Blue (17 page)

Tabitha picked her head up and gave her a half-smile.

“What’s the matter?” Alyssa asked.

“Just everything. Everything is the matter,” Tabitha replied.

“I know what you’re feeling. I think we all have good days and bad days. Try to keep your head up. I know it seems like so much to take in, but we’re going to be okay,” Alyssa said, wrapping her arm around her friend and pulling her close. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”

The girls stood in line together to get their vitamins for the day. Marguerite was no longer seated behind the table with the vitamins. She was serving food behind the counter, laughing with the children and calling them each by name.

As they sat down at their table, a loud thunderclap rang out and everyone in the cafeteria jumped. A few of the younger children started to cry, and a couple of young girls screamed from being startled. Almost instantaneously, the rains began to fall outside. It was as if the thunder popped the bulging clouds that couldn’t hold the rain in any longer.

“Well, it looks like we definitely won’t be able to go to the pool today. Unless you count walking through the courtyard as swimming. Wow, I’ve never seen rain like this before,” Alyssa said finishing up the last few bites of her oatmeal.

“You wanna just come back to my room and we can hang out there for the afternoon?” Tabitha asked, standing up from the table and picking up her tray.

Alyssa nodded.

The girls walked back together to Tabitha’s dorm, and Tabitha collapsed down perpendicular on her bed, while Alyssa closed the door behind them.

“Are you on your period now?” Tabitha asked her.

“No, I just got done about a week ago. Why?” Alyssa replied.

“I just didn’t know if you had gone through blood harvest yet. I wanted to see if you could tell me what I have to look forward to,” Tabitha said.

“I mean, they drew my blood yesterday at harvest, if that’s what you’re talking about,” Alyssa said.

“No, not that blood harvest. The other blood harvest,” Tabitha said.

“What other blood harvest?” Alyssa asked, curling her brow at her.

“They didn’t give you a cup—thing—yet?” Tabitha asked, turning over to look at Alyssa.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alyssa said, shaking her head.

“Oh, well, then I guess I have something I need to share with you,” Tabitha said.

Tabitha told her the entire story. She told her about her relationship with Marguerite. About the vitamins, their effects on the girls, Marguerite’s swapping out her vitamins. She ended with the blood harvest, and what she saw behind the dormitory this morning. She figured there was no use in hiding anything from her anymore. She was going to find out soon enough anyway.

Alyssa listened to Tabitha with wide eyes, shocked at what she was hearing.

“I don’t even know what to say right now,” Alyssa said at the end of Tabitha’s rant, swallowing hard.

“Me either. I wish I did,” Tabitha said, shrugging her shoulders as she felt tears of fear well up in her eyes.

The girls spent the remaining few hours of the afternoon in silence. Alyssa only spoke when another question wandered into her mind that she thought might be worthwhile to ask. Tabitha wove a bracelet out of some hemp rope, and Alyssa flipped through a magazine, intermittently looking out the window. The sky grew dark as the furious rains continued to fall.

After they had eaten dinner together, they told each other goodnight and went to their separate dormitories. Tabitha walked back to her bedroom alone, changed into some pink pajama shorts and a t-shirt and crawled into bed. She wanted to forget that this day had ever happened, so she decided to turn in early. She stared at the ceiling and wondered what Alyssa might be doing at this very moment, secretly wishing she could be there with her. The thought of her friend put her mind at ease. Tabitha found herself in a dreamlike state, imagining herself balancing on the top of the dam, her arms spread out from her sides as she walked along the top, one foot stepping in front of the other. She imagined Marguerite running toward her yelling, pleading for her to come down. And just as she turned her head to look at Marguerite, she slipped from the spray of the water, and fell into the rumbling waters of the Vaal.

Her body jumped as she awoke from the too realistic falling sensation in her dream. She turned over onto her side and felt the back of her shorts stick to the sheet as she turned; she could feel the wetness of the sheet underneath her hip. She closed her eyes and sighed. Reaching over to her nightstand to flip on the light, she already knew what she would find when she did—a growing spot of bright red blood seeping into the sheets around her hips.

Tabitha got out of bed and walked into the bathroom to clean herself off. She threw her bloody clothes in a pile beside her toilet, and realized that she would have to run to the laundry room to get more sheets for her bed. She put on a pair of shoes and walked out the door.

The rain was coming down harder than ever, and the courtyard had basically turned into a pond. She ran underneath the awnings, under the orange glow of their lights, but the rain falling on either side of the awnings still splashed her. As she passed the cafeteria she noticed that there was a light on in the kitchen. She decided to peek in to see if someone was there, and to turn the light off if it had been left on mistakingly. She walked into the cafeteria and peeked in through the doors to see Marguerite, frantically pulling all the food out of the pantry and onto a cart. After Tabitha realized that Marguerite was alone, she pushed open the doors.

“What are you doing?” Tabitha asked in a whisper.

“Beetha, what are you doing here? You have to get out of here!” Marguerite replied as she threw a huge bag of flour onto the cart and waved her arms frantically at Tabitha. “Please. Just trust me. I don’t want them to find you. Don’t go back to your room. Go hide!”

“What? Why? Marguerite, what is going on?” Tabitha asked, her voice wavering. She could feel the lump forming in her throat and the tears forming in her eyes. “Marguerite, what is going on?”

Just as Marguerite threw a bag of oatmeal onto the cart and opened her mouth to order Tabitha to leave, a voice on the intercom broke the silence of the compound.

“Attention, residents! We are now under a serious flash flood warning. This is not a drill. All residents please report to the third floor of the main compound dormitory immediately. Please remain calm and file up the stairs in an orderly fashion. I repeat. All residents report to the third floor of the main compound dormitory immediately. This is not a drill. Thank you.”

“Tabitha. Run! Get to the third floor and hide somewhere. Now. Go! Please. Just go!” Marguerite pleaded with her.

“What is going on? I don’t want to leave you!” Tabitha said frantically as her eyes flooded with scared tears.

Suddenly, the doors to the kitchen flung open and in stepped Dr. Hance, holding Tabitha’s pink pajama shorts.

“Oh, yes. Of course I made a special trip to get you. How ironic that I’ve waited so long for you to join the rest of the girls, and you would have joined them tonight anyway,” he said, holding up her bloodied shorts. He stormed across the room and grabbed her by the arm. Propping the heavy door to the outside open with a huge bag of flour, he told Marguerite to push the cart out the door. He yanked Tabitha by the arm and pulled her out the door, kicking the bag of flour out of the way and letting the door close hard behind them.

The rain poured over Tabitha’s face, making it difficult for her to see anything, but she somehow made out the silhouette of a semi-truck at the end of the compound wall. Out of the back of the truck was a ramp leading up to the bed, and she could see Marguerite pushing the cart of food up the ramp and into the bed of the truck.

Dr. Hance pulled Tabitha up the ramp, guided her around the cart, and pushed her down into the bed of the truck. She fell into what felt like a pile of legs, and looked to her left and right to see that all of the girls from the dormitory were seated and lined up along the walls of the semi-truck with their legs in the middle.

She looked back and saw Dr. Hance, standing at the back of the truck. He reached up to grab the tether attached to the door, surveyed the bed of the truck, and pulled down hard on the tether. The door of the truck slammed hard behind him and he beat on it with his fist. The truck started and began to move.

Tabitha looked around for any light she could find—but she could only see the darkness.

Part II: Supply

P A R T  I I

S u p p l y

C h a p t e r 
13

Anytha opened the refrigerator, pulled out a gallon of milk, and poured some over her cereal. She looked out the kitchen window of her parents’ house as the sun was just beginning to rise.

It was hard to believe that it had been almost a year since she received her acceptance letter to Vaal Tech, and even harder to believe that she had already finished her entire freshman year of college. Shortly after she had received her acceptance letter, she applied for a job working in the campus library. After interviewing with the head
librarian, she had landed the job. The job, along with the scholarship she had been awarded to attend school there, had solidified her decision to become a student at Vaal Tech. Tuition was much more affordable—half the price of Pretoria University—and the job on campus allowed her to live a comfortable lifestyle away from home while she was attending school. And she got to be with Ari.

Anytha was grateful that her parents had decided to help her pay for part of her tuition, but was not fond of the condition they placed on the money—she must come home on her breaks and stay with them. Anytha might have preferred to stay back in Vanderbijlpark with Ari, volunteering at the orphanages over her summer break, but she felt the need to honor her parents’ wishes, since they were helping her get an education; and since her job in the library didn’t exist over the summer anyway, she had no way to claim that she couldn’t make it back to Pretoria. The day that finals were over and the school year concluded, her mother had pulled up in front of the orange metal pillars of Vaal Tech’s main campus and picked Anytha up, talking her ear off all the way back to Pretoria.

Ari had decided to stay back to help out at the orphanages that had been nearly completely destroyed by the devastating floods that resulted from the rupturing of the Vaal River Dam a little under a year ago. The rainy season was too much for the reservoir to hold, and the rupture of the dam lead to the destruction of almost everything within a couple of miles of the Vaal River—one of the most devastating natural disasters in South Africa’s history. Hundreds of people had lost their lives, and even more were still unaccounted for. Anytha wanted to ask Ari to come back with her to Pretoria for the summer, but she knew that Ari was needed more in Vanderbijlpark to be a part of the continued relief effort. Anytha knew that the children at the orphanages were in desperate need of help, and she almost felt guilty for being unable to be there with Ari, trudging through the mud and scrubbing their floors. But she had promised her parents that she would stay with them during her break, and that was a promise that she needed to keep.

Anytha was startled from her reverie by the sound of her mother running down the stairs.

“I just got a call from one of the decrees,” Delah said, switching on the set. “Inali’s at a press conference on TV in a few minutes.”

Anytha sat down on the couch next to her mother, eating her bowl of cereal. The local newscaster interrupted the regular scheduled programming of a cooking show and told the audience that they would be going live for a press conference at the Humane Harvest Compound of the Vaal River Dam area—Humanity.

As Anytha took a bite of her cereal, the camera focused on a podium in the middle of a stage with a concrete wall as the only backdrop; up to the podium walked Inali, tapping his index cards against the surface of the podium, and speaking into a cluster of multi-colored microphones.

“Thank you to everyone for coming out today,” Inali said, adjusting his suit jacket.

“It is a very bittersweet day for us at Humanity. We come together today to break ground on a new building for the residents of this compound. While we would normally be celebrating a day such as this, it is with heavy hearts that we remember why we have to break ground on this new building in the first place. As most of you are aware, the substantial rains that February brought upon the Vaal River Dam were too much for it to handle. Record breaking rains caused the breach in the dam that the architects themselves said would never be possible. The rush of the waters destroyed many buildings and took hundreds of precious lives; and though we mourn with the families of all the victims of this terrible tragedy, today we come tog
ether to remember a particular group of young women that lost their lives on that horrible night. The horrible night when the rushing waters of the Vaal River swept away the entirety of the brand new girls’ dormitory here at Humanity, along with the seventy-eight beautiful young women and staff members that were trapped inside,” Inali said, pausing to wipe away a small tear from the corner of his eye.

“We come here today not only to remember these young women that lost their lives, but to break ground on a building to keep their legacy alive. We also come here today to celebrate the fact that the other residents in the compound were saved by the quick reacting staff of Humanity, rushing them onto the third floor of the compound before the water could breech the walls. Because of your quick thinking and bravery, hundreds of lives were saved,” Inali continued as the audience erupted into applause.

“I would like to present to you today, on behalf of the South African government and the Practice of Blue of Pretoria, the official plan and model for the safer, updated design of the new girls’ dormitory of Humanity,” Inali said, walking over to a table and pulling a white sheet off the top of a large model of the new concrete building as the crowd clapped their hands.

“In memorial of the seventy-eight girls of Humanity that lost their lives in the flood, I, and the rest of my camp want to make this groundbreaking more than just shoveling the dirt. We want it to symbolize the start of a memorial. For those of you that cannot see the building model clearly enough, I would like to point out to you the plan to plant trees around the perimeter of the building. Not just any type of tree, though. After months of planning and obtaining special permission from the government, the Practice of Blue has decided to donate seventy-eight Jacaranda trees to Humanity, to be planted in memorial of the seventy-eight beautiful lives that were lost. As most of you already know, it is usually illegal to plant a Jacaranda tree in South Africa. But, we also know that just like the precious girls who lost their lives on that terrible night, Jacaranda’s don’t look like any of the other trees that are native to South Africa. Yet they are still a beautiful sight to behold, especially as they bloom in the spring, showing their true colors to the world. Many would call the Jacaranda ‘unwanted beauties,’ and something in my heart tells me that the girls that passed away in the flood felt that they often could be described in the same way.