The Pariah

"I am Nobody" ---Odyssey, Homer

Nick looked at his sister who was sleeping on her small twin mattress in the living room. His amber eyes watched her with fondness in them. He was lucky to have her and he knew that. He ran a hand through his dark brown hair as he tugged on the white shirt that covered his thin, pale chest. He really did not want to have to wake her up but he knew he had to. He knew he had to get her ready to face the day because that's what they always had to do.

Nicholas Hart had been taking care of his sister Mia since he was seven and she was three because their mother died from an unknown illness, their father thought it was some type of brain cancer. Their father was always away at work and wanted nothing to do with them when he was at home, so Nick became Mia's guardian. By the time Mia was eight, their father died, and Nick became full on in charge at age eleven. He even dropped out of school to get a dangerous factory job to pay the bills. If you couldn't pay the bills in Armonia you were seized by the government and sold into slavery. Nick wasn't a fan of slavery nor the government, so he wasn't about to fall into that trap.

The government in Armonia basically had an all powerful ruler with an all powerful army. If you didn't comply you got shot or sold into slavery, if you didn't pay your taxes you got shot or sold into slavery, if you lied about your living situation you were shot or sold into slavery. The consequences were always the same you were killed or seized by the government. Nick didn't want to die, he was tired, but he wasn't suicidal. He also did not want to work as a slave to some rich idiot that the president owed or who paid for a person. Nick didn't understand how you could buy a person, but it wasn't his place to question. He was just a kid himself and an uneducated one at that.

Nick shook his head as he brought himself out of his thoughts, he had stuff to do. He couldn't afford to have his head up in the clouds. "Get up, get dressed, we leave in ten." Nick called to his sleeping little sister.

At seventeen years old, Nick had managed to keep their one-story house on their one acre of land in one piece, held down a safe-ish job at a bakery, and made sure his sister wasn't a terrible human being. He might not know that Armonia was once known as America before the plague that wiped out half the population and the country declared a state of emergency. He might not know that the region he called Noaven was actually the Great Plains, and the section he lived in was actually somewhere in Texas, but didn't slow him down any. Nick knew how to keep two teenagers fed and functioning. He was able to get Mia to school on time. He was able to keep both of their noses clean and stay under the section's radar. As long as Noaven Section One was concerned, Nick's Aunt Kathy was staying with them. Was she ever home? No, because she was always on 'business' when really she was eating dirt just like his parents.

"I don't want to leave for school," Mia yawned, her green eyes looking into her brothers with challenge in them.

Mia Hart physically was a spitting image of her brother, but with personality they couldn't be more different. She was small, lanky, with green eyes that combated Nick's golden ones. Her dark brown hair, which was the same shade as Nick's, was long and usually tied up in a braid, so it could stay out of her way. Mia was constantly on the move, mostly intellectually though. That kid could never be satisfied, one answer was never enough for Nick's little sister. Mia had to see all sides of the equation even if it drove him over the edge. Sometimes, Nick just wanted to shake her thin shoulders and tell her to get a move on and that it wasn't that big of a deal. Everything was a big deal to Mia though, but that was part of being a fourteen-year-old genius.

All Mia wore were hand-me-downs from the Baker's son and from Nick himself. Most of her clothes looked worse for wear, but it's what they could afford. Nick was lucky to even have things that could keep up with his growing body. Being a poor, teenage boy wasn't exactly easy. Especially since all of his salary went to feeding them and paying the obnoxious taxes the government kept upping. Some days, Nick didn't even think he would have enough to put food on the table. The term 'scraping by' took on a whole new meaning with how much Nick struggled to provide for the two of them.