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I don’t hearfrom my attorney or even my sister for the rest of the week, and for days after that, but I keep my poker face on to keep Lace from worrying about it. Mr. Jaxon is just as bad, hovering over me like he expects me to lose my shit and shoot the place up or something, as if it were really that easy. After all, I’m serving time now. Real time. Shouldn’t I be freaking out?
The sun is out on Friday afternoon as Lace and I sit together in the dying grass of the exercise yard, hand-in-hand, eyes closed as we bask under the warmth of the sun on our skin. Many of the others are playing a competitive game of basketball straight ahead of us, but I have no interest in giving everyone an excuse to push me around on the court. This is where aggression toward one another is taken out—under the watchful eyes of the prison guards. I have no interest in initiating myself into a crew, not even Ronnie’s. Not until I at least have good reason to.
Beside me, Lace sighs, content, squeezing my hand in hers. I look down at our knotted fingers and squeeze back. “Tell me about you.”
“Me?” Lace asks, smiling like I’ve said something funny. “Trust me, there’s nothing about me worth telling.”
“If that were true I wouldn’t be sitting here with you now.” I turn my head toward Lace, admiring the soft glow of her skin, the red in her cheeks from the warmth of the sun. She smiles, lips closed, and shuts her eyes again.
“I ran away from home when I was fourteen.” She keeps her voice steady, but under the layers of sassiness and humor, I can feel her pain when she talks about it.
“Were your parents like mine?” I ask. Lace shakes her head and laughs, but it’s humorless.
“My parents were great. Picture perfect, really.”
“So what made you leave?”
“I was a rebellious teenager, I guess.” She shrugs.
I don’t want her to stop. “Tell me.”
Lace shrugs again and lies down on her back in the grass, still holding my hand as she pulls me down next to her. We stare at the sky together, bodies in the damp grass, huddled close.
“Everything that happened to me is my fault,” she continues. “I ran away from home because I rebelled. I couch surfed for a while, sold drugs and sex to pay for food and housing.”
I don’t say anything to this. I don’t have to. I stroke my thumb over the top of her hand instead.
“Soon, it wasn’t food and shelter I was after,” she continues. “At some point I realized that drugs were the easiest thing to control, the easiest thing to access as a girl on the streets, anyway. So I went from dealing to using very quickly.”
“Where were you living?”
“Everywhere. On the street, in shitty motel rooms. On a stranger’s couch who could give me drugs and pay me for sex.” She pauses and takes a deep breath, and when she speaks again, her voice trembles. “See, Joey, when you’re on enough drugs, you don’t care about anything else. You don’t care about the cleanliness of the bed you’re in or the person you’re fucking to get there. You just think about your next fix, because once you get that fix, everything is okay for a little while longer. Nothing else matters, just the high. The carelessness. Drugs are a Band-Aid. Not stitches, but a Band-Aid. A temporary fix that you want to last forever.”
“What about your parents? Did they ever find you? Did you ever go home?”
“I tried,” Lace admits. “I tried more than once and so did they. They begged, they pleaded, they threatened. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t be at home or around them, because when I was, things were worse. My guilt was worse. I wanted more than their love. I wanted money and I wanted drugs.”
I roll over to my side so I can see Lace’s face. She continues to look at the sky, but a single tear rolls down her cheek. I reach over and brush it away, and she forces a smile and sniffs.
“There’s not much more than that,” she says. “I lived my life like that, in and out of jail on minor infractions. I kept my nose down and brain off, paying for drugs with sex. Then one day I guess the courts decided that I couldn’t keep my nose down quite enough, and I was becoming a nuisance to the law. So, here I am.” She pulls her lip between her teeth and begins to chew. I reach over and stroke her hair, fingers resting on her warm cheek.
“Thank you for telling me.”
She chuckles humorlessly and rubs a distressed hand over her face, then rolls her head to the side to meet my eyes. “I won’t blame you if you’re disgusted. It was a disgusting thing to do.”
I smile and close my own eyes before rolling again onto my back so I can see the darkening sky once more. Lace’s hand stays firmly on my own.
“I only told you half the truth earlier,” I say. “There’s more to my story that I let on.”
“Worse than what I just told you?”
“The degree of our pain is not justified,” I murmur. “No one thing can be worse than the other, because it merely depends on who is experiencing it at the time.”
“Wise words from a wise woman,” Lace cracks, but she raises my hand to her mouth and kisses it.
“My dad didn’t just take off.” I close my eyes again and allow the sun to warm my skin. I feel cold inside now, but it’s not from Lace’s story. It’s from my own. “He left after I accused him of doing something he did.”
“What did he do?” asks Lace, but we both know the answer already. I just have to say it aloud.
