by Ava Castle
Chapter One
Becca Cross
“Cross! Yo, Cross! You forget your own name?”
“I bet she did,” someone from down the hallway called out in a nasty, singsongy voice, “I just bet that pretty young thing forgot her own damned name. Not that bright, but ooowee! Looks like a great piece of ass, don’t she?”
“Shut your mouth, Martinez! Nobody wants to hear your filth.”
“Sure, but I was just agreeing with you, see? Just trying to be agreeable.”
“Are we going to have a problem, Martinez?”
I knew that voice. Knew it too well. Had heard it too often. The officer.
“No,” the voice turned sulky now, none of the frivolity from before. “No problem. No problems here, boss.”
“Good. I hope to Christ not, because it’s too damned early for this kind of shit. You don’t want to fuck with me this early in the morning, you hear me? I shit you not, it’ll be the biggest mistake you ever make.”
What a strange thing to say.
I would never have opened my mouth and said a thing like that because, you know, I wasn’t feeling particularly suicidal on that particular morning, but still. It struck me as odd. It would be the biggest mistake she ever made. Which, it stood to reason, would mean that if any of the rest of us fucked with the good officer, it would be the biggest mistake we had ever made as well. In some circumstances, that might have been true. But for us? I was pretty sure our biggest mistakes were all behind us, and it hadn’t gone well for a single one.
Things could get a hell of a lot worse than the wrath of officer Slone, and we all knew it. The funny thing is, I think she knew it, too. I could see it in the way her cheeks reddened after she spoke, especially when she looked at me and saw the way I was looking right back at her. She realized what she had said, and she was embarrassed. That wasn’t a good sign for me. Not after she had already called my name. Officers had a way of taking their moods out on us. We made for disgustingly easy targets.
“Something funny, Cross?”
“No.”
“No? No what?”
“Sorry. No, officer Slone. Nothing’s funny. At least, nothing that I can see.”
“Really? You could’ve fooled me with that smirk on your face. Sure you don’t have a joke to tell us? I’m sure everyone on the block would just love a joke.”
Any small amount of humor observed on my part was now long gone. That was the way things went in here. It was practically impossible to hold onto any kind of a good feeling for very long. They didn’t want you to feel good. They wanted you to feel the opposite of good. That was, in fact, the entire point. I hadn’t been sitting on death row for all that long, but it was long enough to know that much. Sitting in my cell day in and day out, only allowed out for an hour a day, I was forced to listen to the squalls, anger, and despair of my fellow inmates. The noise was constant, with no reprieve. For a girl who valued her silence in a big way, it was a severe punishment for me, and added punishment on top of the official punishment. As if that weren’t enough.
My name is Rebecca Cross.
Becca to most.
I’m scheduled to die.
Stainless-steel-ride, we call it in here.
Lethal injection, you call it out there.
At least it’s not the electric chair—anymore.
“Well?” Officer Slone barked at me again, “I’m waiting.”
“Waiting?” I asked in confusion, my thoughts having drifted off to some place far away as they were so often prone to do. That far away place where death is a reaper, ready to collect me and take me wherever it is I’ll go. “Waiting for what?”
“Jesus-A-Christ. You really are a piece of work, you know that, Cross? Waiting for you to tell me a joke.” She smirked, proud of her smartass response. “Guess I don’t need one, after all. Just talking to you for more than thirty seconds is enough of a joke for me.”
I put my head down, making a point of only looking at the floor and the front of the gray jumpsuit I had been given to wear for the rest of the days of my life. Days that were, as the establishment felt the need to continuously remind me, numbered. Gray was one of my favorite colors, or at least it had been before the awful mess I had gotten myself into, but not in this context. Nobody wanted to spend the remainder of her days on earth in a prison jumpsuit.
“Alright, Cross, put ‘em up.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your hands, Cross. Good god, Almighty! It’s like talking to a puppet instead of a person! Put your hands up. Put ‘em out where I can cuff ‘em.”
“What for?” I knew that was a mistake, even before the question left my lips. Some things are like trainwrecks though, they are unstoppable. And today it seemed one of those things was my mouth.
Officer Slone’s eyes narrowed, eyes so dark they looked like a cup of black coffee to me and, ridiculously, made me miss the little diner where I had spent the early mornings serving the world-weary workers of the world. Her face got a pinched, unhappy look and her hand moved down to the stick she always wore on her belt, right where it was easiest for her to grab it. It was her “kickin’ ass stick.” That was her name for it, not mine. It was the thing she used to keep us in line, to keep us from trying too hard to be the women we had been on the outside. All of the officers wore them, but their love for them varied just as much as their dispositions did.
Some of the officers seemed like genuinely nice people who wanted to make a difference in the justice system. Some of the others, though, take Slone for example, seemed to be in it for the joy of inflicting pain. She was quick to use the stick and quick to use the taser as well, always coming up with some reasonable excuse to give the higher ups for why her force couldn’t be considered excessive. The way she was looking at me now, I could see that her patience was almost gone. I was confused, there was no way around that, but I had better wise up quick, or else I was going to be in a whole lot of pain very shortly. Slone leaned in close to my cage, so close that I could smell the eggs she’d had for breakfast.
“Listen up, Cross, and listen good. You’re either going to put your hands through the slots so that I can cuff you the way I’ve been instructed, or I’m going to make a call. And do you know what call I’m going to make?”
“No,” I whispered, feeling my throat begin to close up with fear and what felt like thousands of days’ worth of accumulated tears I would never shed.
I was trying hard to keep my eyes on the jumpsuit, to pretend it was a pair of pajamas or something instead of a prison jumpsuit.
She wouldn’t let me, though. Something about her glare demanded that I meet her eyes, and what I saw there was hatred. Not just for me, at least I didn’t think so, but hatred for all of us. Officer Slone hated every single woman in the prison. There was no way around it.
“I’m going to come to the unfortunate conclusion that you’re resisting an officer, which calls for a whole new kind of force. Do you want that? Do you really want to be on the receiving end of all of that?”
I resisted the shudder that wanted to course through my body. “No.”
“What was that? I can’t hear you.”
“I said no!”
Trainwreck time. My mouth just did it again.
Thanks for nothing, mouth.
The whole cell block grew quiet.
If I had learned anything, it was that people made a reputation for themselves quickly in prison. For better or worse, people got an idea about you pretty much as soon as you got on the block and from that moment on, that was sort of just who you were. My nickname had quickly become little mouse. Although at times I wondered if it should have been big mouth. I may not be gutsy, but my mouth�
�s filter seemed to be a sieve at times.
I was quiet and made sure to keep to myself, and it reminded the women around me of a timid little mouse. At first it bothered me, but after a little while I realized that it meant nobody much was paying attention to me. When you were in prison, being invisible wasn’t a bad thing.
The way I had just yelled, though, that had definitely caught the attention of all of the women around me. I could hear little gasps of surprise followed by catcalls and laughter.
Officer Slone’s face went very, very red, her eyes bulging so that she looked like she might actually explode. I wanted to clap my hands over my mouth, to take back what I had just said, but there was no way to do a thing like that. Plus, clapping my hands over my mouth would mean that I wasn’t putting my hands out like Slone had asked me to, and I was pretty sure that was just about the worst idea possible at that point.
I put my hands into the slot, bracing myself for the feeling of the cold steel closing around my wrists.
“Trying to get assertive now, are we? Go ahead, Cross. Give it a try, see how it works. We’ve got the whole walk to visitation with just the two of us. Plenty of things could happen on a walk like that. Wouldn’t you say?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, because I really was.
“I won’t do it again.” Because I really wouldn’t. It was the only time during my incarceration I had ever acted out in any way, but I could see that it was something that would have a lasting effect.
Officer Slone not only had a reputation for being a hardass, but also for holding one hell of a grudge. She may have been joking when she alluded to violence during a time when we both knew there were no video cameras to capture it, but then again she may not have been.
I had no way of knowing.
“You bet your ass you won’t. I’ll see to that; you can be sure of that. Open gate twelve!”
I yanked my hands back just in time to keep myself from being swept along with the large metal door as it slid open to let me out. Glancing at Slone, I wasn’t sure that being out of the cell was a good thing. Only one hour of being out or not, I thought staying cooped up might be better than taking a walk with this hostile psychotic excuse of a prison guard.
Not to mention the fact that I was now totally confused. I had been in the pen for a little over a year (nothing compared to the fifty-year sentence I was in there to serve), and I had only had one visitor. That visit had been at the very beginning of my stay, and it had been made very clear to me that there would not be another one.
I was fully prepared to spend the rest of my life without ever seeing someone I cared about again. I was so prepared for it that I was afraid of the mention of visitation. It was a break from the routine I had built for myself, which was something I had come to heavily rely on. I thought about this, fixated on it really, as I walked in silence alongside Officer Slone, who high fived and exchanged crude, loud comments with almost every officer we passed.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Officer? Can I ask you a question?”
“Who knows? You can try. I might even answer you, if you’re lucky. Then again, I might decide the question was defying an officer at which point I’ll have to use the force required to take you down. Life’s a gamble, you know? It’s a straight up bitch, too, but I figure you already know that. You’re in here, after all. If you haven’t learned that yet, you ain’t ever gonna learn.”
I stayed silent, shuffling one foot in front of the other and looking down at the floor. This was one of the things I hated about being locked up. People always seemed to be talking in riddles to me. People never said what they meant, which meant that I never knew what I was supposed to do or say. Like now, for instance. I had no idea what she wanted me to do. Did she want me to ask my question? Did she want me to keep my mouth shut? How the hell was I supposed to know?
“Jesus, Cross! It’s like you need your hand held through everything! If you want to ask your question, ask it! I’m not gonna babysit you through the thing.”
“Oh,” I answered quickly, so quickly I almost tripped over the word despite the fact that it was only one syllable long, “I’m sorry.”
“Just speak, will you? Good lord.”
“Sorry. I was just wondering: Why are you taking me to visitation?”
“Why the hell do you think, Cross? What do you think usually brings people to visitation?”
“No, I get it. I mean, I know what the visitation building is for. It’s just that—”
“What? Say what you want to say, goddamnit, or else I might just shut you up permanently.”
“I don’t think it’s for me. I mean I don’t think it can be for me. Nobody’s come to visit me since right after I got locked up. I don’t think anyone would start now.”
“Nope. No mistake, Cross. I think I know what I’m doing. It’s definitely for you.”
“Then do you think you could tell me who it is?”
The officer turned on me then, a look of disgust on her face. I looked at her and wondered to myself how a person could be that keyed up all of the time without just dropping off of a heart attack or just having a stroke or something. She seemed to be handling it just fine, however, her face breaking open wide in a grimace that made me want to go off and hide somewhere. It was the look of someone who was most definitely dangerous, someone who was only a bad step away from doing someone some major harm. Funny, that I was the one stuck in a prison cell.
“Just what the hell do you think this is, a sorority house?”
“No ma’am.”
“No? You sure about that? Because the way you keep on talking to me, I would swear that you think we’re girlfriends or something.”
“No ma’am.”
“That’s good. That’s really good. Because I’ll tell you something, I’m a hell of a lot more likely to be your worst fucking nightmare than your girlfriend. And you can put that in your fucking memoires. Now no more questions. Got it? Or I might not take you where you’re supposed to go at all.”
Some part of me knew her threats were at least mostly empty. She was in the prison as law enforcement, not one of the inmates. If she was doing the job (which seemed like a decidedly shitty one to me), she must need it. No way was she going to risk everything to rough up an inmate that bugged her just a little bit too much. That being said, I’d always had a pretty healthy fear of authority figures so there was another part of me who was perfectly willing to take her at her word. That part was big enough to keep me from opening my mouth again. Instead I just shuffled along in front of Officer Slone, allowing her to shove me roughly every other step. I had gotten much too thin while in prison and the shoves hurt, but I just gritted my teeth and bore it. There was nothing in the world that could have made me speak out against anything the good officer did at this point. Not a damned thing.
“Cold? Is that you shivering up there?”
I was shivering and there was no way for me to deny it, but I shook my head no. I didn’t want her to see me as weak, and I didn’t want to mess up the tentative peace the two of us seemed to have reached as we silently left building a and into the yard. The sky above me was every bit as gray as the uniform I wore and I could see my breath pouring out of my mouth like fog. When I was little, I had loved to pretend that I was a little baby dragon who could take off anywhere at any possible moment. Now I knew it was nothing but my breath, and that wasn’t going to take me anywhere.
“Alright, you win. You’re the bravest little engine that ever could. Just get inside, will ya? This has already taken up so much more time than I was willing to spend.”
Officer Slone shoved me one more time and I was inside the visitation building. I felt like a deer in headlights, looking around a building I was completely unfamiliar with. There were signs everywhere, all of which warned which behaviors were allowed and which weren’t. From what I could see, there were a whole hell of a lot more things that weren’t allowed than things that were.
/> “Cross! I’m looking for Cross!”
I shuffled forward, trying to keep my subservient ducked head while figuring out where I was trying to go at the same time. There was a massive, burly officer motioning for me to come forward, ushering me into a narrow hallway that reminded me of some kind of cattle run. It made sense. I felt more like a barnyard animal than a person. That seemed to be another one of the points of the way they kept us locked up. We weren’t supposed to feel human. We were just supposed to feel like cattle.
“On the end, Cross, last phone on the line. Don’t do anything stupid, got it? You’re being watched.”
Against my better judgement, I let out a little bark of laughter that didn’t even sound like me; not even to my own ears. Did this douchebag really think he needed to remind me that I was being watched? Of course, I was being watched! I was in prison. I slid into my cracked orange vinyl seat still smiling, almost having forgotten what I was there for in the first place. It only took one look up to wipe the smile off of my face, though. A person couldn’t forget where they were in a meat locker like this for very long.
“Miss Cross? Am I looking at a Miss Cross?”
“Um, yes?”
The man looked up at me, a stern expression on his face. He was in a crisp black suit, the kind that was clearly expensive but that would also disappear into the background almost as soon as its wearer was out of sight. He had a pair of wire rimmed glasses perched on his beak like nose and thick brown hair that might have been curly at one point but that had been gelled and combed into submission.
“Is that a question? Are you telling me you don’t know who you are?”
“Um, no. No, sorry. No.”
“So then you ARE Miss Cross?”
“I am. Yes. I’m Rebecca Cross.”
“Fine. That’s good. That means you’re exactly the girl I’m looking for.”
Chapter Two
Becca Cross
“You look surprised, Rebecca.”
“Becca,” I interjected quickly, feeling sick at the sound of the use of my full name, “it’s Becca, ok? Not Rebecca.”
