by Skye Warren
This breaks the tension. Guys are snickering and smiling. A few make wisecracks—nothing too outrageous, because Dixon is on alert now, but it’s as if we’re all laughing together. As if we’re being real with each other. Humans, not numbers. And suddenly, I feel good. I didn’t want to be here, still don’t, but since I have to, this isn’t so bad. As long as I ignore the concrete walls closing in on me and the metal bars on the windows. And Grayson.
I’ll give you twenty minutes.” There’s a shuffle of papers. At the end of the twenty minutes, I’ll have them expand on the item they feel the most energy around. That will be the next assignment.
I look over at Grayson, who’s been observing all of this with an expression that’s unreadable, but I can’t help but think that he’s annoyed. As if I’ve done something he doesn’t like, or maybe he prefers me flustered and out of control. I set the papers aside on the media table, steel myself, and walk to him.
“Can I have my…” I point to my sweater on the back of the chair.
He twists his big body and grabs it off. My belly tightens deep down as I look at my soft sweater lying across his rough, corded hand. He’s taken my refuge, my seat, my sense of control. He looks at me like he sees me. Oh, it’s good he’s chained up—it really is.
He holds it out to me on a finger, closer. “I don’t bite,” he says. “Much.”
I snort and grab it. My finger brushes his and sparks enough electricity to jolt my heart out of my chest.
He sits back, watching me pull my sweater on. It feels strangely intimate, dressing while he watches, and makes me thankful for Dixon’s presence, distracted as he is. And for the other guys, busily scribbling away, whispering when they think I’m not looking. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be alone with this guy. He scares me in a way that’s different than a dark-alley scare. An alley I’d know how to handle. Him? Not so much.
I grab my briefcase and set it on the corner of his desk, rooting around for the papers I passed out on the first day. My gaze isn’t meeting his, but that’s only because I can’t find what I need. My voice comes out low so as not to disturb the rest of the class. “So you’re interested in creative writing?”
His voice is quiet. Rough. Slightly mocking. “Yes, I am, Ms. Winslow.”
My cheeks heat again. If it weren’t for the menace glittering in his eyes, he’d be beautiful.
“Here’s the class schedule. You’ve missed two assignments, but it’s no more than a few paragraphs of writing.” I explain the assignments—the meaningful event and the non-meaningful event. “We’ll be doing exercises for a few weeks and then choose one exercise to polish. Toward the end we’ll create a journal to be published online and in print, full of our vignettes.”
His lips quirk at the word vignette. I wonder suddenly what level of education he’s had. Being that he’s a latecomer, they didn’t supply me with his background info like I got with the other guys. Does he ping on the word because he doesn’t know it? Or maybe he does know, and he finds it pretentious.
Who cares? I’m the teacher here. I’m in charge. I set the briefcase on the desk like a wall between us.
Five
~Grayson~
She stands there behind her fortress of a briefcase. Books, briefcases, glasses—it all just makes me think about exposing her, stripping her, making her helpless. She’d hate it and love it—I know that for a fact. It’s like I know her even though I never saw her before this week.
My mind goes to the glasses. How well can she see without them? I’m hoping not well at all, because it would be hot if I took them away. Hot for me and also for her.
And then there are blindfolds.
Snap out of it. I’m here to be the perfect student. I should be focusing on her silly assignment, listing objects.
She’s digging in her briefcase for something. “…since you don’t have one of your own.”
She pulls out a clothbound notebook, worn on the edges. I watch her page through, dark brows furrowed. She has an old-fashioned look, features carved with a delicate instrument, perfectly polished, eyes big and soft. I can imagine her in a black-and-white photo standing in front of some old-timey farm, pitchfork in hand, with that prim look. Prim in a way that gets me all kinds of hot.
Her lips are moist, or at least the top one is because she sucks it in when she’s nervous, and I want more than anything to suck it in myself and maybe even bite it. And to take those glasses away. Every house I’ve ever robbed, every establishment, it’s the same story—you identify the first line of defense and take it away. That’s how you get control. For her, it’s those glasses.
She’s ripping pages out of her notebook, and now I feel shitty because it’s obviously her writing book and she’s clearing it for me to use. What’s in there that she doesn’t want me to see? She pushes it across the desk, open to the next blank page.
“You write in it upside down and from the back?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’d rather have my margins at the bottom instead of the top.” She folds the pages and stuffs them into her case. “It’s easier on the hand.”
I nod. Modifying your tools. That’s a pro thing to do. I find I like that. Admire it, even.
“Twenty objects. You understand?”
“Yes, Ms. Winslow,” I say.
She blinks.
I need to stop saying her name like that. She turns away, addressing the class. “How are we doing? Questions?” Her bid is met with silence. She walks up the side of the room in that pencil skirt and now that red cardigan, which felt soft as kitten fur. “As insignificant or boring as you want. It just has to be true. No fake stuff.” Up she walks, and around the back. “The most boring bit of honesty is worth ten thousand times as much as the most glittering piece of fiction in this class.”
I look at Teke in the back row, scribbling away, and I think about what he said—that she knows when you make stuff up. But will she really?
The idea of giving her anything real from my past feels like acid in my gut. Too high a price to pay. But I have to get in that online journal.
Stone’s got alerts set up for certain terms; it’s a way we identify places to hit. Whatever I write, if I weave in the right terms, he’ll see it in her little magazine. He can’t call me, but he knows I’m here, and it won’t take him long to catch my message. The censors are good here—I can only sneak in a name, who to bribe, but that’s all I’ll need. Stone and the guys can take it from there.
But my instructions to the gang have to be hidden inside something devastating enough to create a smoke screen. I have to make up something good, because no way can I give her anything real.
Teke raises his hand, and she walks over to him. He points to something on his paper, lips moving as he asks a question soft enough where I can’t hear. Apparently she can’t either, because she leans closer.
I grit my teeth. Every guy in here is checking her out. Even Dixon, who’s married with three kids. He looks too. I mean, she could be eighty years old and they’d still be looking, because we’re hard up. But she’s not eighty. She’s…what? Eighteen? Nineteen? Eyes so fucking hopeful. God, she’s young.
But not too young. The curves beneath her stiff linen skirt give that much away. She’s all woman.
Forcing my gaze away, I glare down at the blank sheet of paper. Twenty things. Ordinary things. Real things. This is gonna be easy. If I could fool the head of the Cincinnati Art Museum into letting me “appraise” the tsar exhibit, this girl doesn’t stand a chance. I almost feel bad for her.
Another guy speaks up without raising his hand. “The last place I lived was the Jersey Penitentiary. There wasn’t ten things in the whole place.”
That draws a laugh.
“Twenty things,” she says, not backing down. I like that about her, how she tries to be strict. It won’t work on me, but the other men here, they respond to authority. She gets that.
An image of a baseball game forms in my mind. I didn’t pla
y much baseball—they took me away when I was five, but I remember tagging along with my older foster brothers. They gave me the position of point guard. They’d make me be point guard and wear the right-handed mitt, and I would stand next to the water bottles and keys and keep score and get the balls. Those were the happiest times I remember, out in the sunshine playing baseball with my older brothers. I barely knew what I was doing—I don’t know shit about baseball except that part.
That was one of the things I would daydream about after they took me away. I start my list:
Water bottle next to a chain-link fence.
A piece of glass that is perfectly sharp on two corners, but with soft ridges on the other corner.
Flattened Taco Bell cup full of ants.
Right-handed mitt.
Mike’s hat for first base.
My shoe for second base.
Scrubby dandelion in the dust.
Working my way around the playground, I fill out the list just as she claps her hands.
“Pencils down,” she says like we’re taking some big test. “Now we’re going around the room, and each of you will share one thing from the list. You get to pick which thing. It can be the most important thing, or the least. Big or small. Anything you want.” She nods toward Teke. “Go ahead.”
Teke’s nervous. Sweating. It’s weird to see him this way. He could crush her as soon as look at her. That’s how fucked up prison is—it reverses the natural order of things.
“There was a pistol,” he finally says. “A Beretta. But not just any gun. It got me through some tough times, you know. Kind of like it was lucky or something.”
She beams at him, all proud that he came up with something meaningful. It makes my gut twist. If the gun had been lucky, he wouldn’t be here.
Each of the guys has her full attention as they share their piece. It feels faintly like jealousy, watching her. I want her attention on me, but it never comes. We hear about a plaid couch. A hat. A key chain.
I pick up a pattern—she likes the personal stuff. The embarrassing stuff. She lights up on stuff you feel shitty about.
She never calls on me. Every guy here shares something except for me.
“Now I want you to pick one item, whatever you feel the most strongly about, and write a paragraph about it.”
What. The. Fuck? I raise my hand.
She comes over, her eyebrow raised coolly. “Yes, Grayson.”
Grayson. Is that supposed to mess me up, when she says my name low and throaty? Hell, it just makes me want to hear it again. But closer, quieter. Along with buttons flying, silk tearing. Petal-soft skin I can bite and mark.
“Why didn’t you call on me?”
“This was your first class. I didn’t want to put you on the spot.”
I’d wanted to test my theory. Now I can’t. “Are you going to read our paragraphs?”
She hesitates. “That’s the idea. Feedback helps you improve and eventually prepare your work for publication.”
I can’t completely hide the smirk at that. Publication. Of our vignettes. She’s so fucking overblown. Instead of being annoyed, though, I find it hot.
Her eyes narrow. “There’s only fifteen minutes left, so you’d better get writing.”
“Yes, Ms. Winslow.”
Something flashes in her eyes before she turns away. And I write, because this is important. Getting her approval so I can send a message to my crew.
I think about my foster brothers and the kind of things they used to feel shitty about. I remember the Jordan Clinic incident—my brother felt shitty about that. It was right after he made the high school baseball team.
I decide to write his story like it’s mine. I don’t know much about baseball—I was five when I stopped playing any kind of games—but I’m going to try to fake it. That’s typical childhood shit, right? I try to imagine what it would’ve been like.
It’s the happiest day of my life when I make the high school baseball team. Me and the guys go out celebrating, and we get really wasted. We get wild and start throwing rocks at windows and tagging walls like we sometimes do. I guess they all deserved it except Jordan Clinic. Mr. Jordan, he was never anything other than nice to us kids, but we trashed his window and spray painted inside.
I really get into it, using the scene where he told me.
The next day, I took my uniform out of the box. And my mitt. As point guard, I got the right-handed mitt. I tell my little brother about what we did, pretending it’s all a joke, but even he can see how shitty I feel about Jordan Clinic. How bad old man Jordan would feel when he saw what we did. I put on the uniform for him and show it off, but I just feel bad…
I can still see him in our room; I can still taste how guilty he felt.
It’s a little heavy-handed, but I think she’ll buy it. Senseless violence and guilt. How can you go wrong with that?
Six
~Abigail~
Students fill the space around me, expanding through the hallway like a deep, rushing breath. In and out, like the school is meditating its way through a day of classes. In a few minutes they thin out, leaving the door to Esther’s office in plain sight.
My appointment started fifteen minutes ago, and I’ve been standing here for much longer than that. I’ve done my two additional sessions at the prison like I said I would. I need her to let me out of the class. She’ll be disappointed, but it’s too much for me. He’s too much for me.
I square my shoulders and knock.
“Come in, Abby,” she calls right after my knock, her voice serene, expectant but not impatient.
I push inside and find her in front of her desk. Did she know I was standing just six feet away? From her gentle smile and squeeze of her hand on my shoulder, she did.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I say. “I don’t know what got into me.”
“There’s nothing to worry about.”
That’s it. No pressure. She settles herself behind her desk and waits for me to speak.
I start haltingly. “Well, they didn’t mock me the last two class sessions like they did at first. That’s one thing at least.”
She nods encouragingly. “You connected with them.”
“The first pieces of writing they turned in were…overblown. Their second set of assignments, you could feel the truth. That part was good.” I think about the way we laughed together. Maybe there was a little connection. But I think they need someone older, someone who actually wants to be there. And I need to be anywhere but prison. “It’s not a total failure, but…”
She waits.
“It’s still not going to work. I haven’t changed my mind. The class feels out of control.” I’m the one who feels out of control.
“It sounds just the opposite,” she says.
“I got a new student,” I say. “The class was full.”
“Ah,” she says, a wealth of meaning in that one word.
“I said he could join the class, but there are too many students now, and everything’s falling apart. It’s not working. Bottom line.” And that was the deal we made. I need her to not go back on it. I did my time; now I want out—just like the inmates have their sentence and then they’re free.
“All right.” There’s no censure in her voice. I want there to be censure. “He’s disruptive?”
“Not really. Even though he’s sitting in my chair. He took over my chair.” I stifle a smile. He really is kind of brazen.
“And your class? Has he taken that over too?”
“Not really.” Not the class. More like my mind. Even my body. He keeps popping into my thoughts in a sexual way, and I’m not really a sexual person. Don’t have time for that sort of thing, anyway. “The prisoner… Grayson…he’s a good student. He’s magnetic, persuasive, and clearly very intelligent. A bullshitter, though. But even his bullshit is…haunting.”
“How so?”
“With the other students, their stories were boastful. Lifestyles of the rich and famous.” I pause, think
ing about his telling detail—the baseball point guard. There’s no such position. And he’s right handed—he wouldn’t wear a right-handed mitt. “Grayson talked about baseball in his piece, and even though he obviously grew up in America and everything, he got it all wrong. From what he said, you’d think he never played it. That’s how they used to bust Russian spies, you know? Because what American boy doesn’t know baseball?” As Esther nods, I go on. “It’s eerie. Even the poorest American boy knows the sport. Even kids in juvie. It’s one of those lies that reveal too much.”
“He has a story,” she offers.
“I guess. But somebody else can help him better than I can. Anybody else.”
“Is that your job? To help him?”
“No,” I say, feeling petulant. I know what’s coming.
“No, your job is to give him a safe space within which to tell his story. That’s the gift of the class.”
She doesn’t get it—I don’t have a space large enough for Grayson. He feels endless and frightening, full of secrets and strange magnetism. Like a black hole where, if I go near the edge, I might fall in and never find my way out.
She leans forward, brow furrowed with concern. “He didn’t…touch you, did he?”
A little zap of surprise jolts me. “He never touched me.”
Even if a glance felt more intimate than a touch.
“Okay,” she says. “If you want to switch up projects, I’ll look at your joining Callie at the senior center.”
She’s trying to hide her disappointment, but I can feel it, and I’m suddenly pissed at myself. I’m better than this. Stronger than this. Last class time, I’d made that nice connection with the guys, and what if one of them really needs to tell his story? What if Grayson does? Nobody threatened me. Nobody touched me.