After (11 page)

That was her trash. She’d dropped it all into the Glad trash bag with the Quick-Tie, one by one.

And . . . the towels? The blood? The used tampons? The . . .

The images snap off. Stopped. Blank.

Her skin is pricked and cold. Each hair is erect, every nerve alive. She’s panting as if she’d just done pressure training at goalie practice.

She grabs the papers, mashes them into a tight ball, hurls it to the floor. But a caption from one of the newspaper articles catches her eye:

Certain death. Certain death. Her mind pounds out the rhythm the syllables create. Certain death. Plucked from a trash can. Plucked from her trash can—her toilet paper roll, her potato chip bag, her orange juice container. Stuffed into her Glad Quick-Tie trash bag. Her hands. Her.

That’s why she’s here. That’s why she’s sitting in this walled-in cage. Her black trash bag and what was inside of it. That’s what all the charges are about.

She squeezes her head between her hands.

And heaves her breakfast into her lap.

The lock snaps open.

Devon jerks upright in her bed. Will she ever get used to that sound? That sound, which announces each new day?

She stands, shuffles to the toilet in the corner of her cell, relieves herself. The pad lining her underwear displays only a thin brownish streak this morning. Like the blood at the end of a period.

When she’s finished, she goes to check outside her door. Like yesterday, the girls are moving around the room, preparing for the day.

This is the day Devon must join them. She must go out there, get a tray from off the food cart. Retrieve her bag of toiletries with the other girls and wash her face, brush her teeth. Go to school. Start working toward that Honor status so the judge will be impressed.

And that thought, her status and impressing the judge, reminds her that she has a job. Or at least, she thinks she might. Henrietta had assigned it to her yesterday afternoon.

“Since I had to clean up your mess today,” she’d said, “you get to clean up after everyone else. Starting tomorrow. Okay?” Henrietta had said this after hosing the puke down the drain in Devon’s cell. “What comes around, goes around.” Then she’d handed Devon the unit rules test as promised and made Devon sit on the stainless steel toilet in the corner to take it while she herself proceeded to wipe down Devon’s mattress and mop the cement floor with a strong disinfectant.

Devon feels some relief. She has a mission; she always does best with a task to perform. She now has a place to go and something specific to do when she steps outside her cell. She’ll walk right up to the desk and the staff woman behind it and inquire about her job.

Devon turns to her bed, folds her one sheet and one blanket, first in half, then in half again, and once more in half before stacking them neatly at the foot of her bed as prescribed in the unit pamphlet. Devon places her pillow on top of the pile, then peers out her little cell window one last time. The path to the desk is clear, no girl in her way to step around. She takes a breath to center herself and pushes open the door.

“Good morning,” the woman says when Devon gets there. She’s unfamiliar, this woman. She’s very tall and lanky with short dishwater blonde hair.

Devon nods back.

The woman waits for Devon to say something, to ask a question or register a complaint.

Devon clears her throat. “I’m new here. And I was told yesterday—I mean, Henrietta told me—that I have a job cleaning up? I’m just wondering what exactly it is that I have to do. Because I’d like to get started on it right away. If that’s okay.”

The woman says nothing for a moment, just looks at Devon with an amused expression on her face. “Well!” she finally says. “This is new and refreshing. Someone
asking
me for a job? I seriously think this is a first.”

Devon smiles to herself. One step closer to Honor.

The woman turns toward a white board on the wall behind her. A simple chart is there, chores listed in one vertical column—Laundry, Mop, Windows, Sink/Counter, Wipe Down, Trays/Trash—and first names in a second column beside it. The woman rubs off a name beside “Trays/Trash,” picks up a dry-erase marker and writes “Devon” in its place.

This surprises Devon, that the woman knows her name already. Why does everyone here always have to know everything? Devon can feel her momentary burst of “take charge” confidence seeping away. What else does this woman know? Devon thinks of the crumpled papers stashed in the cubby under her bed. Has she seen the articles, too? Read them?

“Here you go,” the woman says. “The girl who had Trays and Trash was released last night, so it’s all yours. That means from now on, I expect it to get done by
you
. If it doesn’t, you’ll lose points, which will affect your status.” She tells Devon the requirements for the job. After every meal, once all the girls have returned their trays to the food cart, Devon will stack the trays neatly. She’ll then get a trash bag from the staff on duty and pick up any napkins, milk cartons, sporks, et cetera that were left around the room by accident. After that, she’ll empty the trash in the bathroom and shower rooms. Finally, she will attach the trash bag to the hook on the food cart and wheel the cart to the door to the unit so that it can be taken away later.

“Pretty simple. Any questions?”

“No,” Devon says, absently running one hand along the top of the desk. “I don’t think so.” She sees a piece of paper taped there:

Devon snatches her hand back, looks at the woman guiltily. That rule wasn’t in the pamphlet. She feels a jolt of panic—she doesn’t know all the rules here. But she must. She must learn all the rules and perform them to perfection. It’s her best shot of returning back to the real world, her real life.

“Don’t be sorry for the things you didn’t know anything about.” The woman turns away to mark something on a clipboard. “But now you
do
know it, so don’t let it happen again. Pretty simple.” She points toward the floor beside the desk. “Now grab your toiletry bag out of that box. Your name’s on one of them. Find it, use it, and bring it back when you’re done.”

Someone else is waiting to talk with the staff. In her peripheral vision, Devon can see a small, dark-haired girl bouncing up and down on her toes impatiently.

The woman shifts her eyes to the other girl then. Dismissing Devon.

After breakfast is over, the girls start to make their way to the classroom, one of the rooms off the entryway. Devon had managed to sit alone, in a corner, to eat a few bites of the toasted frozen waffle and mushy fruit cocktail. Beside her was a cart jammed with paperbacks, worn with use. Scanning the titles had given her something to do while the other girls moved around the room or did their chores or ate at the round tables. Only after most of them had cleared out did she move to collect the stray napkin, the stray spork.

Devon veers the cart with the trays and trash around the few girls loitering in the entryway outside the classroom. She stops the cart at the door to the unit, as she’d been instructed. The moment she’d entered through that door replays in her mind, and all the accompanying feelings—how she had felt clutching her bedding to hide her chest, stress churning in her stomach. That moment was not even two days ago. Her stomach still feels the same; that anxious feeling has never left her, not even in her sleep.

Devon peers through the door’s small window to the hallway outside. Directly across is another unit, labeled UNIT C. Through the small window of the opposite door, she catches movement inside. Blue jumpsuits carrying breakfast trays to a cart, pushing and shoving and jostling each other. Boys.

“Mmmm. Nice, huh?” A voice whispers behind her.

Devon looks over her shoulder. A girl is there, standing a little too close, invading Devon’s personal space. She’s heavy-lidded, with only tiny dark slits for eyes, her brown hair twisted into two low braids held with rubber bands. Her face is too pale, even for the sunshine-challenged Northwest, with big, pouty lips.

“Yeah, well,” the girl says, “as the saying goes, ‘If you want to marry a prince, you’ll have to kiss many frogs.’ Compliments of my friend Anonymous. That, over there, is a pod
full
of frogs.” She leans even closer, whispers, “Pucker up and get busy.” She turns from Devon then, a crooked smile playing those lips as she saunters away and through the door to the classroom.

Devon takes a moment to steady herself; the girl had startled her, though Devon doesn’t think she’d let it show on the outside, thankfully. And that thing about a prince. Hadn’t Kait once said something to Devon about finding a prince, too? Devon pushes the thought away and follows after the girl toward the classroom.

“Time to zip the lips!” Devon hears a voice shouting over the loud girl chatter as she crosses the threshold. A woman rises from behind a cluttered desk at the front of the room.
Must be the teacher
, Devon thinks. She watches as the presumed teacher props herself on a tall stool beside the desk, a large whiteboard to her back. Waving Devon forward from where she had hesitated in the doorway, the teacher says, “Come on in. Take an empty seat.” She scans the room and points. “That’s a good one, over there.”

Devon’s eyes skim over the room’s three rectangular tables and find the vacant seat indicated. It’s beside the pale girl with the braids. The girl scoots her chair back to make room for Devon, presenting the seat to her with an open hand, her crooked smile creeping back onto her face. Devon feels sweat prickling all over her body.

“Hey!” The teacher turns back to the room of girls and raises her hand. “Ladies? Hello, ladies!”

Devon moves for her seat, careful to keep her face a mask. She does a quick scan as she moves: the three tables, including hers once she’s there, will each hold five girls. She does the math—fifteen girls in all.

“Ladies, why am I raising my hand?”

The noise level in the room drops one notch, then two.

Devon reaches her place and sits down.

“Better.” The teacher says. “Now—”

Devon feels eyes hitting her from all directions. What should she do with her hands? Place them on the table? Put them in her lap? She glances at the black girl sitting across from her. She’s outright staring at Devon, sucking on her thumb. Devon looks quickly away.
Another option
, Devon thinks wryly,
place hands in mouth.

“Uh, Ms. Coughran?” the thumb sucker across Devon’s table blurts.

The teacher looks over at her. “Yes?”

Staring down at the tabletop, the girl says, “I just wanted to say that why you raise your hand is ’cuz you want us to be quiet.”

A snort comes from somewhere in the room, and a “No duh” from another.

“You’ve got it,” the teacher says. “Thank you, Destiny. Now—”

Devon chances another quick peek across the table at the girl who the teacher had called Destiny. She’s sucking on that thumb again, her face unreadable. Her hair’s twisted into tiny Rasta knots; it looks like she’s wearing a wig of brown Cheetos sticking up everywhere, but cool.
Destiny
, Devon thinks. A curse, that name. Like her own middle name, “Sky.” Devon’s mother’s dreams, compressed into three heavy letters.

“Okay,” the teacher says, pulling up a clipboard from the desktop. “Roll call time. When I call your name, all I want from you is ‘here.’ Got it?”

Devon turns her eyes back on the teacher. She puts on a pair of funky reading glasses that had been hanging around her neck on a multicolored beaded chain.

“I’ll start with me—Ms. Coughran—with whom most of you are well acquainted.” She smiles. “That’s ‘cough,’ as in what you have when you’re sick and ‘run,’ as in what you do when you’re chased.”

“Tee hee, Freak Woman.” Devon hears the braid girl beside her scoff under her breath. “So funny, I forgot to laugh.”

“Now, let’s hear from the rest of you—Bella?”

“Here.”

“Casie?”

“Here, Ms. Coughran.”

“Destiny?”

Devon keeps her eyes on this Ms. Coughran as she goes down her list. Yet another person here with an indistinguishable ethnicity and age. But she looks too young to need reading glasses, Devon decides. She has this dark hair twisted up into some hair clips, and warm brown eyes. She wears hip clothes, but not pretentious or ridiculous for her age—a short jean jacket, boot-cut jeans, square-toed shoes, big sterling hoops in her ears. She makes a point to smile at every girl as she calls her name.

“Devon?”

Devon blinks, yanked back to reality.

Ms. Coughran is smiling at
her
now.

Devon’s heart pounds. Okay, so what’s the big deal? Calling roll happens the first day at any school. And sometimes every day, if you have study hall with Mr. Brugman (aka “Drugman”), who’s never learned a single student’s name in his twenty-two years at Stadium and is proud of it. Calling role is expected.

“Here.” It comes out a sort of gasp, which Devon isn’t satisfied with, so she clears her throat and repeats, “Here.”

“I need your birth date, the last school you attended, and current grade. I don’t have a copy of your school records yet, but I’ll put in a request for them today.” Ms. Coughran has pulled a pencil from somewhere and is waiting for Devon to talk.

Everything in Devon’s body is resisting this; the room is quiet, listening. What ever happened to the Right to Privacy? When the information comes out of Devon’s mouth, it’s fast and tinged with annoyance. “May fifth. Stadium High School. Sophomore.”

“Thank you, Devon.” Ms. Coughran turns back to her clipboard and resumes calling roll. “Evie?”

“Here.”

“Grace?”

“Here.”