The blaring sound of an airhorn broke the peaceful silence, making me jerk so quickly I fell off the edge my bed and landed sideways on the cold linoleum form. The guys began to talk amongst themselves as we heard the voices of drill sergeant barging through the doors. It was pitch black outside and inside in the room, and when the rectangular lights turned on row by row, three officers, including Sergeant Mitchell, came marching down the hall. Of course, his voice was the very first one I got to hear this morning.

”Get up and stand in formation!”

After kicking off the blankets, I scrambled to my feet and copied what the other guys were doing, standing at the foot of their barracks in two opposite rows. We kept our hands by our sides, shivering because it was so cold. I blinked twice and quickly wiped the crust from my eyes. Nearby, I could see our marked blue bags in front of us, then yellow, orange, and red. Sergeant Mitchell yelled something I didn’t understand because his words were too jumbled together, but the other fellows began shouting their platoon numbers as he went down each row, reaching for their bags.

“You have thirty seconds to get dressed. Thirty, twenty nine, twenty eight, twenty seven..“ He had an awful voice crack, and began to cough. “Twenty six...“

Grateful that I remembered the color of my platoon, I grabbed a blue marked bag and zipped it open. I slipped the pants over my shorts and slid my arms through oversized camaflouged jacket. A blue vest had been sewed in the front, and my fingers felt slippery as I buttoned it over my olive green shirt. I had just shoved my feet into the boots when the countdown finally ended.

“Someone isn’t dressed yet,” Sergeant Mitchell continued. He and the two other drill instructions cornered an unfortunate soul who was just putting their jacket on. “You’re all a team. If one person goes down, all of you go down. It’s not about individuality. It’s about ‘we’ and ‘us’, not ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Do you understand that?”

“Yes, drill sergeant!” we replied.

Oh no.

“All of you drop down this instant and give me forty five pushups. All of you! Learn how to follow instructions. When I say get dressed in thirty seconds, you get dressed in that time period. This is the red phase of your training. You’re going to break off any civilian habits you still have. Hurry up.”

As my arms began to burn once more, I wondered how it could be morning. It had come way too fast; I could’ve sworn I had only gone to bed an hour ago. It seemed unfair, and the dark sky outside didn’t help. I cursed the universe. It was supposed to be fucking night time.

* * * * *

Morning seemed like a blur. The guys who were wearing the same vest as me were grouped together. Nobody appeared to look like a teenager.

Once they snapped a picture of us they gave us our IDs, and stabbed our arms with needles to give us our shots so we wouldn’t catch the plague. We slipped our helmets on and walked out in the hot field, following a lieutenant that had been assigned to us. There was around a hundred of us together, and when we stopped in front of a track I felt my heart sink.

The lieutenant turned around and faced us. He was a small, but muscular guy, and the sunlight glared on his glasses. He held a clipboard in his hands. When he opened his mouth, to my surprise, he did not shout.

“Welcome to PT, also known as physical training. My name is Lieutenant Jones, and I will be your drill instructor. There is a mile and a half course for you to run underneath eight minutes and thirty seconds. Anyone who finishes late owes me forty pushups. Is that understood?”

”Yes, sir!” everyone yelled. I stayed silent.

“You will all be assigned in separate groups of three,” Lieutenant Jones continued, pacing back and forth. “Remember, the main goal is team work. You need to work together; this is brotherhood.” He began calling out names as people stepped forward, taking off their jackets and helmets admist the sweltering heat and reattaching the blue vest on their shirts. As I took off mine and dumped it on the ground, sweat clung to my shirt, making it stick against my back as I strapped back on my own. After five minutes of role call, I heard that dreaded word again.

“Aaron, Burns, Mouse.”

I felt like I was going to throw up. It’s Bueler, you uncultured swine, I wanted to scream in his pointy looking face. Timidly, I stepped out of the crowd as I felt several eyes settle on me. The two guys in my group were fighting to keep the smiles off their faces. One appeared to be in their early twenties, the other one not looking a day over nineteen.

“Someone needs to pick up their child. He looks like he enjoys food a little bit too much,” the youngest one whispered as we stepped on the track and gathered in the front of the finish line.The older one smirked and gave me a sideways glance.

“Get ready!” Lieutenant Jones hollered as he held a whistle that hung from his neck. He paused.

I bit my lower jaw as I slightly bent my knees. Davis had taught me a lot about running when I was back in Jova, but it wasn’t so bad because there wasn’t this much pressure. I gripped the hem of my shirt and took a deep breath.

“Go!” The sound of the whistle rang in the air.

The pounding feet of a hundred men shook the ground, leaving me behind a cloud of dust. I coughed and took off, but realized that there was nobody beside me. It was around the third lap did I notice that they were sprinting when they passed me. Each time we arrived the finish line they overlapped me, and I was panting and gasping for air like a dying horse. The constant food binges back at home had finally caught up to me. Running used to be a lot easier when I was at least sixty pounds lighter.

When I finally stumbled across the line, everyone was already standing and walking around with their hands over their heads. I leaned forward to desperately catch my breath, staring down at the ground. One of my boots were untied, and I was reaching down to fix it when Lieutenant Jones’ voice startled me.

“Private Mouse!”

I looked up quickly and saluted. “Yes, sir.”

“You ran a time of eight minutes and fifteen seconds.”

A wave of devastation washed over me. “Yes, sir.”

“You were last. Why the hell were you last? You think that’s something to be proud of? Well, do you?!”

Even underneath the blasted sun I felt a shiver run down my spine. Everybody had dark, beady looking eyes, their antennas burning into my soul. They looked like aliens, not humans.

“N-no, sir.”

“Then why are you last?”

“B...because...”

“Because you’re slow, that’s why!” He started to yell, and I braced myself for it. “You’re not putting in maximum effort. Know what happens to your men when you slack off? Do you?”

“No, sir,” I answered.

“They suffer. You put your teammates down. Your decisions have an impact on them. In combat, you have to learn how to work together. If you don’t do your part, you’re all going down. Private Burns and Private Aaron, get up here. You all owe me forty five pushups, and not those half ones you been trying to pull off. I want you all the way down to the ground before you go up.”

The look of rage on both mens’ faces terrified me. They weren’t smiling anymore. But they said nothing at all, and together, when we got down on the dried grass and began the first one, I realized that maybe making friends wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought. When I saw Lieutenant Jones writing down something in his log, I sighed. Baldwin was going to kill me if he found out I was on my way towards being kicked out.

”Fatass,” Burns hissed in my ear.

Strike two.

* * * * *

It was so hot outside that my shirt and pants were drenched with sweat from all the activities that we had to do. I must’ve drunken over six liters of water out of my canteen, but it all came out through my skin because of the excess sweat. We had to do pull ups on a metal bar that burned our hands on account of it sitting out on the afternoon sun for so long and hold our body weight up for two minutes.

We then entered a clearing area in front of the woods. It was a relief finally be in the shade, but the earth was dark red under our feet. I made sure not to stand too close to Aaron and Burns, as we all got ready to do our next activity. I was relieved to find out I wasn’t the only one who sucked at this one. Lieutenant Jones called it the Bear Drag, where one person would pull their partner across the ground on their back while they held onto their neck. Their hands and feet clung frantically against the dirt as they struggled to get across on all fours.

Fortunately, I was the one being dragged this time. Aaron refused to look at me as he was in the lead, my shirt and pants completely covered in red dust. It was only until we had to switch positions did everything begin to fall apart. Burns stood anxiously in the line, because I knew he was at the limit with the pushups.

“Faster!” Aaron screamed up at me as I dug my boots in the soil. “Put some muscle into it!”

There was so much sweat in my face that it burned my eyes as I began to push forward as fast as I could, even though my arms and legs were on fire. I felt Lieutenant Jones’ eyes on me, but I knew I could not look at him when I heard his voice.

“Do you want to do pushups, Private Mouse?”

I finally gave up and struggled to my feet. Despite all my efforts, we hadn’t moved from the spot that we began in. Everyone else had finished and was waiting for us. Aaron shoved me off of him with one hand, causing me to land on my bottom in the dirt. I sat there, flies buzzing around me.

“Burns, Aaron, Mouse. Forty five. I’m not playing games. This is serious. Mouse, you’re hurting your men. You need to get your act together. You can do better than this. Do you guys have what it takes?”

“Yes, sir!” we shouted, getting on the ground. Burns looked so devastated he looked like he was about to cry. Aaron, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to beat the shit out of me. And honestly, I didn’t blame him. I was mad at myself.

* * * * * *

The final course of the day involved us climbing backwards on a rope across a river in the woods. My arms and legs felt so sore I could barely take a step without wincing. The Darby Queen obstacle course had really screwed me up; climbing those huge wooden walls were not my forte. Once again, I was the very last to finish, causing Burns and Aaron to suffer unnecessarily again. And by now, I had lost track of how many pushups I had done so far.

“Why don’t you just give up, tree top?” Burns had yelled at me, and a couple of drill sergeants had to pull him back because he was literally on the brink of tears. They weren’t coming from anger, but from exhaustion.

I made sure to hang back as far as I possibly could behind all the men whenever we jogged to our next training course. Even behind all these heads, I could make out how wide the river was. Our shadows stretched out on the ground from the setting sun, which left a pinkish purple hue in the sky. The water was grey and murky, and looked about nine feet deep.

“Private Mouse!” Lieutenant Jones called out.

I sighed. “Yes, sir?”

“Get up here.”

It took a while to make my way through the crowd, brushing past hands and elbows. When I stepped in the very front, the earth in front of me was very slippery and muddy. A bright yellow rope, attached to two trees on both sides of the river, stretched out over the water.

“Go across to other side and drop through where that rope stops.”

I reached for it, but he shook his head.

“You can’t use that.”

I looked at him for a moment, before I understood what he really meant. In the distance, I heard Sergeant Mitchell approaching us, his hands clasped behind his back as the orange platoon sprinted nearby, finishing up a two mile run. Their vests contrasted brightly with their olive green shirts and camaflouged pants.

“Yes, sir,” I answered, ignoring how shaky my voice sounded in front of the pairs of eyes watching me.

With both hands, I held them out towards the water and began to concentrate, shutting everything out. The liquid began to morph and shift as two long streams floated towards me and began to coat both of my arms. There was a startled gasp, and then deep murmuring amongst the people behind me, but I didn’t dare look back. The water felt cool against my sweaty skin, and suddenly I wanted to jump into the river.

“Does your head hurt, Private?”

“No, sir.”

Lieutenant Jones paused. “Don’t you lie to me.”

“A..a...little bit sir.”

“Just as I thought. Go across for me.”

I took a shaky breath before shooting one of my water arms towards the nearest tree on the other side. The end curled around the branch, and I pushed myself off the muddy riverbank, feeling the breeze against my face as I began to swing. My boots lightly tapped the surface of the river as with my other free arm, used another branch to hoist myself up into the air, balancing on one of the higher branches in the tree.

“Private Mouse!” Sergeant Mitchell yelled.

My head was killing me, and the thick layers of water coating my arms spilled down vertically, some splashing in the river below and some on the earth. With my wet hands, I gripped the branches and looked down at everyone else. They looked tiny and small, whispering and pointing to me.

“You need to work on pain tolerance. In combat, there won’t be time to sit around and recover, with bullets flying around. It is your job to use the water around you and spike your enemies before they can shoot. This will give your guys the opportunity to attack. You have this huge water source in front of them. Trap your enemies in ice! Be resourceful, damn it.”

“Yes, drill sergeant!” I replied.

“Jump down from that tree and swim down. Don’t interfere with anyone else.”

The drop below made my stomach queasy, but I counted to three before letting go off the branch. When I crashed through the surface of the water, thousands of bubbles rose and swirled around me. As I came up for air, coughing and spitting, four guys were already on the rope, using their legs to get across.

* * * * * *

I dragged myself through the damp earth, the water getting shallower and shallower against my legs. Not too far, some guys were swimming right behind me, splashing with their feet as they kicked across the surface. Mud clung to me, coating my skin. It was good for keeping mosquitoes from biting me, though.The blue vest I wore was completely crusted with it. I knew that doing my own laundry was going to be a nightmare.

Recruits walked past me, joking and laughing with each other as they headed inside the building for chow. As I stumbled to my feet and grabbed my bag and camaflouged jacket, something brushed against my shoe. It was getting dark, but there was just enough light to see a tiny green frog, which was staring up at me with curiousity in its dark eyes.

My heart skipped a beat.

Slowly, I knelt down so I wouldn’t frighten it and cause it to hop away, since it appeared to be a baby. It stayed rooted in its spot, chewing on a fly it had just caught. I held my index finger out, and without hesitation, it jumped right on confidently. I couldn’t help but smile at its webbed feet, which had a beautiful orange tint on the edges. I didn’t think it was poisonous. The frog then moved onto the bridge of my knuckles.

“Hey, there,” I whispered. “You lost?”

The creature tilted its head as it made its way up my sleeve before settling on my shoulder. This day had been shitty so far, but at least I didn’t completely fail at one of my goals. I gently scooped it in both of my hands as I began to walk across the field. The frog stayed still, enjoying the texture of my palms. Probably because they were still muddy. Hopefully, it would be easy to hide because of its size. I was gonna have to figure out how to make a little home for it, in the midst of the barracks, red faced officers, and sweaty men.

I could pull it off.

“Why don’t you stay with me? You look like a girl to me, so I’ll call you Lulu. Can we be friends? You’ll be my first one. I think we’re gonna get along fine, you and me. Are you hungry? There’s plenty of bugs in our room, so you’re going to feast tonight.”

Lulu hopped back on my shoulder, her slimy toes clinging to my shirt, which was oddly comforting. We headed back in the building, the smell of food from the cafeteria lingering through the windows.

Above us, stars glowed in the night sky.