Contained by Love

Chapter 14 - All's Fair in Love and War

         The next four days passed in a blur. We were all preparing for Wednesday, which was when I had decided to wager my war.

    This Tuesday morning started like any other, except for a few select things. Normally, the girls would be waking up yawning and thinking about how to do their hair. The boys would be sleeping in, dreaming about their lives back home. Today, the girls hadn’t a wink of sleep; for they were far too busy planning about what they would wear when World War Three would break out. The boys were far too busy to think about the lives they so desperately wanted to get back to. They were practicing their punches, wrestling with one another and making sure they could master a KO punch.

    Personally, I hadn’t even had an ounce of snooze time since my speech. I was up all night modifying my plan and making sure it was perfect. It was now half past eight, and I had half an hour until my next class.

  Fishing for a hairnet in my dresser, I hear someone pacing behind me. I sigh, knowing exactly who it was and why. Without turning around, I hear her nervous intake in breath.

   “You know it’s just a cooking class, right?” I say, finally facing Gwen. She lets out an anxious laugh and rolls her eyes.

   “I’m pretty sure you know that’s not the reason I’m stressing.” Her eyebrows crease, creating a frown that didn’t match her lovely face. I give her a quick, sympathetic hug.

  “Everything is going to be fine as long as we stick to the plan. Do you know what you have to do?”

  Her deep thoughts cloud her eyes, and she looked at me with a faraway look. I stand there for a couple moments, knowing it was best to leave her alone.

   Since that first meeting, I didn’t organize another one. Not only because I didn’t think I could stomach it, but because of the hassle it took to get everyone together. Instead, I had devised a way to get the messages across.

  There was a wall, in one of the staircases. The paint was chipping, the wallpaper barely visible. It was the perfect place. Since then, I would go there with the Sharpie I stole from Madame and wrote a sentence in my encrypted code. After my speech, I had explained to everyone how to read it.

  A smile crosses my face as I picture myself and Ryan using these codes at school. Well, my old school, that is. He had come up with it all by himself.

   The way it worked was kind of simple really. To someone who didn’t know it, it sounded like gibberish. But if you were listening to the right sounds, you knew what people were saying.

  For example, if a person wanted to say “hello”, it would sound like hetegel-letego. Absolute gibberish, right?

Wrong.

After each syllable, said person has to add a “etego” sound. So while it may seem that person has lost their mind and is blubbering like an idiot, think again. It was so effective back in the old days, the teachers, or my parents, even Bea and Anna, they never caught up.

  It was the best plan I could come up with. Madame would probably assume some prankster was writing random messages just so they could mess up her wall.

  But to us, it was a secret language. A way to communicate outside of her crazy mind.

  At first, when I had demonstrated it to all the kids, the look they gave me was sort of priceless. Kind of like I went off the deep end. And who knows, maybe I did? But I didn’t care. Because the most important thing in my life right now was to get each and every one of these suckers out of this school.

  So we stayed up until two in the morning. Then, and only then, did they actually start to understand it. I had them practice with me, and with each other until it was spotless. I told them to keep drilling it in their heads. If they wake up and want to say good morning, they would say “gerogood motogornitiging”.