Wire Fence

Chapter 4 - The Arrival

-- Within this chapter, and within this whole story, there are characters that believe that men are better than women. I do not believe that this is in any way, shape, or form true. It is simply an opinion I created for my characters. I am so very sorry if it offends anybody, as I never meant for it to do so. Thank you --

Chapter 4 - 

"I'll explain everything to you as soon as possible. But right now I need to go. Your mother can come back at any moment and we might not be so lucky next time," Dawai explained, walking towards the door.

"Well you can't just leave me like this! I'm scared, I'm confused, I can barely breath, and my head is throbbing! Please, just tell me something." 

"In time, I promise. If you trust me when I say that I'll protect you, come see me tomorrow. If you'd rather stay at home thinking you're safe here, I'll understand," He said, walking back towards me. He leaned down and placed his lips on my cheek for a split second. The warmth was almost unbearable, yet pleasant enough to make me go weak at the knees, "That's called a kiss, remember? Hopefully I'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye."

Dawai and his warmth were gone all too soon.

I sat at the desk for the next hour or so, watching people pass by. But my mind wasn't focused on the people. It was trying to decipher why Dawai was determined to keep his discovery a secret from the Leader. Whenever Outsiders tried to come in, everyone in Alridy grew nervous. The citizens of Alridy suddenly became over-protective and scared to death. Although I never saw Dawai much at times like these, I always assumed he was just as stressed as everyone else. But now he suddenly seemed calm and collected, and out of character for a citizen of Alridy in a situation like this. Maybe it was just the age he had grown into, and a feeling of strength and masculinity had come over him that demanded to be represented through a state of fearlessness. 

In attempt to organize and then clear my mind, I left the house and ventured out into Center Alridy. All of Alridy's shopping centers were located here, and run by the Leader's Men. It was quite difficult to shop when you were a female younger than these Men, as it was impossible to voice your needs, so we always sent Rowan out to do our shopping. My only task in Center Alridy was to walk around and enjoy the scenery, and that was my plan for today. While my home was surrounded by vegetation and crawling with vines, Center Alridy had bare buildings and paved streets whose sight made my heart speed up. Dawai told me I would've loved cities -- whatever those were, as he refused to tell me -- since I was so fascinated with the layout of Center Alridy. 

My favorite building in Center Alridy was our school, placed away from the shops and closer to the river. With it's clean stone walls and mostly green lawn, it was official one of the best-looking buildings in Alridy. The male's left side of the building was decorated in bushes housing little red flowers, and the female's right side had rocks lining the walls. I had never seen the inside of the male's side, but just going with my gut feeling I presumed it was much nicer than the right side; if the outside looked better, surely the inside did too. Maybe they had desks instead of benches, and notebooks rather than chalkboards. Maybe they even had two Teachers to a room, rather than one. Whatever they had, I knew for a fact that males were better educated than the females. Although we were forbidden for two people of the opposite gender to speak about what we were learning, it was quite obvious that the males were receiving more information than us females.

I wandered through Center Alridy dodging both the bodies and eyes of older men. It was greatly frowned upon to be careless when walking the streets, and accidental bumping into the older men could earn a woman a stinging slap to the face. A man bumping into a woman could result in the same punishment, even though it wasn't the woman's fault. Dawai couldn't stand seeing a scene like this play out and often avoided cutting through Center Alridy to get from one place to another. He called it 'unfair' and 'unjust', whatever those words meant. Although I couldn't see what was wrong with a situation like that as we were told that men are more important then women, should be treated with respect, and are allowed to take whatever actions they believed were right for a certain situation as long as those actions didn't break any rules, Dawai refused to explain his thinking to me.