Connections

Chapter 11: Unanimous

By the end of that day, Ric and I each had jobs at a deli in town run by the Wolf's (a werewolf family). They had a daughter, Margaret Wolf, who was working there when we signed up. She's a year younger than us, but ages don't matter once you're Assigned. She got Assigned a year earlier than the rest of her class, something about being an exemplary student. But the whole time we were there, she didn't pay a lick of attention to us. I'm glad we weren't customers, because it was honestly very lousy service. Not that I thought I was going to do much better. The only difference was that I didn't have a choice. I needed this job. When Chris told me what the Animalz get each month to live on, I was completely astonished.

By the end of that day, I was also doing a very good job at distancing myself from Chris.

By the end of that day, I felt like the world's biggest jerk.

And by the end of that day, Chris wouldn't even look at me.

What's worse? Feeling the pain of knowing you're a traitor if you let yourself feel the feelings you're heart has craved for years? Or seeing the object of those affections go to bed without so much as a goodnight? What made that hurt so much worse was that I said goodnight. And he just walked away, as if he hadn't heard me. But he was right next to me, and I know he heard.

I was afraid I might have been doing too good a job at distancing my self from Chris. It didn't feel like we were even friends any more. I'd spent the entire day not laughing at his jokes, finding errors in his grammar, telling him his human sayings were stupid, and just overall being a jerk.

I could tell Melanie was having second thoughts about me. I could also see, to my relief, a bit of confusion, a bit of hurt, and a bit of concern – not just for her brother, but for me too. It was a sign that she didn't completely hate me. Yet. I could also tell that Ric saw right through me. He knew what I was doing, he just couldn't figure out why.

But none of that mattered when I finally went to bed. I was just glad that Ric didn't decide he wanted to talk with me, because the last thing I wanted to do was talk. But I'd made a promise not just to their mom, but to myself. I had already strayed so far from my own people, I didn't want to be marked a traitor. Because then everything really was lost. Because then, I was no better than the dirt on my shoe. And that was one thing I was never going to be.

I woke up by myself the next day, glad I didn't have nightmares about all the things I was stressing over lately. Here's an abridged list:

-Chris

-Ruler

-The humans

-Chris

-And Chris

I know it seems kind of stupid to be worried and or stressed out about the humans, but there were many reasons. I mean, first of all, there was the fact that while I haven't had any nightmares while sleeping, I don't think I was sleeping deep enough for nightmares to even be a possibility. Gretchen and Bill still hadn't made good on their unspoken promise, and I felt like a string ready to snap. Then there was Chris' mom, who didn't stop watching until I went to bed last night. But it wasn't all bad. I was worried about the rest of the humans. The kids who I could hear telling their parents they were hungry at night, just before bed, and the parents had to say there was nothing else to eat. The elderly who would occasionally break out into moans of pain because they couldn't afford their medication. The wives who would cry on their husbands shoulders, thinking their kids were asleep, when in reality, everyone could hear her cries.

It wasn't right, and I felt bad about it. For sixteen years I'd stayed in my white-walled room, playing on my computer, eating in the dining room, when some people didn't even have enough money for something as simple as food. No Supernatural ever goes hungry. All these years, our textbooks have told us to be proud because Supernaturals have done something the humans could never do. We ended world hunger. And I was stupid enough to believe them. Yet, right under our noses, people were still hungry. We didn't treat actual animals like we treated the humans. It wasn't right.