I FOUND MYSELF alone for the first time in three years, one month, and thirteen days. (I was counting.) I had a cell of my own, with the door sealed closed, its window hole covered and dark. I had privacy.
Only, we all knew to be careful what we wished for. Maybe to not do so much wishing after all. Because this wasn’t a gift; it was Solitary, in D-wing, a section of the Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center I’d only heard about, through passed-along stories and a few bold lies. (We’d heard there was a girl who tried to eat other girls’ ears off, and that, after two separate ear incidents, she was housed in D and never saw sunlight, like a carnivorous mole. The Suicides, as we called them, were also housed in this wing, where the nightly rounds were constant. Officially this was known as Suicide Watch. The Suicides were strip-searched for pens or pencils at the end of each school session, every single day, all because one Suicide tried to gouge a hole in her own throat with a blue-inked Bic way back in 1993. Only one of these stories was a lie.)
In my years at Aurora Hills, I’d wheeled my book cart past the entrance to D-wing many times. I’d detour on purpose. I’d let the wheels slow, the cart stutter, and I’d take the opportunity to peek in. It looked grayer than our other three wings, and there was more howling. In my travels, that was all I could hear or see.
Now, though, I was inside, and I didn’t know how long I’d be staying. When one of us was brought to Solitary, otherwise known as the hole, none of us knew when she’d be getting out. I’d heard rumors the ear-eater was still here.
The doors in Solitary were different from the green doors on the regular wings. As were my clothes, now caution yellow and easy to spot in a shadowed hallway, if the locks let themselves go again and I got out for a second time in one weekend. The doors were thicker here and built with reinforced panels, like armored barricades. They were stone gray, as if someone thought they weren’t even worth painting a real color. The surface was scratchy, and rough against skin, I discovered, after shoving myself against my door, trying to get someone’s attention through the closed hole. My face and neck came away stippled in raised dots. Scrapes on my forearms and the palms of my hands oozed and stung.
That was my first night. And the floor was where I must have spent it.
Outside D-wing, most of us had been returned to our cells. The last sound of the night that most of us heard was the clank and crank of the locks as each of our steel doors resealed behind us. Our hearts sank, our spirits dropped. Our guts tied themselves back up into their familiar knots. The night came to an end.
We heard other things, too, since we were wide awake and wanting answers. We heard the COs’ muffled talk from behind our locked doors. We couldn’t make out all the words but could sense the shock in their voices, the confusion, maybe even the fear. It wasn’t often that we sensed fear coming from our captors.
The COs were recounting what happened to them when the locks came open—how they all had their backs turned at the same moment, how each one of them on night duty, all across the compound, had been caught unawares. One had been in the toilet. Two had stepped out for a smoke. One was checking fuses and got stuck in the dark basement, feeling for a way out. This grand coincidence felt to us like magic, or like a miracle—either/or, because in the end it gave us the same thing.
We didn’t feel sorry for the COs, not one bit. We hoped they’d be reprimanded for losing track of us, punished, and severely. Some of us wanted them all fired. A couple of us fantasized they’d be lined up against the wall out behind the facility and beaten with chains.
Some of us had their hand marks still on us, from when they grabbed us, our eardrums burst from their machine-gun shouts when they yelled for us to get down on the ground. One of us had gotten caught with Minko, the worst of the COs, on the stairwell, and thanks to him, she wouldn’t be able to sit comfortably in a chair for days.
We were collecting all our own stories. They were ours to share, not theirs.
The last thing Jody, in B-wing, remembered from our hour outside our cells was a closed door rammed in her face by one of the COs. He grinned when he sent the door swinging. It knocked her clean out, and didn’t feel as good as when she did it to herself.
Others of us turned ourselves around when we heard the COs coming, like Cherie, who raced back to her cell in B-wing like she’d never left it, and hid her face under her pillow as if she’d kept it there all night. Peaches played statue in a dark corner, until it was safe to come out. A-wing was there for her when she got back. Natty sang quietly to herself, eyes on the floor so she wouldn’t be accused of insubordination, and sang louder when she went wandering, but scooted back to A-wing the second she was told she was out of bounds.
A couple of us didn’t even take part, so we couldn’t be blamed.
In C-wing, Mack had used the opportunity to daydream. She imagined her life in rewind: starting with not hiding that stash in her school locker and not elbowing the vice principal in the face, which got her expelled and then locked up, to rewinding all the way back in time, back five years, six years, seven, eight, nine years, to the first mistake she believed set her fate in motion. She was eight, little beaded braids and squeaky-new sneakers, walking right on past that pink bike on the sidewalk and not swiping it for her own. She pictured—and was still picturing, when her cellmate returned—just leaving that bike be.
Lola returned to a swift reminder. When she’d ditched the cell and gone running, she’d given one quick glance back at Kennedy—a sack of frizz on the floor, barely recognizable as human—and then she got caught up in the crowd, her body surging through corridors with our bodies, her feet hitting concrete with our stampeding feet, and she forgot how she’d left Kennedy unconscious or maybe even dead, and how much more time would be added to her sentence if Kennedy was dead.
Lola checked the floor as soon as she entered her cell, but Kennedy was not where she’d left her. Lola choked on the envious thought that maybe hair-eating Kennedy, out of all of us, Kennedy, the least deserving, Kennedy, the most despised, the most pathetic, had been the one to get free. Then she choked on laughter when she realized that Kennedy had simply dragged herself, like a wounded animal going off into the fields to croak, under the bed.
D’amour was discovered by a CO outside, one charred hand fused to the electric fence, but that news wouldn’t make the rounds until later.
Most of us were back in our usual cells. Still, some of us wore our smiles to sleep, our jaw muscles aching from permagrin. Some of us heard the whimpers of our cellmates in the bunks above or below, and told them to shut up or felt the tears coming and couldn’t say a word because we were too choked up ourselves.
It took hours to corral us all, to count us, to come back around and count us again. We thought that would be the big event of our summer—the night everyone would be talking about for years to come, a legend in these walls, a brilliant glimpse of the passing sun. We had no idea.
After the COs completed their rounds, we did our own kind of counting.
We had roll call in the darkness, from inside our cells. If anyone was missing, we wanted to know about it first, before the morning bell and the fluorescent lights flared.
“You there?” said a voice through the heating vents in C-wing.
The vents of A-wing answered, “I’m here.” And more and more of us, “Here. Here. Here.”
We said our names. We claimed our spaces.
In B-wing the vents were set low to the floor and hissed clouds of dust in summer (though they stayed quiet when we needed that hiss for warmth in winter), but at a certain angle, once our vision adjusted to the low light, a blur of movement could be made out from the cell next door. There was next door’s eye. Next door’s mouth. The voice clear as crystal, even if the face looked diced and sliced through the grate.
Here. We made it back. We didn’t get far. Disappointment was in our voices as we said it. Here, here, still here.
That night, all through Aurora Hills, we spoke to one another. We checked up. We checked in. The COs couldn’t have stopped us if they tried.
“How far did you get?” we all wanted to know.
Those of us who had stayed put in our bed slabs were quiet. Those of us who made it only as far as the visiting room, and broke the glass mask of the vending machine and gorged on salty snacks till our tongues blistered, said as much, but it was the girls who tried for the doors, who tried to lift the gates, eyes set on the road, those were the girls who spoke of their adventures with true pride.
Had I been in my usual cell in B-wing, I would have communicated through the vents like the others. I would have wondered about D’amour and asked if anyone else had seen her. We would have made a few guesses, among us, to how much electricity could run through a living body before it took too much and got itself dead. But mostly I would have listened to what everyone else said. I wouldn’t have gone to sleep until I’d heard absolutely everything.
But in D-wing, I discovered, there was no way to communicate except by pounding something heavy against the wall. There wasn’t much to pound, since no unattached chairs or personal items were allowed, but there were hands attached to arms, and attached to legs there were feet. There was always something to slam against a wall, once a girl got to looking.
D-wing had its own kind of Morse code, and I’d pick it up quickly, though I might not have been clear on what the codes meant. I assumed that three short pounds meant we were making it through the abyss alive and kicking, and other sets of pounds and rhythms meant Stay strong, sister and Are you awake? and Fuck the police. Two slams meant that we were hungry, not like our neighbors could do anything about that. One slam, made with the whole body, could mean a number of things: Let me out, which was obvious. Weren’t those tuna fish guts they called a sandwich disgusting? I’m protesting by throwing my entire being at this wall. Or, say if a girl keeled over and her body slammed against the wall, it meant, possibly, that she passed out. I couldn’t be sure.
I tried to communicate with thumps and slaps from my feet and hands, but they got sore after a while.
Amber.
B-wing.
I made it outside.
I think.
I saw someone who shouldn’t be here.
I swear.
I had a chance to run, but I didn’t take it.
Don’t know why.
This turned to gibberish against the wall, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Usually I felt connected to the other girls, even if they didn’t acknowledge me at lunch or bumped my shoulder in the hallway and went on walking. Now I felt entirely separate.
After a while, all attempts at communication faded out. We were tired.
In the harsh light of morning, when we awoke behind our locked doors, this would feel like a massacre.
I knew that better than any of us. I’d been wet from rain, my throat all screamed out, mud in my hair and mud in my eyelashes, the grit of mud in my mouth, when they caught me. I was outside the facility. I think it was Long who had me, or it was Marbleson. At some point when I was kicking, there were two of them holding me, keeping count of my legs, and it wasn’t my fault they lost track of one and Marbleson (or was it Long?) got the black eye. All for this, I was accused of assaulting a guard.
One thing I knew for sure was that our walls were green again, and clean. The way they should be. And even in the stress of spending a night in the hole, this was a small comfort I clutched close to me, the way I used to have a stuffed lamb I slept with every night, before my mother married him, when I was still happy, and a kid.
Morning came. Sunday morning. Or, wait, was it Monday now? It couldn’t already be Tuesday, could it?
I sat up, on the floor in my cell in Solitary. I found my feet. My throat scratched from old screams, so I kept it quiet, rubbing it from the outside, over the skin, as if that might help. My skin was raw from the sandpaper walls. I stood. Then I got dizzy and sat back down.
Here in Solitary, the lights were on at all hours, which meant the hours spun without my being able to keep track. Only meals shoved through the food slot let me know time was actually passing. If I happened to sleep through it—on the mattress against the wall, gray, and also as cold and hard as the door—the tray of food would be taken back, like I’d rejected it. I couldn’t be sure how many meals I missed.
My memory was a distant boat I’d set sail in the river, and the current was too strong to snatch it back. Though I’d never had a little boat; I’d never lived near a river. I’d never even been the kind of girl who’d play near raging, flighty things. My outside life, cut short at the age of thirteen, when I was arrested, had been far more careful.
This carefulness, noticed by all my teachers in school and always mentioned on my report cards, ended up being held against me in court. I seemed calculated, they said. It spoke of premeditation in my stepfather’s death, they said. It was in my diary.
“A thirteen-year-old is absolutely capable of planning the perfect murder.” Someone in court said that.
My hands were folded on the table as those words were said. I wouldn’t look at any faces, but I couldn’t close my ears. A so-called expert witness spoke of what a young mind is able to understand, its sense of right and wrong, and how we lived solely in the moment, without thought of consequence, as the frontal lobe is not fully developed until age twenty-five.
I didn’t know anything about any frontal lobes. As I listened, I thought, How could it be called the “perfect” murder if I am sitting here right now, accused? I wondered how they could know so much about my brain without lifting open my skull and poking through it. I expected my lawyer, a pale pinch-faced woman who’d been assigned to me by the court, to speak up. But my hands were folded so carefully. And my shoes were laced up nice, with one knot each. And if my clothes were too tight, I didn’t fidget and let it show.
Behind me, across the aisle of the small courtroom, sitting for the other side, the side seeking justice for her dead husband, was my mother.
Pearl wasn’t in the room, of course, since she was only seven then. I’ve wondered ever since, wondered at night in B-wing and wondered now, in the forced solitude and under the bright lights in D-wing, what my little half sister had been told about me, what she understood. It was her father who was taken from her, a man she happily called “Daddy” while I’d spat at the ground when my mother said I should start calling him “Dad.”
I weighed less, back then. I hadn’t yet had my growth spurt. My shoulders hadn’t filled out. Still, there was something menacing they saw in me, even at that size. If I stood before the judge now, this big, my jaw set by my habit of tightening it, he would have handed me a guilty conviction in ten seconds instead of taking a recess and coming back with it in an hour and ten minutes.
People can’t move on until the finger is pointed, and the gavel’s come down. This is called closure, and it’s also called justice, and they are not always the same thing.
I thought for sure I was in Solitary for days on end, maybe even a week. My leg hairs grew, my stomach shrank. But when the door at last opened, it hadn’t been a full seventy-two hours. I’d made it to Tuesday.
The lock turned, and the hole in the door—down low, to traffic the food trays—flopped open, and I could see two gray-clad legs. A CO.
I didn’t know which guard was assigned to D-wing that week. It could have been Long or Marbleson, sporting the black eye I’d gifted one of them. It could have been Minko. None of us wanted to be trapped alone with Minko.
I retreated against the wall as the locks—more installed on this door than in other wings—snapped open.
If those two gray legs did belong to Minko, I had to be ready. My mind spun over how I might be able to injure him, hoping permanently. If it would be better to use my knuckles, or get some leverage and kick with my foot. (One of us—Polly, in A-wing—once fought off a would-be rapist with a hockey stick to the solar plexus. When she reenacted the scene for us, making do with an invisible weapon, she mimicked the sound of his pain and defeat and shame, a deep soul-crushing whimper. We loved to picture her assaulter going down, fish-eyed and flopping on the sidewalk, so we asked her to act out this story again and again.)
I would be like Polly if I had to be, though I had no sports equipment with which to take him down.
But no. It wasn’t Minko. The door cranked open, and the CO who entered was Santosusso. He was practically as young as we were, and cheery, no matter the day. Of course, he was also new. I couldn’t have been more lucky.
“Hey there,” he said. He glanced at a clipboard. “Amber, right?”
His eyes skittered around the pitiful space, avoiding me and mine. He seemed ashamed at having to witness me in here. This was his first summer, and we’d caught him acting like he cared. It gave some of us the heebie-jeebies. Others found it endearing. Mississippi was in love with him, and so was Lian. But Peaches warned he might snap at any moment, as it was always the nice ones who had the sickest of the sick stuff buried behind their big blue eyes—and we should watch our backs with him.
“Yeah,” I said weakly, acknowledging my name.
It was weird that he called us by our first names; most COs used last names for us as if we were enlisted in the military, and a few just called us “Inmate,” as they were used to working at adult maximum-security facilities, where the prisoners didn’t even deserve names.
“Time to go back to B-wing, Amber,” he said, actually smiling at me. He even had two identical dimples, one on each side of his face. He looked like a boy at my old school. Like a civilian, offering to take a walk with another civilian.
When I didn’t come forward, when I didn’t immediately offer up my wrists so he could cuff them for the walk home, he softened further. “How’re you doing? What’s going on?”
These questions confused and disturbed me. Maybe it would have been better to be confronted with Minko—at least I knew what he wanted. I would have known I was right to be on guard.
I shrugged. He flashed his dimples.
Except, now that we were talking, now that the door was open, and air was coming in, I remembered I had so many questions. First I needed to know the day. It was Tuesday, he said, which felt impossible in every way, but I went with it. Questions dropped from my mouth, one after the other, faster than the one before. “What happened?” I wanted to know. “Were you there? Did you see? Did they catch everyone? What was it? What went wrong? Could it happen again?”
He interrupted to explain that this was his first shift since Friday, so he wasn’t clear on what happened Saturday night, if that’s what I was asking.
But he must know something.
“Is she dead?” I said. “D’amour.”
“The blonde?” he said, not unkindly. “Drug trafficking, right?”
I didn’t take the bait. We don’t talk about one another’s crimes to anyone in authority. We know what we know, and we don’t ask after what we don’t know. I wouldn’t agree or deny that I was aware of what she’d done to get her eighteen months—and I wouldn’t put in an opinion on if she was guilty or if she was innocent. It’s best to say we’re all innocent.
“I saw her at the fence,” I said. “I saw her go up in lights.” That was the only way I could think to describe it, like she was a fireworks show for the Fourth of July, a holiday we didn’t get to celebrate in here.
“She’s okay,” he said. “In the infirmary. Second-degree burns, I think I heard. But she’s not bad off enough to be transferred.”
I guess I didn’t react.
“She’s alive,” he continued, assuring me. “That fence is electric, you know. But she’s okay. Really.” Maybe he thought I cared more about her well-being than I did. That I’d been crying over her in here. For D’amour, I hadn’t shed one tear.
He secured my wrists—the usual protocol when being transported from one cell to another; we got used to it—and we started out the door.
“I’ll tell D’amour you were asking about her,” he said casually as he shuffled me forward. “She’s not coming back to B-wing.”
“What? Why not?”
“She’s moving to A-wing. You’re getting a new roomie today.”
“Who’s getting transferred? Lola? Kennedy?”
“Oh no. Yeah, that’s a whole other story. You’re getting someone brand-new.”
I was made to walk ahead of him, and I considered this piece of information. The prick of memory nipped me. We were passing the stairwell between B-wing and the canteen. The sensation of having known what he was telling me, known it was coming because I’d lived it before, grabbed me.
She was coming. She was the next thing to come, after the locks. Once she was here, everything would go wrong. Of that I felt certain.
I jolted in Santosusso’s grasp. We’d reached the entry gate to B-wing. We were almost home.
“Cuffs too tight?” he asked.
I shook my head. I knew I shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t let him in on anything more than I had already because he wasn’t one of us, no matter how young he was and how nice he seemed with his dimples. I asked anyway. “Does her name”—it was coming to me, there it was—“start with an O?”
“You been watching the news? I thought they monitored what played on the rec TVs. But yeah. You know who I mean, then. It’s in all the papers, too. Keep an eye on yourself, all right?”
“What’d she do?”
Even as I said it, I felt I should know the answer. Something in his face said so, too. Then his face shifted, and darkened, and I lost the two dimples, and everything else was a blur. I felt his hands turning the handcuffs lock to let mine go, and I sensed him drifting off, leaving me before the open door to my cell as if I’d wandered here all alone without needing permission from anybody.
It was an odd moment, and that was only the beginning.
The sign that said WYATT had been removed from the cinder-block wall outside my cell, and a new sign, one that said SPEERLING, was attached in its place.
D’amour’s things had been cleared out of our shared cell, and the top bunk was stripped, indicating a new arrival would show up soon.
This new arrival would be our forty-second.