The Girl With No Name

Secrets

Carolina took a shortcut to the girls’ bathroom. The orphanage was like a maze. It was an old building filled with twists and turns, lots of staircases and secret passages. If you were anyone but Carolina, it would seem like a simple, old building. But Carolina knew better. She always took the secret passages to get around the building, so as to get to places faster. She had learned about these passages when she was young and had first come here. She was walking around, not really sure of what she was looking for and had stumbled upon these passages. Now, she used them for almost any reason, so you wouldn’t normally see Carolina walking around, and that was the reason why she seemed to magically appear in rooms.
   She was so used to these secret passages that she probably could get around them with her eyes closed. It was embarrassing to say, but she knew these passages better than the normal way that everyone took around the building. Sometimes she would get lost when she walked around the building without using the secret passages, which was quite embarrassing. She should really start using the normal way, but she never did, no matter how many times she scolded herself, and told herself she should really not take the passages all the time.
   Maybe she liked it so much because when you were walking on the first floor of the passages (as she was now), grass and plants grew on the floor, and she liked to see them there and walk through them. She had an idea why they grew there, but she didn’t tell anyone, of course, or else she would have to tell people about the passage.
   After a while, she made it to the girls’ bathroom. She hurriedly changed in a bathroom stall into her green skinny jeans and a simple blue tank top. It was mid-May, and it felt like it. It was beautifully sunny today, like it had been for the past week. She got out of the stall and another girl took her place. She looked around for Catherine. She didn’t see her, and she didn’t bother to go and see what was holding her up, even though she felt like it. She learned to give Catherine her time and space.
   Catherine washed her hands and fixed up her hair before she went back to the secret passages to get to the cafeteria for breakfast. However, on her way, she saw something that she thought she would never see, and she hoped she’d never see. At the end of the passage, she saw mist. The Mist.