“Where’s Miss Brunswick?” I asked in a panic. “Got to find Miss Brunswick, got to find Miss Brunswick…”

The nurse looked concerned.

“It’s okay, hon, we’ve got Miss Brunswick. She’ll be fine. Now you just lie down and rest. You still need some sleep.”

I did lie down. Then I realized just how tired I still was. She pulled that cozy, warm blanket over me again, and I closed my eyes.

When I woke up again, that nurse was still there. “Feeling better, hon?” she asked.  I nodded.

“Is Miss Brunswick okay?” I asked after a minute. “Can I see her?”

“No, hon, you can’t see her just yet. Don’t you worry about her. You’re not supposed to leave this bed until you’re one hundred percent better, and that’s a ways off.”

I felt very confused.  Why was Miss Brunswick in the hospital too? I had deduced enough in my two very long naps that that was where we both were. I questioned the nurse about this before she left.

“Hon, I really don’t know why she’s here,” she answered. I was certain it was one of those answers adults give children when they don’t want them to worry. I tried to ask her again later, but she wouldn’t answer me, pretending she hadn’t heard what I had said.

After a few hours, a doctor wearing a long white coat walked in. He sat down on the bed.

“Good afternoon, Natalie,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“I feel just fine,” I said grumpily. “I just want to know why Miss Brunswick is in the hospital too.”

The doctor wasn’t at all like the nurse. He said slowly,

“Natalie, your teacher is being treated for malnutrition and a broken ankle. I daresay you’ll be able to see her soon. Very soon.”

It was as if he had read my mind. I was suddenly much happier than I had been before, and answered his following questions with enthusiasm.

I got out of the hospital before Miss Brunswick did. When I asked why, everyone told me,

“Because your teacher walked four hundred miles and climbed fences and trees and goodness knows what else with a broken ankle.”

“But I walked four hundred miles and climbed fences and trees and everything else too.”

And then everyone always said, in that sticky-sweet voice, “There’s no denying that you did, sweetie, but Miss Brunswick had a broken ankle. So, it makes sense that she’s going to have to stay here for a little while longer, right?”

They didn’t mention the fact that neither of us had eaten on our entire journey, which had lasted three weeks. I knew that had factored in somewhere, and that she was probably very sick and they weren’t telling me.

“Can I at least see her before I go?” I asked pleadingly.

“Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt,” the doctor said.

When I was escorted down the hall to Miss Brunswick’s room, the platoon of doctors and nurses surrounding me were whispering amongst themselves. They thought I couldn’t hear them, but twelve years in drill camp had given me superb hearing skills that they weren’t aware of.

“…not sure this is such a good idea…”

“…might upset her all over again…”

“…not when she’s so delicate…”

Stuff like that. I kept an open mind, thinking that I was going to see Miss Brunswick again. The whispering stopped abruptly when we reached the closed door. The nurse leading the group went up, knocked on it, and pushed the knob. The door swung into the room. They nudged me forward.

“Visitor for you, Mariah,” the first nurse said too cheerfully. I looked around the room, and saw a bed against the wall. And there was Miss Brunswick, sitting on the bed reading. One of her legs was encased in bright green plaster. I smiled weakly.

“Nat?” she said, adopting a tone of disbelief. “Are you feeling better?”

She looked better than when I had last seen her. Not nearly as unhealthily thin now, and much happier.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” I said. “How are you?”

“Better, thank you, dear,” she replied with a smile. “Sit down.”

I did so awkwardly. My furious thoughts at the nurses and hospital staff disappeared immediately, now that I knew Miss Brunswick wasn’t deathly ill.

“I’m not supposed to tell you very much,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “in case you get sick again, but I do want you to know that I’ve thought through what our plan is once I’m out of here.”

Plan? What plan?

“What plan?”

Miss Brunswick laughed. I then realized I’d never heard her laugh before. It was a pretty sound.

“Oh, Nat, you mean you don’t know what plan I’m talking about? You can’t really expect everything to just smooth over after this. While you were unconscious back in the police station, I reported the Commander and all the staff to the police. We absolutely can’t show our faces there again. They play to kill.”

I didn’t ask what that meant.

“Nat, we have to hide. The Commander is going to track us down. Maybe even in another country. It’s not even really safe there, but it’s as close as we can get. Do you remember when I told you that we weren’t going back to the drill camp? I meant that I was already planning to report them, to find a police station we could enter safely. The one officer attempted to call us in, but a more sympathetic officer believed us, and called an ambulance to take us to the hospital. The police said that they were going to keep you in the office we were just in until they settled things, but I can’t let them take you. They’re never going to give you back, they’re going to say that I’m not your legal parent, but what they don’t understand is that you don’t have any legal parents. There’s a reason you were at the drill camp in the first place. There’s a reason we ran away. There’s a reason you came to rescue me.”

I glanced back at the door. The platoon of doctors and nurses had vanished, except for one who was scrubbing the already spotless equipment, trying her hardest not to look like she was listening.

“Nat, what you did for everyone was extremely brave. Not many would have done it, and I can see why no one else did. They were scared. There’s no doubt that you were scared too, but I’m proud of you.”

These were words spoken by a true mother that I had never heard. These were words that meant a lot to me, that I had longed to listen to since I had been very young.

“You’ve held out excellently. I don’t think anybody else could have walked four hundred miles in three weeks without eating. I know how hard it was, and I most certainly don’t blame you for collapsing back in the police station.”

Suddenly, the nurse came hurrying over to the bed.

“Natalie, dear, I think it’s about time to go and give Mariah some rest,” she said in a forceful tone that implied that she wasn’t taking any nonsense. I nodded and climbed off the bed. “Good-bye, Miss Brunswick,” I said. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She nodded and smiled as I walked away. I felt very tired suddenly, and I stopped in the hallway where the doctors and nurses had congregated. I must have looked ill again, because one of them muttered to another, “The poor dear, look. It’s shaken her up, just like I thought. What Dr. Nels was thinking when he allowed it I don’t know…”

“I’m fine, honestly,” I said to anyone who would listen. The nurse that had been whispering simply replied, “Of course you are, dear,” while taking my pulse. I jerked my wrist away from her.

“Can I just leave?”

We made our way stiffly to the front door. One woman held it open for me, and I climbed into the police car that was waiting. The driver sped away from the hospital, and started to drive along the bumpy country road.

“Where are we going?” I asked after a few minutes. The driver didn’t answer me. I repeated my question, louder this time.

“We are going back to the police station,” he replied, in a voice that implied that he would much rather do anything else besides drive a twelve-year-old kid around. “There’s someone that wants to see you.”

That ‘someone’ turned out to be a reporter.

“I don’t want to talk to reporters,” I said when I walked inside, and tried to push my way through the throng of police officers surrounding me to the door, but they pushed me right back.

“The reporter wants to talk to you,” said the lady holding a pencil and pad of paper. “I just want to ask you a few questions, hon. I’m Josephine Meitner, and I need some answers.”

She settled herself on one of the stiff plastic chairs. I did too. She smiled awkwardly and began talking.

“Hello, Natalie, like I said before, I’m Josephine Meitner, reporter for the Little Hanover Bugle, and I’m here at Little Hanover Police Station to get some information from you.”

“About what?”

I was starting to get skeptical about this reporter lady.

“Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” she said airily. I nodded, still skeptical.

“Natalie, you were formerly a member of Tuscana Drill Camp, but have escaped  with your teacher, Mariah Brunswick, and arrived here, in Little Hanover, four hundred miles away, after three weeks, is that correct?” She said all this very fast, and didn’t wait for a reply.

“So, Natalie, how do you feel at the moment?” she asked.

“Um, I, uh, erm…”

I’d never been asked a direct question like this before, especially not from an adult. No one really ever cared about how I felt, and now, when faced with it like this, I drew a blank.

“I guess I feel, erm, confused. Yes, confused,” I said. It was the fastest true answer I could come up with.

Josephine jotted that down on her paper. “Uh-huh. And do you feel frightened for your teacher? I understand she is still in the hospital?”

“Uh, not really, I guess,” I stammered. “I mean, she’s not really critically injured or anything…”

“Of course,” she said. “So, have you thought about what you’re going to do after the police decide you can leave? Or are you going to just go to the orphanage?”

I couldn’t decide what to say now. What was I supposed to answer? How was I going to look stammering out yet another reply?

“I haven’t really thought about it yet,” I finally decided on.

“Sure. So, are you ready to move on and turn away from the drill camp?”

“Yes.”

That answer I didn’t have to think about. It was a confident answer that sprang immediately to my tongue. I wasn’t ever going back to the drill camp, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.

“And that wraps up our interview, Natalie. See you!”

Josephine stood up, and I followed.

“I’ll see you soon, Natalie,” she said, “and don’t forget to read the story in the Little Hanover Bugle on Wednesday. Good-bye.”

She pushed open the door and strode out to the parking lot. I watched her leave, until a police officer led me none too gently away from the window.

I spent three days in the waiting room, waiting for, well, nothing really. Miss Brunswick was coming back, and she was going to take me far away from here. Only that much I was certain about. The place varied, but mostly I was the only one there, staring at a particular spot on the dark-blue wall. People gave me funny looks, but I ignored them.

Then, three days later, Miss Brunswick walked through the door. She still had her lime-green cast, but she looked fine otherwise. I rushed over as fast as I dared.

“Nat!” she exclaimed.

“Miss Brunswick! How are you?” I asked.

“Fine, fine, just one minor setback,” she replied, patting the cast. “I’ve made a full recovery!”

There was just one thing that was bothering me, and I decided to ask about it before we left the subject.

“How are you going to get that thing off?”

Miss Brunswick looked down at the cast, thought for a second, and replied, “You know, Nat, I don’t think I really know.” She was laughing when she said it. I laughed too. It felt good to be genuinely happy again, now that it was all over at last.

The End