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H E R
It was almost two months until Carl Grimes finally left his cell. He walked into the cafeteria, head down, eyes to the ground. Uncomfortable in his own home.
Lizzie shut up for once and we (Patrick, Mika, Lizzie and I) all watched in silence as he made his way to the buffet table laden with a pot of oatmeal and some fresh fruit. His cheeks burning from all the unwanted attention.
He wasn't wearing his hat, revealing his matted dark hair. His skin was unnaturally pale from not being out in the sunlight in so long, his face was slightly gaunt and twisted into a permanent scowl but his light eyes told a different story.
He was strange at first glance, if I'm being honest. Almost wild looking. Dirty fingernails and eyes that blazed, like they were afraid to blink. Like a mangy animal, wounded and tense.
I almost felt bad for him.
Ugh, that's another thing. I always feel bad when I shouldn't. Guilty for things that aren't my fault. Like I owed him something. But it had been his choice to hide away in his cell, wasting away the spring season. I had nothing to do with it.
"We should ask him to sit with us." Mika, Lizzie's younger sister, advised.
I liked Mika. She and Lizzie were a package deal, in terms of our sisterhood. She had a sweet, round face and stubby little hands, only ten years old. Lizzie and I babied her, more than necessary, but it was nice to have someone to cuddle or to braid the hair of.
Lizzie and Mika were quite lucky, well, lucky enough. Their father had survived, on account of a heart condition had excluded him from the Woodbury militia and thus he had not ended up in the pile of road side corpses, marking the sisters as the few non-orphan children that occupied the prison.
"He won't." Lizzie replied loud enough that I'm sure our conversation would not go unnoticed by the boy, turning back to her bowl. "Remember what Beth said, he doesn't like us." She sent him a look that was impossible not to miss.
"She never said that." I retorted quietly so he wouldn't hear, but it didn't matter in the long run, I'm sure he was hanging onto every word that came from our table. "She just said he was shy. There's nothing wrong with being shy."
I wasn't sure exactly why I was defending the boy-man-thing who had been almost a phantom of the prison to us until this occasion, but I did feel it was unfair for us to speak poorly of him as we knew close to nothing about him besides our own folklore.
