Juvy part 6

I sat down in the cafeteria after looking around for Juvy for a while. The girl next to me was humming an Avril Lavigne song. I held my breath and just listened to her quiet singing. I missed music. Her voice was sweet and similar to Avril Lavgine’s. Of course, if I was at home, the old song she was humming wouldn’t have been my first choice, but considering that there was absolutely no music at this place, I greatly appreciated the girl’s singing. I wished that she would just go on forever. Eventually she stopped singing, sighed, and pushed the food around her plate, obviously not appealed to the muck. I looked at her and wondered why she was here. She looked so innocent. Her hair was blonde and went just beneath her shoulders. It surrounded her delicately. Her eyes were brown and sad. She had long eyelashes and her arms were small. She looked weak, which was surprising since we had been laboring for over a month. She looked young, maybe thirteen. I could see her eyes filling with tears. I wondered what she had done to get here. “You have a really good voice,” I said to her. She looked up at me with her big, sad eyes and said quietly, “Thanks.” She sighed and said, “I miss music. Back home I was in the choir in my school. I performed solos in almost every concert.” She stared off into space with longing her eyes. “You don’t look like you belong here,” I said. She shook her head, “I don’t belong here. I belong with music. This place has no music. It makes me sick.” I could tell that she was very passionate about music. “You like Avril Lavigne a lot?” I asked. She shrugged, “I don’t know...that song just speaks to me here.” I tried to remember the lyrics to the song she had been humming but nothing came to me. “It says, ‘is it enough to love, is it enough to breath.’ Right now, I feel like its definitely not enough to live. I don’t know how I would have felt before I came here, but here its clear to me that there needs to be more to life than just living.” I nodded in agreement and then looked around again for Juvy. I didn’t really want to get into a conversation with this girl about her philosophies, though what she was saying did make sense to me. Then, out of nowhere, I heard a thump next to me and saw Juvy sitting down next to me. “Girl,” he addressed me. “Boy,” I replied. I smiled. I didn’t have to think about this life not being enough. I had Juvy.

The rest of the day the lack of music seemed to hang over me. I tried to find rhythm in the dishes clanking against each other but the girl next to me kept dropping them on the counter and it threw off the pattern. I tried to find rhythm in the plows scraping on the ground but they hardly made a sound. Juvy didn’t come out to the fields that day and I felt alone. The silence of the people around me was eating me alive. I was so glad to have Juvy. I didn’t understand how these people could go through this without going insane. At the end of the time we spent plowing, a handler announced to us that we were done plowing and we would start seeding the following day. I looked down at the ground and imagined pine trees springing up. I imagined them growing up out of the ground and scraping the sky within one minute. I imagined Juvy putting me on his back and climbing one of the trees. We would get to the top and stare out across the trees outside of the fence. We would jump from one tree to the next until we were outside of the fence and deep inside the forest. My daydreaming was interrupted when a handler yelled at me to get to my cabin and clean up before dinner. The lower floor of my cabin, cabin B, had four showers. It took forever for everyone to get showered. Once it was finally my turn, I stepped into the water and breathed deeply as the hot water surrounded me and took me away from this place. The floor was disgusting and I wore socks into the shower so I wouldn’t get athlete’s foot. I scrubbed my face well to keep away acne. Luckily for me, my skin didn’t seem to get acne easily for some reason. At home my skin had been completely clear and here my skin was almost clear. Much better than most of the rest of the girls. Juvy’s skin was pretty good too. He did have some acne, but not very much and nothing compared to a lot of the guys. I stepped out of the shower and Shelby handed me a rough towel. I walked over to my bunk and put my orange jumper back on. When I first came to Juvy, I felt totally disgusting changing back into my sweaty jumper after showering, but by now I was used to it. I looked at myself in the reflection of the window and my green eyes stared back mockingly at me. I stared at my reflection and imagined it walking away, leaving Juvy and walking back into the full body mirror in my house. I wanted to melt into the glass and join my reflection in that world of freedom. Then again, I thought, my reflection could only go where I went. I thought of my reflection in the lake water, in the dish water, on the windows of the buildings and in the eyes of the kids that ran by on the trails.I sighed and knew that I’d rather be anywhere than here.

© 2009