The Confined

8. Ego (Part 1)

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for further chapters!
If you enjoyed the chapter vote and share!!♡

------------------

2302. 04. 13?

"Hi," she said. I twirled around. Violet stood there in the job interview waiting room, waving at me. I thought it was a dream. I thought she was one of the people who would never be here. I realized that I was staring at her without saying anything. She tilted her head slightly.

"Hi," I replied.

"Can I talk to you for a moment?" she asked. I practically became a rock. "You know, me and you. Privately?"

"Ye-yeah. Of course. B-but I'm next in line," I stammered.

She smiled. "After the job interview. After both of ours are done."

I gulped and nodded. She was going to start criticizing me for the stuff I said the other day. Say that I was wrong again.

"Egorbis. Come into the interview room please," the speaker called out.

"Good luck!" she called out as I walked into the room. Maybe she knew that she had been talking nonsense about rebelling. She wanted to apologize.

I couldn't concentrate at all. I could proudly say that this time was the worst interview in history.
I was thinking. Thinking deeply about her. What would she possibly want to talk to me about? Privately?

"Ego," the female interviewer sighed. I looked up and saw that the interviewer was the woman from whom I had accidentally ripped the wig. I gasped and fell off the chair.

"Hmm... Whatever you're thinking about, you should think about it later. Whether it's about last time or not," she humphed. I sat back down on the chair embarrassedly. "Tell me why you are appropriate for this job."

"I-I... I can fix things well."

"Yes, but why does that make you appropriate for the job of an energy saver?" She squinted at me.

"This job interview is for energy savers?" I shrugged idiotically. This was the worst job interview already.

She rolled her eyes. I thought they might roll out.

"Get out. Now." She gritted her teeth. I was about to leave when I heard her murmur, "You don't belong here. You are a worthless one."

I spun around. Anger flared in my ears and warned my body, but I was through with all this. I was done with being underestimated.

"Shut up," I growled at her. "Do you know what it's like to live somewhere like here? Do you know what it's like to wake up every day to wonder how you're going to earn a couple of pennies? Do you know what it's like to go around pleading with people like you to give me a job? I don't want to be under your feet, cleaning your shoes just so I can do more work. I don't want to do this anymore. I quit. I quit being a Confined. I give up."

She blinked at me in shock but I wasn't finished. I wasn't near finishing.

"And why do you even interview for this stuff? You just have to walk or ride a bike for like twelve hours. You could just let everyone in the whole Confined to do that. They would do that for money. They would do anything for money. You know that," I spat out. She seemed soothed and now she was smiling. She was amused at this.

"It's because of people like you, Mr. Ego," she grinned. "People like you try to mess our lives up."

"Well, get this. All I asked was to be given the least amount of respect. I've been haunted countless times by you and your filthy minded RLs, but I've never heard anything as childish as what you just said. You should be ashamed of yourself. You're not supposed to treat people like that. Go and read the Bible or something," I shot back. She flinched at the last sentence. The RLs all follow a religion and although I had no idea what hers was, it hit her right in the stomach. I walked out of the room, slamming the door behind me.

Violet jumped up to me. "How did it go?"

"You were right, this isn't a place for people to live. It's for people to be tortured." I threw my name tag on the ground and marched outside.

"Ego!" Violet called behind me. She'd followed me out.

"I thought you were there to apply for a job." I said without turning around to look at her.

"I was." She smiled. As she took a hold of my hand my soul kind of jumped out of my skin.

"Come on. I told you I have something to tell you." There was a sparkle in her eyes that I had never seen before. She looked very excited. I had only first talked with her yesterday and she was acting like we were best friends.

"Look, if you're going to start lecturing me about rebelling and stuff-"

"I'm not," she cut in. "I'm sorry about the other day, but I'm not sorry too." I didn't even know what that meant. "Anyway, I'm taking you to my bunker. I want to show you something."

"Okay," I squeaked. She dragged me all the way to her bunker. And there she was. Eva. She was sharing a bunk with Eva. That made my day much more complicated.

"EGO!" Eva screamed as she bounced up and down and hugged me. She sounded like she could be three years old, but she's actually eight. She's quite tall for her age, too.

"Eva," I patted her on the back. I had to literally pull her from the doorstep of the bunker to the last bunk, which Violet used.

Violet searched through her belongings and took out something small. Something wooden. Wood is not normal in the Confined. It was something that I had never seen. "I want you to fix this for me," she said.

I opened it. The thing was made of wood, but it was decorated with white and colored paints. Delicate carvings decorated the bottom, and on top was a beautiful girl. Well, it wasn't exactly a girl because it wasn't alive, but anyway. It was a girl. With a really puffy dress. And her leg looked like it was gracefully kicking something.

"What's wrong with it?" I looked up at Violet. Eva was singing a song lying on the bottom bunk.
"It doesn't twirl around," she sighed. "My mother gave it to me. It's the only thing I have right now that reminds me of them."

"Your parents?"

She nodded. Tears were creeping into her eyes. There was that feeling again. The feeling that I wanted her to stop being sad. The feeling that I wanted to prevent her being sad.

I stared at her for a long time, trying to define what this feeling was. She was looking at the floor the whole time as if she knew I was staring at her and she was too humiliated to cry in front of me. I smiled. I stroked her hair. I don't know why I did it, but I did. I wasn't a romanticist. I had never in my life been in a relationship. And now here I was stroking a girl's hair. A girl that I first talked to yesterday.

"I've never even met my parents you know," I said. I don't know why I said that either. It was just that, whenever I was with her or near her, all my emotions started to spill out. It wasn't my intention. "They abandoned me." I looked down at my feet because it was her turn to stare at me. I suddenly wondered if I had remembered to wash my face today.

"You've never met them? In your whole life?"

I nodded sadly.

Then, she stroked my hair. All the alarms in my body rang so loudly that I thought it was going to burst into fireworks. My ears were terribly hot. I had to get out of the situation. I pulled out something from my pocket and started fidgeting with it. Then I realized with horror, that it was the pen I'd stolen from my previous job. I quickly hid it.

"What's that?" she asked quizzically.

"Nothing," I snapped. "It's none of your business,"

"Okay." She was surprised by my sudden attitude, but she kept calm. "Are you going to tell me about the job interview today?"

It seemed like a reasonable topic to talk about so I told her all about it. How I felt, how I wanted to turn everything upside down. How much I wanted to rebel. And how I couldn't.

"I understand now. I know you can't rebel with me. But whenever you're ready, you can take hold of my bargain," she said firmly. "You know you will, someday."

I shrugged. "I don't think so." And I meant it.