and I don't wanna sit still

[skepticgirl_1]

Usually I wasn't a big fan of field trips. They tended to be boring, awkward excursions that never taught us anything worthwhile and just gave people an excuse to socialize without the teacher being able to stop them. Which wouldn't have bothered me, in the past, had I had someone to socialize with, too. But when the new girl was going to be the gone girl in six months, no one really paid me much attention. That was fine by me. If only the field trips were interesting enough to distract me.

But this, this was different. I didn't have any friends in this class (yet), but I did have friends, and I could sneak peeks at my cell phone and send texts every so often. I wasn't doing a whole lot of that, however, given that this field trip was to a place called DARKLab. DARKLab. Had no one in marketing noticed this? Did the board of directors really think it was a good thing to say they controlled a dark lab? Either a whole lot of people had a very dark sense of humor or there was something going on here. I chose to investigate the latter.

Peeling off from my group was easy enough. There were too many of us for only a teacher and two parent chaperones who didn't know what they were doing with this many teenagers. I innocently slipped into a bathroom, waited for everyone to forget about me, and then headed straight for a door that said "Employees Only."

I stopped abruptly in front of the door because, of course, it was locked and, of course, it was a card key lock, not anything I could pick.

I hesitated and spun in a slow circle, wondering what alternative route I could use.

Comments

[skepticgirl_1]

I was disappointed, but after three months, I was getting used to this particular brand of disappointment. I shrugged it off as best I could and moved on. One day, maybe I would find someone who knew my city. Maybe even more than just a spot on the map. A girl could hope.

"Eh," I said, timing the response so it sort of attached itself to the shrug, an end note as my shoulders dropped. "I was in the children's home at first, which sucked, but I found myself a guardian so I'll be moving out soon. That helps. But otherwise.. I mean, how's someone supposed to really settle in here? At no point does it ever get less weird. Does it?"

[makeithome]

Gwen chuckles, shaking her head. "Nooo," she says. "I mean, some things do. Aspects of your life settle. You know, I have my job, school, my boyfriend, and that's all... normal." And she's grateful for that, she really is. She knows she could easily be back in New York, which, on one hand, she longs for; on the other, though, she fears that possibility, not sure if she'll remember the things she needs to know there in order to survive. "But every time I think things are getting normal all around, something happens to shake it all up."

[skepticgirl_1]

It was reassuring to hear from someone who had been here for a while that things didn't get less weird. I hated the thought that at some point all of this might get normal for me. You stopped questioning things when they seemed normal, stopped investigating. And I couldn't ever stop that.

"So it's normal here?" I asked, a little skeptical. "I mean, you're working with a bunch of natives, right? That would be weird to me. And it's after all an experimental lab kind of thing. You've never had any weird stuff go down?" I realized that might have sounded too investigative, so I added, "Even like, a Darrow-only illness that you've never seen back home?"

[makeithome]

"Oh, it is... so weird sometimes," Gwen says, pulling a face. "They're great people, most of them, but they're so... okay with everything? They don't find it weird. Or they think I'm weird for not being from here." So far, she hasn't had to deal with that much prejudice; it hasn't stopped them from hiring her, for one. But they do sometimes ask questions about it like she's somehow supposed to be representative of all non-Darrow natives, and it's awkward. "But the science itself isn't any stranger than back home. I mean, I was in high school at home, and I only interned at one lab, so I may not have the best gauge for that, but."