The Azuli by Cassidy Shay (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📕

they would do that to her.
I didn’t say anything, finding that it was much easier to just look at my still untouched food. In the silence, I picked up my fork, poked my mashed potatoes, and then put the fork back down.
“I sort of have a plan. It needs a lot of work, but I know I can get it done before the experiment officially starts. There’s one thing that I can’t do by myself,” I said, hoping she would offer to help so I wouldn’t have to ask. Luckily for me, she did exactly that.
“What can I do to help?” she asked. Later, I wondered why she hadn’t hesitates at all. I guess I should have thought about it first, but I was too busy celebrating in my head for anything else to be going on up there.
“I need a lookout.”For the rest of lunch, we talked about the plan. She even gave me a few ideas to fill in the gaps, but I thought they were too risky. I didn’t tell her, though, because I didn’t know how she’d react, and I didn’t want her to abandon me or turn me in. We talked about timing, weak spots, the cameras, and a few other things that were crucial to the success of my plan.
When lunch was over, we both went to our separate rooms, each of us wearing smug smiles. When I got to my cell, Macy was already there. She saw the smile on my face, then looked away. “Can I assume that you have found someone to help you with your suicide?” she asked, looking at the ground.
“Macy, you can assume whatever you want. It doesn’t matter to me,” I told her. “But if you were to assume that, then you’d be correct.” I sat on the bed and started thinking, wondering how I could improve my plan.
“I got it!” I shouted a couple minutes later, making her jump. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. But… what do you suppose is in D7 and D8?”
Each DarkRoom was separated from all the others by a strip of hallway, but D7 and D8 were combined. It was rumored to be a mess-up on the builders’ part, and no one came in or out of either of the doors. There were several rumors as to what the rooms contained, but no one knew for sure.
“It’s a laundry room, Penny. You know that,” Macy stated, but I could hear the uncertainty in her voice. I knew from our late night conversations in the past that she didn’t believe the laundry room story at all.
“Right,” I said sarcastically. “Just like I’m madly in love with Carl, and this is just an academy where we receive special treatment.” Macy didn’t say anything back, but instead went back to the book she’d been reading. I continued with my planning until I was interrupted by Jack and Carl.
“Hey guys!” Jack said, seeming overly cheerful. “How was your lunch?” he asked, but no one answered him. I was hoping he would leave so I could get back to my planning, but instead he plopped down on my bed and started bouncing.
“Really, Jack? Why can’t you see that I’m upset and don’t want to talk to anyone right now?” I snapped. He stopped bouncing, but resumed seconds later.
“Well, I don’t understand why you’re so cranky all of a sudden,” he said. “After all, Carl and I are going through the same thing you are, and we’re just peachy.” He wiggled his eyebrows, something that had always cheered me up. That time, however, it was all I could do to not punch him. Carl sat down on the floor, but wouldn’t look at me. When he started speaking, it took a minute to realize that he was talking to me.
“I got done talking to the Vipero a little while ago,” he whispered. “They said we need to be seen together more often. Eating together. Holding hands. Hugging when we part ways. And…” he paused, showing a glimpse of his dramatic nature that we thought had up and disappeared, “kissing.”
He said this last word with disgust, as if it tasted bitter on his tongue. I didn’t say anything, but tried not to focus on how little time I had left.
For the next five weeks, I did everything that was required of me. I walked around awkwardly holding Carl’s hand, hugging him, and kissing him. It was supposed to be practice for when our parents arrived, but I didn’t understand why we needed three weeks to practice hugging and kissing. To me, it seemed like the Academy was trying to convince that Azuli that the couples were in love. If we were seen by the Vipero walking down the hall together and we weren’t holding hands, we got in trouble. I decided to suck it up and go along with them until after all the parents had come and gone.
About once every two or three days, I stayed behind during lunch so I could talk to Collin. We became good friends, and I began to trust him. During the third week, I told him of my plan to escape after the wedding.
“It’s risky,” he’d said. “But I believe that you can do it. It’ll be a little boring around here for me with you gone, but I understand why you’re doing it, so I won’t get mad at you.” He nudged me with elbow, showing me he wouldn’t have been angry anyway. “It’s better to die in an act of freedom than to live a life of slavery, right?” It was because of things like that that I had grown so attached to him.
Those five weeks, I had mixed feelings on just about everything. I was excited, but scared, happy but sad. I wanted to see my parents, but I didn’t want them to see me in this place.
My Memories mostly had to do with family. I observed the ways that parents and children interacted with each other in the past. I viewed and drew Memories of kids who had been with their parents their whole lives, and kids who, like me, could hardly remember the last time they’d seen their parents.
They didn’t help me feel much better. There were some families that got along, of course. Some long-lost sons and daughters just fell into the arms of their parents. But the majority of the ones that I viewed were the opposite. Screaming teenagers, adults that couldn’t stand the sight of the parents that had abandoned them years before.
There was one that kept replaying, even in my dreams.
It’s a sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. She’s sitting on a patio at a restaurant, waiting.
Her food comes first. It’s just a salad, and she doesn’t touch it. She waits and waits, and waits. After a long time, she flags down the waitress. “May I have my check, please?” The waitress nods, then returns shortly with a little black folder. The girl, who is in her twenties, is just pulling money out of her purse when a man and woman appear.
“Ana?” asks the woman. The girl, Ana, looks up. “I know that we’re late. And I’m sorry. But traffic…”
“Traffic wasn’t a problem for me,” says Ana. She stands up. “You guys are an hour late. We agreed on 3:00. It’s…” she looks at her watch, “4:08. And I have somewhere to be.” She begins to push her way past her long-lost parents, but her father grabs her arm.
“Ana, honey,” he says, in a voice that’s too sweet. “What could be more important than reuniting with your parents? You know that we love you. And what happened when you were little… we can put that behind us, can’t we?”
She just shakes her head. “My daughter is more important. I have to pick her up from her piano lesson. I have to be a parent.” She practically spits this at them, and then starts to leave again. Suddenly, she stops. “And no, we can’t put that behind us. I will never be able to forgive you for how you just let them take me from you, and you did nothing to stop them.” Then she leaves.

That’s the one that scared me the most. Because my parents just let them take me away. And I was worried that my parents would use the same fake voices and excuses that Ana’s parents did.
I tried talking to Collin about it, hoping that maybe he’d have a happy-family story that would reassure me that everything would be okay. That, though, was just as bad as the Memories.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said when I asked about his home life. “It doesn’t matter. They aren’t here, and I don’t want to bring them here.”
“Oh, come on,” I pressed. “Just tell me a little bit about them. Please. You know all about my family.” He just snorted at that. I lightly slapped his shoulder. “Please, Collin. I want to know about the people that you grew up with.”
“You don’t want to hear about them. They weren’t a family. Just a bunch of people that are related.” After I pushed and pushed, he finally gave in. “My dad… he works for the government. He’s pretty high up. When I was little, my brother and I used to just sit and look at his uniform. He got it cleaned every Tuesday afternoon, and didn’t need it again until Wednesday. So every Tuesday night, we would go sit on the floor of his closet and just… admire it. I was maybe three or four. We used to dream up these grand partied that we would go to, and all the medals and awards we’d earn. That was when we were still a family.”
“What happened?” I asked. I could just picture him as a child, admiring a uniform, touching all the medals and pins.
“My brother turned five. It was a couple weeks after my fifth birthday. We didn’t have the same mom. And he was… he is, I guess, an Azulate. And I’ll never forget the day that he was taken. My father… he just stood there. He didn’t give him a hug, he didn’t even say anything to him.” He shook his head. “After that day, I hated him. For the next eleven years, I didn’t want anything to do with him. Then I turned sixteen, and he sent me to work here so that he wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore.”
He clenched his fists, and wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t know what to say. “My family was only a family when my father still acted like he cared. But I know that he never really did.
“But can you blame him? After what his parents put him through, how could he have any room for love?”
“What? What did they do to him?”
Collin just shook his head. “You don’t want to know. You wouldn’t be able to see your parents if you heard what they did. You’d be too scared.” He sat there for another second, and then got up and left.
During those weeks, I met with Mary only a couple of times. And those meetings weren’t very productive. She always got distracted, and started talking about something completely irrelevant. It’s frustrating, but I don’t say anything to her about it. If she gets mad at me, it could mean that I’m dead.
Fortunately, talking to Macy, Jack, and Carl gave me a break from everything that was going on. They always tried to keep the conversations away from the wedding, or our parents,