He Didn't Come

“He didn’t come,” Jack whispered to herself from the backseat of a plain brown sedan.

Her new social worker didn’t answer her. She hadn’t expected him to. He was a small graying man with short fingers and a severe overbite. Jack suspected that the latter was the cause of his unnerving silence.

“Hey, you do talk, right?”

His voice was dry and crackly, like sandpaper rasping over his words. “Yes.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He seemed surprised. “They didn’t tell you?”

Jack rolled her eyes. The janitor who found her sleeping in the closet had radioed management as soon as he laid eyes on her. She tried to split, but two cops overpowered her before she’d gotten even a hundred meters and arrested her. Arrested her! She couldn’t believe it.

“What’s the charge, asshole? Unlawful sleep?” she’d snapped while she struggled.

One of them actually slapped her. She tried one of the escape maneuvers that Riddick had taught her, but she wasn’t strong enough, not to mention that the hand restraints hindered her movement. She settled instead for swearing at him for several seconds, until the cop that wasn’t preoccupied with restraining her held up a bit, the kind that they used on the really dangerous criminals. That shut her up real quick.

“No, they didn’t tell me. They locked me up and didn’t feed me for twelve hours, but that was the extent of their kind hospitality,” she sneered.

“Now, now, young lady, there’s no need to get lippy. I’m taking you to a place called Chapel Hall. It’s a girls-only institution for wayward youth.”

Jack snorted. “What’s so damn wayward about me? I’m a good little angel. I never do anything wrong.”

In the rearview mirror, the social worker raised bushy eyebrows at her. “Running away from a foster home, delinquency, escape from a mental institution, resisting arrest… need I go on?”

She flopped back into the cracked artificial leather seat with an angry sigh. Riddick, please come save me, she thought as she put her head in her hands.

Jack didn’t speak as she was registered at Chapel Hall. The director, sitting behind an enormous desk with fashionable clutter, asked her some questions. Jack just ignored her. She didn’t even make eye contact. She didn’t want to be there, and wanted everyone to know it.

Eventually the director, Mrs. Simmons, gave up on Jack and directed her questions toward the social worker. Jack didn’t even know his name. It didn’t matter. He was just another one of the same breed of men and woman who made it their personal goal in life to put her in the worst situations and homes imaginable. Jack wasn’t expecting anything much better this time.

She tuned out the two adults as the social worker summed up her life in less than five minutes. He seemed to hang almost lovingly onto the details of her time in the hospital. In a place like this, there had to be, at the very least, a teen counselor. The counselor would get her records by the time the day was out. Great. Hopefully there was someone pleasantly psychotic who would keep the sanity squad occupied and off her ass.

Overall, Chapel Hall was a surprisingly nice place. A large facility with dorms (obviously), a school, and a full-size gym, it screamed ‘rich founder.’ Either that, or the local government took particularly good care of its poor little orphans. Somehow, Jack didn’t find that likely.

She wandered away from the office and poked around the lobby. There were hallways that lead from the lobby to what, she was sure, was an intricate mess of hallways and offices. The first floor seemed devoted entirely to administration. She followed a random passage away from the lobby, and then another, and then another. She passed file rooms filled with data discs, rooms that seemed to be used solely for storage, and a king-sized kitchen. It was huge, and everything gleamed with cleanliness.

Again, Jack was struck by the quality of the facility. The state hospital she had been at before wasn’t half as nice as this place. This was a facility for wayward youth? Shit, where did they keep the good kids? In a palace?
She figured that she had been walking around for at least fifteen or twenty minutes. Her social worker would probably be pissed off. Good. Let him be. Jack tried to find her way back to the lobby, but soon realized that she was hopelessly turned around. Oh well. She figured she would just keep looking around until someone found her and started yelling at her. They could yell until their lungs flew out of their mouths for all she cared.

After several more minutes of looking around and feeling bored, she found the gym. Now there was something that would interest her. She peered through the window in the door before slowly opening it. The gym was deserted, the equipment barely used. There was a basketball court in one corner. No scuff marks on the floor. Punching bags on the opposite side, with the same air of newness. Near the punching bags was a door that led outside. Jack jogged over to it and opened it a crack. Donli’s hot wind kissed her face. It smelled like dust and loneliness.

There was a jogging track about fifty meters away that actually had some people on it. There was a short, skinny woman with a whistle and a hat who was shouting for the girls to run faster.

They were all tanned a dark brown, much darker than she had ever seen on a white person before. Looking up at the sun, she knew why. It was much larger than New Germany’s sun. Either that, or it was closer, which made little sense. She was on the sixth planet in the system.. In any case, it was hot out. Very hot. She stepped gratefully back into the climate-controlled gym. The warmth from the sun faded, and she looked around. She spotted some exercise machines in a little alcove next to the door. Nice. It seemed like the gym was here just for her, waiting to be put to good use. If she was stuck here, if Riddick wasn’t able to bust her out for a while, she’d be glad to oblige.

At the sound of the door opening, she turned and watched as another girl, who looked a year or two older her, came into the gym wearing ugly canvas pants and a green shirt. She was tall and had the deep tan that appeared to be typical of Donli. Her hair was curly and only a shade darker than her tan. The look of surprise on her pinched features shifted quickly to one of contempt. “Who’re you?” she asked with a smirk.

Jack shrugged and didn’t answer. The local seemed gearing up to give her some real shit. Jack knew the type.

“What, you don’t have a name?”

It was Jack’s turn to smirk. “No, I have a name. I’m just not going to tell you what it is.” This tight-ass bitch didn’t deserve any courtesy, not that Jack had any to give in the first place.

“Why, you little….”

“What, little bitch?” Jack laughed coarsely. “People have called me much worse, believe me.” She approached the door, purposely looking aggressive. She glared fiercely at the other girl, whose eyes widened as she stepped back. Jack brushed by her, slamming her shoulder into the girl. She just meant to bump into her, but the older girl stumbled and barely remained on her feet.

Jack left the gym and the girl glaring venom at her with the uneasy feeling that she’d forced herself into making an enemy all too soon. Who knew how long it would take Riddick to find her? Oh, he’d find her; she had no doubt about that. But how long would she be stuck on this desert planet in the meantime?

She rounded a corner and bumped right into someone else. She lost her balance and went sprawling on the floor. The synthetic tile on Donli was just as uncomfortable to land on as it was on New Germany. Jack began to pick herself up, and a strong hand gripped her elbow and hauled her up the rest of the way.

“So, that’s where you disappeared to,” her social worker said sarcastically.

“So, you found me. You get a gold star!” Jack said, mimicking his sarcasm with her own and outdoing him by a long shot.

He glowered at her behind his salt-and-pepper facial hair. “Come on. Mrs. Simmons wants to see you.”

Never releasing her elbow, he guided her back to the lobby. The secretary didn’t look up at them. She was too busy painting her nails. He marched Jack straight into the office, where a frowning director gestured for her to sit down. “You can leave, Frank,” she said with a polite smile.

The social worker left without another word. Jack fixed her eyes on the director. She was just beginning to think that she hadn’t handled her first hour in Donli too well when the director confirmed her suspicion.

“So, Jacqueline. Fr—”

“Jack,” Jack interrupted.

“Excuse me?”

“My name is Jack.”

The director looked at the paper on her desk. “… Not Jackie?”

“No. Jack. Just call me Jack.”

Simmons apparently didn’t feel like arguing. “Fine. Jack. Let’s move on, shall we?” She didn’t wait for Jack’s mocking nod to continue. “Franklin tells me you’re a runaway.”

Jack shrugged.

“Just so you know, that behavior won’t be acceptable in this facility.”
Jack laughed crudely. “It wasn’t acceptable at the hospital, either. Didn’t exactly stop me, did it?”

The director took off her glasses and polished them with a cloth next to her computer, removing every speck of imaginary dust in an apparent effort to seem as proper as possible. “Be that as it may,” the director began, “I don’t want to have to put you on probation your first day here. Therefore, we’ll overlook your little disappearing act and try to start over. I am Mrs. Simmons, the director of Chapel Hall. What has Franklin told you about the facility?”

“He said it’s a correctional facility for ‘wayward youth.’”

“Hmm. I see. Well, it was at one point, but once we got a new sponsor, it became the best, and now, the only, girl’s youth home in the system.” Her voice took on a businesslike tone. “I don’t want you to damage our reputation here at Chapel Hall. If you make us lose our funding, I promise that you’ll regret it.”

Jack supposed that Simmons thought she was being threatening. Her voice certainly sounded that way. It was just hard to take a middle-aged woman with tan lines, sun wrinkles, and ridiculous half-moon glasses all that seriously. Jack tried to suppress an unhappy smile.

After another twenty minutes of not-so-subtle threats, Simmons pressed the intercom for the secretary. “Get one of the girls down here. Have whoever it is show Jack the dorms and get her settled in.” Turning to look at Jack, she asked with artificial sweetness, “You don’t have any clothes that need to be put away, do you, dear?”

Jack bit back the retort and shook her head.

“That’s fine, then. Go sit in the lobby. Don’t go anywhere.”

Obviously dismissed, Jack did as she was told. She felt suddenly very tired. She didn’t have the energy to be any trouble. For the moment, all she wanted to do was sleep.

She got her chance soon enough. The girl who arrived to give the cursory tour didn’t say much. One look at Jack’s faded clothes and distinct lack of hair, and that was it. Snobbish bitch, Jack grumbled.

The girl led Jack straight to some rooms, without saying a word about the facility or offering any advice on how to get around or get comfortable there. “Okay, you’re how old?”

“Thirteen,” Jack answered.

“You’re in room five, then.” The nameless teenager pointed vaguely down the hallway. She said with a voice rich with distant contempt, “We can burn those rags tomorrow.”

With that, she turned and walked in the opposite direction. “So much for the grand tour,” Jack muttered. She opened the door to room five and flipped on the light. There were four beds, a roomy closet, and a single desk. Three of the beds were obviously well-used. They were sloppily made-up, and there were dirty clothes piled all over the unused bed. There was no linen underneath the clothes, at least not that Jack could see. She looked around for some sign as to where she could get the stuff she would need to get her bed put together. There was nothing.

A noise from behind her made her start. When she turned, she saw two identical girls staring at her. “Who are you?” they asked in unison.

“Jack.”

“You’re not in our room, are you?”

Jack blinked. “If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

The girls were about her age, with shoulder-length blonde hair parted on the side. It really was like seeing double. They even sounded the same.

A third girl walked in. “Hey, Janie, where….” Her voice trailed off when she saw Jack, who resisted the urge to bow sardonically. “Hi,” the third girl said cautiously. She was the first person on Donli that Jack had seen that was naturally dark. Her black skin was smooth, and her hair was braided all around her head. Jack found herself admiring the intricate hairstyle.

“Hi,” Jack said.

“I’m Mika,” the third girl said. “This is Janie and Lauren.” Each girl waved half-heartedly.

“What happened to your hair?” one of the twins asked. The other shushed her.

Mika was surprisingly nice. She offered to move the clothes from the spare bed, and directed the twins to find Jack some bedding. Mika was obviously the dominant roommate. Jack kept her distance. She didn’t trust the girl, and she didn’t want to form any kind of an attachment to anyone. As soon as Riddick came for her, she was gone.