We came here all the time in the beginning because the real world was too dangerous. I miss it, just the same. Sometimes my father would talk about the way the world used to be, and it was so unreal I couldn't even imagine it. He showed me a drawing of a mouse wearing a big smile and clothing. The paper was torn, and the only part of the caption I could make out was the word "Disn." After he would talk about it, I would dream for weeks about playing the childhood games he described. He always told me about how it was when he was growing up. He used to go out with his friends in a car to see a movie at a real theater. I would sit with my chin in my hands and just stare at him in amazement.

My father was born in 1991. He is a quiet man, not too tall. He has old pictures of when he was a baby. They are like stills from a movie, not like films. Memories frozen in time. I loved looking through the old albums,imagining what it was like to laugh so much. Adults now are almost always serious, always looking worried and talking quietly in groups so the kids don't overhear them. He always told me that in away I was the lucky one, because I never knew what it was like before.

Before, when I still could leave The Other and go home, nearly every kid was in a gang. You didn't really have a choice. My gang was a Blue. We didn't hurt anyone if we could help it, and the guns we had were used only for protection. I was really too young to protect my neighborhood as well as I would have liked. By the time I had left for good,all I was allowed to do was go out on the big patrols around our neighborhood. That is, when my parents allowed me to go. That didn't happen very often.

I've never wanted to be in a Red. Only a Blue. Of course, the Reds always tried to recruit you, tell you you were safer with them, but I never believed it. My best friend was killed the summer before I left, and all because of her gang. I knew some people in Reds, but we really weren't supposed to talk to them. It was hard, but it was just the way it was.

Dad said that there were always gangs, but they didn't really start to control things until a little after the turn of the century. The President brought in the military to all the major cities, and it got better for a little while, but then he was shot during a parade, and the new President didn't support military control as much. Of course, now the military is trying to keep order, but now the gangs outnumber them. That's why the Blues formed, to help them keep peace. It's not fair that they'll arrest us for carrying weapons just as quickly as the Reds, but Ricky, the leader of my neighborhood Blue, says that we still have to help the military in our own way, or we'll all be killed. He calls it "the ultimate sacrifice." It makes me feel good that I try to help, even though my mother never allowed me to bring my gun into the house. She made me keep it in the garage with my dad's tools.

Even though we patrolled every minute, the Reds would get through. Last month, the entire McTell family from down the block just disappeared. Both adults, and the twins. The twins were only seven years old, so I didn't know them well. The Reds left their mark behind, written on the front door in red paint the color of blood. The police came, but when they saw the mark, they pretty much gave up. Even though they didn't condone Blues, they knew that they would only be able to keep the peace with our help.

I'm old enough to remember the first commercials for the Protector SafetySuit. People were getting shot and killed on their way to work, and kids couldn't leave their houses anymore unattended. So a company came up with a lightweight bulletproof suit, jackets, pants, shoes,everything. It's expensive, but at least we weren't trapped in our house anymore. Of course, lots of Reds have bullets that will tear through anything, even Protector, but there's not much you can do about that. The bullets are about four times as expensive as the standard bullets, so it didn't make much sense to have them, unless you were going on a specific shooting, not something random.

So, we did all we could do. I overheard my mom talking to a neighbor once, before I left. She said that a newscast on the viewer reported that gangs on the east coast were using chemical warfare. I asked Ricky what that meant, and he told me not to worry about it, that it was just a rumor. I worried anyway.

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Copyright © 1995, Monica Israels
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