NUMB

Day Forty-Eight - Elyse

I am taken to Sheila in the morning. She sits at a large desk in an otherwise empty room with her fingers in a steeple and her eyes fixed on me the moment I come through the door. The Warden escorting me pushes me into a chair on the opposite side of the desk. My eyes meet with Sheila's.

"Good morning, Elyse. I hope you slept well." She looks perfectly put together up close, not a strand of hair out of place on her head. There are so many details you don't see on someone until you are sitting a few feet from them though. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth are deep, more evident now. She has piercing eyes, a pale shade of grey—cold and uninviting, just like the Compound.

"I did not sleep," I say.

Sheila's eyes zigzag over my face. "You've been pulled from class before because of it, yes?"

"Yes."

"Do you know why you have trouble sleeping?"

I wait before answering, my eyes narrowing. "I do not feel tired, so I do not sleep."

One of her perfectly shaped eyebrows arches. "Yes, well," she adjusts herself in her seat, shuffles some papers on her desk, "I've read your file and know all about your insomnia. It hasn't posed any health problems so far, which is good. Do you know why you are here?"

"I fought with another Numb in the courtyard yesterday."

"Mm-hm. And the girl you fought with, did you know her?"

I hesitate. Do I tell her that Krysta and I are friends? Or do I lie and say we have never met before? What will happen to Krysta if I admit we do know each other? Sheila watches me and I wonder if she can read my thoughts, if they are playing out on my face. "I have spoken to her once or twice."

Sheila purses her lips, pulls a file from under a few others and opens it. "Krysta, Level Two. She's got a record, that one. Anger control problems. While common with her Level, hers are a little more difficult to keep under wraps than most. This was not her first fight."

I keep my mouth shut about the fight with Quinn. Sheila does not need to know that I was present for that one as well.

"You on the other hand," she pulls another file and opens it on top of Krysta's, "have a clean record, violence wise. It says here that you were brought into the infirmary on multiple dates due to illness. Tell me about that."

I relax in the chair, fold my hands on my lap and stare at her. "I got sick and was sent to the infirmary. The nurses thought I had the virus that has been going around, but it must have been the flu. I recovered quickly."

Sheila assesses me, closes the files and stacks them on the side of her desk. "Yes, well, you were very lucky. Not everyone," she pauses, narrows her eyes, "recovered as quickly as you did."

I do not say anything back to that. I study her instead, try to find a crack in her mask that will tell me what she is thinking when she looks at me. There is nothing though. Her face is more blank than the Numb I have grown up around.

"It has come to my attention though, Elyse, that you have skipped out on a few of your weeklies."

The blood in my veins freezes.

"You are marked as having received the shots, but that's not true, is it? See, I know you have been avoiding them, you and a group of your friends. I have some very interesting security footage that I think we should watch together." Sheila presses a button on the keyboard embedded in her desk and a screen lowers from the ceiling on the wall to the right of me. A few more buttons click and then a video pops up on the screen. The hallway is familiar, the Level Three bedrooms.