In the Wake of Wanting

by Lori L. Otto

  “Yours are so light.” She kisses me softly. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Coley. Did you get enough sleep?”

  “I’ll nap later. My night was perfect.”

  “And your morning?”

  “It was like slam poetry personified.” I laugh at her description. “Also perfect.”

  “It’s the best send-off for me. Something to remember you by before I head to jail.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” she says, shoving me playfully in the chest.

  “It’s an inevitability. Just accept it.”

  “I’ll just keep luring you back to bed,” she threatens.

  “Not a bad plan, but I don’t think you have the stamina.”

  “Oh, I have the stamina. I’ve been doing laps every night at that pool a few blocks away.”

  “I’m proud of you.” I think about that first week back at school after spring break, how there were still a few lingering assholes who brought up some aspect of the video. For the most part, though, things were okay for Coley. Regardless of the fact that photos of the two of us together had been all over the tabloid sites and papers, she was still asked on dates by random guys a few times a day. With her hand firmly–and obviously–grasping a fresh can of pepper spray, she politely declined the offers.

  During the weeks, now back at school, she’s decided to focus heavily on her classwork, swimming and diving, intent on getting a 4.0 her second semester at Columbia and on making the women’s swim team. For workouts, she had few options, and the closest one was a large pool that would force her to put herself in the public eye on a regular basis. Her brother, Joel, accompanied her the first few times and scared off any potential harassers. By the third evening, she went alone and bravely faced the few people who were rude enough to mention the video to her. The lifeguards there began to help her out, too, and have been keeping an eye on things ever since.

  I can’t wait until try-outs in June. Once she makes the team, she’ll have full access to the private facilities in Inwood.

  “I don’t know why you’re proud. I ran away from the worst of it while you suffered here alone.”

  “Self-preservation isn’t running away. And I didn’t suffer. The scrutiny I received was nothing compared to yours. I’m glad you weren’t here while their idiocy was fresh and abundant. I’m glad you took the time you needed.”

  “You’re the best boyfriend I’ve ever had.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut in thought, then laugh. “Laureate, from what I’ve heard of them, that’s not saying much.”

  “You’re the best boyfriend I could ever hope for. You anticipate my needs and understand me. No one has ever understood how my depression affects me.”

  “If they can’t deal with a complex woman, that’s their problem. Not every guy was built to be the nurturing type. You just happened to stumble across one this time around. I feel like my upbringing and my volunteer work have kind of prepared me for anything.

  “I’m just floored by the amount of poetry you were able to write while you were at your mom’s.”

  “It’s cathartic. It’s my only way out of the funk some days.”

  “You’re gifted. A sign of genius. But what’s great is that it pulls you out and makes you happy.”

  “It does.”

  “You should submit more of these to journals, you know?”

  “After this semester, I probably will.”

  I kiss her forehead. “Good. While you do that, I’m finishing my novels.”

  “You better. I’m dying to know how they end.”

  “I will. It’s my top priority.” This time, my lips land on hers and linger for a few minutes. “Listen, I have a bus to catch.”

  “Don’t go, Trey.”

  “I have to do this, Coley.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I need closure, too. I have things to say.”

  “Write an op-ed or something. Pryana would give you space.”

  “I couldn’t know for sure that he would read it. I need to make sure I’m heard.”

  She sighs and rolls over again, groaning at the brightness of the sun but suffering through it to show her disapproval by turning her back on me. I kiss her shoulder before pushing myself off the bed to get ready for my adventure.

  On the Q100 bus, as a much-needed distraction, I go over the notes I’d taken last night at Shea’s restaurant when I met up with Will. He and I went over the four discussion topics that were likely to appear on next week’s astronomy final. The exam wasn’t some easy multiple choice quiz or a test to see if we could put the planets in order. They were all hypothetical questions about the cosmos.

  It’s not that I wasn’t prepared to answer them on my own, but having his insight won’t hurt my grade. Unfortunately, talking to him has required me to do more research since I didn’t fully grasp half of the concepts he threw out, as if we were talking about the weather. If I can master this, though, I’m sure I’ll ace the final.

  I check my phone after it vibrates in my front pocket, and I smile when I see her name.

  - - I really wish you weren’t doing this. It scares me.

  I look around the bus at all the other passengers who have been staring at me the whole trip from Manhattan: ladies with small children, men in suits that look suspiciously like lawyers, young women who look like they haven’t slept on a clean bed in more than a couple of nights. There are a few rougher looking guys, too, who could pass for inmates in the place we’re all heading to.

  City of New York Correction Department: Rikers Island. Home of New York’s Boldest.

  The sign is ugly and dated, and I find the last line to be odd. To whom exactly are they referring? The rapists and killers and thieves they house in these facilities? I might suggest Most Heinous. Least Honorable. Don’t denigrate the word bold. It has many fine uses.

  - I’m fine, laureate. I hear there are a lot of cops here.

  I may as well deliver a lighthearted response in hopes of easing her fears.

  - - Aslon and Pryana should never have asked for this story.

  - The story was my idea.

  Truth be told, there may be no story, and I gave that warning to my professor and president when I left class yesterday. Maybe Asher won’t be willing to talk. Maybe this trip will be fruitless.

  But I have things to say to him, and I’ve been promised a captive audience. He’s going to hear what I have to say, whether he wants to or not.

  While the driver sits behind other buses at the gate as it waits its turn, I go through the questions I’d memorized last night, as well as the statements I’d intended to make to him. While Danny had arranged for me to have a private meeting with my ex-friend with only a guard present, I still wasn’t allowed to take anything electronic into the room with me, nor anything that could be used as a weapon, such as a pencil or pen, so I wouldn’t be able to jot down his responses.

  I was told that there was a good chance the interview would be recorded, and that I could have a copy of it for a small fee. Whatever the fee, I’ll be willing to pay it.

  - - Call me as soon as you’re on the bus and off the island.

  - I will. I love you and I will see you tonight. You’ll still be at my place?

  - - Yes, boss. Studying and working on my stories so you can edit them later.

  - I have better things to do.

  I think about last night and this morning, and how much I love having her around. Ever since spring break, she has gone back to her dorm room on Sunday nights to make sure that her priority is school during the week. When she’s gone, there’s a staleness in the air in my apartment as her absence settles in. I hate it. This week is study week at Columbia, though, and my apartment is infinitely quieter than her dorm building. I have just as much studying as she does, so I’m only a distraction to her when all our work is done.

  - - You don’t get to do the “better things” without editing my homework. Sorry, boss.

 
; - Stop calling me that.

  - - Stop being so bossy, then.

  The bus lunges forward as we’re let onto the premises. Anxiety starts to set in. As much as I want to give Asher Knoxland a piece of my mind, I also liked the thought of living the rest of my days without having to see his mendacious smirk ever again. Since I know I’ll still have to face him in court, though, telling him how I feel seems like the right thing to do.

  A horrendous smell fills the bus as soon as the door opens. The kids make their disgust known audibly. I literally find myself wanting to gag. My eyes water as I wonder if the air here is even safe to breathe.

  - Shit just got real. I’ve got to go. Don’t worry about me.

  After turning off my phone, I wait until the rest of the passengers are off the bus before descending its steps onto the blacktop where we all wait to be led in by a guide. After he tells us about the lockers to our right, I put my phone, wallet, and keys into one, keeping only my license, two editions of The Times and a page from The New Yorker. I’d left my valuable watch and most of the contents of my wallet at home, just in case an unscrupulous person on the outside got access to my stuff. I wish I’d brought some gum or something to distract me from the stench. It’s worse than anything I smelled my entire first year of college, when I lived in a dorm where we had a community bathroom shared by about twenty guys.

  “ID?” the woman in uniform behind a glass window asks. I slide my license in the tiny slot at the bottom. After reading it, she looks up at me, surprised. “Jackson Andrew Holland, I-I-I?” she reads aloud. “As in Trey Holland?”

  “Yes, officer.”

  “Now why in God’s good earth would you be here at Rikers Island?”

  “I’m here to interview Asher Knoxland for The Columbia Daily Witness.”

  “Where’s your bodyguard?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “You should,” she says.

  “Are you for hire?” I ask her with a smile. She doesn’t appear to find it funny. “I’ll be fine.”

  “What else do you have with you?” I slide the papers through the hole, too. “We have a library, you know, with much better reading materials than this.”

  Ouch. “I don’t know if they have full articles with all the evidence stacked against Asher in them. I just wanted to make sure he knew what he was up against.”

  “This doesn’t sound like a friendly visit.”

  “It’s not.”

  “We don’t encourage intimidating the inmates.”

  “Nobody’s forcing him to read them,” I argue, hoping she’ll let me take them in. “Ma’am.” I swallow hard. She pushes them back through, crumpling them all in the process.

  “Here’s your ticket,” she says, handing me a slip with Asher’s name on it. “Give it to the guard inside. He’ll take you where you need to be.” Finally, I get my ID back. “Should have brought a bodyguard. Next!” she yells, looking at the person behind me.

  I step aside, then pause, wondering if this really was such a good idea after all. I reach for my phone, remembering it’s in the locker only after I stick my hand in my pocket. A little encouragement from someone would have been nice.

  “Plenty of cops,” I mutter to myself, moving forward.

  One of the guards snatches the ticket from my hand and passes it off to another. I look him over as he studies the paper. He’s got two guns, plus a nightstick, a radio, and about five other gadgets in holsters. A taser, probably. “This is that Holland kid. Get the warden,” he says, his voice so low I can barely hear him.

  I look around everywhere, incredibly anxious and now suddenly afraid that I have to watch my back.

  “Step aside,” the other officer tells me, pointing to my right.

  I don’t waste any time, getting out of the way of the rest of my traveling companions as they are allowed entrance into the prison to see their loved ones or clients or friends. And here I am, waiting for my enemy.

  “Trey Holland!” a woman shouts from ten feet behind the entrance. She approaches with two other uniformed officers behind her, one man and one woman. I stand alert, afraid I might have a heart attack any second with the rapidity of my heartbeat.

  “Yes?”

  “Officer Hughes and Officer Laurens are your escorts today. Where’s your ticket?”

  “He has it,” I say, pointing to the burly man in front of me. He hands it to Officer Laurens.

  “Let Mr. Holland through,” the warden instructs, and they open the door for me. When I walk inside, she talks directly to me. “Do not stray from these two, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “They’ll be with you the entire time. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I won’t be held liable for the dead Holland kid in my jail. You should have brought your own guard.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As I follow them through the dank building, I wonder when Asher became such a hardened criminal that I’d have to have so much protection from him. Walking past jail cells, men of all ages and races look out at me, some making suggestions I’d never consider and can’t quite believe I’m hearing. As I turn away from one of the less pleasant offers, a man grabs my forearm, holding tightly.

  “Hey!” I yell, trying to pull away from his incredibly powerful grasp.

  “You like it up the ass, pretty boy?” he asks, his breath as strong as his grip on my arm.

  “In one second, that bone will be in two pieces, Jock!” Laurens says, holding up her nightstick as a threat to him. The prisoner digs his nails into my skin before he lets go. “Hughes, follow the kid.”

  The weight of this situation suddenly hits me. I’d planned to gloat. I’d planned to brag about my own freedom. I’d planned to show him our articles that had been picked up by The Times and Coley’s poem that was published this week in The New Yorker. But that’s not who I am or what I’m about.

  Asher’s life is over. It’s a fate he brought upon himself, but it’s not something for me to take pleasure in. These men who are making idle threats against me are likely to act against Asher. Putting myself in his shoes for a second, I am completely terrified for him.

  “In here, kid,” Laurens says, holding a steel door open for me. It looks a lot like the interrogation room I was in the night that I was questioned at the police station. Asher sits on one side of a white table, his hands cuffed and chained to it, allowing for some–yet minimal–movement. His head is bowed down, and he makes no attempt to see who’s coming in the room to see him.

  “Knoxland, you have a visitor!” Hughes yells. The door slams behind me as I take a seat, startling us both. Once his head jerks up, I can see that the right side of Asher’s face is red and purple. Dried blood sticks to his swollen lips. His hair flops over his brows. I don’t remember the last time I saw him without some sort of product in his hair. His normally green eyes have taken on the gray color of the room.

  “You’re more pale than normal, Holland,” he says, breaking the silence. His voice is deeper; hoarse. I don’t even know what I’m doing here anymore. If I was going to interview him, I don’t remember the questions. My biggest reason for visiting was to flaunt my freedom. I think he’s having a bad enough day without that additional slap in the face.

  I wonder who did that to him. If it was his own braggadocio that got him into a fight or if it was some sort of standard Rikers initiation. Looking back into his eyes, they don’t shine with his signature Asher arrogance. In fact, I can see the fear in them; I can even sense the fear he’s feeling.

  “My lawyer said you were here to interview me. Are you going to ask me any questions?”

  “Yeah,” I say quietly.

  “He said they’d be school-related.”

  I shake my head. “I think you know I didn’t come here to ask you how to publish the paper or anything.”

  “You know I can’t ans
wer anything. I’m not going to incriminate myself. I have a right to a fair trial.”

  I scoff at that response, but I can’t argue with him. I didn’t expect this to become a confessional or anything.

  “Well, why are you here?”

  “Honestly? I was going to interview you to see how you were going to spend finals’ week. To find out what your plans were for graduation night, when you should have been moving on from Columbia with your degree. Maybe see what jobs you had lined up in here.”

  “That’s a pretty jackass thing to do,” he tells me. “That doesn’t really sound like you.”

  “No,” I agree. “It really doesn’t. It’s not what I want to talk about anymore.”

  “What do you have there?” he asks, reaching for the papers I’m clutching in my hands. They’re just out of his grasp. Feeling ashamed that I’d brought them, I fold up the pages. “At least tell me what they were? Articles about me?”

  “Yeah. Two of the articles The Times had picked up from The Wit and a poem Coley wrote. The New Yorker published it.”

  “The New Yorker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s just a freshman.”

  “Well, she’s good. It’s good.”

  “What was it about?”

  “The different ways people deal with desire,” I tell him vaguely.

  “I guess you two know all about that.” He leans back in his chair awkwardly, restrained by the cuffs.

  I start to seethe with anger as I remember being alerted by my uncle and brother-in-law with the news that an intimate video of me and my girlfriend had gone viral. “You didn’t catch us doing anything wrong. I have no idea why you would ever do that to someone who had been your friend. Loyalty meant nothing to you, I guess.”

  “You were with the girl I liked, Trey.”

  “It’s no excuse for what you did. She never liked you back. Coley and I had been friends all semester. You knew that. You had to know we were getting closer.”

  “Too close.”

  “I was faithful to Zaina, and as soon as I could break it off with her, I did. And likewise, as soon as I could go out with Coley, I did that, too. I’m in love with her.

  “What you recorded and decided to distribute to the world–that was meant for no one else to see or experience but us. So I don’t know what kind of sick pleasure you got out of that, but you didn’t catch me in any sort of compromised position. I was free to be with her. There was no girlfriend whose heart you could break by posting that. You couldn’t destroy my life. You did some damage to Coley’s, though–you hurt the one person you claimed to care about. It will take a lot to rebuild her reputation, and what was it for, Asher? Huh? Nothing.”