The lunch bell tolls, and the jail wakes up with the sound of doors buzzing unlocked and feet traversing metal walkways.
“Why don’t we pick this up another day?” The doctor closes his notebook.
“You just got here,” I say.
“I’ll be back later in the week.” He lifts his stool up from the ground and tucks it awkwardly beneath his arm.
I walk the opposite direction down the skyway, glancing behind me at Wilson’s back. He’s about to walk right out of here, to freedom. He can do that and I can’t. The moment I realize this, I hate him for it, just a little.
In the cafeteria, I look around for Angel through the throng of girls with grizzled faces and big fists who make the blood jerk in my chest. Without hands, everyone else’s are a threat. Angel told me how these girls can fashion a weapon out of anything, an elbow, a bolt loosened from a classroom chair, a sharpened shard of plastic broken off a laundry basket. When someone gets you with one, they don’t just stab you once. They have a partner hold you down while they stick you in any soft places they can.
Angel strolls in through the cafeteria doors, and the orange sea of bodies parts around her. She is one of the only first-degree murderers here and even the big girls with eyes like caged bulls’ steer wide of her. There are so many people here that it seems like every mealtime someone is glimpsing me for the first time, gaping as though they’ve never seen anything as bizarre. As though we’re not all missing some pieces.
I stand behind Angel in line. She’s reading a book with a red cover. When I ask her what it’s about she doesn’t even look up. “Too complicated to explain,” she says.
“Try,” I say.
She pauses. “Do you know what Mars is?”
I shrug.
“Well, some people think we ought to go there. Leave Earth behind.”
“It’s supposed to be better there?” I ask.
“Supposed to be.”
We wind toward the counter where the girls hold their trays out to the lunch ladies behind a plastic partition. A tray will be waiting there for me specially, everything on it items I can either suck through a straw or carry to my mouth with my stumps without much trouble.
Nearly to the counter, a tall girl pushes in front of me in line and I lose sight of Angel. The back of my neck prickles. I glance behind me at the pulsing wall of thirty or so girls, pinched eyes and bulbous knuckles and shifting weight. I put an arm on the girl’s shoulder to push in front of her. “Get outta my way,” I say.
Without looking, the girl jerks her elbow back and connects with the side of my face. I blink sudden tears and scan the room for a guard. None are looking this way.
I dodge to the side so I can make sure Angel is still there in front of the girl.
“Back in line!” comes the voice of Officer Prosser, one of the few guards who makes us refer to her by her official title. She has a pile of wiry red hair clutched to the top of her head with a large plastic clip.
I step back. The line moves achingly slow, and when it’s my turn, I lever my tray up with my forearms and nearly run to where Angel’s sitting.
“Calm down, crazy,” she hisses. “You weren’t gonna get shanked with that many guards around.”
I shake my head. I touch my forearm to my cheek, which still stings from the sharp plane of the girl’s elbow.
“God, you are greener than green,” she says. “Stop looking around at everyone. Keep your eyes down.”
“It’s hard,” I say.
“They’re not that scary,” she says. “See that one over there?” She nods at a brown-haired girl hunched over her tray, placing peas on her tongue and swallowing, one by one, like pills. “Her name’s Wendy. She’s going to Billings after this, that’s the adult prison. She confessed to assaulting her eight-year-old neighbor with a baseball bat. I read about it—they didn’t have hardly enough evidence to convict. Lots of girls confess just to feel like they’re doing the right thing. Sometimes the cops’ll make them think they can go home if they just say they did it, though you’d have to be a total idiot to believe that.” She swallows a huge mouthful of mashed potatoes. “These girls, naw, they’re pancakes. Most are pumped so full of Adderall they can hardly walk, let alone shank you. The real crazies aren’t allowed in gen pop. They live up in the hospital most of the time.”
“It’s different for you,” I say. “You make them scared.”
“Then give them something to be afraid of,” she says. “You’re a badass bitch. You’ve done way worse than half these girls.” She rummages with her fork into a small potpie and chews for a moment. “Is there some other reason you don’t like them?”