Lyrical

Chapter 2

July 2, 2208

Have you ever been asleep, dreaming, and a weird noise enters your dreams? That happens every morning for me. And that weird noise just happens to be the one and only wake-up bell. They change it every day. It's rather unnerving to wake up to a rooster cawing one morning and a bear roaring the next. This morning I happened to wake up to the beautiful melodies of someone snoring. Loudly. The person controlling the intercom this morning must have a sense of irony.

Anyways, Veronica and I both look sit up and look at each other, a confused expression plastered on both our faces before we realized that neither of us was making that awful, crackling noise. Then we both cracked up. Not that it was particularly funny, it just surprised both of us. When we were done, we had the traditional rock-paper-scissors game to see who gets to use the shower first. I won.

It took me a couple minutes to work out the old scanner, but eventually I got in. After I was done, I put the old set of clothes that I changed out of last night into the clothing chute. Technically we were supposed to get changed every morning, but nobody ever did because nobody ever liked sleeping in sweaty clothing. This was one of the few things that the guards were lenient on. Another set of clean clothes would be delivered directly to our dressers in the middle of the day, when we weren't allowed in our cells. They also searched our cells during this time to make sure we weren't up to anything. Luckily I knew more hiding places than anyone else here.

But getting back to the point, our morning routine went by quickly without so much as a little blip in the schedule. The only slight variation was the fact that I chose to wear black socks in stead of white. It matched the required black shirt for all prisoners. We also had ill-fitting, blue jeans and old shoes.

"Love the outfit today." Veronica said sarcastically.

"Yep, mixing it up with the black socks." I grinned.

"Well, you do have a big day today." she looked at me pointedly.

"Not this again." I said, as I turned away from her.

"What?" she asked, "Me bugging you about your new friend."

I looked at her sternly as I began, "First of all, no, I wasn't even talking to you. I was talking about my foot hurting," (my excuse for everything) then, "second, I have no idea if this guy is going to be my 'friend', which by the way I have no idea what that means. The dude could have killed ten people and be a total maniac! I mean, there must've been some reason he was sent to prison."

Then she raised her voice just a little too much as she said, "He could also have had insane parents that he never met and is just stuck in a bad situation like most of the rest of us here."

Usually we tried to keep our voices down during our little quarrels, which we had every now and then. (hey, you live with the same person for 10 years, and you're bound to get on each other's nerves once in a while)This time we had not been as cautious as we usually were and our voices had been raised enough for the sound monitor to pick it up. Now they were probably looking through the camera feed to see if we were in a fight, and, once they saw our tense stances toward each other, they would send a couple guards down to check it out.

We looked at one another for a moment before we nodded and sat down on the ends of our beds. We both had gotten in enough arguments to understand that to be calm by the time the guards came was the best way to avoid a lot of brutality.

"So, how long?" we asked at the same time. Our traditional game to play when we new the guards were coming. It basically meant 'how long until they get here and we're busted'.

She went first, "five."

"Eight," I said, "They're always tired and slow in the morning."

"True." she agreed as we both looked at the clock and waited.