The Broken Record Player

Chapter 1

 There is dirt in my eye. I wipe my now half closed eye and keep on digging. I have a mission to dig until I reach the bottom, but there may not be a bottom, so this is why I’m doing it. To show proof that something is true. Well, She pushes and pulls her weight over her shovel. Alana is her name, her name is a 'Sun' name, I think her mother was a sun when she was younger. Her mother died when she was 3, that’s when we became friends. Later on when she was 5 her father killed himself, and left a suicide note, it said something like ‘I loved my life, but it was better with her.’. Since we were so close, she moved in with my family and I, as she had no family left. But we are her family now. We practically adopted her and I am still best friends with her. She has beautiful light brown hair, and chocolate brown eyes, she is fairly tanned, but who isn’t when you are outside for the day in the boiling sun, digging holes in the ground. She is tall, and thin, if the world was different, and not put into classes, she would be an actress, a model, or something. Her hair is getting in the way of her work, so every now and again she pulls it back. Her hands trembling as she does, like she is worried she will be shot in the field if she moves.

        “Hailey! Keep at it!” A Redder shouts at me. Without thinking I put my head back down and start working.

Where I live, the world is split up into 7 classes. The Scientists, the ones who put all of the proof they can find together and make an answer for practically everything. Then, The Judys, the ones who argue and make judgements without the evidence, the ones who persuade the scientists to do all of these experiments. The Suns, they are the class who are experimented on, the ones who try new drugs, get diseases through injections, and the ones who usually die under the age of 55. The lefts, the ones who ran away, or who were too out of the world to be controlled like we are. They just put their life on the line, and hope for the best. They never lose, but then again they never win. They are put into separate cages, not like a prison, but similar. They are all diagnosed with a disease the scientists made up as soon as they found out about these people. They call it ‘Snowflake’ disease. This is because when a snowflake gets a tiny bit damaged, it either melts, or falls to pieces. They consider these people as broken. Then there are The Pops, the ones who just overlook what we are doing, acting rich, maybe they are rich. I have never met one before, but then I notice that nobody except people older than me have met them before. Then there is my class, the ones with no name. We have a nickname, but it isn’t classified as our name. We can be called the Pales. We do all of the experiments for everyone. Right now, the Judys want an explanation of gravity, so half of us are digging to the core of the world. A quarter of us are falling off buildings and the rest are getting results and collecting news for the other classes.

        My brother, Peter, is a collector in this project. He gets news from the scientists, and reports back to the Redders so then they know what we will be doing. He is a year older than me, 18, so does everything I do but a year before. Which is good, so I am ready for what is going to happen to me later in life?

        In 4 days there is something called ‘The Sky’. The day was named after Richard Sky, who changed the rules of life in these 7 classes. He made a difference, but it didn’t save us all.

        The sky is the day when I have an interview with a Pop, all by myself. And then one with my family, and Alana. It's my first time to get an interview, you start when you are 17, and once everyone in you family is 17 or over, you start to have a family meeting. The sky is meant to be a secretive day. But I have heard about it, two Redders were talking about it when they were next to me. I heard random things like '...26 days to go...I heard that last time we lost over a twelfth of our society to the snowflake disease....I hope I don't get it....' Then they started chasing after each other pretending that one of them had the disease.

        I get home after digging a few more metres. On the table is carrot soup, with bread and butter. I sit down and everything is quiet. Peter is looking down at his plate and wishing it wasn't there. Everyone else is also depressed. It's because it's the first year of the whole family to have an interview. Together.

'Are you ready?' My mother look at me and Alana. It's our first time to do this, so of course we are not ready.

'Are we allowed talk about it?' I know we can't talk about it, but I say it so then we wouldn't talk at all.  Sometimes I like silence.

'Look, I am just trying to help you, it is so silent in this room we could hear a storm coming from the other side of the world!' I can tell from the strain in my mother voice that she is telling the truth.

'Well that's because there are so many holes in the ground that we can hear anything from the other side of the world!' I am getting frustrated, but I don't know why. She was just making a conversation. And I am making it too loud.

'Girls, please stop, remember how close it is to the sky? They are watching us. Anything we do now can change their opinion.' My father is right. When it gets to 15 days until the sky day, all video cameras in houses turn on. They like to watch how we act as a family. To see if they are making the right choices when they make the announcement. There has been no changes in our class for 24 years. Whoever's class gets to 25 year of no change, that class gets one whole year out of the system. So this years interview changes everything. It is unbelievably important.

        The rest of the evening was a little of a blur. I went upstairs with Alana, and we got changed into pyjamas.

"Are you alright?" Alana asks me while picking up her clothes off the floor, into the laundry basket.

"Yeah," I never like lying to Alana, she can always tell when I'm lying, so I change what I said as soon as I noticed I lied. "I mean, aren't you scared, you know, of changing classes?" She looks up at me when I say 'changing'. Her eyes looking straight at me, she is a great listener Alana is. Maybe that's why she is a good friend.

"Don't afraid to change," she says while grabbing some unfolded clothes from her wardrobe. "You may lose something good, but you may gain something better." She looks down at her clothes, and starts to fold them. I look at her, and for some reason I start to tear up. I fast walk across the room, and hug her. I sniff and start crying, but I am able to get out some words.

"I'm afraid of losing you." That sentence makes me gag, it's horrible what this world can do to you. Change your whole life with just a few words from the Pops. It's crazy.