Free Slated by Teri Terry

unsmiling man with thick glasses appears from behind a row of filing cabinets.
‘Come this way,’ he says, and we follow him through another door.
Processing? I look at Mrs Ali.
‘Just getting your school ID sorted,’ she says.
But it is more involved than that. First my fingers are pressed one by one on a small screen for digital fingerprint storage. Then my head is held firm and I am ordered not to blink; a bright light shines endlessly in my right eye for a retinal scan. My eyes tear and vision blurs when it is over. A ghostly afterimage like the branches of a tree lingers, black on the white wall, white on the dark floor, then gradually fades. Finally a normal photograph is taken. Then he fusses with a computer for a moment, and a plastic card spits out the other end.
‘You must wear this at all times,’ he says, and slips it into a holder and puts it around my neck.
I hold it up, and there I am. ‘Kyla Davis’ it proclaims under the photo, and there is a red S after my name. An uncertain smile on my lips that Mrs Ali managed to elicit just before the flash.
‘There. You are officially a student of Lord Williams’ now,’ she says, like it is an accomplishment, or a choice. ‘Now we must go back to the Unit.’
We go out the front door of Admin this time. Nestled alongside the building is a large stone monument, rose bushes around, with 2048 carved on top: six years ago.
‘What is that?’ I say.
‘It is a memorial. To some students who died.’
I walk closer, somehow drawn to see, and Mrs Ali follows.
There is a list of names carved into the stone, with ages after. So many, from Robert Armstrong, 15, to Elaine Weisner, 16, and thirty or so names between. All my age or near enough. Stopped, still, silent forever.
‘What happened to them?’
‘They were on a class trip to the British Museum in London, and there was an AGT attack. Nothing to do with them; there were traffic diversions that put them in the wrong place, and the bus got hit. Not many survived.’
I stare back at her, unable to take it in. ‘AGT?’
‘Anti Government Terrorists: Fodders.’ Her lip curls when she says the words, as if they taste bad.
‘Come along now,’ Mrs Ali says, so I follow her back to the Unit. As my feet automatically step along the path, I can’t stop the images that appear in my mind: a bus stuck in London traffic, explosions, flames. Screaming; bloody hands banging against windows; a final explosion. Then, silence.
A stone memorial, thorny roses, and all those names.

Mrs Ali leaves me in a chair outside an office. ‘Wait until she calls you,’ she says, and disappears down a hall.
The door says ‘Dr Winston, Educational Psychologist’. Soon it opens; another student comes out.
A woman’s voice calls from inside. ‘Next!’
Does she mean me? There is no one else about.
‘Next!’ the voice says again, louder, and I get out of my seat, peek uncertainly through the door.
‘Hello, is that Kyla Davis? Don’t be shy, come in.’
She smiles: or does she? Her face has bright red lipstick painted on in a turned up crescent. She has so much makeup caked on that if she smiled properly, her face might crack.
‘You’ve got your school ID done, I see: good. See that, by the door: you put your card along it when you come in. It says who you are.’
I turn back: there is a card sized slot set in a small boxlike machine attached to the wall by the door.
I look uncertainly at my ID, take it in one hand and look back at her.
‘You don’t have to take it out of the holder, just hold it, face down, on the slot.’ I do so and it beeps.
‘Good girl, now have a seat. You do that in and out of every class at our school; also at the Unit from now on. So we always know where everyone is.’ She beams that lipstick smile.
I perch on the edge of a seat in front of her desk.
‘Now listen up, and I’ll just explain the rest of your day.’ And she tells me that I’ll be doing tests all afternoon, to see where I am at. Whether I