The Management

Chapter 1

The timer on my watch ticks too slowly.

I know the rules, and I know I'm not supposed to look at anyone else's screens, but I can't help myself. Is my watch broken, or does my brain find algebra so dull that it changed my perception of time? I peek at Sasha's watch. Her timer reads the same as mine.

She sees me look, and looks confused.

"What's wrong?" She mouths.

"Never mind." I mouth, turning away. She looks at my screen at exactly the wrong time, just as our professor looks up from his tablet directly at our table. He clears his throat.

"Sasha? Do you care to explain why you're looking at Kaylee's screen?" She looks up at him, startled.

"Uh..." He sighs and takes a document from the side of his desk and fills it out at record speed, before placing it in the wire basket at the end of the table. I don't see paper or physical documents almost ever, the exception being these documents.

Sasha turns red as the class groans and the timers simultaneously vibrate on our wrists. Time to go home. I close the case of my tablet and put it into my bag, signing out on the keypad by the door with Sasha at my side and Caroline coming up behind me, and pulling on a lock of my blonde hair and smirking. Her own light-colored hair is in a high ponytail, straight and shiny.

"I hate uniform, don't you?" Sasha says as we exit the academy, signing out on what seems like keypad after keypad. I could type 'Kaylee 32126' with my eyes closed. It seems like it would be too easy to fake a sign out. I know everyone in my year's birth number, and we were all born in 321, so I could sign out as anyone I liked.

We checked our watches as they buzzed again, telling Sasha to go with Caroline to pick up clean uniforms for next week, and telling me to go the the Junior academy to collect my brother and sister. There are more keypads to sign in to there, but at least my siblings don't have to try to figure out a keyboard every few minutes. I can easily do it for them. 'Jackson 3284' and 'Cassidy 32934' have become almost as familiar as my own code. They are two polar opposites, just like our parents were. Cassidy reminds me so much of our mother that it used to be hard to look at her. Jackson and I look like siblings, so much so that people often forget that Cassidy exists. I don't forget, and neither does my father.

"Hey." I say, signing in and signing them out, then resigning out for myself. The both say hi back and Jackson begins talking rapidly about his day as my watch tells me to go home.

After about thirty minutes of walking, we arrive home long before my father will be.

"I'm hungry." Cassidy says quietly after Jackson finally finishes his story.

"Me too." Jackson says, hanging up both of their backpacks by the door and sits down instead of running around. The lunch at their school is quite small, and its been about four hours of them running around and doing classwork. I was hungry too.

The glass pantry had a full charge, and projected a full cabinet of food. But, per usual, the cabinet was empty upon being opened.

"I'm sorry." I said, closing it. "No extra food. Dinner will be in an hour or two. Do you think you'll survive until then?", I say, dramatically fainting against the couch. Jackson laughed and pushed me off as Cassidy ran around whacking him in the back cackling. It was easy to forget about time and that it was Friday, Distribution Day. My watch buzzed angrily at me to stop playing and get changed but I ignored it. Distribution day came to often to seem important to me anymore, and I think Jackson and Cassidy felt the same. After ignoring it three times, a shock went up my arm that made me cry out.

"Stop!"