I LET IT carry me. The noise. The loud rush of inmates felt like something liquid and fast-moving enough to pull me along with them, and I didn’t fight it. I felt it—them, all of them—pushing me forward, wanting me to be the one.
Then it—they—let go.
I landed on the stairwell between B-wing and the store window of the canteen, which was closed off with a grate for the night. This spot, which offered a wide view of the facility from the protection of a wall to lean against, secure from sneak attacks, was usually taken in daytime by an armed guard. I kept the found flashlight dark, not wanting to call attention to myself. I waited. Watched.
Natty was long gone, and she’d taken the shivery notes of her song with her. Now in her place was the girl who didn’t wait for me to follow. My cellmate, D’amour.
I caught sight of her in the dim fizz of light from the EXIT sign that hung over the fire door. A devil-red glow, still faintly lit from the building’s emergency backup system, occasionally flickered. She was a crimson chalk outline moving with purpose. And calm.
She seemed to know exactly where she was going.
The fire door was a door we’d never seen opened. It wasn’t an emergency exit we were allowed to step through, even during emergencies. We assumed it shot straight outdoors, to the side yard, the staff parking lot, and all the fresh, free air beyond. This was the door D’amour tried to pull open. When it wouldn’t pull, she tried to kick it down.
D’amour was slight, and she didn’t weigh all that much. She was flighty and kind of vapid and, we suspected, quite dumb.
Now she was something else. She wasn’t acting dumb. She didn’t seem numbed up or high off whatever new substance Peaches was peddling. She seemed hell-bent. The light in her eyes was red with determination.
She shoved her body against the steel-gray expanse of the door, yellow hair flying. She wanted out. I’d never seen anyone want out as badly as she did right then. But the door wouldn’t budge.
Then she spotted the unbarred window.
I caught the rest in flashes. It wasn’t that I couldn’t focus; it was the lightning, the summer storm raging through the window. She’d be dark, and then she’d go bright. Her yellow hair black, her yellow hair white. I caught her, foot kicking out and the perfect hit in the center of the glass that caved it in. Then came the second and third kicks that made it shatter. She’d gouged open the window into the night.
This window was narrow, but so was D’amour. She was inside with us, breaking glass with her feet, and then she was outside apart from us, braving the wind and the rain.
She bent down to untangle a chunk of long, sloppy hair from the window frame. Her hair came free, and then she was also. Free and running for the first set of gates.
Thunder shook the scene. But it was only weather. At some point the storm would stop, and the sun would come out, and the whole world would then be there at D’amour’s fingertips. That was how we imagined escape to be, in the most blinding of our getaway fantasies. We had so many.
Any inmate held here at the Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center would have rushed that open window. It was our dream, come to life. So why wasn’t I following D’amour? Why wasn’t I trying to escape along with her? I had a real way out now, open and calling me closer. I took a step, stumbled. I switched on the flashlight to find the stairs. No one was there to stop me—no one but myself.
I should have run to it. Dived through, hoping the hole would fit me, kicking out more glass to make room if it didn’t. I should have been out there, in the storm, speeding for the closest gate. Any one of us would have abandoned whoever was left and gone running.
Sometimes I’m sure I did do it. That maybe I buried it, blocked it out.
I have this distant memory, hanging on a ratty clothesline in the backyard of my mind, and in this memory, I am running. There I am, running fast and hard for that window as if it’s a set of doors that will soon be slamming closed to passengers and I’ll lose my chance. I will lose at all chances forever. That feels real enough.
Glass. Shards of it. The edge of the window slicing me with its teeth. Then pain.
The pain tells me I really did do this; the pain is too precise for this not to have happened.
And the storm. The storm, now that I’m out in it, pounds like an alarm of some kind, but not one shutting me down, face mashed to the ground, hands in surrender on my head. It calls me closer. Says it’s my time now; the whole rest of my life could be found on the other side of that gate. I’m not afraid. That’s why it feels so artificial. How could I not be afraid?
I don’t remember much more, because, next, something slams against me, as heavy as a sack of stones. Reality.
That memory—the pain and the wet and the getting closer, the shaky view of the approaching gate, the yellow-haired girl racing for it, and me on her heels, but clumsy on my feet, slipping in the mud, unsteady, about to go down—that memory blinks back. Blinks away. Gone.
No matter how I may have pictured myself escaping this place—face-first or feet-first—truth is, I can’t leave it. I would never.
That’s my real secret.
If D’amour had made it out, and I mean for good, we may well have forgotten her. We always forgot girls, once they left us. A girl could be a legend among us for months, even years, but once she was transferred or—worse—released, we didn’t like to think so much about her. She got blacked out of our imaginary photos, erased from around our tables. We’d recite her stories until the names and specific characteristics faded away, until it was that-girl-in-green, that-girl-in-yellow. Until it was somegirl, which may as well have been any one of us.
But this is what happened, instead, to inmate number 98307-25, the girl we knew as D’amour:
She reached the first fence. She went for it across the mud, and she did make it, soaking wet and shaking. She grabbed her hands to the metal rungs and started to climb. She slipped a few times in the mud, and she lost a canvas shoe, but she kept climbing.
She was a pinprick of movement rising up the length of the fence. We expected shots to ring out. The air horn. At the very least, we expected the release of the dogs.
But it seemed the only eyes on her escape were our eyes. My eyes.
My flashlight beam didn’t reach out there, but still I could see her. The lightning made it so I could.
She was nearing the top of the fence. And we knew what was up there. Razor wire. Hadn’t I explained this to D’amour when she first got here? Didn’t I tell her what happened to the last girl who tried? A girl (we misplaced her name after she got transferred) made the climb during rec in the yard when the COs’ backs were turned. Broad daylight, in view of anyone and everyone, and she’d thought it a good idea to try her fate at the fence.
We watched for a while, chuckling to ourselves, critiquing her moves, until, on delay, the COs caught on. They observed her climbing, and only looked on, weapons not even raised. I guess they knew what the razor wire had in store for her, and they had hushed to silence, waiting for the touch, and then the screams.
D’amour didn’t scream when she reached the top of the fence. She was tougher than I’d given her credit for. She flinched and then, somehow, she vaulted herself up and over, with a blast of energy I hadn’t seen in all the months we’d shared a cell. She was covered in mud and almost impossible to make out in the dark storm. Or that could have been blood. Maybe the sharp barbs on the wire coils had sliced her clean through. But she did keep going, running for the second fence like she wouldn’t need her liver or her spleen on the outside if she could only make it.
Here was another thing I’m not sure D’amour knew: The second fence was electrified.
She might have assumed the storm had knocked out all the power on the property, including outside, so the second fence would be cold and climbable and not mortally armed to zap her like a third rail. It would have been a logical assumption after the locks had opened.
She was wrong, though, and all it took was a single running leap for the fence without testing it first. One touch and that fence came alive.
D’amour took every volt it had to give her. The sound was a sizzling snap booming through the night. The stink, which reached me, even as far away as I was standing, was like a burning tower of tires.
It was the brightest light I’d ever seen.
Then that light fell, fast, like a meteor into mud, dropping down into darkness.
It was in that exact instant when it happened. And this can’t be explained to any of the other inmates when they ask if I saw D’amour get electrocuted, if I saw her go up in a white-blond burst of flames, and if it was awesome. Because, yes, I did see all that—and then I saw something else.
Someone else.
When D’amour went down in that flash of light, the walls shifted around us. A different kind of window came open. And someone just as bright slipped in.