Andy O'NealDialogue #18D81E * Cell #14 * Location Cafeteria
Day 23 started the same as every other day so far. Andy stared into the distance while eating the bland, shapeless and tasteless food standing in front of him. He hadn't expected luxury dinners or anything, but this could barely be called food in his mind. Taking the grit onto a spoon, he turned it around to see it drop back into the bowl in lumps. The little piece of butter on top did nothing to improve the taste or aesthetic of the meal. Andy's toast lay on the side, in his mind upgraded to his dessert and the creme de la creme of his daily breakfast.
He longed back to home, to the food his mom always made. The afternoon snack when he would get home, the careful piece of chocolate when he opened his lunchbox at school and of course the eggs on toast served to him still in his bed.
Yep, food is the thing I miss most....He looked to the few other kids in the room. Most of them siting alone, almost all of them in eerie silence. The social aspect of it all was kind of lost. We knew each others names, but not all of each others crimes. Some liked to play it more to the chest than others. Andy hadn't told anyone of his crime yet. Although his work has had some big consequences, from behind a PC it seems kind of meagre compared to what the others might have done. In the beginning Andy had liked to play a game where he would look at one of the others and imagine what crime they had committed. But this little game in his mind had gotten very scary, very quickly, so he had stopped.
As always he tried to make himself look bigger and tougher by his words. He proclaimed out loud:
"The yelp review I'm going to write about this place is going to be scathing." He looked to the right and gave the girl sitting there a wink and a smile. Softer, and to no one in particular, he continued:
"My journalistic ability and choice of words will bring this place down." Again he watched as his grit fell from spoon back into the bowl. He decided to give up on it, even though he was still hungry. He tried to save the little piece of butter best he could, and he put it on his toast. His dessert had been slightly burned, but that only made it that much better.
His little outburst had raised nothing but an eyebrow with the one guard on duty.
Must suck, Andy thought,
being a guard must be shit already, but then to look after a bunch of kids...must have been a punishment of some kind for him too.Andy sighed audibly. Today was going to be boring. As part of his punishment he was not allowed to touch a PC while in juvi, so the IT lessons would be without him. Of course he didn't need it, he could dance cyber circles around their teacher in any case. The worse thing was that it made him feel like more of an outsider than he already thought he was. The visitation hours were probably even worse. Andy had told people about his visits and went into the visitation area often enough (coincidentally when no one else was), but he hadn't received any visits so far. Andy waited for his mother, but she never came through the door. His father was still on duty in Iraq and Andy feared him coming more than any other punishment they could give him in here.