Episode 173: Pip & Circumstance (Asa)

It was another day, another waiting period between classes and Cecil’s arrival. Before now, they’d watched a video about clothes. Names of clothes, parts of clothes. There were way too many clothes out there.

People actually put ropes around their own necks. How stupid could people get? They even called them ties!
The movie got interrupted several times, especially with questions about clothes for boys, compared to clothes for girls. Why did guys have to deal with zippers when girls wore skirts? What was the point of a bathrobe. Which way did people tie hospital gowns and why were they so useless?

By the time the movie was over, everyone was a little…stressed. Too many pieces of clothing made good weapons, and too many more made no sense.

And belts for pants that fit…fashion accessories? Why would anyone waste resources on that? “Who goes around wearing a weapon anyone can just use on them?” he asked, generally anyone in the room with ears.

“It’s not just a weapon they can use against you,” Brendan argued. “You’re wearing it. To use it on you, they have to get it off you. You’re way more likely to use it on them.”

It didn’t bother Asa that Brendan was right. It was the way he said it, like Asa couldn’t possibly be making a joke for the sake of it, under the assumption that everyone in the room knew belts made a good weapon.

Before he could think of anything to say, besides things he didn’t want the cameras catching, the door opened a crack.

Through the door, they could see Cecil, in the hall. He was talking to someone, a man, and then they leaned towards each other and kissed.

Asa closed his mouth. He didn’t want anyone to see him react to that, so he decided not to react at all, even though that was a reaction too.

He slid the practice board onto his desk and worked on the buttons and zipper more, until he could do them easily. He kept his eyes down when Cecil strode into the room.

“Sit down, please,” Cecil said, like he was in some kind of hurry. Asa looked around to see who wasn’t already sitting. Brendan. It was always Brendan, thinking he was special. Asa moved his eyes back to the zipper.

“We have a situation we need to discuss,” Cecil told them.

“What kind of situation?” Thayer asked.

Asa wished Thayer would keep his mouth shut.

No, Thayer was right to talk.

Asa just had a bad feeling about today. He’d done fine at sword training, he’d behaved for the videos, he’d practiced the clothes.

It was the teachers. Something about them had changed. The lessons had changed. They hadn’t seen Emily since the lying game that morning, when she’d given them all kinds of weird food and games to try.

It was like a last meal.

Asa’s whole body was tight, waiting, ready to spring into action. He didn’t want to die, or Thayer to die. Or any of them, really.

“An obstacle course, with unique challenges,” Cecil told them.

Deadly challenges? People throwing knives? Steep cliffs?

Asa gripped his desk.

“You’ll be helping someone through the course,” Cecil explained, “not just getting yourselves through. Each of you will be assigned a six-year-old boy to guide through, and whichever six year old comes in last place won’t be back for future exercises.”

Not their lives. Someone else’s.

A kid, a little kid.

“What about which one of us comes in last?” Neron asked.

Good question.

Cecil looked at them for a minute. Was he considering the answer? Was someone’s life really going to come down to this minute, his mood right now?

“Failure to protect others has a consequence that involves living,” Cecil decided. “Out-living.”

So they would all survive, but one of them would have to live with knowing someone had died because they hadn’t helped enough.

Asa was going to get the weakest kid. Just a guess, but all the blue eyes stuff had to culminate at some point. This might be about presenting him with a real challenge.

Fine. He decided right now, before he even met the kid…if he was the weakest, Asa would help him lose. He would lose soon anyway. It wasn’t fair to a stronger kid, who might otherwise have a chance at surviving, to push a weaker kid to win against him.

He chose this. He chose to let his boy be the one to die if he struggled. Because he had blue eyes and was most likely to live. Because he had a clear justification for his choice, that involved saving someone else’s life by default, and he knew he could live with that choice, guilt-free.

The door opened. The guy from the hall, the one who had kissed Cecil, walked in. Behind him, a line of ten boys.

Six year olds were taller than Asa expected.

One of them though, was short. Short like Asa remembered being. The boy looked around the room and when his eyes met Asa’s they locked into place and then moved away, quickly. Deliberately.

The kid had blue eyes.

Asa scanned the other kids, to see if the short kid stood out like Asa did, but some of them had blue eyes too.

“You can distribute,” Cecil told the guy.

“Real people?” Asa asked.

Guilt-free was strategically easy. Seeing the kids, knowing that short kid was probably going to die…

“Are you not up to the challenge?” Cecil countered. His voice was even, but his eyebrows were up.

Asa shrugged.

The other guy went around the room, dropping kids off in seemingly random order. Asa knew nothing here was ever random. He studied the pairs – the second-shortest kid, who was skinny in a way that made him look tall even though he was shorter than the other kids – went to Thayer.

Asa bet he won. He was wiry and built like a stringy monkey.

The guy stopped by Asa’s desk last, the short kid at his side.

“Hi,” the kid said. “I’m Pip.”

Pip. The name fit him. Asa decided, just in case Pip was going to die, to learn what he could about him.

“Is this…all of you?” Pip asked.

Uh oh. Maybe he didn’t know about culls yet. Asa was older than this for their first cull. He hadn’t learned to be really afraid until he was about eight, after the second cull of many.

“No,” he lied. He didn’t want Pip worrying about group sizes shrinking. “Is this all of you?”

“No,” Pip said. “There are -”

Cecil and the other guy were at the front of the room now, and all Cecil had to do was clap his hands for all of them to follow. While they walked to the long cement room that held the obstacle course, Cecil announced, “The restriction is that it is your task to encourage your charges and offer them advice and help, but you can’t ever lift them.”

Yes, this was a setup.

This was a challenge for the others and, if Thayer was right about Asa’s eyes making him special, a lesson for Asa. A lesson in guilt and loss and not being enough.

Asa was very used to being enough. It was probably his biggest flaw, the knowledge that he’d made it this far.

Cecil blew a whistle, and they started. The first stretch was looped ropes, where you had to run between a zig-zagged grid of ropes. Pip was behind almost right away because the ropes were almost as high as his knees.

This was cruel. Not that Asa was surprised.

He gave up. Pip was going to lose, and he wasn’t going to make him feel bad the whole time. It wasn’t his fault this obstacle course was built for bigger kids.

“There are a hundred of us,” Pip told him when he reached the end of the rope grid. The next step was to climb an angled wall with a rope strung along it. Asa showed Pip how to do that part and then got behind him in case he fell.

“Only ten got to come here,” Pip added.

Was this a pre-cull for the six year olds, or did some of them have a chance?

“Same,” Asa lied. “This must be a special thing. I’m Asa.”

“We better do a good job, then,” Pip said, “so we can win.” He gripped the rope and started to climb. The rest of the class had such a head start by this point that there was no way they wouldn’t lose unless a miracle happened.

“Have you done this course before?” Pip asked.

Asa offered him a hand up to finish climbing the rope, but then remembered he wasn’t allowed to lift Pip, so he waited. “We do this most mornings. Do you?”

“No, first time. We just run or swim laps. And take a ton of tests.”

Pip crested the hill, and they started monkey bars side-by-side. Pip was actually decent at those and they passed two kids. Maybe a miracle would happen.

Asa wasn’t sure if a miracle was a good idea or a bad idea.

“Are you good at the tests?” he asked Pip.

“He doesn’t tell us,” Pip said. He tried to shrug, it looked like, or he had a twitching problem. Either way, the monkey bars interfered. “He said only some of us will stay in the program.”

This group was going to be culled younger than Asa’s group’s first cull, it sounded like.

“Yeah, they might send some home,” Asa said. At least Pip wouldn’t be scared. They reached the platform on the far side of the monkey bars, where Thayer was stuck with his kid, trying to get him to jump from the last bar to the platform.

“Have they ever sent anyone in your group home?” Pip asked as they went towards the mud pit. “I want to go home.”

Asa couldn’t even comfort the kid right. Now the kid was going to get himself killed on purpose because he thought he could see his mommy and daddy again. “Well you don’t really get to go home home,” he invented. “You just have to work in the kitchen and clean the bathrooms and stuff. It’s not very fun.”

Thayer had caught up to them again already. “Work in the kitchen?” he asked pointedly. Asa would have laughed except he was standing knee-deep in mud that was almost waist deep on this kid who was probably about to die, and he wasn’t allowed to pick him up and help him through the mud. “Sounds like an awful job to me,” Thayer added.

Asa pointed to the wall up ahead. This one was more vertical and didn’t have a rope to help.

“How are we supposed to do that if we can’t lift them?” he complained.

Thayer’s kid grinned. “Like this,” he boasted. He ran, so fast that he seemed to run more on top of the mud than sink in, and scaled the wall impossibly fast for a kid his size.

“Like that,” Thayer laughed.

“Can you do that?” Asa asked Pip, even though he thought he knew the answer.

Pip looked up at the wall. “Yeah,” he said, but his face got paler.

Asa sighed. He took his shirt off and tugged on the sleeve of Pip’s. “Here, give me your shirt. We can make a rope to climb.”

It might not be allowed, but it was worth a try. Pip was at least not in last place right now.

“Is that allowed?” Pip asked.

Asa smiled. He’d learned enough, and he had a sense of what he could get away with even if it was a little bit of a risk. “Thayer’s right: I can’t lift you, but I can give you tools.” He waited until Pip passed him his shirt and then tied them into a sturdy square knot. “So I’ll be at the top holding this for you, okay?” he asked.

As long as he only held the shirts and didn’t pull them toward himself, Pip’s success wouldn’t break the ban on lifting.

“Thanks,” Pip said. Asa scaled the wall and dangled the shirt-rope, which Pip used to climb the whole wall. When he reached the top, Pip said, “I could have jumped it, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Asa assured him. The last thing he wanted was for dying Pip, if he was going to die, to be unhappy. “I just don’t know what’s on the other side today,” Asa invented. “Your friend is crazy, what if it’s gross slime?”

“Yeah, that would be bad,” he agreed. They walked to the edge of the platform and looked down: Sand.

“Well, it could have been slime,” Pip said.

“Sand is way better.” Asa offered his hand and they jumped down off the platform and into the cushy sand together. They still weren’t last in line.

It was good, because even though Asa had promised himself he would let the struggling kid die if he had to, it turned out he kind of liked Pip. He seemed…genuine.

Most of Asa’s classmates, maybe all of Asa’s classmates, had forgotten how to be genuine.

There was sand, for about twenty meters, then an eighty-foot rope ladder, and then the victory platform. Almost done.

“Let’s run this part,” Asa suggested. Maybe they could get ahead of the other two groups on the sand strip. “This is just fun, right?” he asked.

“It looks fun,” Pip agreed. He dusted sand off his hands and knees. “I can do running parts.”

From the top of the victory platform, Cecil announced the first to complete the course.

They were in sight of the finish. So close.

They ran. For Asa it was more of a patient trot, but he could see Pip was going all out. They didn’t get ahead of anyone new, but that was okay. Two groups were still behind them.

When they reached the ropes ladder, Asa looked up. He remembered how scared he’d been the first time he’d climbed this when he was ten. How high it had seemed, high and wobbly and impossible. There were five sets of ropes that led from the sand area to the victory platform. Asa led Pip to one and held it steady while Pip took his first step.

Pip froze as soon as Asa let go of the support. He was going to have to hold the base the whole time to keep it from swaying. It would cost them time.

He stayed at the base, prepared to race up as quickly as he could once Pip reached the top. He held the base of the rope ladder. Pip climbed. He paused and looked down once, and then after he did that the ladder shook more with each step.

The first fall, he only slid a rung and recovered quickly. Asa reminded him that he was doing a good job. He hoped Pip wasn’t watching the other two kids who were catching up to him on their own rope ladders.

The second fall, higher up, was worse: Pip slid down three rungs before he caught himself, and he hung there for a long time while the ropes in Asa’s hands jiggled from Pip’s nerves.

By the time he was going again, he was tied with another kid for last place.

It was up to Asa to catch up, because Mikail was right behind the other kid on their ladder.

As soon as Pip reached the top, Asa charged up. It saved seconds, maybe, but Mikail was well onto the platform by the time Asa reached it, gasping for air because he’d never done the ladder so quickly before.

He lay flat on the platform and caught his breath and his disappointment. He’d set out saying he’d let Pip die if Pip was weaker than the others, but now there was nothing in him but guilt that he’d failed Pip.

Pip, who was still there beside him, offering a hand to help him up.

“It’s okay,” Asa promised him. The lie sounded flat in his ears. “You’ll be better next time, it takes practice.”

Pip arched his back a little. “I can do good on my other test later,” he agreed.

“Yeah,” Asa breathed out.

Pip was so small, his face so bright, his skin so warm and alive.

“What do you like?” Asa asked.

Pip looked up at the ceiling of the victory platform, lost in thought. “I like those games,” he said, “the ones with pieces.” Board games, maybe? “And I like when they serve chicken and dumplings.”

Better than when they served classmates.

Asa looked out at the rest of the room, full of obstacles and different parts of the course, because Cecil used movable pieces to change the shape of the course every few days. There were easier obstacles they could have included. Things that wouldn’t have singled Pip out for being shorter.

“What do you make of that?” Cecil murmured to his kissing friend.

The friend looked right at Asa before he answered: “I think kids are a weakness for him.”

Asa looked away. This was going to become a thing, a problem. Weakness meant cull, or it meant doing it again and again until he became hardened to it. Until he could kill a kid with his own bare hands, probably.

He turned his attention back to Pip and chicken dumplings that hopefully weren’t classmates. “Me too,” he managed. “That’s good food.”

“What do you like?” Pip asked.

The blue of the ocean. The softer curves of Emily’s body when he stopped pretending he wasn’t noticing them. The ideas Thayer came up with when he let himself relax.

“I like board games too,” Asa told him instead. He thought Pip would probably like Emily, as a mother figure not as a person with curves.

“I agree. We should do this more,” Cecil said loudly, like he wanted to be sure Asa was still eavesdropping. “What are you going to do with Pip?”

The guy looked at them both again. Asa got the feeling Pip was listening too.

“I doubt Adele will let me cull him yet,” the guy said. He studied them for another minute. “I’ll make him run the course all night.”

No. Pip’s hands would be raw, his muscles would ache, and he would have a whole school day ahead of him on exhaustion and no sleep. It was as bad as killing him outright.

“And Asa,” Cecil offered. His voice turned down when he said Asa’s name, annoyed. “I didn’t think he’d fail.” He crossed the platform to where Asa and Pip sat. “First place time was nine minutes, eleven seconds. You have until morning to get him to beat that time.”

“What?” Asa argued. He wasn’t sure why he argued, except that he wanted to make sure Pip wasn’t going to be culled as soon as he mastered the course. That would just be unfair in a mean way. “What about working in the kitchen?”

Behind Cecil, some of Pip’s classmates congratulated the fast kid, Thayer’s fast kid who’d scrambled up the wall, for coming in first place. Maybe ironically, maybe deliberately, his name was Dash.

Cecil turned around to smile at Thayer. “Well done,” he told him.

Asa said it too. It was weird, being on this end of accomplishments. He was used to being, if not the winner, then one of the best.

Last place…

The kissing guy walked over. “Last place time was twelve minutes, thirty-four seconds,” he told Asa. A difference of three minutes and twenty-three seconds.” He looked at his wristwatch. “You’re not allowed out of this room until you make it up.”

“Or you can both work in the kitchen,” Cecil threatened.

A chill coursed through Asa.

Maybe this was good, a good thing. He didn’t want to die, but wouldn’t it be such a relief? No more fighting against his classmates, always trying to be the best, to stand out a little but not too much.

“We have cameras on you,” Cecil told them, an added warning.

“And no shirts by his final round,” Pip’s teacher decided.

He and Cecil rounded up the rest of Asa’s group and the other little kids and led them out of the room. The door snicked shut behind them.

Pip took a deep breath and walked back to the beginning of the course. “Practice, right?” he asked.

“No, we’re not doing it in order,” Asa told him. Not yet, anyway. “You already are good at a lot of this. So we work on the ropes a few times and see if that fixes it. Not too much, or you’ll get thirsty.”

“We can’t get drinks?” Pip asked.

Ha. “Do you see any water in here?” Asa pointed out. “And they said we can’t leave until you beat the time. So let’s be efficient.” Asa walked over to the rope ladder, where Pip had lost the most time. “What was hard about the ropes? Don’t be proud, be honest.”

Pip showed his hands to Asa, the rope burns and the blisters. “I’m not strong enough to hold on long enough to get through it,” he apologized.

Of course not, he was six.

Asa pulled his pants off, grateful for the square-cut shorts he had for wearing under his clothes. “He said no shirts by final round,” Asa said. “He didn’t say anything about pants. Come on, let’s shrink the gaps between rungs.”

Using his teeth and his hands, he tore the pants into strips that he thought could probably be used as incremental rungs to shorten the gaps between ropes on the ladder.

“Do you do this stuff all the time?” Pip asked, wary, watching Asa tie each end of a strip to the ladder rungs. “I thought…rules…”

Asa faced him. If he was going to live because they did this right and their teachers were honest for once, Pip needed to learn some important things.

“You have to look for any way you can find, to make it work,” Asa explained urgently. “Word games make you look smart, and smart is valuable to them. The smarter you are, the more they don’t want you working in the kitchen.”

Pip stopped moving, his grip clenched around one shoulder-height rung. “It’s not really the kitchen, is it?” he asked.

The kid was way too smart, or intuitive, or something. “Why do you think that?” Asa hedged.

“You’re scared of the kitchen,” Pip said.

He didn’t provide any evidence, but that didn’t make him wrong.

“There are ten of us,” Asa admitted. “There used to be as many as there are of you, when we were your age.” He tried to think of a way to explain how this worked, without explicitly telling him. “Does Emily teach you guys?” he asked, to distract himself while he thought.

“No?” Pip said. “Who is Emily?”

Asa didn’t know who she was. Some person named Emily. But he knew who she would be to Pip if she ever taught his class.

“She’s good,” he explained. “When she starts teaching you, you can trust her.”

“If I don’t go to the kitchen,” Pip clarified. He gathered another handful of pant strip and tied it in place. “I can hold them this way, and I won’t just slip off.”

“What can I say, do, that will help you ?” Asa asked him.

Pip thought about it. His hands rested against the easiest rung to reach, relaxed. “Does it get better?” he asked.

That, at least, he could be honest about. “Yeah,” he promised. “Because even though you’re smaller – I used to be smaller too – sometimes being smaller makes you faster at stuff. When you start the tangle cage, you’ll fit in more places because you’re small.”

“What’s the tangle cage?” Pip asked.

“It’s this, over a pool, with rock walls all around it.” Asa actually enjoyed the tangle cage, except for the constantly being surrounded by classmates trying to win against him. “It’s pretty fun, but then they make it mean because that’s what they do.”

“Mean how?”

That question had a complex answer. Maybe too complex for a six year old.

He decided to do advice over giving a real answer. “Make a friend, and don’t ever let them change your mind about that friendship.”

“Okay,” Pip said, like he already had and his friend was standing right there with him.

He had no idea.

<- Episode 172 | Episode 174 ->