Chapter two
Slaving Away
I woke to the sound of hammers and anguished cries. As my eyes were focusing, I saw a hard face above mine, standing there. Unmoving.
“Get up! Get up! Get up!” the face was screaming. I shout upright in my bed, startled.
“What the heck is your problem?” I yelled in the evil woman’s ugly face.
“MY problem? You hear this, maggots? Miss Princess here needs her beauty sleep! Don't you, Blaire?” she screeched.
Blaire? Who in Sam heck was Blaire? I was Mandy…?
It took me a moment to realize those thin lips were flapping at me. I jumped out of bed and saluted. It only seemed appropriate. And then I realized it was. As she marched angrily away, she cleared my sights. We were in a wide, long room, with grimy scratched windows and creaky wood floors. The ceilings were high and sloped, and the triple bunk beds lining the walls almost touched the ceiling. I observed the other girls in the hall, watching them pull on navy blue button up fitted shirts, knee length pencil skirts, and a three striped navy blue cap with white piping at the seams.
I was on the bottom bunk. I spied my bed. I had been lying on top of the perfectly made sheets, tightly tucked under the mattress. At the end of the tripe bunk bed were three oak chests. The middle one was labeled ‘Blaire’ so I assumed it had to be me. I opened it and found the tight fitted clothes matching the other girls, and struggled into them. They were quite small for me. Build for a girl with a smaller waist, a smaller butt. I heard a seam tear as I tugged on the shirt.
With a victorious flourish, having defeated the tight outfit, I slapped on the cap, over my loosely hanging hair. After a quick look around, I realized I was supposed to have my hair in a tight sock bun. I didn’t know how to do one. I looked up to the bed above me. A lean Native American girl was pulling her jet black hair into one just then.
I looked at her pleadingly.
“Err…Excuse me, would you mind helping me put my hair into one?” I begged, referring to her tight bun.
“Sure, Blaire!” she said, seeming to know me—which hugely confused me, seeing as I didn’t even know myself. She leaned down from her bunk and combed my hair back so tight it felt like someone was vacuuming the extra skin off my head. Wrapping an old long sock around my ponytail, I felt her fold my hair over it and tuck everything neatly.
I was thankful she had been so willing, and wondered if she knew I didn’t even know what her name was.
The girls began to march out of the door and me and the other girl followed, in a perfectly straight line out the huge oak double doors. Onto a crop of clumpy grass, we all stepped out the door, and started on a rough stone path toward a tall barn looking building. Mud was spattered on the outside walls, and I could clearly see the water damage just below the gutter, a darker shade than of the cream white the building was painted.
The hard jawed chick that woke me up that morning hurried us all in. as I stepped inside; I began to realize where I was. No, never mind. Not where. When.
We stepped into one of those rooms from the olden days, where everyone was sorted by ages and we all went to different parts of the room, and the older kids would tutor the younger and you got rapped across the knuckles for misbehaving. We were in a schoolhouse.
The kind with the army instructors teaching.
As I found out later, we were all supposed to learn to become catholic housewives while our future husbands were drafted into the war. What. The. Hell. How do I get knocked over by a skateboarder one year and step through a time machine the next?
I sort of went along with the teachings, although I yearned to know what was going on at my home. The time period where people didn’t speak using ‘thee’ and ‘shall’ in confusing manners. At least to me, it was confusing, anyway.
And the most surprising thing was, the schooling they gave us was far below my intelligence level, and after we did learn ‘how to properly learn the art of modern literature and thy neatest handwriting’, the whole schooling summed up to about 3 hours, and then we were supposed to go do ‘thy deeds’.
