Dark and Light: The Island

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Location: The detention centre

I found out the following day from a particularly severe- looking L. E that my trial was set for five days time; I had almost one week in the detention centre before I had to be carted off for the court and be sent to the Island. At least I knew that Cole would be there when I got there.

The trip home that was mentioned in the rules that had been on my bed had been scheduled for three days time; apparently, it wasn’t a social visit - just a chance to get the things that I wanted to take to the Island with me together. There would hardly be any time to speak to my parents properly, and they probably already knew anyway. If Jose had of told me that the system override would show up on the guards’ computer, I wouldn’t be in this mess. My blood boiled at the thought and I tried to push it out of my mind, but it wouldn’t go very far.

The second day in the detention centre wasn’t that bad. I had thought that the longer I would be there, the worse people would be, but it seemed as though nobody took any notice of the people who trickled steadily into the gaol from being arrested; maybe it was because nobody would be at the detention centre long enough to really call it home. It was a temporary holding place for all of us. The Island was where we were sent to serve our sentences, not the detention centre.

We were all woken up at seven in the morning by a blasting alarm that came through the intercom; Chloe threw a piece of crumpled up paper through the bars of my cell when there was no one looking. Trying to be inconspicuous, I dropped my jeans on top of it and then bent to pick them up. When I turned away from the corridor to pull on my top, I unfolded the paper to read what she had written on it. ‘Meet me at the top of the steps at break’ was all that she had scrawled on it. I put the paper into the pocket of my hoodie (black with white drawstrings and a white zip, provided by the detention centre. I didn’t know when they had put them into my room, but they definitely hadn’t been folded at the foot of my bed when I had climbed into it the previous night.

I sat down on my bed and thought about what I would be doing today. Probably, it would just be a day of sitting in my cell until break, then sitting outside until lunch and then, after lunch, going back to my cell. It was a boring and repetitive timetable, but what else could they let us do? Run around and go crazy? I grinned at the mental image of us all just doing what we wanted.

Then I really thought about it. They couldn’t let us out of the strict timetable in the detention centre, but they did on the Island. Why? Because on the Island, we were away from ‘normal people’. We weren’t the government’s problem anymore, so we were left to our own devices. They couldn’t allow us to run wild in the detention centre because, technically, we still belonged to the government.

At around ten o’clock, an L. E came around with a clipboard and asked everyone if they wanted something to do. By the time he got to me, I was bored out of my mind and was ready to do anything I could get my hands on in order to pass the time better.

“Want anything?” he asked lazily, staring at me.

I swallowed. “What is there?” I asked carefully.

He glanced at the list that was on his clipboard. “Musical instruments, art supplies, notebooks and pens, access to the computer lab and a clean iPod and books.”

I thought about it hard. I wasn’t the best at playing instruments; I only really knew how to tune a guitar, could play a few notes on a violin and do a few songs on the piano. But I didn’t particularly want to play anything, so I ruled that option out.

I had always been good at art at school, but I hadn’t painted in such a long time that I wasn’t sure if I could do it anymore. Sketches were all that I had done recently, and none of them were very good. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to draw or paint anything anyway.