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Newt handed Thomas a dubious jar of yellow liquid, as he nodded suggestively towards it. Thomas looked down into the glass of what might well be Gally’s piss, cringed, and gulped it back anyway. A memory swam to the surface of his mind. “#Yolo,” he thought. The drink was like a bitch slap to his taste buds. He spat it out, the spray floating away with the midnight breeze. The Grievers heckled distantly on the bitter wind.
Newt laughed. “You’re not supposed to drink it, you Shank!”
Thomas looked at him blankly. “Then why did you nod suggestively?!”
“It’s a metaphor, see.” Newt explained, with a somewhat pretentious look on his face. “You hold that disgusting klunk right in your hands, but you don’t give it the power to make you feel like klunk.”
The Glade sure was confusing. Thomas thought he didn’t much like these folks.
“That’s Gally’s special recipe…” Looking past Newt, Thomas saw Gally raising his pint and winking like Simon Pegg in Shaun of the Dead. Whatever that was.
“So it was piss?” Thomas grimaced.
Newt chuckled, sighed sadly, and looked wantonly into the distance.
For a few moments, they sat in silence, listening to the soft lullaby of the hooting Grievers. Thomas’ wet, inquisitive eyes drifted over to look at Newt; he noticed the way the firelight glistened through each and every silken strand of the boy’s flaxen hair. Thomas was reminded of that one time at band camp. He shuddered. His eyes flittered gently down, like the wings of a dying moth, and landed coolly on Newt’s lap.
“Is that a rock in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Thomas half joked, laughing nervously.
Newt looked embarrassed. He patted Thomas’ cheek fondly. “Nice try, sugar lump.”
Reaching into the pocket of his papery, hooded garment, Newt revealed a chunk of the Maze wall. “You take a piece of the prison that holds you, put it in your pocket, and then it becomes your prisoner.”
He attempted to throw the rock nonchalantly into the air, only to have it fall into the shadowy grass around them. With a look of suppressed panic on his face, Newt scrambled around to find his prize possession. Awkwardly Thomas watched as retrieving a generic looking pebble, Newt stuffed it hastily back into his woven pouch.
“That was deep.”
“That’s what Alby said,” Newt whispered, smirking to himself.
“What?” Thomas was confused.
“What?!” Newt coughed. “You ask too many questions, Greenie.”
Thomas had a lot of questions. He wondered if Newt had ever seen the original, and clearly superior, Star Wars trilogy. Whatever that was.
At that moment, the cute Asian with the hella buff arms, strolled over, a shifty smirk gracing that flawless complexion.
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything, lads.” He laughed. Thomas was scared.
Newt stood up, stretching out his slender limbs, like a malnourished cat on a tepid day. He exchanged an excessively complex and long-winded handshake with the other boy. Thomas wondered if it would ever end. After what felt like the longest of all infinities, (Some infinities are bigger than others), Newt sat back down, a package grasped firmly in skeletal fist.
Flapping the parcel intrusively in Thomas’ face, he sniggered enthusiastically. “D’you know what this is?”
Thomas paused considering for a moment, Newt’s insensitivity towards his recent memory loss. “It would seem not.”
Newt ignored the dangerously sassy attitude that this Greenbean was developing. “This, Tommy, is the greatest creation ever to come out of Frypan’s kitchen. Is it nutty, is foamy, is it hoppy, does it have a surprisingly fruity note which lingers on the tongue? No, to be honest, it tastes like Griever tears mixed with Chuck’s bath water, but that’s not the point.”
Thomas sighed, tired of Newt’s games. “Then what is the point?” He asked reluctantly.
“See in the beginning, we had to go scrounging around for food and things like that. Frypan found this stuff, put it in the stew, and everyone just went mad for it.”
“Whata’ you mean, “mad”?”
“Well, It’s kinda like the changing… but better.”
“What’s the changing?” Thomas asked, and he could tell that Newt had said too much. Again.
“Slim it with the questions while I’m monologuing, Greenie. Anyway, we call this the Bliss. Stops us getting cranky, you know?”
Thomas felt the odd weight of dramatic irony resting on his supple shoulders.
As Newt continued to blather on about the nutritional value and low calorie content of this so called Bliss, the cute Asian swaggered over. Turning to Newt, he pressed a solitary finger against the skinny boy’s sumptuous lips.
“Hush, my sweet flaxen prince.” Thomas thought he may have misheard. Buff Arms, reached behind his curvaceous ear and present to Thomas a joint.
“What is this and who are you, Buff Arms?”
“Why thank you, Cheekbones.” He tapped Thomas on the nose affectionately. “My name is Minho, I am the Archbishop of Banterbury, and Keeper of the Runners. Those shanks over there,” he motioned to a group of athletic boys that seemed to be chanting ‘LAD, LAD, LAD’ repeatedly, “are my waste men.”
The runners jeered heartily, and with great passion, at their Top Lad. Thomas noted that he would have to look up all these terms on Urban Dictionary when he finally figured out the Wi-Fi code for the Glade.
“Now dear, Greenie, are you ready to immerse yourself in the sweet delights of this premium paradise?”
Thomas wasn’t sure that he wanted Minho’s ‘sweet delights’; he hadn’t been particularly fond of Gally’s. Alas, he found himself yet again indulging in the wonders of peer pressure, inhaling the potent fumes deep into his rubbery lungs. For some reason, the effect was instantaneous.
Thomas decided it would be fun if he could no longer feel his graceful toes, wriggling around in the shallows of his flimsy plimsolls, he was vaguely aware that he may have kicked the lone piece of prison that Newt failed to place back in his papery pouch. The Griever’s moans slowly transformed into the incessant wubbing of hardcore dubstep, remixed within an inch of its life by a teenage Audacity enthusiast.
Newt said something to Thomas, but he found it hard to decipher over the sick beats being laid down behind the maze walls. He stared at Newt, pondering the entire existence of faces, his eyes swimming with the ghosts of his past that he no longer remembered, and noted how Newt’s nose, would look so much nicer adhered to his own fleshy visage.
“Be not afeard; the glade is full of noises.” Newt yammered. “Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” He leapt up like a freshly birthed lamb, onto the log on which they had been leaning. His arms stretched wide, and Thomas thought they seemed to encompass the entire Glade.
“Sometimes a thousand twangling Grievers will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, that, if I then had waked after long sleep, will make me sleep again:” His voice so rich and beautiful, yet simultaneously so boring and bourgeoisie. “and then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open, and show riches ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.” He jumped down from his stage to a standing ovation, arms flopping into a spindly bow, before sitting back down next to Thomas.
“Were you talking about the rain, Newt?” Thomas asked calmly above the clatter of all the Gladers.
“Yeah, mate.” Newt laughed, his smile reflecting the facets of a million rainbows.
“That’s deep, man.” Thomas reiterated.
“That’s what Alby said.” Newt reminisced, a far away look on his face.
“I know, Newt, I know.” Thomas smiled finally feeling at home. He thought this wasn’t really at all like The Hunger Games. Whatever that was. His scar had not pained him for 19 years. All was well.