Appointment

“Come on! Jump down!” I’m in the tall tree in the empty space and the boy with the green eyes is calling for me. “Jane! Are you listening to me?”

“Okay. Okay. Just give me a minute.”

I don’t understand why I’m about to jump, but I feel like I have too. There’s something down there pulling me there. Not physically, but I can feel it. I know if I jump, I’ll break at least one ankle, but I can’t help myself.

“Jane!”

“I’m coming. Move out of the way, unless you want me to crush you.”

“Okay, but hurry. I think someone is coming.”

I swing myself down and hang on to the branch with both hands. Then I kick my feet so that my body is swinging. Back and forth. Back and forth. I think I have enough momentum to get over the gate.

“Here…I…come!”

I jump down and land safely on the other side. Nothing hurts. Nothing’s broken.

“You made it!” The boy with the green eyes comes over to me and hugs me. It’s too long, but I don’t push him away. Whatever made me jump is making me hold on to him right now. He brings his right hand to the back of my bald head. I don’t know why, but I wish I had hair. I move back so I can see his face. Green eyes.

He brings his hand down from my head to my cheek, and he asks me a question:

“Are you going to stay with me?”

I jolt out of my sleep. It was a dream. I don’t usually dream, but lately I’ve been having some weird ones. Most of them involve the boy with the green eyes. I don’t like dreaming. They put impossible things into my mind that I want to be real long after I wake up.

I wonder why the boy asked me that question. My father told me that dreams, especially strange ones, are trying to tell us something about ourselves. I wonder what my new dreams say about me. And I wonder why he asked me that question. Of course I can’t stay with him. I have to find my father. I don’t want to stay with him. I don’t.

Things have been strange lately. My whole body feels weird all the time. I don’t know how to explain it, but my body is changing on the inside. I know it is. I can’t prove it though. And I’m emotional now. I feel like crying sometimes, and I do not cry. Most times, I’m just angry. So angry I could punch a hole in a wall, or a face, or something. I just want to break things now. And I think. A lot. I’ve never wondered about anything much. Things either were or were not. I never wondered if my father were dead or alive. I simply knew he was alive. Now I wonder if he might have died. I never wondered where he was; I simply knew I was going to find him. Now I wonder how that’s even possible.

It’s a good thing that today is my Appointment. I get to miss school for it.

Appointments are mandatory. Every year, we are required to see a doctor for an Appointment. It checks our bodies to make sure that we are fit enough to work, or learn, and it regulates out weight. That’s the most important part. We must maintain regulation weight. We all must be thin enough that physical differences do not appear. I’m not sure what exactly is supposed to appear to make us look different, but the Collective says that it could happen if people ingested unnecessary nutrients. One time, someone got caught eating extra meal pills. They killed him. They said that selfishness was divisive and a form or rebellion. I don’t really understand selfishness.

Most of the time appointments involve needles and other things I don’t like, but this appointment is supposed to be different. It’s my last appointment before my surgery. I have been taking the injections for a week now, and the doctor must check on me to make sure everything will be ready on time. I’m a little worried, though. I’m never on time for anything.

I walk to the bathroom towards the Cleanser to be cleaned. I step onto the platform and close the screen. I grab the nose plug and eye mask, and I close my mouth. Then I press the button to start it. The warm water hurts when it hits me, but I get used to the pressure. I like the Cleanser. It will the one thing I’ll miss the most when I’m gone. When it’s finished, I walk back to my bedroom to get dressed. My body is still bruised from my climb last week, but it’s not that noticeable. The doctor shouldn’t have to question me about them. I put on my standard gray pants and a long sleeve shirt and leave the house.

“Goodbye, 3C2.”

I walk down the street toward the Deck. The Deck is a large station where the people in my area of the sector wait for the Shuttle. There are several decks throughout our sector, but there is only one Shuttle. It travels from the Water to the River and everywhere above, below, and between. To me, it looks like a big, long, gray worm hovering over the ground. Thinking about it makes me smile inside.

The Shuttle arrives, and I walk onto it. The inside is gray, like everything else, and there are benches lining the walls so that we have to face each other. No one ever looks at anyone though. Not really. I take a seat on the bench nearest the door. I wonder what will be different about this appointment than the ones I’ve had before. My mother refused to talk about it. She always refuses to talk about everything. My father was different.

Once I came home crying after an appointment that involved needles. My father tried to comfort me, but I wouldn’t have it. I was 6.

“Are all doctors like that?”

“Of course not. Some are good. Some are evil.”

“What’s evil?” That concept was foreign to me. Evil wasn’t something that the Collective taught in school.

“Here I’ll tell you a story about an evil doctor.”

He proceeded to tell me about a Dr. Lector that ate people. It terrified me, and he laughed at me when he finished.

“If you could see your face right now!”

Then he told me about a funny doctor that changed the way a girl talked. I thought it strange that people could talk differently, but I didn’t ask any questions. I just listened. He didn’t stop telling stories after that. I heard about a doctor that helped a detective solve mysteries, and a doctor that made himself crazy, changing between something shy and something scary. There was a doctor that could talk to animals, and a doctor that created a horrible, evil monster. The word came up again, so I restated my previous question.

“Evil is hard to explain. You can feel it deep inside of you, when you hear about it, or when it happens to you, or if you do it yourself. It’s something so wrong that it can’t be excused or justified. It’s destruction, sadness, and hatred all wrapped into a package of despair. It’s just wrong.”

“That’s why I told you the story.” He could tell I was still confused. “That’s why I love fiction books. They help us understand things that we can’t readily explain.”

“So evil is like killing people, and eating them, and not being sad about it.” I felt like that was evil. If not, just disgusting.

“Yeah, that’s a type of evil. There are many different types of evil. You only really know it when you see it; you feel it.”

“Will I feel evil one day?”

“I hope you never truly learn its meaning, Jane.”

The Shuttle glides to a stop, and I stand to get off. When I rise, I think I catch a glimpse of someone across the way looking at me. When I look, back, they’re already gone. I try not to dwell on it because I know that I’ve been a little crazy lately, but it still bothers me.

The appointment building is big. I can count 20 floors from the ground beneath it, but I can’t look up any longer. It feels like the building might fall on me. I enter and realize that this is my first time coming here without my mother or father as an escort. The recognition threatens to overtake me, but someone pulls my attention back to my surroundings.

“Welcome 3C2. Are you here for your appointment?”

Why else would I be here? This is why I hate computers. “Yes.”

“Follow me.”

The nurse walks me to the elevators. There are two types of machines here: nurses and doctors. All the nurses look like women, and have long red hair. The doctors look like men and have short red hair. It’s not red like the green-eyed boy’s hair though. I always thought it didn’t look right, but now I know why. It’s artificial. They all wear gray pants and shirts that feel as soft as clouds.

We go up to the sixteenth floor, and the nurse leads me to a small room with a gray, padded table, a chair, and a small machine on wheels. It looks the same as all of the appointment rooms.

“The doctor will be with you momentarily.”

“Thank you.”

The fear of something different is slowly disappearing as I walk into the room and sit on the padded table.

I don’t wait long when the doctor enters.

“Hello 3C2. How have you been?”

“Well.” I was going to tell it about my strange dreams, but I decided against it. I don’t know if such an admission would get me into trouble.

“You haven’t been feeling strange at all?”

“Not really.” How does it know?

“Okay. I am just going to check some things, and then you may leave.”

“Okay.”

“G374S3644G32? Bring in the sedative please.”

A nurse, maybe the same one that brought me upstairs, brings in a tray with a needle on it. Great, a needle. I tense my arm, and prepare myself for the painful prick.

I hear an alarm go off on my eyescreen. That either means I have a message or my mother set an alarm to wake me up so I’m not late for school. But I’m not supposed to be at home. I’m supposed to be in the appointment building. But when I open my eyes, I’m in my bedroom. When I sit up, I feel a sharp pain below my belly button. I look down my pants, but nothing looks different. I don’t know what they did, but I know it will be painful to walk and pee for the next few days. I should still be okay to leave on time though. I cross the room to my eyescreen and pull up my message.

Thank you. Your Appointment went well. We will see you again for your surgery next week.

At the end of the message is the Collective symbol. I delete it, and look at my wrist for the time. I have an hour to get to school.