"Ego Trip: Chapter 2" by Allison C. Lynch

We managed to make it inside before we were late for biology. Ms. Williams, the stuffy spinster that teaches it, looked at us a little weird, but she didn't send us back for passes or anything like that. When Andy trudged in a few minutes later with a late pass, she took a close look at his scuffed and dirty shoes and simply motioned for him to take a seat. With Andy, it's wise not to ask any questions. He joined Leo, Daisy, and I in the back, muttering a low apology to Daisy as he passed by her. She nodded, not looking up from her notes. By the next day she would be on speaking terms with him again. Daisy is like that.

With biology first period and calculus second, it wasn't until third period and English that I had time to relax. English is definitely one of my favorite classes. Mrs. Ladley, the language and arts teacher, has a teaching style all her own. In fact, she lets us discuss and run the class on alternate days, and gives us free periods at least once a week. This period was no exception.

"I want Hamlet read for next Thursday," she said, perching on her desk like a bird. "Other than that, you've got the day off. I'll be correcting papers in my office." With that, she swept out of the room and left us to our own devices. A dangerous thing when you've got a class like mine.

We were silent for half a minute. Then, forming a small circle with our desks, we all burst into rapid chatter.

As always, my friend Cherry led the conversation. She's the most optimistic person I know, always seeming to find something good about the worst possible situation. She even managed to cheer up Daisy when her dog died, and that took a lot of optimism.

Next to her was Dolores, or Lori, as most of us call her. She's Cherry's best friend and her complete opposite. Where Cherry is bubbly and optimistic, Lori is quiet and pessimistic. She's also got a bad habit of overanalyzing most of the things she thinks about, so but that all together and you've got a nervous, overanalyzing, pessimistic person, whose dark hair and eyes seem to reflect her personality perfectly.

Next to Cherry and Lori were Patrick and Shelly, the twins of the class. While they look almost identical, with dark blonde hair and blue-green eyes, they have different personalities. Patrick would best be described as a…well, a wimp. He's scared of everything. Cough near him and he'll be across the room in three seconds, already breaking out a bag of lemon-flavored vitamin C drops. He won't touch an insect for fear of an allergic reaction, and I've heard that he still sleeps with a night-light at night. Not that that's bad, it's just…well; he's kind of old for that. But, beyond his unnecessary fear of everything, he's a pretty cool guy. No sense of rationality, but a cool guy.

Shelly doesn't talk. She's one of the shyest girls I've ever known. She won't start a conversation; you have to talk to her first. Her reasons for this are a bit strange - she says that she's afraid that no one will want to talk to her. That's Shelly for you. Always a bit scared that she'll look silly or make a fool of herself. She is the sweetest girl you'll ever talk to, if she'll talk to you. Mostly, she keeps quiet.

Randall completed our group. There isn't much you can say about Randall, except that his only constant is his unpredictability. He's random in every sense of the word. If random were a country, he'd be king, prince, archduke and court jester. A very cool guy Randall is, but you just never know what to expect from him. I think that's what makes him so much fun to be around.

"Did you guys hear what happened down near City Hall?" Cherry said in a hushed voice, as if she was telling us the latest gossip. She flipped her short black hair behind her ears and glanced around the circle with eager blue eyes. She received six blank stares, so I supposed that no one had.

"What happened?" Lori asked, her face already beginning to contort in her usual analyzing mode. "Did someone important get kidnapped? Is the city under attack? What happened?"

"Lori," Cherry said, placing a hand over one of Lori's, "you need to learn to look on the bright side a little more. You worry too much."

"Well," Lori retorted, frowning down at the desk in front of her, "I think it's worthy of worry when something as horrible as that happens."

Daisy looked at Lori for a minute. "She hasn't even told us what happened yet. How do you know it's bad?" she said, and I could tell that she was becoming annoyed with Lori's constant worry.

Lori looked up. "Isn't it always bad when it involved City Hall?" There was silence for a minute, and then everyone began talking at once. It took several minutes for Cherry to get total attention back on her and her news.

"As I was saying," she said loudly, and we quieted down, once again we focused on her. She grinned at all of us. "I heard that the CenCom is broken, which means that everything's off-line until they can fix it."

There was silence again, but this silence was thick with tension. The CenCom, or Central Computer, regulates everything in Cranar City, and in the whole district as well. Everything from the TV stations to the traffic lights are controlled by the CenCom, and without it, who knows what disaster could happen? The silence continued for several minutes while we thought about what Cherry had just told us.

"Are you sure you heard right?" I said after ten minutes of deafening silence. "The CenCom can't be broken, it's never broken before."

Cherry shrugged. "My dad mentioned something to my mom about the CenCom having some sort of glitch." Cherry's dad works for City Hall as a programmer. "It might affect some of the daily functioning of the city. To fix it, they might have to shut it down temporarily. Which means…"

"No school!" Randall said, grinning. We all laughed, letting the tension loosen for a minute. Randall was right; if the CenCom had to be shut down, then school would undoubtedly be closed for however long it took to get the CenCom back to normal. But, on the other hand, EVERYTHING would be closed. No TV, no shopping, no electricity even. Cranar City would be at the mercy of the fates for that period of time. A scary thought.

"So," Lori said, holding out her hands, as if weighing the options on them, "there are two choices. We can either shut down the CenCom, cripple the city for who knows how long, to fix the glitch in it, or we could leave it how it is and risk the glitch growing so big it completely shuts down the CenCom forever." She stared at hands. "That's bad."

"What part of the CenCom does this glitch effect?" Patrick asked in a small voice. I don't know why he asked, he knew that what kind of answer he'd get.

Cherry thought for a second, then looked at Patrick. "I think the Unified Confinement System," she said, and Patrick's face when white.

"The UnConSys?" he said, his voice thick with disbelief. The silence was back.

The Unified Confinement System, UnConSys for short, is Cranar City's maximum-security prison. There are only a few prisoners - Cranar City's a pretty safe place to live, but every now and then, you get a crazy citizen who wants to take over the place. The last big thing that went on there was the capture of Cranar City's own "super-villain," some psycho who called himself the Id. He claimed he was the only real thing to ever come out of Cranar City, and that everyone else was just a product of imagination and "ideal models." He was locked away in the UnConSys when I was just a baby, and as far as I knew was still in there, kept captive in solitary confinement. I've heard that he's like a savage, with no morals or human qualities at all.

"The UnConSys?" Patrick said again, and again we lapsed into silence. If the UnConSys went off-line, then there was no telling what could happen. The prisoners could escape; the entire city could be at the mercy of insane criminals with no mercy for the innocent. I could tell my friends were thinking the same thing.

Cherry was the first to venture a comment. "Well, it's not that bad, really," she said, and Daisy laughed harshly.

"Not that bad? Cherry, now is not the time for optimism." She sighed and leaned against the table. "I can't believe you think it's not that bad."

"Daisy," Leo said, giving her a hard look. Daisy rolled her eyes, but shut her mouth. Leo turned back to the rest of us, his hard look softening as he glanced around the desks. His eyes met mine, and without a word, he nodded to me. Time for me to step in.

"Look, guys," I began, speaking calmly, even though I was as worried as everyone else appeared to be, "I don't think we should concern ourselves with this. If anything serious happens, serious enough for us to be involved, they'll tell us. For now," I continued, looking around the table, "I think we should just worry about our grades and let the people who know what they're talking about work this out."

Cherry nodded, though her normally bright smile was a bit strained, and Lori frowned, looking away before looking back to me and smiling slightly. Leo nodded, his face set in a carefully neutral expression that wouldn't betray his true feelings. Shelly glanced up at me and looked at me for a few seconds before nodding almost imperceptibly. Patrick's color had returned to normal, and though his mouth was a thin line of tension, he nodded. Randall smiled a little, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he wasn't up for cracking jokes now. Shifting my gaze to Daisy, I found her staring at me with a look normally reserved for the girl that had crashed into her in the lunchroom.

"Ed, the voice of reason," she said, her voice holding a hint of sarcasm, but she smiled a little, letting me know that she was only kidding. "Maybe we should start on the reading. Mrs. Ladley would like that."