Scarlet Prison

Chapter 27

When Novashi and I were little, we used to beg her mom for chocolate. Her mom was a woman of ritual, and after dinner each night, she would scoop her hand into a bowel on a high shelf above the TV and pull out three small chocolates, each wrapped in brightly colored foil. She would then carry these to her favorite corner of the couch, which had sunken in from years of her ritual (this did nothing to change her preference for the spot), and she'd spend the rest of the evening working on her laptop. The chocolates each served as a "pick me up" while she worked. She never ate the chocolates all at once. Rather, she consumed them at interspersed moments, when she felt her attention might be waning.

You see, Carmell viewed the chocolates as a sort of medicine, while Novashi and I saw them as candy we simply had to eat. We began by first asking nicely if we could each have just one. Being kids, the only time the chocolates occurred to us was when we saw Carmell eating them, so the only time we'd remember to ask for them was at night. To our dismay, Carmell would explain that we weren't allowed to have chocolate so close to bed time. After our persistent "why's," we would receive more information than we were able to comprehend. Chocolate, we learned, has stimulants in it that go into your brain and tell all the little neurons that it's time to wake up and start working. Furthermore, chocolate contains sugar, which is known to make children hyper. Carmell was allowed to eat chocolate because she still wanted her neurons to keep working, and she had a later bed time than us. If we ate chocolate, however, we would never get to sleep. We assured her that we didn't mind staying up a little later or even all night, but she held steadfast to her refusal. We fell into a ritual of our own, of asking Carmell for a chocolate every night I ate dinner over. Eventually, we realized that continuing on as we were would be pointless. Carmell simply always said no. We needed a new plan.

Novashi was like her mother in many ways, but, unlike her mother, she had a friend that was intent on corrupting her. Novashi wanted a chocolate as much as I did, so even though she was hesitant about breaching her mom's sacred ritual, I managed to convince her that the bottomless bowl on the shelf would surely supply a replacement for any losses that Carmell might suffer.

Carmell was much too absorbed in her work to notice that the secret spy game being played around her was in an effort to snatch a chocolate off the lamp table beside her end of the couch. We only took one chocolate because we figured that would be less conspicuous than taking two, as if there was a possibility Carmell wouldn't notice that one of her three chocolates was missing. We snuck it up to Novashi's room and, at her insistence, used a pill splitter to cut the chocolate precisely in half. We each consumed our small bite of chocolate and waited for this energy we'd been hearing so much about. We didn't wait long. Pretty soon, we were wildly ricocheting between Novashi's mattress and the ceiling, giggling all the while.

Carmell came and told us that it was time for bed, and she said I was welcome to sleepover. I said I would stay over, but we insisted that there would be no sleeping involved. We had enough energy to stay up all night long! Carmell accepted this ridiculous proclamation and left us to our own devices. We'd been expecting a war, and the only explanation we could think of was that Carmell knew we had taken the chocolate. She probably figured getting us to go to bed would be a lost cause. Not even Novashi's mom could overrule the power of stimulants and sugar.

But apparently the need to sleep could overpower the placebo effect of kids thinking that trace amounts of stimulants and sugar would provide any sort of energy. We were asleep within ten minutes of Carmell agreeing to let us stay up all night.

I hadn't realized that I'd been taken in by the placebo effect, until I went home and told my parents all about the forbidden chocolate and how we had finally gotten a taste. They immediately decided that Carmell had been "full of crap," my dad's words.