Chasing Imagination

Amy

Casper led me along yet more dated, yellowing-tiled corridors, down past many doors. After a while, it seemed as if the people who had tiled these corridors decades ago had just got bored, and the tiles made way for bare, concrete walls. The lights grew further apart until they also stopped altogether, however it seemed that the Dreamers had placed some electric lamps at various intervals down this neglected corridor.

Eventually, he stopped outside a door, supposedly at random, and knocked. It opened a minute later to reveal a girl dressed just as eccentrically as anyone I’d seen today. She was wearing a very short, black skirt, tights, high, lace-up boots, and a bright pink t-shirt with lots of strange patterns on it, like paint splatters, similar to the graffiti I’d seen on the walls down here. She wore a lot of jewellery, all black and silver and various fluorescent colours, and her hair was light brown and very straight, with strange, artificial pink streaks in it.

The girl glared at me, standing here in my fashionable black trousers and pale blue t-shirt. For the first time ever, I felt out of place. I felt like I stood out. Individuality was not everything the rebels had hyped it up to be.

‘Who’s she?’ the girl demanded.

Casper sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’ Strangely enough, he was looking at me. ‘There aren’t many free rooms at the moment, and I can’t leave you on your own. This is Leah. This is her room, and there’s enough space for both of you in here.’

Leah looked outraged. ‘What’re you talking about, Cas?’ she cried. ‘She ain’t coming in here!’

Casper rolled his eyes. ‘I’m afraid there’s no choice. Most people are currently sharing rooms until we clear out the spaces further up. Why should you be an exception?’

‘I don’t mind sharing, but I don’t want to share with...her!’ Leah cried, looking at me as though I was something she’d found on the bottom of her shoe. ‘Is she the new girl?’

‘Yeah,’ Casper said. ‘She’s called Amy.’

I gave a slight smile, knowing that it would go unnoticed, and decided to give up on trying to be nice to this unfriendly girl.

‘I don’t want a traitor sleeping in my room,’ Leah argued, looking both angry and desperate.

‘Traitor?’ I asked, unable to keep my mouth shut. Leah glared at me.

‘Yeah, traitor,’ she said, her light eyes flashing dangerously. ‘You ain’t a Dreamer. Therefore you’re a traitor, like the rest of this shitty, ignorant world.’

‘Markus has given her until morning,’ Casper said. ‘If she becomes a Dreamer, then she won’t be a traitor anymore. If she becomes a prisoner, then she’ll be outta here anyway.’

Leah’s face was like thunder. ‘Have I got to look after her?’

Casper’s expression was cold. ‘I’ll do that if you don’t want to. I don’t care.’

‘Good,’ Leah said, walking briskly out of the doorway and into the corridor next to us. ‘Then I’ll be off. I’ll be back later—don’t you dare let her put any of her pastel rubbish in my wardrobe!’

She turned dramatically and strode down the corridor back to the developed, central area. Awkward silence hung in the air between Casper and I until he finally decided to speak.
‘Sorry about her,’ he said sheepishly. ‘If there was anyone else I could put you with, I would, but she’s your age and she’s a girl, therefore she’s about the only decent match in here. Soon, though, a load of us will be heading up to London, and we’ll clear out more rooms for sleeping in down here.’

‘Er, ok,’ I said, unsure why he was telling me all of this. Nevertheless, this was a chance to make him feel a little bit worse about the life he’d taken away from me, so I took it.

‘They’re all going to hate me, aren’t they?’ I murmured, deliberately looking as sad as possible. I was sadistically overjoyed when I saw the sympathy and guilt on Casper’s face. He’d taken everything away from me; he deserved to feel some remorse.

‘They’ll get to like you soon,’ he reassured me. ‘You’re not a bad person.’

He walked into the room and I followed him. Inside, it was strangely decorated. The concrete walls had been messily covered with large posters taped up roughly at various angles. Clothes of all strange colours and fabrics and patterns littered the floor, and the precious wardrobe that Leah had mentioned was old and splintered with one of the doors hanging open. There were also a few other pieces of furniture; a couple of shelves clumsily attached to the walls and a table, and then two beds.

It was easy to tell which the occupied one was. One of them was unmade, but had a pillow, a blanket and a bare mattress on top of it. The other was covered in a large, black and purple quilt, clearly bought the last time the punk sort of fashion had been in—it seemed that Leah had bought just about every item of her clothing during that one season, and kept it for the last couple of years until that stuff came back in. There were also various cushions and blankets strewn across it, all different colours and fabrics, giving the bed a messy yet individual and completely unique look.

‘Well,’ he said, looking awkward. ‘This is your bed.’ He pointed, unsurprisingly, to the unmade one. ‘I’ll get you some sheets and blankets shortly. I’m guessing you don’t have much stuff with you, but if you do have anything you can just leave it anywhere; it’s not exactly tidy in here.’

‘Ok,’ I murmured unenthusiastically. If my day wasn’t bad enough already, I was now being forced to share a room with an angry, dramatic bitch who looked ready to kill me if I set even a toe out of line.

‘You know, I’m not exactly having a great day either,’ Casper said, his normally calm tone growing irritated.

I rounded on him, shocking both of us.

‘You’re not having a great day?’ I cried, my voice rising in volume. ‘You’ve taken me away from my family, my friends, my home and my entire life, making me live in this...this dump with a girl who looks like she’s ready to kill me, telling me that I’m never going to see anyone I love again and that from now on the government will be trying to hunt me down every time I set foot outside, despite having not intentionally done anything wrong, and you have the nerve to say that you’re not having a great day?’

Casper looked startled. I was boiling inside with anger. How dare he? So what if he was in trouble with Markus—that was his fault for bringing me down here. That was his fault for standing there in public with that stupidly obvious red and black jacket of his that had cost me my freedom.

‘I’m just saying,’ he mumbled after a prolonged silence. ‘I’m not winning anything from bringing you down here. I want you to leave as much as you do.’

I didn’t answer him. I was afraid I would start shrieking again. Right now, I loathed that man.

Casper

I could see that Amy hated me. I didn’t blame her, but I wanted to apologise. Most of us came from the prisons and the Institutions after having been locked up for months on end as punishment for imagination-related crimes, but there were always some people that had ended up here accidentally. They’d be caught up in a raid or a bombing and seen us too clearly to get away. Some of the more extreme Dreamers took hostages to try and threaten the government; not that the government really cared about individual people anymore. And there were some, like Amy, who would just stumble upon our base or one of the outbuildings or happen across a Dreamer meeting. They were, understandably, the hardest ones. They were the most reluctant to join up. But most did in the end. There were always a few prisoners who couldn’t bear to defy their beloved government, but after a few weeks of being locked up they normally gave in.

Clearly, I wasn’t about to get any more out of Amy. She looked like she was trying to hold back the tears, at least until I left, so I decided to do her a favour and go.

‘I’ll leave for a bit if you like,’ I said, ‘but I’ll need to show you round at some point. And I’m sure we’ll be eating soon.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m not hungry.’

I sighed. ‘C’mon. It’s not the end of the world. You’ll end up liking it down here—I promise.’

She looked at me, her expression cynical. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

There was no chance of getting anything better out of her now so I left, shutting the door behind me and wandering off down the corridor. I’d have to go back soon, or else she’d be subject to the wrath of Leah.

As expected, the familiar message of food was passed around about twenty minutes later. People started making their way into the ‘kitchen’ area down the corridor, and I hurried off to find Amy.

‘Amy?’ I called, knocking on her door. She swung it open, her soft brown eyes solidifying when she saw who was standing in front of her.

‘Oh, it’s you again,’ she murmured.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ I said with a sigh, taking her hand gently. At least she didn’t shake it free again. ‘Come on.’

‘I told you; I’m not hungry,’ she said.

‘Please?’ I asked. ‘Even if you don’t want to eat, at least come and have a look around. I’ll show you the area so that you know where the bathroom and the food stores are and stuff.’

Reluctantly, she stepped into the corridor, still glaring at me. ‘If it makes you that happy.’
This felt like a small victory for me, so I smiled at her slightly, hoping that she would smile back, which of course she didn’t, and led her down the corridor.

‘Do you want me to find you some other clothes?’ I offered, looking at her black trousers and pastel coloured t-shirt that probably wouldn’t go down too well around here.

She glared at me yet again. ‘These clothes are pretty much all that remains of my old life. I don’t want anything else; at least not for now.’

There was no arguing with her, so we walked back into the central hub in silence, where people were gathering in another of the large, low-ceilinged, tiled rooms, sitting down along the rows of wooden benches as some of the older women who took the jobs of cooks and cleaners provided plates of food for the people queuing up.

A few of the people began to glance at us. Naturally, word had gone around quickly about the new girl, or the prisoner as many were referring to her as, and they also mostly knew that she was being looked after by me. Therefore, I, and the unrecognised girl in the pastel clothes, were bound to collectively gain rather a lot of attention.

‘They’re staring at us,’ Amy murmured. I could see from her face that she was frightened. ‘Why are they staring?’

‘Ignore them,’ I told her. ‘It’s just because they don’t recognise you. It happens with everyone.’

‘It’s because I’m...different, isn’t it?’ she said, her tone bitter. To some extent, I could empathise. She had spent her entire life living under the radar, being an all-round good girl, and being, quite honestly, completely average. She would never have been in a situation where she, specifically, would have been noticed, and it was hugely discomforting to now feel as though she had a flashing neon light above her head everywhere she went. I knew this. I had felt this at first, and I’d been far more eager to join up than she was.

I sat with her to eat, noticing that none of my normal friends came and talked to me. Most people generally left us alone; for all the bitterness of people like Leah and the callousness coming from Phil, the majority of Dreamers understood this experience. It always happened when there was a new person in the underground, especially when they were dressed like that. We’d all been through it in some way or another, and we could all sympathise. As much as anything, it was unfortunate that some of the first people Amy had met were some of the most dislikeable people in the whole base.