Under Their Watchful Eyes by C.J. Mitchell

Author:C.J. Mitchell [Mitchell, C.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

[ 17 ]

Bennett’s house looked nice enough. Not the kind of eerie, foreboding mansion in the books that Tatum stole and read me brief passages from—overly ornate passages, too, with every third word completely made up. Like that little Mad Libs booklet she’d found when she was eight and I was seven, and we’d been entirely too immature.

Anyway. It didn’t look like the house that would belong to a Gregory, but I’d never been to the Gregorys’ houses before, any of them, or even the little section of a half a dozen houses sectioned off from everybody else’s homes. Something that a lot of people didn’t appreciate, that was. They said it made the Gregorys seem elitist—and the riskier pieces of gossip said that it was another example of how the Gregorys were elitist.

I was excited enough to have dinner at Bennett’s house with the rest of the Gregorys, including Kieran Verser, the newly elected Gregory. Verser had seemed like the most terrifying candidate of the lot, which was probably why he was voted into office. If there was a threat that nobody was talking about, then it made sense to get the toughest person available to protect you and your family. And if they weren’t available for just your family, then maybe they would be able to protect more people and that would end up being for the better, anyway.

But while I hadn’t been excited to vote for Fowler, I would’ve never voted for Verser, not even if a thousand marker cap drops landed only on his name. He was terrifying. He looked vicious, like the pit bulls in that thin, glossy—if dusty—magazine Tatum had loved (the magazine and the pit bulls).

I stared at the door. I was stalling, and I knew it, but it felt almost like—if I just stayed out here, hands in Tatum’s cardigan, shivering because I didn’t want to wear a hat and risk mussing up my hair, then maybe I wouldn’t have to keep going. If I pretended that none of the last month had happened—the in-between of the present day and the day I voted—then maybe it wouldn’t matter.

I hadn’t done anything horrible, not really, but it wasn’t like I had done anything wonderful, either. I was going along with a broken government and a broken system in the hopes that maybe I would figure something out that worked better. And all it had been over the past thirty-two days was beating my head against a wall and going to leadership training and School and working on my homework and my group project and it just— I didn’t know if I could keep this up for as long as it would take.

And if I didn’t go into Bennett’s house and attend the dinner that was going to be all about my training and my future in the Sanctuary, then maybe I wouldn’t have to admit that I had a future here, no matter how short-lived that future was when it came to this particular method of government.

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