Refuse

4

Ivan reminded her again that he was really hoping she was going to make it tonight. She assured him once again that she intended to be there. Then they just talked, because that is what friends do. Unfeigned and unguarded friendship leads to pure conversation, and she often experienced this kind of fellowship with Ivan.

As they spoke, she absentmindedly pressed her hand up against the almost imperceptible lump in her coveralls where she’d stuffed the shredded paper. From some motivation that she deemed to be almost base and prurient, she felt an extreme amount of excitement and pleasure from the idea (and the act) of stealing raw materials to make homemade paper. She’d often tried to quantify the feeling. She’d analyzed it (or attempted to) and tried to make a judgment from that analysis about what her illegal activities had to say about her character. She’d even hoped to feel guilty about it, because feeling guilty might mean that she still had a place in the social structures of the world around her, and that she hadn’t utterly forsaken the society of the silo in pursuit of her own selfish ambitions. If she could feel guilty, then that would mean that she was still one of them. Nevertheless, in her innermost thoughts, she could find no home for self-recrimination. She knew that in her conscience, she’d already determined that it was the silo’s laws and culture that were criminal, and that her desire to write may be against the letter of the law, but it was not against any higher law that she could possibly imagine.

A subtle smile crept across her face as she embraced the feeling that the cocktail of adrenaline and whatever other self-manufactured chemicals gave her as it thrummed through her veins whenever she stole the raw materials for making paper. She was a junkie and she knew it.

She only enjoyed her feeling of euphoria for a moment though, and the smile quickly melted from her face when she glanced up and saw Joseph Kind staring at her with a look of what she could only interpret as confident malevolence. The high she’d just been on drained from her in microseconds, and at once she was overwhelmed with the feeling that all was lost. Joseph Kind was a picker, but he was definitely one of them. Maybe she was wrong about Joseph. She’d been wrong about people before. But she could not deny the way Joseph’s look made her feel.