Silhouettes and Blackouts

Alex

“I can walk fine by myself, thanks,” I snarled, slapping the guard’s arm away and walking in front of him, acting like I had an idea of where I was going.

In the total time I had spent at North American – three hours – I had spent the majority of it in processing, being questioned by nameless, bland administration employees that I’ll likely never see again. The last five minutes have been spent walking with this guard, who, unlike the others, I will probably see again, being given the grand tour of the place I’ll spend the next six years of my life at life.

The first thing I’ve learned since being here is that gray is the new everything.

Aside from the orange jumpsuit, everything here is gray. Gray walls. Gray floors. Gray tables. Almost every single surface in this place is covered in the same bland shade of grade. Even the uniforms worn by the staff are mainly gray.

It’s as if they’re trying to make us feel like we don’t belong by shoving us into a gray-filled world in bright clothes.

They’re absolutely right.

Seriously, though, would it kill them to put in at least one different color?

The second thing I’ve learned is that the staff does not, nor will it ever, give anything even remotely close to a shit about you. I haven’t been treated kindly since walking into this place. Admittedly, that’s not much of a surprise, but still: would it kill somebody to at least give me some form of respect?

The last thing I’ve learned is that the guards, while exhibiting a lack of care for my personal well-being, run everything extremely efficiently. I have to respect it – they make it so that there’s very little trouble. From what I’ve seen so far, at least. There’s a guard almost everywhere you look and each is armed with a gun, a Taser, and a club. The boys and girls are separated everywhere except the cafeteria and outside, and even then, there’s a fence between the genders. Meals are served at 8, 1, and 6, and if you don’t go, then you don’t get fed. There’s solitary confinement for rule-breakers. Bedroom doors are locked from ten thirty until six AM – anyone outside during those hours ends up in solitary. They put us to work – girls in the mornings, boys in the afternoon. They have us do general chores around the place – cleaning, cooking, all those other lovely tasks. You’re allowed outside whenever you’re not supposed to be working, eating, or sleeping, and may wander around your gender’s “zone” during this time if you prefer staying inside.

Those basics, combined with a shitload of other rules I can’t be bothered to remember, make this a place of routine.

I absolutely despise routine.

Routine equals boredom, and boredom is not something I enjoy, especially when I’ll probably have to endure it for the next six years. Boredom, eternal boredom, is the worst fate in the entire world. Forget about the fact I’m probably damned if God does exist; just shove me into a locked room with no other type of human contact, and that’s hell enough for me.

I couldn’t help but think that Ryan was busy slumming it up with his FBI buddies, concocting his latest lie.

I rolled my eyes at the thought of it. Just let him try.

It really sucked that when he was lying, he was a really cool dude and somebody I could probably be friends with. But, oh well. That’s life. It has a way of screwing you every time you think something is about to go right.

The guard had taken the lead again, but without dragging me this time. I had barely noticed; my mind had wandered off after he had shown me where the bathroom was. Communal showers, no doubt, but that wasn’t something I was worried about: my appearance didn’t matter anymore; it was who was the meanest that got the best odds.

I liked those odds. A lot.

We kept on walking for a few minutes, neither of us speaking, which I was perfectly fine with. I casually scratched at my arm, wondering for the umpteenth time when I was finally going to get to taste nicotine again, when the guard stopped in front of a door that I assumed lead to my room.

Lovely. I couldn’t wait to meet my roommate.

I had never been a people person, to be honest.

“Good luck, sweetie,” the guard – a fat, middle-aged man – cackled in his hoarse voice.

“Fuck you, pervert,” I muttered, placing a hand on the knob.

“If you want any favors, you just might!” he laughed.

I elbowed him in the stomach, hearing a satisfying gasp of pain, and escaped into the room before the guard could have a chance to retaliate. Not exactly the best way to start my stay here, but I wasn’t going to just be some sex toy for the guards. I was a murderer, not a prostitute.

I sighed, rubbing my hands against my…jumpsuit. I wasn’t the most fashionable of people, but seriously. Ew. I shook my head, looking around the room I’d be inhabiting, taking note of the general gray that I was already getting used to. I then turned to look at my roommate and her side of the room.

My eyes widened.

Every inch of her side’s wall – even to the middle of the room, where an imaginary line cut the room in half – was covered in stationary, and every inch of every paper was covered in small, neat script. My roommate, a tall girl with a blonde bob for a haircut and an identical orange jumpsuit, was kneeling on her bed, writing on another piece of paper faster than I had ever seen anybody write before. I didn’t know what she was writing, but I did know that they were obviously meaningful to her; why else would she have covered her part of the room in it?

And then, I got a good whiff of cigarette smoke.

Almost instantly, I was filled with desire. Not for the girl, but for her cigarette – I hadn’t had one since I had been taken into custody. My body wasn’t over the need for nicotine, at all, and the moment I smelled the smoke, I knew that I would die unless I had one in my hands soon.

“You may want to wash the sheets,” the girl said, her back still turned to me. Her voice was bright and cheery, but she spoke rather quickly. “My last roommate killed herself in there.”

…Lovely.

“I’m Jillian, by the way. I’d talk more, but I’m busy solving…” I lost interest immediately after the world solving. Great. I was stuck with some freaking know-it-all loser who loved math. Yes, those were definitely equations on the wall, mixed in with various other things. She must not be here forever, then; probably ten years and then she’d be free again.

My mind still on the cigarette, I moved over to the bed and pulled the covers back to inspect the sheets. Eh. Not bad. I didn’t smell anything, at least. Still, it might be a good idea to take these down to the laundry that I had forgotten the way to already. Lovely. I turned back around, looking at Jillian. “Do you…Why are you staring at me like that.”

Seriously. Her head was cocked to the side and she was looking at me like I was some great work of art she needed to interpret. I noticed that she was wearing extremely oversized glasses over her green eyes, but they somehow made her look prettier…odd. I usually considered glasses of that size to be out of the complimenting range, but I guess she had proven me wrong. Her face was covered in freckles, too. Everything about this girl screamed “freaking genius” at me.

“I’m trying to figure out your name,” she said, her voice dropping to a low and mysterious level.

“It’s Al-”

“No!” She shouted, jumping up and grabbing me. “Let me figure it out, it’s no fun if you just tell me!”

Okay, now I was slightly frightened. And more than slightly annoyed. “Let go of me, please?” I asked, clenching my fists tightly, torn between running for the guards and asking why there was an escapee from the loony bin in my room or punching the girl in the face. I may not have anger problems like I told Ryan, but that didn’t mean I didn’t get pissed off.

She obeyed and started to pace back and forth, her hand on her chin in one of those comical thinking poses. “I know now!” she exclaimed, stopping and staring at me. “Your name…is Taylor!”

“Alex,” I said, clenching my teeth as I sat on my bed.

“Jillian, actually,” she corrected, looking like she had just solved some sort of hard problem.

“No,” I growled. “My name is-”

“Have you any idea why a raven is like a writing desk?”

I would’ve smacked myself in the forehead had the girl not been in the room. It’s going to be a long six years, I thought to myself. “It’s not,” I said.

“And how do you know that?”

“Do you have any reason for why it is?” I asked, now really irritated.

“Do you have any reason for why it isn’t?” she countered.

“It’s not though-”

“HOW DO YOU KNOW?” she screamed, and I flinched involuntarily. “How do you know the world is round when you’ve never seen it? How do you know God doesn’t exist when you’ve never met him? How do you know he does when you’ve never seen him? How do you know two plus two is equal to four? How do you know that my name is Jillian and that I’m not just a ninja who can transform into toasters?

“Furthermore,” she declared, jumping up onto her bed, “they both produce notes. So ha! Ooh, that’s wrong right there…” she trailed off, grabbing her pen and moving to fix something on one of her papers.

I now knew why the other girl had killed herself.

This freak had driven her to it.

Okay, so I was being a bit mean. Get over it, I’m a murderer. Nice is not something I was capable of doing. Even if she did have a point about that question…regardless, I now really needed that cigarette. I plastered on a fake smile and put on my nicest tone of voice and asked, “Jillian-”

“Taylor?”

I could kill her in her sleep and nobody would ever know… I thought, rolling my eyes. “Would you mind if I borrowed a cigarette?”

“Of course!” She exclaimed, turning around to smile at me cheerily. “Just don’t smoke it too much, it might make you addicted and then you’d get lung cancer and I would be sad and would have to go have a nice little funeral for you just like for the three squirrels that those idiots killed last week cause they were bored and that wouldn’t be nice at all really,” she said, not taking a breath throughout the entire sentence.

She threw her pack and a lighter at me and turned back to her work. “Thank Jesus,” I mumbled, taking a cigarette out of the pack and lighting it. I took the drag, resisting the urge to let out a small moan as the chemicals rushed into my body, and sat back down on my bed. I carefully watched Jillian, sliding the pack and the lighter into my jumpsuit – she wouldn’t miss them – and kept on taking drags, wondering how the hell I had survived without a cigarette for so long.

I remembered that I had meant to ask Jillian where the laundry was to wash these sheets, but something told me that I wasn’t going to get a straight answer out of her. I snubbed out the cigarette, putting it back into the pack for later, and got up. “I’m going to go find the laundry,” I said slowly.

“You’re from New York, aren’t you?” Jillian asked.

“Boston,” I muttered, knowing she wouldn’t listen. “Do you know where the laundry is?”

“There is none,” Jillian said cheerfully.

I couldn’t help it – I slapped a hand to my forehead. “You just said I should go wash those sheets, though!” I said, my voice conveying my frustration perfectly.

“I did, didn’t I?” Jillian replied, turning around to smile at me in that same creepy, cheerful way. “I didn’t say there was one, though!”

“Why would you say go wash them then?” I snarled.

“Because you should. But, there isn’t a laundry, so you can’t. That’s unfortunate, huh?” she smiled. “By the way, what’s the square root of negative one?”

“I’m going to find a friend,” I muttered, giving up and heading for the door.

“That’s not the right answer!” she called as I slammed the door behind me.

If I thought that hell was boredom, I was wrong.

Hell was having to spend the next six years dealing with Jillian.

I rolled my eyes. I was fairly certain that it was about five o’clock now – it had been four thirty when I had finally gotten out of processing – which meant that Ryan was probably working…or slumming it up with his FBI buddies. One of the two. I stood against the wall, debating on whether or not I should go searching for him. Well, I didn’t exactly know where he would be anyways – he was working right now if he was an actual inmate, and unless he was outside for work, I wouldn’t be able to find him.

Then again, my other option was going back into my room and having to deal with Jillian.

Time to go find the liar.

Well, at the very least I could get acquainted with the place. I started walking for a few minutes until I came to a clear glass door that led to the prison courtyard. It was either the courtyard or wandering around the perimeter fence on the other side of the prison. I could see that the girl’s half was filled with people wandering around, but the boy’s half only had a few guys, all of whom were working.

Naturally, there were about twenty guards in the place, but that went without saying.

I sighed, opening the door and walking outside. I sensed that everyone had turned their eyes to me, but, instead of looking away, the majority of them kept on staring. Lovely, I thought. I’m known. I had hoped that it wouldn’t be this way, but, apparently, I had been wrong. My mom was as infamous as Al Capone; if you were involved in the world of crime, you knew about her.

Unfortunately, that meant you also knew about me.

I had never gone to high school, but I was suddenly getting the feeling that I was an outcast. While I’m sure there were some people here that admired or respected my mom, there were probably even more that had gotten screwed by her, whether directly or indirectly. I had never done anything to them, but they didn’t care, and nor did I expect them to. I doubted they would take the whole “I hate my mother” as an excuse for not hating me, even though I was full-on planning to keep up that lie.

So, I scowled at them all. It probably didn’t help my case, but I was not in the best mood right now. I had gone from being examined by what was probably a group of pedophiles to having the living shit annoyed out of me by some freak and now I was being whispered about and stared at like I was the freak.

I wasn’t a freak, though. I was just the daughter of a famous con.

Apparently, one that had screwed everyone in this place.

I wasn’t the only one that life had screwed, then.

I walked over to the fence, already knowing that there was no chance that Ryan would be over there – I didn’t see anyone wearing a baseball hat, and something told me even in prison he would still try and sport one. I got a feeling that it would be confiscated, but oh well. Jillian had somehow gotten cigarettes, so there must be some sort of good behavior system. Either that or corruption amongst the ranks.

I sighed, placing a hand on a section of barbed wire that wouldn’t hurt me, and looked over at the boy’s side. Nobody over there really stood out to me… well, except for one person. But, that was only because the mere sight of him brought about a further irritation in me. I had never liked scene kids, and this kid was most definitely a scene kid. They were just such wannabees to me. Furthermore, in my business, you wanted to blend in – it was what kept you in business. Scene kids just seemed to be all about being loud and expressive and disrupting my entire way of life, which was to not be noticed. It was hard not to be noticed, though, when you had neck-length hair that was dyed black with red highlights in it, a lip piercing, snake bites, and eyeliner.

None of it really went with the orange jumpsuit, to be honest.

The kid I was staring at looked up and I scowled at him. He rolled his eyes, looking away from me. I turned back around, scanning my side of the courtyard.

Jesus Christ, this place was more diverse than New York City.

I wasn’t kidding. There was literally a person from every nationality, every size, every social clique, here. There were the usual prison clichés – big, bodybuilder type women that looked like men – and there were fragile looking girls, who looked no more than thirteen and might burst into a cloud of dust if you touched them. There were scene queens and gangsters, people who were obviously spoiled brats and those who had been total nerds.

As I continued looking, I also began to notice that there was a type of order to the way things were set up. It seemed that on the outer edges of the courtyard was where all the weak people were set up and as you went closer to the center, the inmates became stronger and surrounded by more henchwomen, which meant that the girl right in the middle should be…

A bull.

I had to blink a few times to make sure it was actually a human and not a misplaced animal sitting on the center table with a barbell in her hand. Then, I had to make sure that it was actually a woman and not a man sitting there. Oh, this girl matched the description of prison cliché so perfectly it wasn’t even funny. She was huge – tall and wide – she was muscular, she looked like a man, she had an obvious tattoo, and she was staring right at me.

…Ah, hell.

It took me three seconds to realize this girl was not a fan of me, or, more importantly, my mother. I didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t matter – it was obvious to me that my mom had screwed her. Either that or the girl had some serious anger issues. Either way, I was in some serious shit now – this girl could easily beat me to a pulp. I had my strengths, yes, but not many of them concerned my physical abilities. The bull, on the other hand? Clearly, her strength was her strong point. She could crush me, little, short, thin old me, without breaking a sweat.

Still, I was determined not to show fear. I had been taught my entire life to never show fear, even when faced with a life-threatening situation. This time was no different – I had killed someone much bigger than her before.

Admittedly, I had done it using a gun, but that was beside the point.

I kept eye contact going with her as she glared at me, until she finally broke it. I let out a sigh, momentarily happy that that was over with, until I saw that she was making a straight beeline for me. I backed up against the fence, feeling suddenly trapped, as every eye in the courtyard turned to the two of us.

She stopped in front of me, two flunkies on either side of her. The other four I had no problem with, because they didn’t appear to have much physical strength. The bull, on the other hand, captivated most of my attention. “Well, if it ain’t Alex Rugenwald,” she taunted in her deep man-voice.

I bit back the sarcasm that I really wanted to throw at her. Now was not the time to be smart and witty, even though the opportunities were plenty. “Obviously, it is,” I replied, crossing my arms and standing my ground.

“Your mom screwed my family out of twenty grand,” the bull growled.

“You were aware you were dealing with a con, correct?” I asked, choosing my tone extremely carefully.

“If I were, I wouldn’t have made a fuckin’ deal with her!”

“Well, that’s your problem and not mine,” I said slowly. “My mom and I don’t get along all that well anyways. If she screwed you, I’m sorry, but I had nothing to do with it.”

“Yeah, well, to me, you did. You look plenty like her anyways. I’ll be happy to change that.”

She took a step closer and I instinctively backed up, holding my hands up. “Do you really want to be thrown in solitary?” I asked, trying to convey worry for her into my voice.

“My dad killed himself cause of that bitch!” The bull roared. I flinched, feeling spit fly at my face as the bull got closer.

“Look, I’m really sorry about that,” I lied, still holding my hands up, “but I already told you, I had nothing to do with it! If you want to punish somebody, go after my mom, I really don’t care!”

“Yeah, but that bitch isn’t here. Good job on filling in for her,” she snarled, punching her fists together.

“That’s not the best idea, Annie.”

I looked over my shoulder, about ready to hug the other person in thanks until I saw it was the scene kid from across the fence. He was standing against the fence, both hands on the wire. From here, I could see his eyes were a dark blue and his skin was a pale white, complimenting his hair color and eyeliner nicely. I scowled at him, muttering, “I don’t need your help.”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t bother with her, Annie. Look at her. She isn’t worth it. You could pound her into the ground in seconds; that wouldn’t really give you any satisfaction, now would it?”

I could hardly believe it – the bull was actually listening to him. Suddenly, I was angry – did he really think I wasn’t going to put up a fight? “I can handle myself, thanks,” I growled.

“If you could, I wouldn’t be here,” he muttered back, looking back at Annie. “Believe me, Annie; you’ll get your revenge eventually. You’re out in ten years. You can go hunting then. Leave her kid alone for now. At least until there’s less guards here.”

Annie glared at me then looked back at the kid. “Alright, Aidyn. But I swear to god, if she even thinks for a second she can fuck me over like her mom, I’ll beat her to a fucking pulp, you understand?”

“I’ll be cheering you on.”

“Good.” She looked at me, shoving me backwards. I snarled, swiping at her face and missing by miles. She and her posse laughed harshly, turning away from me and walking back to their table.

I was furious – with Annie and her posse and with this kid who thought he could just fucking butt in on my personal fucking affairs! I turned back around. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I snarled, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “I had that entire thing under control-”

“From where I was standing, it looked like you were about to get your face rearranged,” he interrupted. I glared at him, not wanting to know that I secretly agreed. “It looks much better in its current arrangement.”

“Are you fucking flirting with me?”

“Prostitution,” he said simply, a cocky smirk crossing over his features. “It’s a habit.”

“Oh, lovely, you’re diseased.”

“I can’t have kids.”

That stopped me for a second. I quickly recovered though, fixing him with another glare. “I can handle situations on my own.”

“You’re obviously new around here, so I’m going to tell you how things work,” he said, acting as if I had said nothing. “That, right there, is Annie. She’s not a murderer officially, but we can all tell she is. She got arrested for some major DUI and assault shit, I don’t know exactly, but I really don’t care. She is in charge of every girl here. I don’t suggest being on her bad side.”

“Too fucking late for that,” I scoffed.

He rolled his eyes. “Just because your mother is criminal royalty doesn’t make you a princess.”

“I gathered that, thanks,” I growled.

“Good. Now try not to fuck things up again. I don’t really feel like saving your ass twice, even though it does look good.”

I balled my hands into fists as he walked away. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” I called.

He looked back. “Aidyn,” he said simply, another cocky smirk on his face. He winked at me then, turning back around and walking away.