by Megan Lynch
“I mean, why do you even study for these things?” he asked her after she had, once again, beaten him for the top grade in a test. “It’s not like you’re going to stay a Three. You have a brother.”
“I’m going to get a Three job,” she said.
“I know, but then they’ll pair you. And then you’ll just be a Four.” He waved his hand over the projection of the posted scores on the classroom wall. “This doesn’t really matter for you. Just let it go.”
Denver still felt the sting. And all these years later, he was right, of course. She tilted her head up to stop the tears in her eyes from falling into the bathwater. Just let it go.
The next day was moving day. Bristol and their mother helped carry in a few boxes of Denver’s things and arrange furniture in the new apartment across town, a glistening copper building that smelled like paint. New units were still being constructed, so the sounds of construction could be heard, which came in handy, as Stephen’s parents were also helping and there were plenty of awkward pauses to fill. It was, at least, much better than the marriage official demanding never-ending conversation.
Behind the door marked 801, after the sofa was in its final location and the families had left, the newlyweds tried eying each other without being caught. Finally, Stephen spoke.
“I’m hungry.”
“Me too.” Denver had just realized it. “Neither of us has eaten since breakfast.”
“I’d like some rice and beans,” her new husband said.
“That sounds good.”
The two of them looked at each other. In a beat, Denver understood.
“Oh.” She stood as he sat on the sofa along the right side of the wall. “Oh.”
In the kitchen, she fumbled, opening several cabinet doors before remembering where they’d put the pans. It wasn’t until she filled it with water that she became indignant. What was a Four doing in there lounging while she made his dinner? She couldn’t set this expectation. She let the water boil. Then she walked back into the family room.
“You know, I could use some help. In my house, my mother cooked.”
Her first lie.
“Oh,” Stephen said. “My mother did too. I don’t think I can be of much help.” Blood rushed to his light cheeks.
“That’s okay. It might be fun to figure it out together.”
His smile was quick. He rose from the sofa and followed her into the kitchen, where the first little bubbles had begun to appear in the water on the stove.
Stephen peered into the pot. “Good, you’ve got the water going. What should we put in there, the beans or the rice? Or both?”
Now Denver smiled. “Let’s go with the rice.”
She let Stephen pour nearly the entire package of rice into the water, but she heated the can of beans herself. Stephen retrieved two plates from the cupboard. He looked at the stove.
“So…we wait?”
She shrugged. She would not allow his incompetence to define her role in this house. What if there were other things he couldn’t do? She couldn’t possibly do all the work expected of her at the office and cook every meal for him as well.
“Maybe you should check and see if it’s hot enough yet.”
He took a single grain of rice out of the warm water and tasted it. “No, it’s hard.”
“I think it’ll get softer if we leave it in there for longer.”
“We can try that,” he said. “So your mom did all the cooking too? What about your dad? Where was he today?”
“My dad is…deceased. A train ran him over when I was young.”
“Gosh, I’m so sorry. Why was he so close to the tracks? Was he an engineer?”
She winced. “No. No, we think he…wanted to go.”
Stephen appeared to be at a loss for words. Finally, he said, “So…your mom handles everything alone?”
“Yes, but my brother cooks too. He works in a kitchen.” She looked up. “Have you ever met an unreg before today?”
Stephen’s eyes did a funny twitch. “Have I? An unreg? Yes, I think so. Some of them clean our building at night, so when I work late I say hi sometimes.”
Denver snorted. “You two sort of sound alike, you and Bristol.”
“How do you mean?”
But then Denver realized what she’d meant. That was the voice Bristol used when trying to convince Mom that he’d been asleep in his bed all night, trying to hide the paint still under his fingernails. “Nothing. Never mind.”
Stephen looked over her shoulder. “Denver? Is the rice supposed to be getting bigger?”
There was a small mountain of rice rising out of the pot, so they quickly transferred it into a bigger one. Soon, they were straining the small can of beans and weeks’ worth of rice and carrying their plates to the little table built for three. Denver picked up her fork, but Stephen put a hand on hers.
“Denver? Could I ask you something?”
She put her fork down and drew her hand away. “Sure.”
“In my family, we do this thing before we eat anything. You just say something you’re thankful for.”
“Before you eat anything?”
“Well, any meal.”
“Every meal? Every day?”
“Yes. What do you think?”
She thought it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of. But as she’d just spent the first evening of their marital life lying to him, she thought it better not to say this.
“Okay.”
Stephen lowered his chin as if he were about to face-plant into his food, but stopped, thankfully, so his forehead hovered above the table. He closed his eyes. “I am thankful for this dinner, our new home, and for my wife.”
That last word sent an electric current through Denver’s skin. Stephen looked up at her before she was ready.
“Now you,” he said.
“I…I am thankful for those things too.” The words were clunky and ran into an uncomfortable pause when she was deciding whether or not to also give thanks for her husband. But the pause ended, and Stephen picked up his fork and began to eat. Just as well, thought Denver. They were only married on paper. They weren’t real lovers. Just two strangers, not to be trusted with the others’ secrets.
Chapter Fourteen
Compared to the other boys in Samara’s classes, Jude stood out as charmingly naive—the way he talked about being free perplexed her and everyone else he mentioned it to. He obviously believed there’d been some sort of a mix-up that led to his arrest, but Samara didn’t have the heart to tell him that you didn’t just get out of prison. It took years of appeals and unbreakable DNA-based evidence of innocence. Metrics was all about strength and superiority, or at least the appearance of it, and the strong and superior would be less so if they allowed their cracks to be seen. But Jude seemed like the type of person who believed he could make things happen out of sheer will, as if the unthinkable could be reversed if only due to his own resolve, and Samara liked him for that.
He had taken up the habit of cornering her in the yard when she had outdoor duty and peppering her with questions. She didn’t mind, but his questions did finally give her some insight as to what the warden was talking about. One day, for example, he asked her:
“How do you know if you’re making a good choice?”
“What do you mean?” she’d asked.
“I mean”—he scrunched his sweaty nose to keep his glasses from sliding down any further—“when you have a choice to make, is there any real way to know it’s the right choice? Sometimes when I’m making the license plates, I can see a little imperfection, but if I stop to fix it, it might take me longer than the thirty-six seconds. We’re only supposed to have each one in our hands for thirty-six seconds. So what’s more important? Quality or time?”
Remembering what the warden had said about his mental disorder around this issue, she reminded him that the right way was always the way he’d been taught. “If the time limit is thirty-six seconds, then that’s all the time you get.
If the shop manager notices any major differences in quality, then they’ll adjust. But think of it this way: what if every boy took longer to make the plates?”
Jude scratched at his temple. “It’d affect efficiency.”
“Exactly. Smart boy. Also, everyone may have a different standard of quality. You may have it on your station for two minutes, then the next boy in line may have it for ten seconds. There’d be no way to measure how many plates to expect to get done in a day!”
Jude was quiet, and Samara had congratulated herself on getting through to him. Maybe she could convince the warden he wasn’t a danger after all.
“Unless,” Jude said, interrupting her internal back-pat, “they waited for a month and took the average.”
“Okay, Jude, almost time for the bell. Move it.”
But today, Jude asked no questions. He sat alone in the yard, not speaking to anyone. It was odd, but then with Jude, odd was what she’d come to expect. It wasn’t until she realized Kopecky was also sulking that she decided to get involved.
“What’s wrong, Albin?” she asked him, and he bowed his head so low that the wrinkles in his thick neck disappeared.
“Nothing.”
“You can tell me. Are you having an argument with your friend? Do you remember your script for this situation?”
“I’m not talking to him with no script.”
“Exactly, scripts are very useful for this kind of thing. Just say—”
“No, Miss Shepherd. I’m worried about him.”
Still taken aback at his interruption, Samara huffed. Why didn’t these boys seem as afraid of her as they were of the guards? But Kopecky didn’t even seem to understand what he’d done; he just looked down at his hands, opening and closing them. “See, Miss Shepherd—I think someone here’s got something against him. Maybe a guard. In our cell this morning—”
Samara’s watch flashed blue.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Samara. “If you need help with the friendship reconciliation script, I can help you practice. Otherwise, I want no more nonsense.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kopecky, eyeing the flashing light on her wrist.
Samara went home after work with two questions on her mind. What had happened in Jude’s cell this morning, and was he in danger? The answer to the first was relatively easy to discover. All she had to do was request access to security videos, which she tried in her bedroom. She was surprised to find she had full access. She watched security videos for an hour before she looked up Jude’s cell, as not to draw attention to what she was searching for. Finally, she typed in the location and the evening before the surprise inspection. The evening before, one of the guards had clearly gone in, slipped something under his mattress, and walked away. The cameras were turned off at night and activated by ancient motion detectors, so because Jude had stayed close to his bed when he’d gotten up the next morning, she wasn’t able to see anything more until the morning inspection. The warden had gone completely mad looking for whatever the guard had placed under his mattress. Samara was impressed with Jude; watching the video again, it was doubtless he’d found the drugs and hidden them under his foot—it was all in the way he was standing, which she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t had close contact with him every day.
To discover whether or not Jude was in real danger was trickier. There was no need, the warden had told her, to have contact with any staff at the detention center. The guards rarely spoke except for one-word commands, and the kitchen staff had never said a word. She suspected they’d also been warned that they were not to have contact with anyone else either. People grumble and commiserate when they’re allowed to talk to one another at work. Warden Paul seemed to know this and had the good sense to nip it in the bud. After seeing what the guard had done, Samara thought it would be safer to ask the kitchen staff.
The next day, when the unregistered woman set out Samara’s bowl of gray oatmeal on the countertop, Samara said, “Thank you.” The woman smiled.
The day after that, she looked down at the plate of drying rice and shriveled broccoli and said, “Thanks. Looks delicious.” The woman smirked, which worried her at first, but then the two caught eyes and Samara could see the woman assumed she’d been joking.
Samara sensed she was running out of time to be coy, so she waited until her class was over and approached the woman again, who was on her hands and knees scrubbing a corner of the kitchen. She saw no need to beat around the bush—if someone saw her, they’d both be in trouble, so it was better to get it over with quickly.
“The boys who are sent away from here,” Samara said. “Where do they go?”
At first she wasn’t sure the woman had heard her. She just continued scrubbing, the little joints in her fingers bright red with effort. Samara considered walking away, but the woman spoke. “Bad place.”
“A work camp? The country?” asked Samara.
“No,” said the woman, and Samara leaned in to hear her whisper above the hiss of the scrub brush on the tile. “A lab. Without lab rats.”
After a moment, Samara understood. “Why do they go there?”
“The warden sends them.”
“If they do something wrong first,” Samara corrected her. “What kinds of offenses can get them sent away?”
The woman stopped cleaning, stood, and squared herself to Samara. “The warden sends them.”
Chapter Fifteen
Jude wasn’t prepared for this. He couldn’t remember the last time he didn’t know exactly what to do. In school, there was a protocol for every type of problem imaginable. Students were well practiced in hundreds of individual problem-solving techniques. For lost homework, you ask the teacher to search your watch with her find device. If a dog bit you in the street, just bring your whistle to your lips and blow five short blasts and one long one. If you had a friend who liked sniffing glue a little too much, you take the glue, give it to the teacher, and simply say your friend’s name. They never taught you what to do if you were the sniffer. Wait for a friend to solve your problem for you, he guessed.
There was a right way through every situation. Even when he was arrested, he’d remained calm and remembered that’s what you do when you’re wrongfully accused: steady yourself and wait for the truth to come out. But the truth hadn’t, not yet, and he was beginning to fear that Kopecky had been right all along. He’d been set up, probably by the school because he was an outlier ruining their stats and throwing off their averages. The best he could hope for now was that his mother missed him and hadn’t gotten pregnant yet with his replacement. Maybe if she and his father started asking some questions, they could get him out…
But Jude would have to get rid of this bag first.
The raid yesterday morning seemed far away. Surely the warden knew by now where he’d hidden the bag, but somehow he still had it in his pocket throughout his lesson with Miss Shepherd.
In their lessons, they were relearning how to spell and sound out words. It seemed a little ridiculous, since he’d learned to do this when he was four. But several inmates who had been here for about that long—Kopecky included—hadn’t mastered it yet and seemed actively determined not to start now. As if to apologize for his classmates, Jude had participated in lessons more than ever, but it had set a bad precedent: now that he was counting on an hour of quiet to work out what to do with this bag, Miss Shepherd wouldn’t leave him alone. He answered the questions about vowel sounds absentmindedly at first, then irritably. When the first bell rang, he stayed in his seat. It was just a warning bell, and they still had a few minutes before they cleared the room, but they could tell Miss Shepherd was finished teaching for the day. Jude was still, trying to take advantage of every second he was still allowed to be there.
“What’s wrong, Jude?” said Miss Shepherd beside him.
He cringed. Was a few seconds of silence too much to ask for? “Nothing, miss.”
He got up to join the single-file line forming near the door, but his paper
s dropped and splattered off onto the floor. Kopecky crouched down to help. “We’ve got it, Miss Shepherd,” he said to her as she made a motion to do the same.
“Jeeze, kid,” Kopecky said when she’d walked away. “All these little words…what are you doing here?”
He was referring to Jude’s notebooks, where he wrote letters to no one in the margins when he couldn’t take the monotony of phonics lessons anymore.
“Those are just…I just write when I get bored. Don’t want to waste paper, so it’s better to write small.”
“Didja write anything today?” asked Kopecky, looking over his shoulder.
“I wasn’t bored today.”
“That makes one of us.”
Kopecky handed him his notebook.
“You’re talking to me again,” Jude said.
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking, and I think you’re probably smart not to tell anybody what you did. God knows I could stay outta some trouble if I just learned to shut my mouth every now and then. But if you do wanna tell somebody, you can tell me.”
Jude did. He told him about the drugs and quickly recounted the story of how they ended up in his pocket.
Kopecky’s eyes widened. “I knew it. They’ve got it out for you. Why would they put you in prison and then try to frame you again in here?” He swallowed and looked away. “Unless…”
“What?”
“Well, there’s this other place—it’s a prison too, I guess—where they send the kids who are too bad for this place. Kids who do stuff like that.” He nodded to Jude’s pocket. “Looks like sending you here wasn’t enough. Whoever wants you gone really doesn’t want you to come back.”
“You don’t come back from…the other place?”
“No. I’ve heard things…like there, you don’t do work, you are the work. They do experiments on you and stuff.”
Jude shuddered.
“You can’t go there,” Kopecky said. “So what are we going to do?”
