Qualify (11 page)

The stocky Latino boy says he’s Mateo Perez, and he’s not smiling at all. Unlike Jai, he is grim and serious, standing slouched and huddling in his black, worn looking jacket. The mousy-haired ponytail girl is Janice Quinn, and she looks dazed and very, very tired. The curvy raven-haired one is Claudia Grito, with multiple piercings and what looks like a boatload of expensive smart jewelry. She gives me an evaluating long scrutiny.

Meanwhile other teens arrive, an endless stream of people passing through the hall, and quite a few remain, joining our Yellow number Eight party. We give up trying to talk to everyone in our group because there’s just too many of us now to remember who’s who. Gina Curtis, the Dorm Leader, herds us into a compact growing crowd away from other similar groupings all around the endless hall as far as the eye can see. A girl of few words, she simply stands there looking no-nonsense and telling everyone to wait. “Just a few more minutes,” she repeats every few more minutes.

“Not too long, girlfriend, or I am going to pass out on the floor,” says an African American girl who’s one of the later arrivals, with short relaxed hair that’s bobbed and tinted with blond highlights. She stops next to me and plops her stuff down on the floor near my own bags. I look down at her bags and she just shrugs at me with a crooked grin. “Sorry, hope my bag didn’t crush yours. I’m Laronda.”

“No prob. My stuff’s not breakable, it’s mostly books,” I say.

“Oh yeah?” She looks at me sideways. “What kind of books? Are you a smarty-pants?”

Before I can answer, Dorm Leader Gina starts to wave her Number Eight sign. “All right, may I have your attention, everybody! It’s time! We’re going to our Dorm now, please follow me. If you’re Yellow, Dorm Eight, come along now! I repeat, Yellow, Dorm Eight!”

“Jesus, we heard you the first time . . .” Laronda makes a face, then flips her head back and forth and crosses her eyes at me.

I cannot help it, I break out in a smile. Then, just as we start picking up our stuff and moving out, I turn my head and my stomach immediately does a flip-flop.

Logan Sangre is walking by, in a large group of teens. His token is flaming red, and his Dorm Leader is holding up a red sign with a number “1.”

“Hey . . . who’s that hot piece of man-meat?” Laronda nudges me mercilessly. I guess she saw me drool and stare at him and heard the “ding-ding-ding” of falling IQ points raining from my brain.

“Huh?”

“You know that guy? I can tell, yeah! He’s oozing-hot!”

“No . . . I mean, yeah, he’s just someone from my school back in Vermont. I don’t really know him.”

“Big fat liar!”

I flare with indignation, but before I have the chance to say something awful and ruin things with this Laronda chick after only a five-minute acquaintance, she is grinning at me. She then punches me in the arm. “Nah, just messin’ with you. It’s okay. I can tell you’re into him.”

“You can? I’m not!” But I am biting my lip. I really wish Ann Finnbar was here. . . . She’d have my back. Or, maybe not—not in this situation. She’d probably join Laronda and make me cringe and blush about Logan. I can’t believe I am so ridiculously obvious.

“All right, so,” Laronda says. “Nothing wrong with lusting after such a hunkalicious boy toy. What’s his name?”

“Logan . . . Logan Sangre.” I speak his name in a whisper.

“Ni-i-ice. Okay,” Laronda is looking at me closely as we start walking down the hall in our big Yellow group. “Now that I know the name of your lust object, what’s yours?”

“What? Oh . . . I’m Gwen. Gwenevere Lark.” I throw her a sideways glance as we all pass through the hall into another long corridor, and turn right.

“Nice to meet you, Gwen Lark. I’m Laronda Aimes. And I’ll be your server tonight. I mean, your captain tonight. I mean—” And Laronda crosses her eyes and sticks out her tongue and raises her hands slightly apart and to the sides, to mimic a passenger aircraft.

I snort.

A few moments later we end up outside in the cold night, as our group rapidly walks through the brightly lit compound toward a building somewhere in the back. Other kids are moving toward other buildings past us. There are over a dozen structures in this place. Most of them have at least four floors, and some bear the large square four-color logo, while others display solid-colored squares. I assume those are the dorms.

Eventually our Dorm Leader stops before a building with a large yellow square.

“This is Dorm Eight, Yellow Quadrant, everyone. We go inside! Follow me!”

Then we are indoors again, and pleasant warm air hits us, unlike the other building, which was unheated. We are in a large room that resembles a hotel lobby, with several sofas and comfortable chairs scattered all throughout.

“First floor ground level,” Gina, the DL, says, pausing as we come inside and mill around her, a group of at least seventy people, likely more, since more teens are still pouring in. “Common Area and Cafeteria. We’ll see more of it tomorrow. Second floor is Boys’ Dorm. Third floor is Girls’ Dorm. Fourth floor is Classrooms. And basement, one floor below ground level is Physical Training Area.”

Gina puts down her yellow sign and looks around her.

A sea of teenagers watches back. We’re all exhausted.

“Tomorrow morning, at eight o’clock exactly, I want to see all of you here, for Orientation—”

Groans of protest are heard. “No way, it’s three AM now!” someone says.

Gina ignores them and raises one hand for silence, at the same time raising her voice into an authoritative command. “But now, you’re all going upstairs, to your designated floor—boys go to second floor, girls to third—and find a bed.
Any
bed. First come, first served. Choose wisely since this will be your bed for the duration of your stay here. There is bedding and other basics available, including a change of clothes for training. The bathrooms are marked clearly, two on each floor, with twelve toilet stalls, and twelve shower stalls each, so you will have to take well-timed turns tomorrow—but more on that later, during Orientation. Tomorrow, the morning dorm alarm will sound precisely at seven and you will wake up and get dressed and come to eat breakfast in the Cafeteria, all before Orientation. Understood? All right, now, we need to clear this room—the Common Area Lobby—because, believe it or not, there are two more groups of just as many people coming in here in the next few minutes. We’re simply the first in the building. Now, go everyone! Hurry, grab your beds, you’re lucky you get first dibs—go!”

There’s a stampede.

We run up the stairs and the boys remain on the second floor while we keep going.

The third floor landing double doors open into a huge hall. And I mean,
huge
. It’s the size of the entire building, and it is filled with rows and rows of narrow beds. They are simple, like cots in a shelter. Each cot is made with military neatness, pristine white sheets, a neutral beige-colored blanket pulled tight, a single pillow. There is also a grey uniform folded nearly on top of every bed, consisting of a buttoned tunic shirt and pants, kind of like a martial arts sparring outfit. The uniform is extra-large, generic. The beds are spaced three feet apart, with just enough space to walk around, and there’s a small aisle of about five feet between the foot of each bed and the head of the next, so that you can walk quickly through the hall without bumping into beds.

“Wow,” says a blond girl behind me as we pause at the doors. “This is like summer camp.”

Laronda turns around and grimaces at her. “Honey, you
wish
. This is end-of-the-world asteroid camp, and I don’t even want to know what kind of scary-evil “camp activity” junk awaits us tomorrow.

“It’s best to grab a bed toward the center of the room,” I say, glancing around, and start walking quickly past rows of cots.

Laronda follows me. Not sure why she’s decided to latch onto me. “How come?” she asks.

“Because if we’re too close to the doors or the bathrooms, then everyone will be passing by our beds all night long. Plus, doors banging, other noise.”

“You really are a smarty-pants.”

“Heh,” I say as we reach the middle of the hall, and I pick a bed directly under one of the large overhead lights that’s probably the very middle one.

“What are you looking at?” Laronda looks up to see why I am staring to mark the spot.

“See that lamp?” I glance up. “It’s in the center of the room. Easy to remember the exact place where the bed is.”

Laronda dumps her bags on the bed next to mine. “Wow, okay. But what about the bright light? Won’t it be a problem to sleep right under it?”

I give her a brief smile. “It’s gonna be lights out for sleeping anyway. But when the light is on, I might as well have a reading light directly overhead.”

“You’re a total nerd, you do know that?” Laronda shakes her head at me, but I know it’s good humored and harmless.

“I know.” I bite my lip, and then head for the bathroom.

Chapter 6

T
he morning alarm claxon blares through my thick sleep and I swear, I just about fly out of my bed at the noise. I sit up, bleary eyed, heart pounding, and every girl around me is also groaning. Last night, it was chaos long after I got into my bed and pulled the covers over my face, as everyone was still arriving, claiming beds, going to the bathroom. They didn’t turn the lights out until almost four. Hardly enough time to get any sleep.

“Oh no, noooo . . .” Laronda in the bed to the left of me is turning over, and trying to cover her head and ears with the blanket.

On the other side, in a bed to the right of me is a brown haired girl whose name I don’t know—I guess she must have arrived in a different group later. She is looking dazed and kind of scared.

I don’t blame her.

“Bathroom stampede!” someone exclaims a few beds down.

And it happens. I rush to dig in my bag and pull out a toothbrush, soap, and a change of underwear, then hurry along with everyone else for one of the two bathrooms on each side of the hall. We stand in line.

“What time is it?”

“Seven-fifteen. What happens if we’re late?”

“I don’t plan to be late. Do you?” says a girl with a confident voice. I recognize Claudia Grito from last night, with her multiple piercings. She’s several people in line ahead of me, and she sees me staring.

“What are you looking at?” She directs a hard frown at me.

I say nothing; quickly look away. But it’s too late. I see her still watching me, with my peripheral vision. There’s a slow-burn sense of impending horrible familiarity about this. It’s the way bullies usually latch on to me at school, as soon as they notice I exist. I don’t know what it is about me that makes me such a bully magnet, besides being a know-it-all in classes—maybe the way I sometimes space out and look at things with drawn-out curious intensity. . . .

Laronda notices. She raises one brow, glances back and forth between Claudia and me, and gives me a questioning look. I don’t respond.

Few minutes later, we hit the toilets and the showers. The bathrooms are equally sterile and pristine, and there are stacks of clean towels, not to mention little bars of soap for everyone.

“Welcome to Hotel Qualification!” exclaims a skinny little girl with freckles and reddish hair as she grabs a towel and stuffs two soaps in her pocket.

“Hey, no hogging stuff!” Another girl pulls her sleeve.

“Says who?”

I try to ignore them as I attempt to take care of my own business in a hurry and try to get out of the crowded bathroom. As I back out of the shower stall, freshly showered, barefoot, wearing only a bra and underwear and still carrying my clothes and a towel, I slip on the wet tiles and collide with Claudia Grito, of all people.

“Hey, watch it, loser!” She turns from brushing her silky wet black hair that clings to her dark T-shirt, and elbows me in the gut.

“Sorry!” I manage to say, as I back away from her. Claudia is a little shorter than me, but she is powerfully built, sinewy muscle. She whips her hair out of her face, and her nose piercing flashes silver. She glares at me, looks me up and down, and mutters something in Spanish that I don’t want to know, but unfortunately I am in Honors Spanish class, so I know exactly what she said, and it’s ugly.

I break eye contact and get out of the bathroom without another word. I stand outside leaning against the dormitory wall and pull on my old jeans and purple sweater, then my socks and sneakers. When I am done, making sure my yellow ID token is still attached to the front of my sweater, I move past the crowds of girls running around getting dressed and head out the main double doors and down the stairs.

The first floor Common Area is a zoo. There are teens everywhere, looking worried, making noise, lazing around on the sofas, and heading to get breakfast. I follow them toward the Cafeteria noise and smell of food that comes from the back, and into the huge room that has a food bar stretching along one wall, together with stacked trays, plates and servers. Meanwhile long tables and benches fill the middle.

“Hey, wait up!” Laronda Aimes is right behind me, and we enter together.