The Boy Who Wasn't Real

Eric

I stumble across my shipping container, fumbling with the buttons on my shirt. I need to look presentable for the ceremony. After all, today is Volunteer Day. My name is entered thirty-four times this year—twice for every year you're alive. I have to be entered for one more year before I'm free of the burden of being available for volunteering.

Only thirty-four times, I think, trying to calm myself down. That's nothing. You have a small chance of being picked. Especially since the eighteen year olds are such a large group this year.

Yeah, a voice replies to the previous thought. But they've been a large group since they were born and, still, none of them have ever been volunteered.

I get into the habit of talking to the little voice in my head when I'm nervous. Which is a lot. I get anxious when I wake up, because I could be dead. I worry whenever I leave my 'home' for fear of being jumped or beaten. Even though I know my way around a fight, I still have trouble relaxing when I leave the familiarity of my shipping container.

Today, like every seventeenth, is one of those days where I can't stop worrying, no matter how much I reassure myself that I'll be fine. I shake my body out, trying to force the nervousness away. I step in front of a mirror that I lifted from a hardware store. I don't recognize the person in it.

His russet brown hair is tousled, but in a fashionable way. His six-foot-tall body is all lean muscle and the white dress shirt that he is wearing highlights every one of those muscles. The honey-brown eyes staring back at me shine golden in the light. His long legs fit perfectly in the black dress pants that he wears. The stubble on his jawline makes him look older and more rugged. He looks handsome. I know that the mirror can't lie to me about my appearance, but I can't help thinking that I am just seeing what I want to see instead of what's really there.

I fasten the last of my buttons and grab my brass knuckles from the stolen table beside my stolen bed. I run a finger along the engraving on one of them. It's simple, but holds so much value in my life: Being alone isn't the same as feeling alone. I shove them into my pockets, not wanting to get sentimental. I can't afford looking like a weak fool leaving my 'home.' That makes you vulnerable. I don't like being vulnerable, even though I almost always am.

✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧

Volunteer Day falls on the seventeenth of each month. It's where every person below the age of nineteen stands in a plaza and waits for the Mayor of their sector to pull a name out of a bowl. The chosen person walks up to where the Mayor stands and then leaves in a fancy black jet to be taken to The Hollow.

In the past—before I became an orphan—my parents would stand with me and hug me close while the Mayor, Damion Cloudsmith (an ironic last name for the Mayor of Sky), picked out a name from the bowl. Almost every year, the chosen person was seventeen years old. Only once was it someone younger in my lifetime.

Now, I make my way to the Volunteering Plaza alone, looking over my shoulder constantly, fingering the brass knuckles in my pockets. Once I reach the main road, I am enveloped in a stream of children and parents. I try to stay near the sidewalk, just in case someone decides to come at me, but I end up giving in to the flow of the people. In no time at all, I'm standing in the plaza, looking up at the Mayor on a big screen.

Of course he's not really here, he can't be bothered to show up when he sentences a kid to their death. He's probably in his big house, eating berries from the hand of his twenty year old wife who married him just for the reason of his money. How sick.

He's balding, with only a few patches of white hair sticking up from his head. The glasses that rest on his pointy nose are black-rimmed with shockingly yellow earpieces. The bottom half of his face is fully obscured by a white beard that seems to grow outward instead of down. His body is squat, as if someone had squished him down into a compact cube. He wears a suit made of black velvet. A cane rests at his side.