For a night I in which I fell asleep so rapidly, I happened to wake up just as such. I could see the beds at both of my sides with my foster peers still asleep, as dawn barely started breaking through the window. A chill breeze entering through it.
Harry's book fell on my chest with its pages spread open - as if the book felt as unbothered as I did. Do books have feelings? Would the immortalized thoughts of the pen that wrote them count as such? I picked it up once more, giving it another chance to hold my attention. There seemed to be enough light to read. I liked the feeling of peace I felt. Mornings were my most cherished part of the day. Life in the orphanage implied I didn't really have anything that belonged to me - not even time. Hour were tightly scheduled and free time was shared among peers. Only stolen moments like this one did belong to me: a couple of hours reading in the dark - in complete silence. Was this what Harry felt when he retried to his books? Preferring the company of words from people long dead than the company of those living in front of him because the first he at least had the ability to chose?
My eyes landed on a quote. 'I know that I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing.' Socrates regards his admission of ignorance as wisdom, as it serves as a foundation for his method of questioning and learning.
I thought of the day before.
I can applaud that. He had told Ash. Admission of ignorance, You are already more self-aware than most people in this table for that alone.
I smiled at the memory.
Does he think he'll find answers in the pages he reads so much? Newt had asked.
Maybe he did.
I noticed then I had forgotten how much I liked the smell of books. The pages of this one were slowly turning yellow at the corners. It was old.
I heard Amber sit up in her bed to my left, and suddenly the morning wasn't mine alone any longer. It was shared and commonplace again. Like most of my hours.
The clock hanging by the wall next to the door read 6:30 am. It was time to get ready and turn up for breakfast before there was a line to the bathrooms. Lessons would start at 8:00 am and I liked being early.
I closed the book, got up and placed it safely underneath my bed again. It would wait for me until tomorrow night. Books can wait forever- until we are ready to read them. Consider them. Accept the messages they so willingly provide. People are not so patient. I wondered then again at the necessity of immortalizing words. Was is it done so too so that words could wait for us when people couldn't?
I grabbed my clothes fro the day and headed to the showers before Amber did. Water would be cold. It was always cold for the first person who showered as the water took a couple of minutes to heat. But I preferred early than warm.
As I made the line for breakfast at the end of the cafeteria room I scanned the faces of my peers looking for Ash. I found her in the distance. She made eye contact with me for a second.
"sorry." I mouthed from where I stood.
Ash shook her head in understanding, and waved off her hand to let me know she wasn't angry. I could let it go. Ash looked different without her leather jacket, as if a primary part of her self expression had been stripped away to be replaced by the uniforms we had to wear. But I guess that's the purpose of uniforms: to unify. To make us meet in the the middle, at the same level, ignoring the way our edges are jagged.
I advanced on the food line and grabbed a table near the window when done. There was something about windows today that made me hopeful. I heard somewhere patients hospitalized in a room with a window had a better recovery that those in a room without one.
The sound of a food tray being placed on my table startled me. I looked up to see Ash joining me to eat.
"Did you hear what Christine was saying lat night?" I started the conversation.
Ash nodded. "Yeah, but I don't really want to think about it. I don't want things to continue changing so much." That was a fair point. The cafeteria was rather loud that day, the rumor had spread fast. Newt and Harry waved at us from across the room as they made the line for food.
"I don't think anything is going to change." I reassured my friend. "Not for us at least."
"Maybe not for me and Harry, but it could change for you and Newt." Ash replied. The tacit implication of her words lingering. You two don't have parents.
I tried not to flinch.
I shook my head trying not to get my hopes up. I terribly disliked change that was something Ash and I had in common. I looked around at the room then. The conversation from the day before lingering in my mind as I tried to imagine a future outside the walls that had seen me grow. A future where the four of us didn't share every meal. I realized some day would be the last day we spent together, and if we were lucky, we would at least know that it was. I have never been very lucky.
"There they are." I heard Newt say as the boys approached our table with their food trays. Ash and I reorganized our plates so that there would be enough room at the table for them too.
Harry's eyes beamed.
"Someone's in a good mood," commented Ash.
"I payed another visit to the public library next door yesterday."
I laughed and rolled my eyes. Of course.
"By when do you need to return the one you lent me? The Socrates one?" I asked. A genuine question.
"In two weeks, but that's not what I want to talk to you guys about."
I saw Newt raise and eyebrow.
"I started doing research on career options and grants we may apply to for university."
I realized then he was starting a conversation about pulling ourselves up from our bootstraps regardless of the hand we'd been dealt that placed us in this home. He was opening a door I didn't know existed. I had not yet considered our capacity to gain some control of our future, to be hopeful for it even.
"I think I'd like to be a lawyer." He added.
None of us laughed.
"How are you doing this research?" asked Newt.
"Just browsing on google. I'm asking our concealer about it later this week too. I want all the support from this institution I can get."
I looked at him dead serious. Here I was, afraid of change, and there he was wielding it. Except the kind of change he proposed I did want too. A new kind of fear crept down my spine. Could Harry leave us behind? Would Harry leave me behind?
"Sing me up for that. I want to do it too." I said without thinking. With the same urgency a drowning person would reach for oxygen.
Ash looked at me concerned, but I did not understand what was there to be concerned about. Was it the tone with which I had spoken? Had she been triggered the same way I was?
Harry frowned. "You know there are other options, right?" He stopped me.
"Right." I answered flatly. I felt as if I had been thrown a bucket of iced water at me. Of course there were other options. I ran to the option Harry proposed because it looked like a life vest, and if Harry could reach it so could I.
Harry smiled fatigued. Sometimes I really felt he could read me.
"How about you think about it for longer than a second and you get back to me about it in a week. If this is something you still want to pursue then, I'll let you know everything I find."
I nodded. My ego bruised.
Newt chuckled to my right, raising both of his eyebrows, as he continued eating his food.
"If I do get the chance to attend university I think I would get a business degree." Added Ash to my left. She shrunk her shoulders humbly and I realized she had thought about this before. Newt looked at her at that. I think he was realizing the same as me. We were the only two from our quartet that had been short sighed enough not to dream of the future. It was in moments like this I could notice something Newt often hid very well: he cared. That was his secret, I thought.
He turned towards Harry. "Thank you," he said, and I knew what it meant. It meant the same things I had been thinking earlier. Thank you for being the field glasses for our short term eyesight.
Harry waved it off, saving him the awkwardness. "We would probably need to continue searching for grants, but its doable." He added.
"sounds like a plan." he agreed.
We were so entertained talking, and piecing together the idea that that we could arrange ourselves a brighter future than the one we had imagined that we didn't hear Santos approach our table.
She looked off, as if something was deeply wrong. Her stern mannerism particularly notable today. "Thomson, Jones and Fleming. Come to my office today after class. Make it an appointment for 4:30 pm, and be punctual." and with that, she just left.
Silence.
Ash looked at us three scared, noting her last name, Leblanc, had been left out of the list. "What did you three do?" she asked.
We looked at each other, clueless. Harry was the first to speak. "Let's not panic yet."
I nodded. I always followed Harry in regards to intuition. He could pick up on social cues I often missed, and I couldn't rely on Newt for that because he missed more than me. Ash dropped it. She nodded. "Please do tell me what was it about when the, what she called it? appointment? is finished. I'm too curious." she requested.
"what? are you afraid to miss out even on this? Do you feel left out?" said Newt in a sarcastic voice, attempting to bring lightness by making Ash the butt of the joke.
"What are you talking about? I'm concerned for Harry and Lilian, who, unlike you, I do care for."
Newt shook his head still wearing a grin.
"Okay, Harry is right. No point on ruminating about what the meeting could be about. Let's keep talking about the fact that we potentially have a future that will probably not suck as much," I said.
Harry smiled looking at me then. A small curl in his right lip that did not extend to his eyes. He passed me a book then. The title read: "Everything you need to know before becoming a lawyer." It was thick… again.
"Why don't you ever like light reads?" I asked him annoyed.
He raised his eyebrows at me.
I rolled my eyes and opened it.
Class went on relatively fast as the doom of what was awaiting us at 4:30 pm that afternoon never really left my mind.
When the time came, Ash looked at me. "Good luck. I'll keep an eye out." She said, and then left to hang out with other friends of hers. Ash was the only one form us four that had other peers at the orphanage she considered to be close friends too.
I headed then to the Santo's office, and wasn't surprised to find Harry sitting outside her door waiting, he probably had been 10 minutes early for this. Newt was walking in from the other side of the hallway. I looked at Harry, then Newt, and proceeded to knock the door of Santo's office.
"Come in" she said the inside.
We did.