Alone but United

Chapter 2

With a click, Carter’s locker opened. She touched up her makeup, trying to cover the bags under her eyes to hide the facial cost of trying to finish her homework while dealing with a night job. All of a sudden she felt someone’s breath on her neck.

“Would you like to get some lunch with me this weekend?” spoke a deep voice.

Carter turned abruptly, then realized how stupid and pathetic she must look and quickly corrected her body expressions. Who stood before her was a Katt that went by the name of Karmen McClain. His family is one of the most powerful Kats in the Caito Spacecraft. They work alongside with the Royals and help manage all the armed forces on the ship.

This was a good thing. Being noticed by a person of such a high background means she's been on the right track. She had to be direct and sweet.

“Sure. Olivia Jack’s Café, around 4:30 Saturday night?”she said conveniently ending with a sweet smile.

Karmen rubs the back of his neck and gave a look of disbelief,“Ok,” he shook his head, trying to remove the goldfish look in his eyes,“I’ll see you then.”

Karmen walked away torts his friends, and Carter saw his buddies start asking what she had said, soon they started to give him high-fives and other congratulating gestures. Mongering him with first bumps and hanging their arm around his neck.

Carter turned away from Karmen with a small hidden grin, then Tristah jumped out from the door of her lock and slammed it shut.

“Angry about me not coming to a party again, Trish?”

Tristah gave a look of irritation, but a bit flustered about how predictable she really is. She looked at how Carter rearranged the books in her.

Shrugged it off,”I’ll only forgive you if you tell me what that was all about.” she responded with a frustrated tone, ending with a cutesy curious voice.

Carter gave a bit of a laugh and told her that she would only tell her if she could come over at 7:00 on the night of Saturday. Reluctantly Tristah agreed. Once again they went to class and walked to her desk, nothing unusual. But once Carter reached her chair she realized that today she was sharing the desk.

Sitting there, with his trashed converse on the table was Roi. A bit stunned, Carter again had to readjust her facial expression. But by the small laugh of amusement from Roi, Carter assumed he saw her face. Shaking off the awkwardness of the whole entity of the situation she directed her mind to the teacher. This day’s lesson seems to be about the history of the Caito, and the fact Roi seemed to take some sort of interest in the lesson baffled Carter because it was the same lesson every year. Just a reminder to the students of their place on the Spacecraft. Even Carter is tempted to skip this period because of the redundancy of the lesson if it didn’t impact her whole school career.

The teacher discusses the launching of human first long term Spacecrafts home, saying that Caito was one of the first launched, and now there are millions floating through space collecting resources and sending them back to Earth, our home planet. She also showed pictures of our home world which featured dark purple grass and skies of many vibrant oranges. Many kids awed at the pictures, where Carter just concerned herself with each tick of the clock. The teacher then talked about the holiday that was coming up, Darwin’s day, but became more well known as ‘Profugus’.

”This holiday, children, is to celebrate the strong. So for the school week of this glorious holiday, your parent or guardian must pay 25$ for each day for each child they have,”she said with an upbeat tone to her voice,“and as you all know if you miss 5 days of school, your parents or guardians will be given a notice that they will be relieved of all their children in their care and taken to a skyscraper to perform duties as a Serf. Like we say every year, we can’t let the weak infest our hierarchy of our government and let it crumble.”

Carter finally tuned out the teacher. After all, she has saved enough money for both her brother and her to be able to get through the week, and for her date for Saturday.