joyce antrican : d12 : fin

The neighbor opens her door as I'm being weighed down by a basket of her own food. She looks at me, and I look at her, and when she screams, I run. I run out the back door and down the path, clutching the basket to my chest. She screams "Thief! Thief!" but nobody is around to hear her. Life is an every man for himself sort of game, and the woman herself can be blamed for leaving her house completely unlocked. I saw an opportunity. I took it. Nobody catches me.

I stop running once I reach the start of the Seam. This is where I live. I am not fortunate enough to live in a better part of the District. 'Better' being a subjective term, of course. We are the poorest district. Still, there are those who can afford food, and those who cannot. I stop for a moment, only a moment, digging my bare feet into the soft dirt, catching my breath. Children bolt past me, playing tag games with sticks. Once I'm sure I've forced enough oxygen into my aching lungs, I walk to my house.

Technically, this is not my house. It is an orphanage. I have an actual home, one with a mother and a father and several siblings, but I do not live there anymore. I have lived here since I was eleven. So has my friend, Clara. She's waiting for me on the rotting porch, her face buried in her knees. I tap the staircase with the heel of my foot and her head shoots up. "Joyce!" She exclaims, a smile stretching across her freckled face. "What's that you've got there?"

"Food," I reply. I sit next to her and stretch my legs out.

She takes the basket from me and begins to dig through it. "You found all of this?" She asks, sounding somewhat in awe of me. It makes me feel proud.

I ask her to pick something for us to eat now. She chooses two bread rolls that would surely go bad if we waited any longer to eat them. We eat them one crumb at a time, wanting to savor the delicious flavor for as long as we can. I think we must look like so odd, sitting side by side on this porch, taking an agonizingly long time to eat a simple bread roll. Clara and I once tried to pass ourselves off as sisters, but we were very young then. Once we grew up, it was finally obvious to us that we look nothing alike. I have dark skin that glows golden under the sunlight, and coal black hair that falls down my back in fine strands. My eyes, also black, sink deep into my skin, while my cheekbones look like they're trying to break past the flesh holding them back. My nose is flat, my lips are full, my teeth are crooked. My arms feel like they could be broken if somebody shook my hand the wrong way. My legs, however, have some strength behind their frail appearance. I owe this to my preferred way of transportation- running.

I am taller than most of the other girls my age. The clothing provided by the orphanage tends not to fit me because of this. The clothes have been passed around from girl to girl, already stretched and shrunk by the time they reach me. I spend a lot of time in the sun, which means I sweat. My shirts have stains around the armpits and my face is littered with clogged pores.

Clara, on the other hand, is a straw-haired, sky-eyed, ridiculously freckled beauty. I don't understand how somebody so lovely in both appearance and personality could have come from a family like hers. Clara may be beautiful, but I am nothing special. A young girl in clothing that does not fit her, with dirt caked on her feet and her hair plastered to her face with sweat, is not an unusual sight in the Seam.

Clara makes no effort to chat while we indulge in our dinner. I don't mind that. I wouldn't consider myself a talkative person. Conversation is not one of my strong suits. I often find myself saying something harsh when I don't mean to. I'm not mean, just blunt. I don't really understand what the right and wrong things to say to a person are. My sentences are often short, a couple words at most.

When every day of your life is a struggle to stay alive, it can be hard to care about anybody but yourself. Other people are a liability. Once you get attached, you start thinking less about yourself and more about them. You give them your time, your food, your money. The only person I need to care about is myself. I must keep myself alive before I can keep anybody else alive. Call me selfish, but it's something I must do to survive.

Clara is an exception. She managed to make herself a home in my heart. I regret that, sometimes, but I would never tell her. I am a girl who lives with a lot of regrets. It is not good to live in the past, especially not here. I'm well aware of this. I think my life would be a lot easier had I never met her, had I never needed to care about her. I think my life would be a lot easier had a lot of things not happened. I let my grief keep me awake at night. I shouldn't. But I do.

I lick the taste of the bread off my fingers. Clara heads inside with the basket of food. I follow. We bolt up the stairs to our room and spend the next few minutes hiding the food, so it cannot get stolen again. It goes under floorboards, between cracks in the walls. Hopefully, it will not be found by one of the younger children. They have very keen noses.

Once upon a time, I did not live in an orphanage. When I was born, I was the only child of my mother and father, but my siblings soon followed. I don't know why my parents had so many children. It seems cruel. They knew they were bringing us into a world that didn't care whether we lived or died. Since I was the oldest, the responsibility of keeping everybody alive fell onto my shoulders while my parents worked. My siblings were fed and clothed, and I was run ragged. I learned at a young age that the world was not fair.

I met Clara after her house burned down. People thought she had done it, because her parents beat her, but I knew she didn't. She was tired, and afraid, and so was I. I was tired of running after my siblings all the time, and I was afraid of what might happen if I didn't watch them. Somehow, our situations didn't feel different at all. We became fast friends, comforting each other through the bad times we'd found ourselves in.

But new friends mean new distractions. One day, after school, I didn't go home right away. I snuck off to meet Clara. We wandered around the town square, being careless children for once in our lives. I returned home when the moon was high in the sky to find my parents distraught, waiting for me. One of my brothers had died. I didn't understand what had happened. I knew he had been sick for a few days, but it hadn't seemed like anything serious. My parents said that if I had come home when I was supposed to, I would have found him unconscious, and could have taken him to a doctor. I hadn't. They found him dead.

I was sent away to the orphanage the next week. To my parents, I was now the girl who killed her own brother. It wasn't fair, but I was not surprised. I had already learned the world was not fair.

I decided from then on that I wouldn't care about anybody else. If somebody else were to get hurt, I would not bear the consequences for it. I pushed Clara away, or at least I tried to, but she kept finding her way back to me. Now, it's just us. Joyce and Clara, trying to keep each other alive in this indifferent world. Perhaps, some day, I will regret that too.