Diary of a Teenaged Mimic

Dear Diary,

So today was kinda anticlimactic. At breakfast Marshall duBois announced we could find the results of testing in the Library after lunch. The ROTCs and I stayed eating breakfast until they kicked us out, then wandered over to the Library.

The Library was closed and locked, with a small crowd of Candidates milling around waiting. The ROTCs and I looked at each other, nodded, and left, headed back for our rooms. It turned out all four of us were in the inner hallway, as far from any windows as it was possible to be here at PCHA. Our rooms were near identical, although all three of them had their chamber pots under their beds. They'd done some interesting things with their easels as well; Bill had a really nice picture of the moon, Angel had an incense burner, and Saffron had a fancy knife and goblet. When they visited my room the three of them took one look at my easel, which still had the chamber pot sitting on one of the shelves, and lost their shit. Angel stifled a laugh, Bill didn't bother and leaned against the wall laughing, and Saffron shot me an offended look and said, "What the fuck, Diaz?"

"I left it there after I pulled both of them out from under the bed."

"It's a personal shrine, you're not supposed to desecrate it like that."

"Uh... oops?" I grabbed the chamber pot and slid it back under the bed.

After that we all pulled our chairs to our doors and sat there like chatting about nothing much. We griped about the food, the uniforms, the beds, pretty much everything. Like you do.

When we noticed folks moving around in the hallway outside the dorm, we shoved our chairs back, closed our doors, and headed to the Dining Hall. Today for lunch the maids brought out stacked up slices of ham. I decided to get creative, pulled out my dagger and sliced a few thin slabs of bread off my loaf, and made myself the world's saddest ham sandwich. The other three looked at me like I'd gone insane when I started slicing, but Angel got a speculative look once I had my sandwich together.

"Would it kill them to give us some mustard?" I muttered around a bite of sandwich.

"Yeah, I think that's too spendy for us mortals from The Yards," replied Angel.

We spent the rest of lunch demolishing another few trays of food, the others now openly betting on how much I would eat. I had no idea how much I could actually eat without being full, nor how long it would take to start putting on some comfortable padding, but I'd find out eventually.

When the maids kicked us out at the end of lunch, we wandered over to the Library. I wasn't sure how many candidates there were, so I couldn't be sure how many of them failed, but all four of us made the cut. When we started cheering and congratulating us, Sister Cheryl handed us each a big manila envelope and ejected us from the Library. We fell back to our rooms and went through our envelopes, which had, among other things, our class schedules for the remainder of the Summer semester. Our schedules were more or less identical four days out of the week. We also each got a required reading list, a personalized exercise plan, and our scores on the admissions testing.

I wound up heading back to the Library to pick up more books; that's when I found out that Cadets weren't allowed to check out books; I found the ones I needed, noted where they lived on the shelves, and wandered back to my room, the smallest of the books tucked under my shirt. On the way I wandered around until I found each of my classrooms, all of which were in use today.

I barely made it to dinner; the relief after three days of buildup hit me, leaving me exhausted. We got cake during dinner, although the frosting tasted more like butter than frosting. I still ate mine, but I felt really disappointed until Marie brought me my own little personal cake.

When I got back to my room, I was asleep as soon as my head hit the bed.