Article 5 (Article 5 #1)(12)

I pushed between two girls and saw Rosa, twenty feet in front of me, cornered inside the dead end of the alleyway, trapped. Our two line guards were trying to box her in. They held their arms out wide and low, like they were herding a chicken. Rosa shrieked as she burst through them up the middle, back toward the wide-eyed group of seventeens. The ugly soldier beat her there. He rammed into her from the side and sent her sprawling to the ground.

“No!” I shouted, struggling to reach her. A new guard blocked my way. The skin was tightly stretched across his face, and his insidious glare gave me chills.

Try it, he seemed to say, and you’ll be next.

Everyone watched as the jeering, pock-faced Randolph contained the flailing Rosa with a knee, harshly planted between her shoulder blades. After catching his breath, he hauled her body to a stand and locked her hands behind her back with a zip tie.

And then he hit her.

My belly filled with horror as blood spewed from Rosa’s nose and painted her dark skin. I would have screamed if I’d had the breath. I’d never in my life seen a man hit a woman. I knew Roy had hit my mom. I’d seen the aftereffects. But never the actual act. It was more violent than anything I could have imagined.

And then it hit me, like a punch to my face. If this was what could happen to us, to the girls in rehab, what were they doing to the people who actually committed the so-called crimes? What had Chase done to us? The urgency to flee grew even stronger. I was more afraid for my mother than ever before.

“She’s crazy,” I heard one of the seventeens say.

“She’s crazy?” I said in disbelief. “Did you not see that he just—”

The girls beside me parted silently as Ms. Brock pushed her way through. She stared at Rosa, then at me. My blood turned to ice.

“That he just what, dear?” she asked me, brows raised in either cold curiosity or challenge, I couldn’t tell.

“He … he hit her,” I said, immediately wishing I hadn’t spoken at all.

“And placated the beastly child, thank God,” she spouted with feigned relief. I felt my mouth go very dry.

She assessed Rosa down her pointy little nose for several seconds, clicking her tongue inside her mouth. “Banks, take Ms. Montoya to lower campus please.”

“Yes ma’am.” The sandy-haired guard shoved Rosa past me, leaving her attacker behind smirking with satisfaction. I tried to meet Rosa’s eyes, but she still appeared dazed. The ripe twinge of blood elicited a wave of bile up my throat.

And then Ms. Brock turned, humming, and walked away.

*



WE spent the next hours in silent meditation. Class, they called it. Where we sat on stiff-backed wooden chairs and read until our eyes crossed, while cow-eyed attendants occasionally interjected comments like “Heads down,” and “Don’t slouch.”

I was afraid for Rosa. They hadn’t brought her back. Whatever was happening to her was taking a long time.

The guard Banks had returned, and he and Scary Randolph patrolled the rows, deterring any notion of escape or misconduct. None of the other girls whispered now. They seemed shaken by the morning’s events and were on their best behavior.

Because no one, not even Rebecca, would pass me a sidelong glance to validate the craziness of the situation, I read. Nothing fictional like Shelley’s Frankenstein, or even the Shakespeare we’d been reading in English. Nothing that in some way might have transported me from this hell.

We read the Statutes. I’d read them only halfheartedly in school, but now, as my eyes tumbled over the words again and again, I knew they would be seared into my brain forever.

Article 1 denied individuals the right to practice or “display propaganda” associated with an alternative religion to Church of America. Apparently this included taking off school for Passover, like Katelyn Meadows had done.

Article 2 banned all immoral paraphernalia and 3 defined the “Whole Family” as one man, one woman, and children. Traditional male and female roles were outlined in Article 4. The importance of a woman’s subservience. The necessity for her to respect her male partner while he, in turn, supported the family as the provider and spiritual leader.

I thought again of my mom’s one-time boyfriend. Roy had been neither a provider nor a spiritual leader, and when I searched for some clause prohibiting domestic violence, I found no mention of it, not even in Article 6, which outlawed divorce, and gambling, and everything else from subversive speech to owning a firearm. How pathetically predictable.

Article 5 I memorized. Children are considered valid citizens when conceived by a married husband and wife. All other children are to be removed from the home and subjected to rehabilitation procedures.

All the Articles had one thing in common: Violation permitted full prosecution by the Federal Bureau of Reformation.

But what did that mean, prosecution? Rehab? I wondered if my mother was in a room like I was in right now, reading the Statutes, or if she was awaiting trial, possibly even in jail. I wondered if Chase had let her go, and if she was already waiting at home for me to call her and tell her where I was.

I raised my hand.

The Sister at the front of the room rose from her desk and walked toward me. Up close, I could see that she was younger than I had originally suspected. Maybe in her mid-thirties. But her gray peppered hair and drooping eyelids made her appear much older.