The voice of nineteen

Turn 24 of 26

The bell rings and you Return to the office and stand at attention for the rest of the 99 book entry. Soon it’s done as you are a hair station worker that does the donut bun, braids and hairspray along with 4 twin officers who do the same job. You 5 then head to the hair 2 station and stand at attention while waiting for another group of girls to enter. No noise is made. Only silence.

The bell dies and your boots carry you back through the corridor, past the mess, into the office where the Lead Instructor stands with the 99 book open under the lamp. You take attention at the desk and she reads. 'Entry two. The standard reproduces itself only through those who saw it before it was given to them. Hair station two is not a styling post. It is the eye of the station. The evaluator decides when a head is ready — and what the evaluator decides to correct is not questioned, because the evaluator was selected, and selection is the standard above the standard.' She turns the page. 'Entry three. Intakes are coming. The compounds are growing faster than the roster. Twenty graduated will not staff them. One hundred will not staff them. The program is expanding, and expansion requires evaluators, and evaluators are rare, and rare is the only word left in this facility that is not forbidden.' She closes the book. 'That is what you were selected for, Ninety-Nine. The rest of the book is yours. It stays in this office or on your person. Never elsewhere. Never read aloud.'

The quiet officer escorts you out and the corridor delivers you to the standards hall, where four officers are already waiting at hair station two — four identical women, 5'5, dense squared builds, slate-navy uniforms, steel badges catching the light, shining black donut buns with wrapped braids and pins, fixed angry faces pulled taut. They do not speak. You take your place at the fifth position and your body locks into attention beside them, and the five of you stand at the station in a silence so complete you can hear the lacquer drying on the styling forms laid out on the tables: the comb, the wrapped braid, the pin, the spray canisters lined up in a row like ammunition.

Across the hall, hair station one stands empty at its row of stools, and beyond the far doors the hundred voices have resumed their recitation, the cadence rolling through the walls and through your bones. The five of you do not shift. The five of you do not glance. The minutes go by and the silence holds the way the stance holds — permanently, because the body no longer has another way to be.

Then, from somewhere down the intake corridor, a sound the standards hall has not made all day: the heavy clunk of a door unbolted at the far end, followed by boots — many boots, out of step, uncertain, marching badly. A voice, not one of the instructors', young and ragged, saying something frightened that the distance flattens into noise. The four officers at your station do not move, but their chins lift, fractionally, in unison — a fraction of a degree, the same fraction, five faces including your own turning toward the intake doors as the first of the new group comes through them.