Light Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

a reasonable-sounding person to this snarling beast. I made a note to step lightly around her.
    That night, the girl from the bunk above mine stood by the bed, trying to look over her shoulder at her butt. She kept twisting and craning her neck. A lot of the girls were pretty miserable about their uniforms. Even the smallest amount of belly fat looked like a jelly roll in the ill-fitting khaki-green shirt. People’s butts never looked right in the uniform either.
    “It’s not as bad as you think,” I told her.
    She snorted. “Do you think they designed them to make us look fat on purpose?”
    “Probably,” I said. I remembered her from the bus ride. Irit was hard to miss, being half a head taller than everyone else. Leah, in the bunk next to mine, was her cousin.
    “I hope to God we have a better Makit than my sister did two years ago,” Irit said, sitting down on my bed. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff she put that squad through.”
    I sat cross-legged at the foot of my bed, and Leah sat on hers, leaning against the wall.
    “I don’t think ours will be like that,” Leah said. “She seemed pretty nice, actually.”
    “Were you standing in formation with the rest of us?” I asked.
    Leah shrugged. “That’s just to set the mood. You can’t take these things too seriously.”
    “Don’t take it seriously, huh?” Irit snorted. “Let’s see you not take it seriously when she has us run the base perimeter for the fifteenth time.”
    “That’ll just get us fit and skinny,” Leah said.
    Irit stared at her for a moment, not sure if she was serious. Leah started laughing. Pretty soon all three of us were laughing, the kind of laugh where you don’t even know why you’re laughing, but everything keeps cracking you up.
    A few minutes later, the lights went out. I lay in my narrow cot on the rough cotton sheets, surrounded by the soft sounds of a dozen girls settling down for bed. I quickly fell asleep, utterly drained by the long day.
    *  *  *
    I soon discovered that boot camp was like summer camp without a swimming pool, field trips, or arts and crafts. We were on our feet a lot, learning to march from here to there. We learned all about the Uzi and the M-16: how to assemble them, how to clean them, how to fire them. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the satisfying clicks that cool black metal made as it slid and locked into place. Each night, we dropped our disassembled firearms in a vat of oil. The next morning, we had to clean all the parts until not a drop of oil or a speck of dirt remained.
    At inspection, we stood at attention next to our beds, our weapons in pieces on them. Orit stood by the door and called us to attention when Lieutenant Meirav entered our barracks. I worked hard that morning to clean my weapon, and it certainly looked clean lying on my bed. There were certain parts, though, that no matter how much you cleaned them, you couldn’t get all the oil out. Meirav, in charge of weapons inspection, knew that, of course. She picked up each piece and examined it from every side.
    “I’m looking for elephants,” she said the first time she did it.
    I smiled, not sure if sarcasm meant she wanted me to answer or not.
    Just when I thought she was done and I’d passed inspection, she picked up the one piece I hadn’t managed to get perfectly clean. She stuck her pinkie in it and then held it in front of my face so I could see the oily smear on her finger.
    “What’s this?” Meirav asked. It was obvious what it was, soI didn’t answer. There was nothing I could say. My stomach growled. We’d been up for two hours and hadn’t had breakfast yet.
    “Your weapon,” she said, inches from my face, “will keep you alive. It will keep your fellow soldiers alive. Show it some respect, Private Maya, or it will fail you when you need it most.”
    That was a big joke, of course, because the weapons they gave us to practice with were ancient. Irit joked that she recognized hers from