Page 11 of However You Want Me

“What’s your girlfriend say about it?” He sounds fake when he tries to be casual. “What’s her name again?”

He glances at me, smiling, trying to get the two of us to be buddies. I prefer this. In a lot of ways it’s a second chance.

I smile back at him. “Which one?” I say it like it’s a joke.

The fond expression on his face is real. So is the laugh he lets out.

“You’re a smart-ass, Dean,” he says, and goes back to watching the game. “Love you kid. If you ever need to talk, you know I’m here.” He says and then that old chair creaks as he gets up.

“I know Dad,” I tell him and turn back to the TV, trying to forget like I do far too fucking often.

DEAN

10 years ago

We’re never alone in this school. Should I even call it a school? It’s a hellhole. Hell on earth. The worst place imaginable for the worst people imaginable. Like me… but they’re worse.

I always thought that was supposed to be prison, before this. I knew people went to prison. I knew they got arrested and thrown behind bars and treated like shit.

But it’s not really about laws or breaking rules in this place. It’s not about being such a bad kid that our parents gave up on us.

It’s not about anything but sick fucks getting off on ruining our lives.

So we’re never alone. There are always eyes on us, even in the bathroom. No doors on the stalls. We can’t be trusted.

The bathroom has a concrete floor like most of the other rooms I spend time in here. There’s a drain in the middle of the floor. The concrete is almost always wet. They must have to spray it down a few times a day. More if they’re going to beat the shit out of somebody in here, and they usually do.

It has tiled walls and a mirror made out of metal and a rusted metal sink. When the mirror was new, maybe I could’ve seen myself in it, but now it’s just a metal plate with so many scratches and claw marks that there’s nothing but a shadow reflected back.

The bathroom has one stall and one urinal along the other wall. No door.

I go to the urinal. The staff member who escorted me here leans in the doorway, looking annoyed.

I bite back a sarcasticsorry. Sometimes I say things like that just to remind myself that I’m alive, but until today, I wanted to be dead.

I don’t want to think about that bastard in the door anyway.

I want to think about the girl.

Most times when I come in here, I like to think about the window. There’s one window on the far wall. It’s a narrow rectangle of foggy glass, so I can’t see out. It lets a little light in, though.

Most times when I come in here, I let myself look at it just once. They don’t like when I look out the window. They probably think I’m planning some escape attempt. But I just want to see something different.

Sometimes I do, but mostly I imagine scrambling up the wall and somehow bracing myself so I can punch the window out.

I think about how it would feel for that glass to break under my hands. Probably terrible, since it’s probably thick, but when it finally broke—damn, that would be victory. It wouldn’t matter if I cut myself or broke my fingers. I want to break this place as much as it’s broken me. I want to rip a part of it off and make it bleed until it chokes out its last breath and dies in front of me where I can see.

That’s just a daydream. I’ll never have a chance to break the window. Even if I could climb that high and keep myself up there, I wouldn’t have time. I’m strong enough to make it to the ledge, but like I said, we’re never alone. The man standing in the door could reach me before I threw the first punch, and he wouldn’t stop at pulling me down to the floor. He’d get a few punches in, too. I’d end up restrained at best and tortured by myself for who knows how long.

And then drugged up again. They force pills down the throats of the ones who fight back. They keep us weak.

I’m not thinking about that when I unzip the black slacks they gave me. I’m not even thinking about how that sick fuck is watching, or how they pretend it’s for our own good. I’m used to the fact that we’re never alone by now. I’m used to the smell of bleach and piss. I’m used to thinking that it smells like a prison and calling this a school is somebody’s idea of a joke.

I’m not used to thinking about a girl.

I haven’t stopped thinking about her since I saw her through the one-way mirror earlier in the night.

It’s obviously not a one-way mirror. There’s no sense arguing the point, though, because the people who run this place will just beat it out of us. There’s no convincing them because they know they’re lying. It’s enough that I know I can see through that damn window.

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