Blue Read Free Page B

hear what she might have overheard from the rest of the compound staff the previous week. Marguerite gave Tabitha an education that she could never receive within the walls of the compound; the few minutes of talking on Sunday morning were more precious to her than the thirty hours a week she spent in school.
    Marguerite was one of the few residents of the compound that wasn’t afflicted with albinism; her main affliction was a skin disorder that she called her “spots.” Tabitha had done some research on the subject, and found that the medical term for her condition was called Vitiligo. After seeing other people that had the condition, she had come to the conclusion that Marguerite must have a minor case of it. Marguerite’s face only had one white spot in the middle of her right cheek that stood out from the rest of her dark brown skin, but her arms and legs were covered with stark contrasting spots. Marguerite had full lips and beautiful black eyes, and though she was over the age of eighteen and had the choice to avoid harvest and just pay for her stay in the compound out of her salary, she chose to allow them to harvest her hair anyway. Her monthly harvest paid almost as much as her salary.
    Marguerite wore a scarf around her head all the time, like most of the girls did to hide their bald heads, but Tabitha knew that baldness was not the only reason Marguerite was never seen without her headscarf. She hadn’t been as lucky as Tabitha to avoid the black market harvesters before she had come to the compound. She wore the scarf tied farther on one side than the other to cover the hole in the side of her head where her left ear used to be—the main ingredient to the antidote that the healers used to heal the deaf.
    Marguerite had finished her schooling at the compound a couple of years ago, and still fearing life outside of the compound walls, had taken on full-time employment in the kitchen. Over the last two years, she had been promoted twice and was now the head chef at the compound, a trusted member of the staff. She also happened to be in charge of tossing out all of the trash from the kitchen every night, which made her one of the few in the compound with a working key to the outside. Every Saturday night she would leave her extra key under the second row of canned beans on the top shelf of the pantry in the kitchen; Tabitha would retrieve it on Sunday morning, slip it in the keyhole in the heavy door, type Marguerite’s code into the keypad, pull open the door with all of her strength and slip out behind the walk-in freezer into the sparse patch of trees just outside the compound walls.
    The compound never had guards stirring at this time of the morning. If there were guards out at this time, they were probably new to the job. Obviously, if they were given such a terrible time of day to be on guard, they must be rookies. Tabitha had only been caught once in the two years of their weekly outings, and the bag of trash she carried with her had duped the guard. Marguerite said that it may have been less about the bag of trash and more about Tabitha’s “cute, little, innocent face” that convinced the guard. But Tabitha liked to believe it was because of the trash combined with her keen ability to talk her way out of the situation.
    Tabitha sat down on her favorite rock, let her arms rest down at her sides as she placed her weight on her hands, leaned forward, and tilted her head up, breathing the biggest breath she had ever breathed. The water had been steadily rising each week; the rainy season was only beginning and already the water was higher than she had ever remembered. Tabitha shone her flashlight down to the river, and pointed her toe toward where the light touched the water. Only a few more feet and her small subconscious dream of soaking her feet from this pit in the rocks would come true. She lay back on the boulder, placed her backpack under her head, and tried not to drift off to