Page 13 of Rooke
Yeah. I know. I know that she wouldn’t have been able to drag him here kicking and screaming if her life depended on it. Richard Blackheath is a stubborn man. If he says he intends never to see you again, you’d better believe he’s going to be ghosting you for the rest of your natural life. I shake my head, laughing under my breath. Sim pointedly ignores me. “Your grandfather wants to visit you, though. He wants to come every other week and play chess. I told him you wouldn’t want him here, but—”
“He can come.”
She looks shocked. “He can come, but I’m not allowed?”
“Hewon’t look at me like I’m a criminal when he occupies the chair you’re currently sitting in.”
Sim sighs. “Youarea criminal, Rooke. How am I supposed to be looking at you?”
“I don’t know. Like I’m your son? Like I’m a human being?”
She fiddles with the clasp on her purse. Unshakable Sim, shaken. She’s probably thinking about her own work she must get done when she gets back to her office. Either that or just counting down the seconds until she can leave. “I’ll let him know,” she says. “In the meantime, is there anything I can do for you? I can try and talk to Judge Foster. See if he can—”
“No.” The word snaps out of me like a gunshot, violent and loud. Leaning against the wall ten feet away, Rawly, one of the nicer guards, puts his hand on his nightstick, giving me a warning look. “No. Leave me in here,” I say. “I don’t want your help. I just want to finish this, get out and start over again. That’s it. No appeals. No more lawyers. No more judges. Justno.”
She doesn’t understand. I can see it in her eyes. “Okay. If that’s what you want…”
“It is.”
Nodding, she pushes her chair back from the table, clearing her throat. “I added some money to your commissary account. You should be able to get whatever you need, whenever you need it.”
She doesn’t have access to my inmate trust account, so she can’t see that I haven’t spent a cent of the money she’s loaded onto my EZ card. There’s over two grand sitting on the damn thing right now. Impressive when you consider that you’re only allowed to deposit a hundred bucks at a time. I’d rather give the money away than benefit from it myself. I’ll go without smokes, snacks and all that other bullshit before I let her think that she’s somehow taking care of me in here.
It’s rare that a family member leaves before the end of visitation, but I don’t try and stop Sim. I refuse to ask her to stay. She gives me an almost apologetic look, then walks from the visitation room, her heels clicking loudly as she goes. A number of guys follow her with their eyes as she passes their tables. I try not to notice. I hate the woman most days. I will resent the fact that she didn’t try and defend me when the cops came to arrest me until the day I die. But fuck. She’s my mother. It feels like having razor blades dragged down my back to have these bastards checking her out the way they are right now.
Rawly escorts me back through a series of long, winding, narrow hallways with one hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let it faze you, kid,” he says. “Even my parents are assholes.”
I say nothing. He slams the door closed behind him as soon as I’m safely deposited back on my block, and then it’s just me and them—thirty other teenagers who beat their high school teachers, set fire to municipal buildings, or stole cars and torched them like I did.
For the most part no one fucks with me in here. I have a short fuse, so everyone steers clear. Everyone except Jared, that is. Jared Viorelli, eighteen, serving three years for assault. He’s as tall as me. As broad. As quick to temper. Maybe that’s why he will not quit trying to fuck with me. He feels like he has a point to prove. He sees me from the other side of the room and gets up from the game of poker he was playing, heading straight for me.
“Don’t start, Viorelli.”
“What?” He smiles, flashing uneven teeth. “I just wanted to congratulate you. I saw your mamma on the wa—”
My fist connects with his face before he can even finish his sentence. I knew it was going to happen. I fuckingknewit. I could have bet money that it would be Viorelli making the comments, too. My knuckles split open as I hit him again. Blood sprays across the bleach-clean tiles and Viorelli goes down, hitting the ground hard. I hear the satisfying clink and bounce of one of those uneven teeth of his as it flies out of his mouth.
“Ahhh! Fuck you, Blackheath. You are a fucking dead man.” Viorelli turns his head and spits blood. Rawly’s back, then. He lays into me with his nightstick, striking me square between the shoulder blades, and I drop to my knees.
“Down, down, down! Get down on the ground, Blackheath!”
I oblige him, because laying on the ground is far more enjoyable than another blow from the hollow piece of steel he has in his hands. Jared continues to spit and swear and curse me out, but I don’t hear him. The sound of the other guards’ thundering boots as they hurry to help Rawly detain me is missing. I’m deaf to the whoops and cries of the other inmates. In my head, all is silent. All is peaceful. Strange how violence is the only thing that will calm the raging storm inside me these days. I feel like I’m fucking drowning in blood and I don’t seem to mind one bit.
Jared continues to scream threat after threat at me. I smile at him as I’m bodily lifted from the ground and carried away; my smile spreads even wider when I see that it’s not just any tooth I’ve knocked out of his head. It’s his two front teeth.
That’s right, motherfucker. Prod an incarcerated guy about his mom. See what fucking happens.
EIGHT
INTERLOPER
SASHA
Two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc into book club, the doorbell rings. Alison, Kayla, Tiffanie and Kika are arguing over James’s anti-hero status—is he or is he not a redeemable character—and none of them have seemed to register theothernessof the doorbell ringing. We’re all here. We’re not expecting anyone else, and I’m shot through with a wave of anxiety. This isn’t good. People don’t just walk up the steps to my house and ring the bell. The place is too imposing and severe from the outside for sales people to ever try their luck shopping their wares, and, after many years of curt “no-thank yous” and slammed doors, the Jehovah’s Witnesses know better.
“Did you hear that?” I ask the question incredulously, my eyes wide, hand tightening around the stem of my wine glass. Ali looks up from the battered book in her hand, arching an eyebrow at me.
“Hear what?”
