Missed the beginning of the story? Start with Part 1 here.
Cola couldn’t believe it. She’d already been up for hours, looking over her things. She’d had breakfast, and then put a little more food in her belly than usual because she really didn’t know what to expect. She’d heard stories of the Outgoing, sure. But they were just rumours. No one talked about their journies, really. They just said, you’ll know when you get there. Or you’ll know when you come back.
Other than that, she was ready. She’d been ready since the day their scores got posted. Before that, even.
So it made her extra crazy to find that Yin wasn’t there with the rest of them yet, seated on stage at the very center of The Lake.
The Lake had been transformed. All the chairs that usually lived haphazardly around the room had been organized into a neat circle around a center stage, where their cohort of 50 iwere gathered, waiting. Their cohort had been scheduled to leave early, while Cola knew some from the other tents would leave much later. For that reason she knew most of the faces there, while there were a few that seemed out of place. Odd, she thought. She’d felt she’d at least seen everyone from her tent.
Cola watched as some milled about. Others, like Cola, sat, fixed to their chairs. Cola looked furtively around at the different entrances, trying not to look expectant.
She and Yin had said their goodbyes the day before. That part of her life was over now.
“Where’s your friend? Isn’t he coming?” a girl she barely knew from behind her said. Cola ignored the voice, thinking it was for someone else until the girl leaned forward and asked again. Cola looked back at her with annoyance, though that’s not how she felt inside. She watched as the girl’s face withdrew, and regretted her coldness. Tried to make her own face appear more warm, but the damage had been done and the girl looked elsewhere, started whispering with someone else. So Cola just looked back at her lap, twisting her fingers and wondering where Yin was in spite of herself.
They had stayed up late talking the night before. Grandma and Sam and Samuel, and even the other guards and attendees seemed to know that the goodbyes were happening. All over the tents, small voices rumbled. Which is how she knew there were others around her whose friends had been selected for different times; put in different cohorts. Others had friends who didn’t grade high enough to make The Outgoing at all. She had heard those whimpers as well, but was too busy focusing on Yin. On saying goodbye. On memorizing each other’s faces.
Because they’d promised each other to laugh at how different they were if they ever saw each other again. So she had looked hard at him, studying like she studied the rest of the world: slowly. Methodically. Piece by piece. She looked at the small brown mole under his left eye. At the sqaure-ish lines that were becoming his cheekbones. At the ears too large for his bald head. She would remember those things. Then she looked into his dark black eyes, made even darker in the night of the tent, and saw that he, too, memorized her; the straight black hair she could disappear under and the fading thin scar across her cheek and chin. The roundness of her face otherwise. The slight frown she always wore. The crinkled line forever in her brow.
She had watched him read these things in her, remembering what he’d said before about family, then felt a sharp bubble move through her chest, as if it reached toward her throat. Whatever it was pinned her breath to the back of her tongue. She had looked to Yin then, panicked. But he just reached across the bunk from where they sat cross-legged and put his hand on her shoulder.
“We can do this,” he’d said.
And then she felt it, back in that giant room, surrounded by all those empty, organized chairs, surrounded by the people who would either make or break her future in the next few weeks of their journey. Even the light on the walls seemed a different shade of blue. She turned around to the other girl who had been sitting behind her, to tell her that her and Yin had said their goodbyes, but the girl had moved somewhere else.
But another girl sat in her place, talking to a light-haired boy beside her. She caught Cola’s eye when she turned around, and smiled. Cola smiled back. Hi, she mouthed. The girl waved her hand lightly, smiling with her eyes while still talking to the boy. Cola felt pleased. More confident. She could make new friends once she saw how everyone else did out there.
“Cohort 2940! To your seats please.” A starkly tall woman in a long white coat – though in the light it danced blue – strode to the front of the stage, her back facing the empty seats organized all around. Cola stayed where she was, and waited for everyone else to settle down. It happened thankfully quickly to Cola’s standard, and she could tell the woman up front was pleased as well. Suddenly, Cola wished she had sat a few rows closer, to be noticed more–though still in the back of her mind Yin’s absence nagged at her. She cursed him for distracting her. This was exactly why they had said their goodbyes in the first place!
Still, she sat attentively to all outside eyes. Then once all were seated, the others waited, equally silent, as the woman in white stood without speaking and looked into each one of their faces, all 50 of them seated there. This took some time, but when her eyes got to Cola’s, she felt that her insides had been turned out for all to see. She felt that the woman could see exactly what she was thinking. Truly, it was possible that she could. Some lineages had other talents than being able to breathe well in the dust. Like seeing visions from someone’s mind, or being able to tap into their pulse and understand their health. But these were folks who would have come from other colonies. Lineages like Cola’s were more easy to come by, and simpler, but she never was one to complain. It was Yin who had wanted more adventure anyway.
Cola thought all these things as the woman’s eyes passed over her, and regretted not having more interesting or capable thoughts. Everything was a test now. And Yin not being there was part of it. She steadied her jaw and forgot about him completely, waiting for the woman at the front of the stage to speak.
This is a short story in progress from my working short story collection called “THIRST: Stories from a Post-Water World”.
For more stories like this one, read Share. Or, enjoy this story from the beginning with Part 1 here.
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