Segregation

I knew it was wrong. I shouldn't have even come. Hadn't I played this charade with them long enough? I groaned inwardly and ignored the looks our instructors gave me as they marched us into the room. It was drafty with tall window bordering half of the circular room. They lined us up along the windows.

Behind me to the right lay the black side of our world and to the left the white. By the end of today the majority or us would be settling into one compound or the other. That made me, the instructors, and the girl with bright green eyes in the corner the minority. Unlike me, the green eyed girl wasn't pretending she was about to be segregated. I had been considering what to do when this moment came for years and had put it off for so long that now it just didn't feel real.

Nix looked up at me for reassurances. I could see that he thought I was going to end up in the black compound, this made him depressed that we would be separated and afraid for me. I should have told him then that wasn't going to happen, but that would have meant revealing my lie.

"Shea, please step forward."

While my thoughts carried on several had been decided on and escorted out, now it was Shea's turn, there was no doubt she was headed for the light. She and Nix both were. It's what they always wanted. She looked at the pair of us and then stepped forward into my father's hands. He had spoken of this moment a few times but this was my first time witnessing it.

She sat down across from him. He reached out and took both her hands resting an index finger on the tender skin where her veins forked. He closed his eyes. She closed her eyes. I held my breath even though I knew how hard she had worked for this, she was going to be assigned to white.

He smiled and opened his eyes. "You have a kind heart and will be treated to only by kind people around you for your life. You are a white child." A searched his hard smile and saw it, he knew she deserved it but knew that she hated herself for having to strive so hard to deserve it, she felt she shouldn't have to try at being a good person she should just instinctively be one. Regardless her truth was also her desire. I smiled, relieved.

Nix was nervously testing his weight in each foot and looking up at me again, to the door where Shea disappeared and then beyond the window to the white compound. It would soon be his turn I thought when the idea came to me, I wouldn't have to reveal my truth, it was obvious and what they had always thought for me but never said out loud. Nix would go to white after Shea and would always assume I never followed because I was headed for the darkness. In reality, I would always be the grey area.

I was too wrapped up in my self-preserving thoughts to realize I had forgotten to squeeze his shoulder one last time and now he was in my father's hands. I smiled anyway, everyone had always known that those two were meant for one another, they was nothing to fear but-

"I'm sorry, I know you wish for the light but I feel the dark." My father had hardly grasped his wrists before he had decided. I was in shock but nothing compared to what Nix was feeling.

"That's impossible!" He stood up so fast his chair fell back behind him. "I have done nothing but strive to be good! I'm going to the white compound!" His usually calm blue eyes had an edgy terror so that I could see the whites around the pupils like a whipped horse. He slammed his fist down on the table even as I made towards him, but I was held back by the guards.

"You can not interfere with the segregation Masters, you shouldn't even be here," one of them hissed in my ear, a loyalist to my father.

"No! You're wrong!" Nix screamed again, he lunged across the table and the action shocked my father for he let Nix get his fists around the collar of his judging robes. I couldn't blame him I wanted to do the same to that man. Nix was the sort to save a drowning dog, a lost child, a hurt friend; but, if only his anger didn't blind him, he wouldn't hate those that he didn't choose to surround himself with. I could see that's what my father sensed. Before anyone could get him off he dropped his grip and glared at the man. "You can't choose for me," he snarled, pushing the table into my father and storming off in Shea's direction practically leaving dents in the floor from his heavy foot falls. The drafty room had grown colder and darker, and then he had guards of his own on him.

"I wish there was an outcome you approved of more young sir," my father said in that crisp voice like the sheets on a bed you don't want to sleep in. He adjusted his robes and tried to steady his breathing to calm his reddened voice as he glared as his latest victim. "But you are only the reflection of yourself. Escort him to his compound," he commanded the guards.

It killed me that the last look he gave me was more than a plead, it was the mad relief that he thought I would follow him to the darkness. In reality I would leave with my father and go back to the silver compound; with all its luxuries and freedoms he and Shea would never have even found together let alone segregated.