Career Choice

7. Maria and Manuela

 

A week later I was shoveling gravel together with Bianca, who also had reached the level of miner, when one of the staff members told us to go up to the main building. We were nervous when we went inside because we were worried about what kind of punishment we had earned.

 

Instead to my big surprise Maria and another woman was waiting for me. I hugged her. Regardless of the fact that she had sent me here, she was all I had left. “Step back. Rick. I want to see your waist line.” She looked me over and turned to Gonzarles, who was doing some deskwork. “I am truly impressed. You have done so much good work with him.”

 

“He has done it himself. After a difficult start Rich has shown us that he deep inside wanted to come here. He just needed to get out of his comfort zone.”

 

Bianca introduced me to the other woman, which was her mother Manuela. Then Gonzarles told us that today was a kind of home visit. We would go off campus until tomorrow evening and spend it together with our relatives before returning to the center in the evening.

 

A staff member told us to follow him. Together we were guided into a room where staff members helped us out of her uniform and given a proper shower with soap. It was odd. Things that I had regarded as a natural part of my daily life, was now luxury.

 

However once I got the uniform off I noticed that there was some wrong with my back. I was so used to having it supported by the uniform that is exhausting to do without it. Bianca had it the same way. The staff member offered us a normal corset we could wear under our normal clothes. It was a bit odd because I was a boy but it helped with my back.

 

The women were waiting for us when we came outside and we drove by the nearby town of San Mateo down to a town called Rosarito, which was lying at the ocean.

 

Here we booked into a small motel and we ate dinner and toured the city. It was like the holiday I original expected when Maria lured me down to Mexico. It was as HPLC did not exist. The contrast between locked up in a camp and being able to walk freely around in a city was indescribable.

 

In the evening Manuela and Bianca went to their room for a talk about Bianca’s future. When they had left, Maria asked me if I had an idea what to do after graduation. I had to confess to her that I had doubts about my future. Maybe law was a possibility but I was not sure. She had a suggestion.

 

“I know that I can not keep you here after you turn 18 and it was never my intension. I enrolled you at HPLC because I would help you before you turn 18 and can decide to put your life down the drain without anyone can do something about it. I needed something to challenge you and you must have to admit that it had remolded and turn-around your life.”

 

I began to sob. “Yes, but it had been so hard.”

 

“I know, darling, but some day I would not be around and then you will be in a bad situation, if you had not received treatment so you still would have been locked inside your room all day long.”

 

I nodded. She was right.

 

“And I still don’t think that you are ready to live of your own. I have an idea. One of the school, HPLC received students from is located in Jamaica. It is called Meditation Inlet, which just by the sound of the name would give you peace and quietness while you decide in what line of business, you will work. Your high school credits can be transferred, so you would be a distance student and additionally they offer education in housekeeping. It would just what you need so you can live by your own. What do you say?”

 

“Meditation Inlet; It sounds like a relaxed place. Yes, I will take your offer.”

 

“OK. I will make Gonzarles arrange for a transfer, when he means you are ready. Let’s go to sleep.”

 

The next morning I got a chance to talk with Bianca. I told her about my decision to go to Jamaica and she also had news for me.

“I am going to a Christian boarding school in Whitefish Lake, Montana. It is called Sun Grove Academy and is a girls-only boarding school, where they teach sincere family life. It is something I need because we pretty much lived on take-out food due to the irregular work hours of my parents. I have never made food, washed the dishes or cleaned the house. Chores were something that I am unfamiliar with and in order to be a good wedded wife, I have to learn it.”

 

“It is the same with me. It must be our modern society which makes people like us miss out of those things. I remember that one of the teachers called our parents curling parents because they sweep obstacles away from our path.”

 

We continued to talk and Bianca seemed to be a nice person. Wonder how she would look when her hair once again would have grown. Due to the mandatory haircut, we still look like victims of cancer.

 

Late next day we drove back. When we had said goodbye to Maria and Manuela outside the facility we went inside where we once again was put in uniform. They had tried a sort of dry-cleaning and even tough they still were smelly; they were not as unsavory as we have left them.

 

At group therapy we were invulnerable. I could see envy in their eyes and if my eyes were anything like Bianca’s they were glowing. The more I look at Bianca the better she looks. What a shame that we are going to two several facilities