Imprisoned (Parallel Series Book 2) (Parallel Trilogy) Page 3

  “You do it,” she said, motioning to the card reader.

  I pulled the card out of my pocket and waved it in front of the reader inside the elevator. The number four appeared on the touch screen, and since there was no other option, I tapped it and the elevator doors slid shut. The elevator moved downward and a moment later the doors opened to reveal a large cafeteria.

  It reminded me of the cafeteria at school, except for the machine where everyone seemed to be stopping and waving their cards, as well as depositing sheets of paper, before picking up a tray and sliding it along the rail in front of the counter. Workers behind the counter consulted a computer monitor before handing food-filled plates or bowls to each person pushing their trays along. Another thing that was different from school was the different sizes of the people. This was the first time since I’d been in this world that I’d seen people who were a size other than skinny. Somehow it made me feel more at home.

  One thing that was the same as school was the age of the people in line. They all looked like they were high school age. I wondered if they had different facilities for different age groups. If that was the case, then Dad wouldn’t be here. Disappointment swelled within me as any hope that I might see Dad was swept away.

  Alyx gently pushed me out of the elevator and toward the line of people who were waving their cards in front of the machine. As we approached I turned to her. “What does that machine do?”

  “Everyone has a list of foods they’re allowed to eat. Your card will tell the workers what you can have.”

  “Oh.” I glanced at the workers. “How can they keep track of who is who?”

  “Your picture will be on their monitor.”

  “But they haven’t taken my picture yet.”

  She sighed as we stepped closer to the machine. “Then you’ll be the one without a picture.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Go ahead.” Alyx pointed to the machine.

  I waved my card in front of the reader and the machine beeped.

  She did the same, then slid her folded sheet of paper into a slot.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “My food journal. You have to turn it in each morning.”

  “Oh.” I shuffled along and when I got to the stack of green trays, I grabbed one, along with a package containing a napkin and some sort of plastic utensil, and glided the tray along the rails like everyone else was doing.

  A woman pushed a bowl of oatmeal toward me and I set it on my tray. I hated oatmeal, and this looked especially unappetizing. A big lump of tan mush with no brown sugar mixed in. And I highly doubted that they had brown sugar available. Another woman pushed a bowl of fruit toward me—I wasn’t sure if it was fresh or canned, but at least it would be edible. She also handed me one power bar.

  I set the bowl of fruit and the power bar next to the oatmeal and trudged down the line. I would have preferred a plate of bacon and eggs, and a large mug of hot cocoa with a large dollop of whipped cream on top. The thought made my mouth water.

  As we reached the end of the counter I saw bottles of skim milk and sugar-free juices nestled in a tray of ice. Frowning, I took some sugar-free orange juice and set it on my tray.

  “Follow me,” Alyx said as she stepped away from the counter and wound her way through the tables.

  At least it wasn’t like my first day at a new school where I didn’t know anyone. At least I had Alyx to keep me company. We approached a round table with six chairs. Half of them were filled with teenagers who looked to be my age. The other three were empty.

  Alyx slid into a chair next to a boy with short black hair and piercing gray-green eyes. I noticed his eyes because they were locked on me as I set my tray down and sat in the chair next to Alyx.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The abruptness of his question startled me, and for a moment I couldn’t find my voice.

  “She’s my new roomie,” Alyx supplied, much to my relief. “Morgan.”

  He grinned at me. “Tried running, huh?”

  My face flamed red as I realized that thanks to my swollen lip and bruised face, every single person in this room would know I tried to run. And failed, obviously, since I was here. I concentrated on opening the plastic packaging that held my napkin and utensil, but I could feel the eyes of everyone at the table lasered in on me.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, Morgan,” the boy said. “It’s not like you’re the only one who’s tried to escape this place.”

  I looked up suddenly. “Did you?”

  He laughed and looked at Alyx. “She speaks.” Then he turned back to me, all traces of humor gone. “All the time.”

  “Stop it, Billy,” Alyx said. “You’re going to give her the wrong idea.” Alyx glanced at me, then took a bite of her poached egg.

  I dug the utensil out of the package and frowned. A spork. I guess it didn’t matter what universe you were in, the spork was a staple. Ignoring the oatmeal, I stabbed a piece of sliced peach, but the spork didn’t pierce it very far and I wasn’t able to pick it up.

  “You might have to use your hands,” Billy said, grinning.

  I ignored him and instead opened the juice and took a sip. It wasn’t too bad. My stomach rumbled and I decided to try the oatmeal. Scooping up a small bite, I placed it in my mouth. It didn’t taste bad, but that was because it had no flavor at all. I had a few more bites, but the texture was like glue.

  “Next time you should get the milk,” Billy said. “Then you can mix it with the oatmeal. That really helps to get it down.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered. I glanced at the food on the plates of the other kids at my table and saw that no one else had such drab food as me. I looked at one of the girls. “How did you manage to get an omelet?” My mouth watered as I looked at it.

  “Don’t get too excited,” she said. “It’s an egg-white omelet.”

  “It looks a lot better than this.” I pointed to the tan mush in my bowl.

  “When you’re new that’s what you get until they determine what you’re allowed to eat.”

  I nodded. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Cassidy.” She smiled.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “When do you get to leave?”

  “Hopefully in two more months.”

  Two months. How can she sound so casual about it, like it’s perfectly normal? My gaze shifted to Billy. He didn’t look fat at all. In fact, he looked underweight. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  Alyx smirked. “Billy’s not going anywhere.” She looked over at him. “At least not for a while.”

  I wondered what that meant, but after seeing the look of anger on Billy’s face, I decided it would be best to ask Alyx later. I attempted to eat my fruit with the spork again. This time I managed to get a piece of banana. Once that was gone and I failed again with the peach, my hunger got the better of me and I picked up the fruit with my fingers and ate it that way. I glanced in Billy’s direction, somehow knowing he would be watching me. Sure enough, he watched my struggles with undisguised humor.

  I ignored him and finished my fruit, then ate my power bar. A few minutes later Kiera came to our table. Everyone seemed to know her.

  “I’m actually here to get Morgan,” she said to the group. Then she looked at me. “It’s time to meet with your caseworker.”

  Chapter Four

  As I followed her out of the cafeteria, my heart pounded. I didn’t know why I was so nervous to meet him, but I was. I’d never had a caseworker before. It almost felt like he was my parole officer or something. After all, I had committed a crime.

  “How are things going?” Kiera asked as we waited for the elevator.

  “Okay, I guess.” I paused. “Have you talked to my mom yet? Is she coming?”

  “You’ll have to talk to your caseworker about that.”

  “Oh.”

  We stepped into the elevator and she waved
her card in front of the reader, then pressed the button for the second floor. A moment later we exited and I followed her into a reception area.

  “Morgan Campbell,” she said to a muscular man sitting behind a desk.

  His uniform marked him as an Enforcer, and seeing him there made my face throb painfully, memories of being tackled by another Enforcer fresh in my mind.

  “I’ll take it from here,” he said to Kiera.

  She turned to me. “I’ll see you later, Morgan.”

  “You’re leaving?” Panicked at being left alone with an Enforcer, one who could be friends with Hansen and Dimples, I almost begged Kiera to stay, but kept my dignity.

  “I have other things I need to do. You’ll be fine.”

  I doubted that, but there was nothing I could do about it. I watched her leave, then turned to the Enforcer, who stared at me.

  “I need to take your picture for your card.” He held out his hand.

  I gave him my card, my hand shaking.

  He took the card without comment and stuck it in a slot on the camera. “Stand over there.” He pointed to a large X painted on the floor.

  I stood where directed, but couldn’t bring myself to smile.

  He pressed a button on the camera. A moment later the camera beeped and he pulled the card out and handed it to me.

  It was the worst picture of me I’d ever had taken. Besides the fact that I wasn’t smiling, my lip was swollen and half my face was puffy. Oh well. At least it wouldn’t be going in a yearbook. I shoved the card in the pocket of my sweats.

  “Have a seat. Mr. Madsen will be with you shortly.”

  I sat on one of the chairs and saw a stack of magazines piled on the table next to me. I dug through them, but nothing looked interesting. They were either exercise magazines or magazines about eating healthy. Instead, I leaned my head back and stared at the ceiling, pretending the Enforcer wasn’t sitting five feet away from me.

  “You must be Morgan.”

  Jerking my head up, I saw a thin man with a balding head approaching. He didn’t look like he was much taller than me.

  “I’m Mr. Madsen.” He stopped next to my chair. “Welcome to Camp Willowmoss.”

  Camp Willowmoss. He said it like it was a summer camp of some kind. Like people came here by choice.

  “Let’s go talk in my office.” Then he turned and walked down the hallway.

  I followed him into his office and sat in the chair he offered me.

  He pulled up a chair across from mine so that our knees were only about a foot apart. “How are things going for you, Morgan? Are you getting settled in okay?”

  His niceness sort of creeped me out. Did he realize that his employers had jammed a tracking chip in my arm? Was he okay with that? I decided to play along. “I’m doing okay.”

  “Good, good. I’m glad to hear that.” He paused, staring at me a moment. “Well, now that you’re here at Camp Willowmoss, it’s my responsibility to go over the rules with you and to discuss your personal goals.”

  “When do you think I’ll be able to see my mom?” I blurted out. I didn’t care about rules or my “personal goals”. I just wanted to get out of here and be with my family again. Preferably my family in the world I had come from. But seeing the mom in this world would be a good start.

  “Well, seeing your family is a privilege. One that you can earn.”

  “What?” Sharp disappointment stabbed me.

  “Now, let’s talk about your personal goals. What would you like to accomplish while you’re here, Morgan?” He smiled in a fake sort of way.

  I’d like to wipe that grin off your face for starters, I thought. And then get as far away from this place as I can. Instead, I plastered a fake smile of my own onto my mouth. At least as best as I could with a fat lip. “I’d like to develop healthier eating habits and get into a better workout routine so that I can reach my goal weight and then maintain it. You know, a healthier me is a healthier world.”

  His creepy fake smile got bigger. “Very good, Morgan.”

  He grabbed a notepad and pen off of his desk and wrote something down. Presumably my lofty goals, although I couldn’t tell for sure as he had crossed his legs and set the notepad on his knee, which tilted the notepad out of my view.

  “What do you think you should do today to help you reach those goals?” He poised the pen over the notepad, awaiting my response.

  “I had a healthy breakfast already, so I guess I need to spend some time working out.” I smiled a less phony smile, pleased with myself for coming up with answers I was sure he wanted to hear.

  “That’s right.” He wrote something down. “How much time do you plan to spend on exercising each day?”

  “I don’t know. I guess about an hour?”

  He nodded. “Close. We require two hours per day.”

  Two hours? Was he serious? I could see by his face that he was. “How much weight am I supposed to lose, anyway?”

  “How much weight do you think you should lose, Morgan?”

  I didn’t like the way he kept saying my name—like he actually knew me. Pushing aside the irritation, I thought about how much weight Dr. Bradley had said I needed to lose. Her number seemed high to me so I made up my own. “I guess about ten pounds?”

  His eyebrows went up, but he didn’t say anything, so I figured he knew what Dr. Bradley had said.

  “Twenty pounds?” I corrected.

  A smile slowly curved the corners of his mouth. “Yes, at least.”

  At least? I’d never been one to diet and exercise. This was going to be hard. Unless I could escape sooner rather than later.

  He sat silently, apparently waiting for me to say something.

  “Okay, right,” I said. “Twenty pounds.”

  He nodded and wrote on his notepad, then looked back at me. “Now, let’s discuss the rules.”

  Here we go, I thought.

  He grabbed a sheet of paper from the top of his desk. “I’ll give this to you when you leave so you can remember them, but let’s go over the rules together.”

  “Okay.” How bad could they be?

  “First, you’re allowed to write letters to your family, but there are no phone calls and no visitors.”

  “But you said I could earn a visit.”

  “We’ll get to that. Second, you are required to keep a journal of all the food you eat. It will be checked daily against the database the cafeteria keeps. If a friend gives you any of her food, be sure to write it down. You can be sure the friend will make a note of it in her journal, as should you if you give any food away.”

  I’m going to starve in here, I thought, feeling suddenly faint.

  “You’ll turn in the food journal at breakfast each morning. You may have noticed the others doing that this morning.”

  I nodded.

  “When you get back to your room you’ll find a stack of journal pages that you can fill out each day.” He paused. “Third, you must exercise the specified number of hours assigned to you. Your chip monitors your location as well as your heart rate, so it is evident if you’re exercising or not.”

  This really is hell. Now I understood why Alyx was so upset at the idea of me doing something that would mess up when she could leave. “How many hours am I supposed to exercise each day?”

  “Two hours, just like we talked about. But you can break it up over two sessions or do it all in one. We leave that up to you.”

  Oh how very thoughtful, I wanted to say, but bit my inner lip so I could keep up my show of pretended acquiescence.

  He looked back at the paper. “Next, you must weigh yourself once each day.” He looked at me. “We leave it up to you when you want to do your weigh-in. Most people like to do it first thing in the morning. You may have noticed the scale in the bathroom.”

  Actually, I hadn’t, but whatever.

  “You will be assigned a job and you must spend six hours per day working. This is to help defray the cost of housing you.”

 
Why don’t you just let me leave, I wanted to say. That would save you even more money. “What’s my job going to be?” I asked instead.

  “For now, you’ll be assigned cleaning duties. Once you’ve proven yourself there, you’ll be able to apply for one of the more desirable jobs.”

  Well, that was just perfect. Not only would I be starving and forced to exercise, I’d also have to clean up after everyone. Nice.

  “Since you’re a minor, you’re required to attend two hours of classes each day as well as get all of your class assignments done.”

  On top of everything else I had to go to school? “How am I supposed to fit everything in?”

  He looked up in surprise. “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

  My façade of cooperation was beginning to slip. “Anything else?”

  He smiled his creepy fake smile. “We’re nearly done.” He looked back at the paper in his hands. “Absolutely no romantic relationships allowed.”

  Like I’d have time for that, I thought, frowning.

  He lifted his gaze from the paper and looked at me, his fake smile gone. “Since you’ve also been charged with a crime, you’re required to attend nightly group counseling sessions so that you can be re-educated.”

  Re-educated? What did that even mean?

  “And finally, Morgan, your whereabouts will be monitored at all times, so make sure to be where you’re supposed to be.”

  He held out the paper and I reluctantly took it. Glancing at the long list of rules, I scowled, then folded the sheet of paper and put it in my pocket. “You said we’d talk about how I could get to see my family?” I didn’t have to fake the pitiful expression on my face—I really did feel desperate to see my mom.

  He smiled slightly. “Yes. Well. After two weeks, if you’ve followed all the rules, we’ll make an appointment for you to see your family.”

  “Two weeks?” I hadn’t meant that to sound like I was whining, but I knew that’s how it came out. “I mean, is there any way I can arrange to see them sooner? Can I just see my mom?”