Prisoner (Criminals & Captives #1)(15)

The vignette runs back and forth between the rat and the boy and the time the rat doesn’t come back for days. The boy marks the days on the wall with a nail, staking out the southeast corner where the rat comes and goes. His precise focus on dates and hours suggests that he has nothing else but that rat.

The boy doesn’t get to go outside. That fact is never stated, but it’s painfully clear.

The piece is subtle but powerful, and his honesty and bravery blows me away, because he dug into the darkest part of his life with quiet acceptance and a total lack of self-pity. My childhood had darkness too, but I am honest enough to admit there’s self-pity. And not much acceptance, really.

There are no adults in this story. Only the boy, the rat, Manuel, and some of his friends who ooh and aah over the rat. Grayson describes the rat vividly, the gray fur and twitching nose, the crooked spot in his tail where it must’ve been broken once.

Kind of like the boy’s arm got broken. That’s how Grayson puts it in the story—his arm got broken. The passive language and the absence of explanation imply someone broke it on purpose. Who? The vignette doesn’t tell.

There was this shock before the pain set in, he wrote. That was the good part, because once the pain started, it never went away. Grayson’s writing voice is both insightful and matter-of-fact.

Who was keeping Grayson in that basement? What horrible things happened to him there, where a dirty, skittish rat was the best part of his day? It’s moving in the way that it skirts the edges of the reality of it, implying it but never quite naming it.

I think about intrepid little Manuel, twitching his whiskers, looking for his pizza crusts. When he’s missing for a few days, I know he’s left for good. Sometimes I dream up this whole life for him playing outside, and it makes it easier.

I give him suggestions on cleaning up the language, but the piece is solid, and it has the ring of truth, though I’ll admit to having my moments of doubting him after the baseball story.

One night I Google him, just because I have to know for sure that it’s real—because I want to believe him. I’ve refrained from Googling the men in my class—it feels like an invasion of their privacy, and it still does as the page loads with hits for Grayson Kane.

Search listings promise sordid tales of a trial, but something darker draws my attention—a row of images.

There he is. Grayson. Not Grayson like I know him now, tall and wide and intimidating as heck. This Grayson is a little boy. I recognize his features in the young, solemn face.

On a milk carton.

He stares into the camera without a smile. His hair has been cut straight across his forehead, a bowl cut. His eyes are dark and solemn.

I click.

MISSING, it says on the milk carton above the image. It gives his height and date of birth and his weight. Seventy-five pounds. A little boy. Last seen near a white and blue ice cream truck.

If you have any information regarding this missing youth, please contact your local county sheriff’s department.

A lot of missing child cases are custody disputes, but the ice cream truck suggests he was taken. Kept. In a basement.

How long was he held before they found him? A day? Two days?

Long enough to make friends with a rat. Two weeks?

My stomach churns—but not with doubt like before. Now it’s filled with anguish for the little boy I never knew. For the little boy I read about in a short memoir piece. There are so many gaps between the scared boy he was then and the scary man he is now.

I close the page. I’ve seen enough.

At some point Grayson was taken. Held. Those were his brown eyes staring out at me from the back of a milk carton.

*

I’m excited and relieved when the box of professionally printed journals arrives at my dorm room. It’s just two days before the launch party, and I was worrying the copies wouldn’t come in time.

I pull one out and run my finger over the header. I stayed up so many nights getting it just right. The program grant even paid for a graphic designer to do the cover, and it’s gorgeous. This project seems to mean something to the guys, and it means something to me now too.

I recall Esther’s words about giving the men space to tell their stories as I turn to Grayson’s page. I wanted honesty from him. The kind of depth I knew he was capable of.

I got so much more.

It makes a brilliant centerpiece for the first issue. It almost hurts to publish it, putting out words so incredibly raw.

The Kingman Journal is already up online and the pageviews are rising. People are drawn to the realness of the pieces as much as I am. There are ten pieces in all, unless you want to count mine—part of the project was that the teacher participate and write a vignette of her own, so that the stories appear alongside each other. I just put in something old I already had—a piece about my first day at college. It’s a sort of stupid piece, but the journal is for the guys, not for me.





Chapter Eleven




Abigail


The classroom is the same stark room it’s always been, but it strikes me now? on the last day, that I’ll miss it. We did something meaningful here, and I’m glad I didn’t quit. A sort of wistfulness overtakes me as I stand in front and wait for the men to enter.

I curse myself for having worn my blue cashmere sweater—I know better than to wear something so formfitting, considering the way the men look at me. I don’t know what got into me.