The Pact

by Jodi Picoult

  An officer led Chris to the small room where the assistant superintendent worked. Inside was the officer who'd wrecked the cell, and the assistant superintendent himself, a beefy man more suited to coaching football than pushing paper at a jail. Chris stood very straight while the assistant superintendent read a formal charge and advised him of his rights. "So, Mr. Harte," the man said. "Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

  "Yes. Ask me to smoke it."

  The assistant superintendent raised his brows. "I can't imagine you'd like anything better."

  "I don't smoke," Chris said. "This'll prove it."

  "It will prove that you can fake a cough," the man said. "I don't think so. Now: Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

  Chris thought of Hector, and his razor-bladed pen. He thought of Steve, with whom he'd reached a tentative truce. And he remembered what he had been told about minor transgressions in jail--this cigarette could add three to seven years to his sentence, if he was convicted.

  Then again, that was a big if. "No," Chris said quietly.

  "No?"

  He looked the assistant superintendent in the eye. "No," Chris repeated.

  The officers looked at each other and shrugged. "You're aware," the assistant superintendent said, "that if you feel we're missing part of the story, you can suggest we speak to another inmate."

  "I know," Chris said. "But you don't have to."

  The man pursed his lips. "All right, Mr. Harte. Based on the evidence, you've been found guilty of possession of an illegal substance in your cell, and you're sentenced to a five-day lockdown. You'll remain in a cell for twenty-three hours of the day, with one hour free to shower."

  The superintendent nodded at the officers, who escorted Chris from the room. He walked silently through the maximum security pod, collecting his things without speaking a word to anyone. It was not until he was being led to his new cell that Chris realized he would sit there until Thursday, two days too late for his mother to visit; two days too late for the Classification Board to transfer him to medium security.

  CHRIS SLEPT DURING those days. He dreamed often. Of Emily, the touch and taste of her. Of kissing her, tongue deep, and having her push something into his mouth, something small and hard like a peppermint candy. But when he spit it into his hand, he saw it for what it really was: the truth.

  He did sit-ups, endless numbers of them, because it was the only exercise he had room for in the narrow cell. During showers, he scrubbed until his skin went pink and raw, just so that he'd get his full hour out. He relived swim races, nights with Em, class lectures, until his cell became uncomfortably full of memories and he started to understand why inmates did not bother thinking of what they had left behind.

  He did not call his mother, of course, and on Tuesday he wondered whether she had come all the way to Woodsville just to be told her son was in a disciplinary lockdown. He also wondered who had been moved to medium security. Steve would have petitioned the Classification Board that day.

  On Thursday morning he banged on the bars as soon as breakfast was finished and told an officer he wanted to be moved. "You will be," the officer said. "Soon as we get a chance."

  They didn't get a chance until four o'clock that afternoon. An officer swung open the door of the cell and led the way to the other maximum security pod, the one he'd been in the previous week.

  "Welcome home, Harte," he said.

  Chris dumped his few belongings on the lower bunk. To his surprise, a figure curled out of the upper one. "Hey," Steve said.

  "What are you doing here?"

  Steve laughed. "I was going to head out to a bar, but I couldn't find my car keys."

  "I meant that I thought you'd be upstairs by now."

  They both looked at the ceiling of the cell, as if it was possible to see medium security, with its yellow cinder-block walls, its horseshoe day room, its spacious showers. Steve shrugged, not saying what Chris knew he was thinking: that following the discovery of the cigarette, anyone in the jail would have pointed a finger at Steve, although Chris had chosen not to. "Changed my mind," he said. "You get more room upstairs, but three more guys in your cell."

  "Three more?"

  Steve nodded. "I figured I'd wait until I knew someone else up there."

  Chris lay back on his bunk and closed his eyes. After all this time, he liked hearing the sound of another person's voice, another person's thoughts. "Tuesday's coming around soon again," he said.

  He heard Steve's sigh. "That it is," he answered. "Maybe we'll go."

  THE FUNNY THING WAS, Chris had become a hero. By not ragging on Hector about the cigarette, when he perfectly well could have, he'd been elevated to the level of a worthy inmate, one who was willing to take the punches for someone else. No matter how undeserving that someone else was.

  "My man," Hector now called him. Chris was allowed to decide, from four P.M. to five P.M., what channel the TV stayed on. In the exercise room, he was given time on the weight bench.

  It was on the way back from the exercise room one day that Hector cornered him in the dark curve of the stairwell, the place that the cameras couldn't see. "Shower," he hissed, "ten-fifteen."

  And what the hell was that supposed to mean? Chris spent the rest of the day wondering if he had been issued an appointment to get the shit kicked out of himself, or if Hector had some other agenda for needing to meet him in private. He waited until ten, then grabbed his towel and walked down the small cubicle at the end of the pod.

  There was no one else there. Shrugging, Chris stripped and turned on the water He stepped into the stall and had just begun to lather up with the soap when Hector peered over the edge. "What the fuck is up with you?"

  Chris blinked water from his eyes. "You told me to be here," he said.

  "I didn't tell you to shower," he said.

  Actually, he had. But Chris wasn't about to point that out. He shut off the water, only to have Hector snake an arm inside the stall and turn it on again. "Leave it," he said. "It hides the smoke." Then he drew from his jumpsuit a Bic pen that had been burned down into a curve and stretched at one end to make a small tobacco bowl. He unfolded a small square of paper and shook something precious into the makeshift pipe, then quickly flared a forbidden lighter. "Here," he said, drawing deeply.

  Chris wasn't stupid enough to turn down hospitality from Hector. He bent his head away from the thin trickle of water and inhaled, exploding in a fit of coughing. It was not a cigarette, that much was true, but it didn't have the sweet taste of pot, either. "What is this?" he asked.

  "Banana peels," Hector said. "Damon and me burn them down." He took the pipe and tamped it down. "For a jar of coffee I'll make you a packet."

  Chris felt the water run cold down the back of his neck. "We'll see," he said, taking the pipe again when Hector offered it.

  "You know, college boy," Hector said, "I had you figured all wrong."

  Chris didn't respond. He fit his lips over the edge of the pipe, inhaled, and was not altogether surprised to find that this time, it came naturally.

  ON SATURDAY MORNING CHRIS was one of the first inmates taken down to meet their visitors. Unlike the last time his mother had come to the jail, she was standing painfully erect, fury and fear crackling around her like electric currents that Chris could see even this far off. She folded Chris into her arms and for the briefest moment he had the sense that years had fallen away; that he was once again smaller and weaker than she was.

  "What happened?" she said tightly. "I come here on Tuesday to find out that I can't see you because you're serving some kind of disciplinary sentence, and when I ask what that is they tell me it means you're locked inside some ... some cage for twenty-four hours a day."

  "Twenty-three," Chris said. "You get an hour to shower."

  Gus leaned closer, her lips white. "What did you do?" she whispered.

  "I was set up," Chris murmured. "One of the other prisoners was trying to get me in trouble."

  "
He was--he was what?" Shocked, Gus sat back heavily. "And you just ... went along with it?"

  Chris felt two flags of color rise in his cheeks. "He planted a cigarette in my sneaker; one that the officers found when they tossed the cell. And yeah, I went along with it, because sitting by myself for five days was better than having this guy come at me with the knife he made out of razor blades."

  Gus pressed her fist against her mouth, and Chris wondered what words she was trying to hold inside. "There has to be someone I can talk to," she said finally. "I'll go to the superintendent when I leave here today. This isn't the way a jail is supposed to be run and--"

  "How would you know?" Chris shook his head. "Don't go fighting my battles for me," he said wearily.

  "You're not like all these criminals," Gus said. "You're just a child."

  At that, Chris's head snapped up. "No, Mom. I'm not a child. I'm old enough to be tried as an adult; old enough to serve time in an adult jail." He looked past her. "Don't make me into someone I'm not," he said, his words laid like a frank hand of cards on the table between them.

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT THERE WAS a terrible windstorm, and even the solid cement walls of the jail seemed to creak and threaten. Lockdown was late on weekends--two A.M.--with most of the inmates rowdier than usual. Chris had not yet cultivated the art of sleeping like a log when the rest of the pod was animated and noisy, but he lay in his bunk with a pillow over his head, wondering if it was truly possible to hear the sound of the rain soaking into the bricks and whipping the ceiling.

  There had been a fight earlier--an argument about whether to watch Saturday Night Live or Mad TV, which had resulted in two cells being locked down for an hour, the inmates screaming at each other through the bars. Steve had watched TV for a while, then come into the cell and crawled into the upper bunk. Chris had been feigning sleep, but he listened to Steve rip open the wrapper of the NutRageous bar he'd purchased from the commissary that week.

  He'd gotten Chris some stuff, too. M&M's, and coffee, and Twinkies. Because of the disciplinary sentence, Chris had missed the commissary order day, and he supposed this was Steve's way of thanking him for not being a snitch.

  After a while there was no more rustling in the upper bunk, and Chris realized Steve had fallen asleep. He waited until the officers called for lockdown, and then listened to the slap of rubber thongs on the floor; the soft sound of someone pissing in a urinal; the gradual slouch toward quiet.

  Lights out.

  The lights, actually, never went out. They dimmed considerably, but then again it was so dreary in the maximum security section that it took just as much time to get adjusted to seeing during the daytime as it did to sleeping in shadows. Chris listened for that wind, imagining that he was outside in the middle of a field so big that he couldn't see any of its boundaries. The rain would run over him, and he'd lift his face into it and all he would see was sky.

  There was a whimper, and then another.

  Chris smacked the flat of his hand against the upper bunk; he'd done that once or twice before when Steve was snoring. But instead of hearing the other man roll over and settle into sleep, there was a sharp, keening cry.

  He got out of bed and stood up as Steve began thrashing back and forth on his bunk, chest convulsing with sobs. Stunned into immobility for a moment, Chris watched him. Steve's eyes were closed, his breathing labored. He was clearly upset, and he was just as clearly still asleep.

  At the second cry, Chris clamped his hand on Steve's shoulder. He shook a little harder, and in the dim night light of the jail he saw the silver slits of Steve's eyes. Steve shrugged off Chris's hand, and he felt himself flush with embarrassment. The cardinal rule of jail was that you did not touch someone unless you were expressly asked to do so.

  "Sorry," he mumbled. "You were having a nightmare."

  At that, Steve blinked. "I was?"

  "You were crying out and everything," Chris said, hesitating. "I didn't think you wanted to wake up the whole place."

  Steve slipped out of the upper bunk. He walked around Chris and sat down on the closed toilet, cradling his head in his hands. "Shit," he said.

  Chris sank onto his bunk. In the distance, he could still hear the whistle of the wind. "You should go back to sleep."

  Steve lifted his gaze. "Did you know that sometimes you yell out at night, too?"

  "I do not," Chris automatically countered.

  "You do," Steve said. "I hear you."

  Chris shrugged. "Whatever," he said, picking at a cuticle.

  "Do you see her? Em?"

  "How the hell do you know about Em?" Chris asked.

  "That's the name you say. At night." Steve stood up, his back against the metal bars of the cell. "I just wondered if you see her, like I see ... him."

  Chris thought about Jordan McAfee's warning, about rats that the cops put in your cell just to feel out your confessions. If he questioned, he would be questioned, and he was not sure that he wanted that sort of connection forged. But all the same, Chris heard himself whisper, "What happened?"

  "I was home alone with him," Steve whispered. "Me and Liza had a big fight, and she stormed off to the hairdresser's where she worked. She wasn't even speaking to me by the time she left, but she told me to take care of the baby. I got pissed off, and I started drinking whatever was left in the fridge. And then he woke up, crying so loud that it was giving me a headache." Steve turned around, his forehead pressed against the bars. "I tried to give him his bottle and I changed his diaper, but he kept screaming. So I carried him, with him yelling all the time in my ear, and my head about to split. Before I know it I'm shaking him, telling him to just stop crying already." He took a deep, wet breath. "And then I was shaking him, trying to get him to start crying."

  Steve spun around, his eyes gray and glazed. "Do you know what it's like, to hold this ... this little person in your arms ... afterward ... and to know that you were supposed to be the one to protect it?"

  Chris swallowed past the constriction of his throat. "What was his name?"

  "Benjamin," Steve said. "Benjamin Tyler Vernon."

  "Em," Chris answered softly, a perfectly appropriate response. "Emily Gold."

  THEN

  May 1996

  His breath is so close I can taste him. His hands come to my waist, then slide up and up and pinch at me. I want to tell him it hurts, but I can't speak. I want to tell him I don't like this anymore.

  He pushes me back and then his hand is down there and I start to scream.

  THE SCREAM OF THE alarm clock made Emily bolt upright in her bed. The sheets were tangled around her feet; she had sweated through her nightgown. Swinging her legs over the edge, she stretched. She walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower, waiting until steam clouded about her head before stepping into the stall. As she passed the mirror, she turned away. There was something about seeing herself naked that didn't seem quite right.

  She leaned back her head and let the water soothe her scalp. Then she picked up the soap and scrubbed at her skin until some spots were bleeding, but she still could not make herself feel clean.

  FOR ONCE, HISTORY WAS interesting. Gross, but completely riveting. Mr. Waterstone had taken a break from the dry unit on taxation without representation and was detailing life in colonial America. They'd spent the past week learning the going prices for a bolt of calico, a crop of cotton, a healthy slave. Today, they were studying the Indians.

  Oops. Native Americans. The whole point of this diversion from the standard textbook was to give students an appreciation for what the life of a colonist was like. Which included not only interference from the English crown, but also studious lack of contact with the natives.

  Emily's eyes were glued to the screen at the front of the class. As far as she could see, not even the biggest skanks in the class--total druggies--were passing notes now. Everyone was watching the remarkable, reenacted footage of a Mohawk warrior cutting open the chest of a captured French-Canadian Jesuit priest, and eating
his heart before his eyes.

  There was a thump in the rear of the class, and Emily tore her eyes away long enough to notice Adrienne Whalley, a cheerleader, sprawled in a dead faint on the floor. "Oh, shit," Mr. Waterstone said under his breath, but a curse all the same. He stopped the movie, flipped on the lights, and dispatched a student to run down to the nurse's office. Mr. Waterstone himself crouched over Adrienne, rubbing her hand, and Em wondered if that wasn't Adrienne's intention to begin with. Young Mr. Waterstone, with his shoulder-length jet hair and bright green eyes, was the most attractive male teacher in the school.

  The bell rang just as the nurse waddled into the classroom with a bottle of ammonia that Adrienne, now awake, didn't need. Emily gathered up her books and headed for the classroom door, where Chris was already waiting. Her hand slid neatly into his as they began moving in tandem. "How's Waterstone's class?" he asked; Chris had History seventh period.

  Emily squeezed closer to him as a crowd passed by, and then stayed at his side. "Oh," she said. "You'll like it."

  SHE LIKED THE KISSING.

  In fact, if she could have gone back to just that, she would have. She liked opening her mouth against Chris's and having him fill it with his tongue, as if he was slipping her secrets. She liked feeling his moan roll, candy-round and warm, into her own mouth. She especially liked the way his big hands cradled her head, as if he could hold her thoughts together even when they started running off in directions she didn't want to explore.

  But lately, it seemed like they kissed less and spent more time fighting over where Chris's hands should stay.

  They were in the back of the Jeep now--how many times had Emily wondered if Chris had picked this car because of the way the seats folded down?--with the windows all steamed up. On one, Emily had drawn a heart with their initials. She watched now as Chris's back rubbed against it, erasing.

  "I want you so bad, Em," Chris whispered against her neck, and she nodded. She wanted Chris too. Just not quite in the same way.

  In the abstract, the idea of making love with Chris was intriguing. Why wouldn't she, when she loved him more than anyone else in the world? It was just that the actual physical part of it--the way that he touched her body--made her feel sick. She was afraid that by the time she got up the nerve to have sex, she'd be too busy throwing up to actually finish what she'd started. The problem was that she'd look down at Chris's hand on her breast and she'd picture that same hand, albeit smaller, stealing a half dozen cookies from a fresh baked bunch before Chris's mom could see. Or she'd imagine the long fingers crossed in a game of Scissors, Paper, Stone while they sat side-by-side in the backseat on the way to some family vacation.