Future Traded Yestoday

2

The first week was fine. Great, even. It was just like all of the normal years of schooling I had gone through, which made the whole audition process extremely sketchy.

Though maybe my first week was great because it started with just three of us. The other two were significantly older than I was, and yet we were learning the same things. I was constantly staying after lesson time for further instruction to get me caught up, and it was real nice of the older two to not mind everytime I asked a question.

And I asked questions a lot.

But then we started noticing how quickly they kept speeding up our lessons so the physical education portion of the day was lengthening. By "we" I mean the older two in my class. They noticed that first since I was too busy trying to wrap my head around everything.

The hallways were now filled even more with rumors about what we were doing. Well, we were pretty sure we knew what we had signed up for, but there were some rumors that one of the older kids started that we had actually been recruited to join a military program.

That rumor was shut down pretty quickly, but it still lingers around occasionally in the hallway whispers. That and the rumor that I'm the youngest one there.

However, that was quickly dispelled completely when five others joined my little group of three. We had heard of new people coming and a whole bunch of people leaving, but this was the first time we had actually seen new people.

Four of them were foreigners from the international auditions that were scheduled to come late. They evened out the age gap between me and the other original two, but in doing so they also added a language barrier.

A Canadian, a guy from Chicago, a Japanese guy the same age as the American, and a guy from Thailand.

The shock of having someone two years younger than I was was enough to keep us from complaining about the newly added language lessons to get us all on the same communication frequency. Whoever was making these classes was extremely focused on keeping us together at all costs.

I didn't mind, though. I was able to help the kid younger than me with catching up to where we were in lessons, and the native speakers were able to help the foreigners even outside of class. We actually spent so much time together the school noticed and had us room together instead of separately so we wouldn't keep walking all over the place.

They really hated us being in the hallway more than we needed to, and there was a rumor for that too. Someone had said that was because there were people constantly trying to get into the school and they just didn't want us seeing how many they had to detain.

That rumor didn't bother me or stick around my mind as much as the others did. With all my school work I was too busy to think about those who would rather be where I was. It was still freaky, though.

I was actually so busy that I barely had time to call my parents. I did my best to try to call them every Sunday evening, but even then I forgot until they called me.

It wasn't like they kept us from calling our parents. They encouraged it. I heard the older kids saying it was because the school didn't want either party getting nervous or whatever.

The only thing I was nervous about, though, was why I heard other kids playing games through the walls when the eight of us were too busy to even think about it.

Well, almost too busy to think about it. The older kid that had joined us from America- the one that had the rumor around him that he had been on the roster since before the school was built- he always made sure we took a break and had some fun. Or at least he made sure we had fun while we were working.

He was good at that, and I could tell the kid younger than me was pretty grateful for that. We actually share a bunk bed now. That's how often we're around each other.

The kid from Canada and the younger of the two original kids in my class were across the room. He could also speak English, so that just made it easier to get along with the Canadian.

But there we were, just a group of the eight of us, all wondering why the other kids got to have free time while we worked our tails off. It really made me wonder what the school saw that we were missing.