I glance at her face. “What?”
“Stealing. Food probably, by the look of you. You got all your teeth, so I doubt it’s drugs.”
I shake my head. “Aggravated assault.”
She lets out a small chuckle. “Right,” she says.
“You don’t think I could?” I ask.
“You don’t look it. My leg weighs more than you.”
“Anyone can hurt someone.”
“What about your hands or whatever?” she says, her eyes avoiding the empty spaces below my wrists. Where the bandages and sutures were removed, my stumps look purple and thin.
“What about ’em?” I asked.
“Alls I’m saying is, you don’t look like a murderer. Sheesh, take it as a compliment.”
My father once told me that all you needed to hurt someone is a single word, said just wrong enough. Anybody is capable of enormous harm, anyone with a mouth or a hand to write with.
“So who was the guy?” Angel asks. “The one you beat up.”
“How do you know it was a guy?”
“You got that look, like you been messed around by men.”
I swallow hard. I want to tell her it was me who messed up Philip Lancaster, but that would require saying his name. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
She shrugs and turns toward her book again.
“What’d you do?” I ask.
“Same as you, I expect. Tried to kill a guy. Except, unlike you, I succeeded.”
“Really?”
Though her face is relaxed, it forms a natural scowl, a cord of muscle tight over her eyebrows, and though her cheeks and nose are dotted with freckles, she doesn’t look dainty or young or delicate. On her scalp, bands of pale skin are visible between tight cornrows of dirty blond hair.
“They wouldn’t stick a murderer in with another prisoner,” I reason.
“Who said it was murder?”
“Well, what was it then?”
“Self-defense,” she says. “Only, they might not’ve believed me one hundred percent. My uncle was a real upstanding citizen, and I don’t exactly look all innocence and peaches and cream. In any case, these jails are so overcrowded, they’d put a murderer in with a shoplifter just to save money.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everyone knows. It’s common knowledge on the outs. Half my class has ended up here, one time or another. Shoot, coming here’s practically a school reunion.” She squints at me. “What school do you go to?”
“I don’t.”
“Homeschooled?”
“No. Just . . . not schooled. I was raised out in the national forest. Past Alberton. South of Cinderella Rock.” In the hospital, one of the nurses found me a map and I figured out where we’d been living.
Angel looks at me sidelong. “Nobody lives out there. That’s, like, real wilderness. Grizzlies and shit.”
“Grizzlies didn’t bother us. They stay away from noise.”
“But the only people who live out that far are, like, religious freaks who hate the government and sell their daughters to creepy old men.”
My eyes flick to the metal floor.
“That was you? That cult?” Angel says, sitting up. “Dang, I saw that on the news. Heard you lived in holes and ran around naked.”
“You heard that?”
“Something like that. Did you really not have running water?”
“Or electricity.”
“Why?”
“It was my parents’ decision, not mine. I was five when we moved to the Community.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“The Prophet,” I say vaguely, and find I can’t finish the sentence. It takes effort to push through the tangled memories of the past twelve years living in the forest, to when the Prophet arrived, holding prayer rallies in our run-down trailer, his big black-robed presence shoving meaning into every corner of our lives. He made us believe we were saints. That we were being lied to never crossed our minds.
“Hey, I get it,” Angel says, softening. “Your dad probably spouted some bullshit about God, probably sold out his family to follow this guy. Seen it a million times.”
“You have?” I ask.
“Sure. My whole family’s religious. I’ve been around this stuff my entire life.”
A pleasant, electronic tone pulses from the intercom. Angel jumps down. From the front of the block, I can hear the buzz of doors unlocking and feet traversing the skyway.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Dinner.”
Our door is the last to buzz open, and for the first time, I see the whole population of criminals this place holds. Before us, spaced by five-foot gaps, are girls in orange jumpsuits walking two-by-two.
The jail has opened up its metal body and shoved out these girls, these prisoners, this pilgrimage.
Chapter 8