AVENIR

Chapter 1: Why She Rebels

The lights turned on, and the small room was flooded with light.

"Ouch! Hey, what-?"

"Ack!"

"Not again!"

The girls in the dormitory snapped awake and turned to glare at me as a warden stormed through the dormitory.

"It's that book again," whispered Sasha, a burly twenty-year-old and the oldest, meanest, most cunning girl in the dorm. "She can't put it down."

I stared up at the warden who was now looming over my bed. "No, I swear it wasn't me this time!"  I pointed over to the small stand where my one possession – the book Les Misérables, the one I had stolen from the interrogation room so many months ago – was safely stored away.

"We always know when you have touched something," was the response.

"No, I swear, please!" By this point, the warden had snatched up the book and headed toward the fireplace in the corner of the dormitory. Poking the last dying embers of the fire, the warden prepared to reignite the fire and throw my book into the flames.

Let me make something absolutely clear. I had been breaking the rules, just not that night, but believe me, I had been, ever since the day I got here.  Because if one wants to keep their humanity in a corrupt government facility, one needs to break some rules.

Quiet hours here start at 11:00 PM, and even then, we barely get any sleep. We have to wake with the sun, usually around 5:00 AM, where we then have to do whatever the government needs us to do to better their society. When we had to sweep and scrub the floors of each of the ten government-owned skyscrapers – did I mention that was just one day? – I pretended I was Cosette, and I sang as I swept. Since music was banned in our society, I was punished and put on watch. When they had us fix leaks in the pipes in the sewage system, I would pretend I was Jean Valjean, taking Marius to safety before Javert found us. I was told I wasn't fast enough, and the next day, they timed me. Any of the most hideous tasks I could ever imagine...I am warned that if I ever step too far out of line, I will have to begin training, which is much worse than it sounds. Training means becoming one of the soldiers in our society, trained to kill those who step out of line. The police force. Yep, the ones who killed...

Anyway, if I step too far out of line, I'm going to have to start training.

And it's been like this, every day, for nine years.  I am now nineteen years old.  

They had promised to release me when I reached age eighteen, but that all changed when I tried to escape three times (admittedly after being inspired by Valjean).  I barely made it past the dormitory door (in one case, the meal hall door) before I was dragged back inside.  All eyes were upon me, but no one batted an eye.  For none of the girls here like me, I'm not allowed to interact with the boys on the compound, I am always alone (which I was pretty much used to already), and that was that.

The thing is, to cope with all of this, at night, I would turn on my pocket flashlight that my brother gave to me years ago, and stay awake past quiet hours to read Les Misérables. Don't get me wrong, I'd already read it twenty-four times all the way through... all 908 pages, twenty-four times through. Every word of it.  I can relate so much to it, and I still wonder to this day why that cop had it on their shelf. The girls would be kept awake by the searing glare of the pocket flashlight, and their complaints is what got my pocket flashlight taken away from me. It was thrown into the fire, the last physical reminder of my brother.  I could no longer read in secret of night.  But I remembered everything I had read.  Jean Valjean, Javert, Marius, Cosette...they wove tales of adventure, tragedy, and best of all, hope.