The Frowning Girl

                "When everything is perfect there is no reason to be unhappy."

                                    -Wilhelm Deville, Public Outreach Pep Rally, 2354

Hazel was uncomfortable in the metal chair. Her wrists were uncomfortable in the handcuffs because when the Boosters grabbed her she had rubbed them raw trying to get free. A fighter, they called her with their smiles too wide and eyes too bright. The blood had felt sticky and warm as it dripped from her wrists and into the cracks of her cuffs. It was dry now and, to entertain herself, she did her best to pick away at the scabs littering the circlets. How many hours had passed? Six? Seven? Nine. Hazel knew it was nine because the city choir had only sung the first few bars of "And the Lord Fell to Happiness" when her face flashed across the giant televertisement screens.

Reacting to the memory of her face plastered across every screen was difficult. The expectation was that she smiled. The expectation was always that she smiled. Smiling is perfection, perfection is smiling. Our society is for you, only you, always you. Remember that. The slogan played in her head along with a vision of Wilhelm Deville in all his governmentally approved thrill. He wore his suit with the red sleeves, blue chest, and rust colored slacks the same shade as an orange that had started to harden and go bad. Hazel thought he looked more like a clown than the President. Muscles tugged at the corners of her mouth, but Hazel didn't want to smile. Hazel wasn't proud of her face. She wasn't happy to have been on display for the city choir and its audience, to become a statement. She was angry, guilty, and pissed the fuck off. There was no positivity about it. That time a smile did come to her face. Humorless and cruel, but a smile none the less because odds were that the city choir, the audience, and anyone in earshot learned words that would make Wilhelm Deville and his Boosters shrivel up in horror.

She wiggled across the flat seat trying to find a position that didn't make her want to scream. Fresh blood poured from the cuts on her wrists as she pulled the cuffs taught against her skin. Hazel's arms felt weak, but she tossed them in separate directions hard enough the metal between her cuffs made a chink sound that was comfortable and monotonous enough to clear her head of the day's events. Being found by the Agency of Free and Expressionist Thought, the planning, the teleprompter telling her what to say, the raid...she clanged the cuffs again. She wanted so badly to forget.

There was talking behind the door. It was muffled, and she couldn't make anything out and a cold tingling exploded from her stomach to her fingers like the new bombs they were using to execute criminals televised to every home in America. Hazel remembered the way her mother would smile at the spray of debris and blood and her father would laugh his booming laugh. She was seven or eight when she stopped watching the show with them, stopped smiling because she believed she was supposed to. What's the matter with you, her dad would ask patting her legs or shaking her shoulders. Come on Honey, it's fun, her mother would add still fixated on the devastation. The anxiety made her legs numb to the point she didn't feel the blood dripping from her wrists and onto her pantlegs. A lump caught in her throat. The Agency for Free and Expressionist Thought told her what she had was a gift, told her that her emotions made her special.

Hazel didn't feel special.

She felt like a freak.

The door opened, and a man stepped in. Hazel could feel his presence, a crackling electricity that seemed to radiate from his person in tendrils. He took his time strolling across the cement floor, relaxed as if he were meeting an old friend for lunch.

"Hello, Sweetie," the man cooed. "How are you today?"

"Cheery," Hazel said deciding the texture of the floor was infinitely more interesting than the Booster.