Wishes

Mrs. Shelley had been waiting in my room when I snuck back into the Home. She had come in to return my mother’s locket, the one she had recently claimed had been in her own family for years. She watched me open the heart-shaped locket and laughed derisively as I tried to pry open the frame further. It was completely empty - no picture of me as a child and nothing hidden beneath. She asked me what I expected. Did I think there was some secret message or hidden key in there?

Yes, I did actually. Search your heart Anya, Glen had kept saying. And I stupidly believed the key to my past and my parents’ disappearance from Arcadia had something to do with that heart-shaped locket. How could I have been so naive? It was too obvious, too cliche.

She had called me desperate and said the Caretakers had clearly done a good job breaking me down. And I was desperate, desperate to find a connection or some clue about why my parents disappeared. Now that my belief that they abandoned me ten years ago was slipping, I just wanted to find out what really happened.

When I asked her why she brought back my mother’s locket, she ignored me and instead asked where I had been before sneaking back into my room in the middle of the night and what was I hiding in my backpack. At first, I didn’t answer. What was I going to say? That I felt ashamed Glen got hauled away by the security forces after talking to me about my past? That I snuck out of the Home in the middle of the night to retrieve a box Glen had shown me that might have something to do with my parents’ betrayal but then might not? That until a few days ago I hadn’t gone against the Caretakers at the Home for Abandoned Children or the Council or anyone else in Arcadia. I don’t even know myself why I took the risk tonight.

I didn’t know if I could trust Mrs. Shelley, but I sensed she wasn’t there to get me in trouble, and our whole conversation seemed dangerous for her too as she made biting remarks about the Arcadian Council and didn’t immediately take me to the Caretakers when she caught me out of my room after curfew. So I decided to pull out the box from Glen, hoping that I wasn’t further incriminating him. I told her I went back tonight and found it in the school garden shed where Glen had shown it to me the other day, before he was arrested. I thought it had something to do with my parents and I could tell she recognized something about it but wouldn’t say. She just said I should figure out how to open the box as my parents’ lives may well depend on it. Just like with Glen, I was getting the impression from Mrs. Shelley that not only were my parents alive but that they were still in communication with people in Arcadia. But why Mrs. Shelley? Surely the cook at the group home for traitors’ children wouldn’t have been part of the Uprising with my parents. Plus I found her to be calculating and opportunistic, nothing like what I had recently been remembering my parents and their friends to be like when I was younger.

The last thing Mrs. Shelley said to me before leaving my room tonight, though, keeps running through my mind. “Brian and Melissa are wrong - you’re not ready to help,” she said.

Brian and Melissa...my parents. Help with what?

Over the next few weeks, I just go through the motions. Nothing has made sense lately. With Glen arrested and Mrs. Shelley and I never able to have private conversations when I am helping her in the kitchen, I don’t get any new information. I do school like I’ve always done school - do what’s asked, be quiet and unobtrusive, don’t look for praise, recognition or leadership opportunities. Because there won’t be any, not for people like me. And with my seventeenth birthday coming in a few days, I’m not sure it matters anyway. For those of us in the Home, school stops early because we don’t need advanced coursework to to go to the Necessary Support jobs, and those are the only kind we are allowed to get.

I just want to do something meaningful. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. When I was younger, soon after coming to the Home, I saw a little boy and his sister on the edge of the woods on my way home from school one day. They ran off when I started to approach them. I kept thinking about them during dinner and how thin and dirty they appeared, so I decided to sneak some food out to them. I knew we weren’t supposed to leave the Home then but I thought that Mrs. Lambeth wouldn’t mind since I wanted to help someone. I didn’t see the kids but left the food in a bundle near the tree they watched me from earlier. When I got back to the Home, Mrs. Lambeth immediately marched me down to the closet next to her office, where I sat in the dark the rest of the night. When she let me out the next morning, she reminded me that bad little girls who disobey and run away, no matter the reason, deserve all of the bad things that happen to them, just like I did when my parents left me after I ran away from them. If I wanted to stay safe, I must do as I was told. As the years passed, I stopped trying to help people and just focused on keeping my head down. But now as I am remembering more about my parents and their hushed but passionate conversations with friends before the Uprising, that doesn’t feel right.

Today is my seventeenth birthday. My friend Emily is the only one who wishes me happy birthday since the Caretakers at the Home don’t believe in celebrating. My teachers don’t even acknowledge it’s my last day of school. Next week I report to the NecSup office to find out where I will be working.

When I walk in my room after school, there’s a white baker’s box on my dresser. I open it and find a small chocolate cake, emblazoned with birthday wishes for me. Tears threaten to drop...I haven’t had a birthday cake since I was six, when I was still with my parents. At first I think Emily must have left it for me but realize there’s no way she could have done that.

I grab a piece of cake, savoring it, and then notice something stuck to the cardboard plate it sits on. It’s something small wrapped in plastic. I open it to find a note.

Happy Birthday. Make you get all you wish for. - S

Mrs. Shelley, the enigma. I don’t know if the note is heartfelt but at least she gave me a cake. So what do I wish for? I don’t know any more.

I grab another piece of cake and sit on my bed. My mind drifts back...it’s my dad’s birthday and we’re sitting around that old barn where Glen had me meet him this past weekend. I must have been five and was the only kid there - my parents took me everywhere with them then. My mom had just asked my dad what his birthday wishes were.

“I wish for all of us to be free from oppression, to have enough to eat, to have good health, and the freedom to pursue what we love. To be free from a government that suppresses dissent, to be free to stand up for what we believe and to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves.”

So many of the conversations I heard back then were like this, but yet it has been so easy for me to believe my parents had done harm to others and left me on my own during the Uprising. I traded what I knew was right, even at such a young age, for the illusion of safety. The Caretakers knew what they were doing with the brainwashing, but the question remains...why was it necessary?

Today Mrs Shelley and I are finally working in the kitchen on our own. I know someone could still be listening though so I lean closer to Mrs. Shelley to whisper, “Thank you for the cake. That meant a lot. I haven’t had one in a long time.”

“You’re welcome.”

“But the key didn’t fit.” I had found a small key stuck in the bottom of the cake last night and had rushed to pull Glen’s box out of its hiding place. I had assumed Mrs. Shelley had found the key for me, but when I had tried it, it hadn’t fit.

“Use your brain, Anya. You’re supposed to be smart. What if someone had found that key before you? You need to think about why Glen had wanted you to meet him over the weekend. Did you really think it was just to gather plants for the school?”

I was so tired of the cryptic conversations, of these people I barely know suddenly asking so much of me without actually telling me anything.

The next day, Mrs. Shelley told the Caretakers I was to go gather items for the Home garden since I was no longer in school and not working yet. I assumed she was giving me a valid reason to go visit the old barn again. I took the key and Glen’s box with me just in case and made my way through the woods. Being in there again with the smell of mint outside the windows brought back more memories. In colder days, we had spent time in there instead of out around a campfire. I didn’t know what I expected to find here, especially that could be opened with the little key, so I just started pushing hay and broken boards around in the barn, hoping that something would come up. In the last stall, I finally came across another metal box, this one larger than the one Glen had given me.

The key actually worked but I found myself hesitating to open it. Wondering what secrets it could hold kept me frozen. So much had changed in just a week and I didn’t know if I felt up to more changes. I could just turn around and keep up the story that my parents were far away from Arcadia and hadn’t wanted me with them. I could go to my Necessary Support job and keep being complacent and be safe.

But that’s not who I was, not any more. I lift the lid and dig in.