Prisoner (Criminals & Captives #1)(8)

“You write in it upside down and from the back?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’d rather have my margins at the bottom instead of the top.” She folds the pages and stuffs them into her case. “It’s easier on the hand.”

I nod. Modifying your tools. That’s a pro thing to do. I find I like that. Admire it, even.

“Twenty objects. You understand?”

“Yes, Ms. Winslow,” I say.

She blinks.

I need to stop saying her name like that. She turns away, addressing the class. “How are we doing? Questions?” Her bid is met with silence. She walks up the side of the room in that pencil skirt and now that red cardigan, which felt soft as kitten fur. “As insignificant or boring as you want. It just has to be true. No fake stuff.” Up she walks, and around the back. “The most boring bit of honesty is worth ten thousand times as much as the most glittering piece of fiction in this class.”

I look at Teke in the back row, scribbling away, and I think about what he said—that she knows when you make stuff up. But will she really?

The idea of giving her anything real from my past feels like acid in my gut. Too high a price to pay. But I have to get in that online journal.

Stone’s got alerts set up for certain terms; it’s a way we identify places to hit. Whatever I write, if I weave in the right terms, he’ll see it in her little magazine. He can’t call me, but he knows I’m here, and it won’t take him long to catch my message. The censors are good here—I can only sneak in a name, who to bribe, but that’s all I’ll need. Stone and the guys can take it from there.

But my instructions to the gang have to be hidden inside something devastating enough to create a smoke screen. I have to make up something good, because no way can I give her anything real.

Teke raises his hand, and she walks over to him. He points to something on his paper, lips moving as he asks a question soft enough where I can’t hear. Apparently she can’t either, because she leans closer.

I grit my teeth. Every guy in here is checking her out. Even Dixon, who’s married with three kids. He looks too. I mean, she could be eighty years old and they’d still be looking, because we’re hard up. But she’s not eighty. She’s…what? Eighteen? Nineteen? Eyes so f*cking hopeful. God, she’s young.

But not too young. The curves beneath her stiff linen skirt give that much away. She’s all woman.

Forcing my gaze away, I glare down at the blank sheet of paper. Twenty things. Ordinary things. Real things. This is gonna be easy. If I could fool the head of the Cincinnati Art Museum into letting me “appraise” the tsar exhibit, this girl doesn’t stand a chance. I almost feel bad for her.

Another guy speaks up without raising his hand. “The last place I lived was the Jersey Penitentiary. There wasn’t ten things in the whole place.”

That draws a laugh.

“Twenty things,” she says, not backing down. I like that about her, how she tries to be strict. It won’t work on me, but the other men here, they respond to authority. She gets that.

An image of a baseball game forms in my mind. I didn’t play much baseball—they took me away when I was five, but I remember tagging along with my older foster brothers. They gave me the position of point guard. They’d make me be point guard and wear the right-handed mitt, and I would stand next to the water bottles and keys and keep score and get the balls. Those were the happiest times I remember, out in the sunshine playing baseball with my older brothers. I barely knew what I was doing—I don’t know shit about baseball except that part.

That was one of the things I would daydream about after they took me away. I start my list:

Water bottle next to a chain-link fence.

A piece of glass that is perfectly sharp on two corners, but with soft ridges on the other corner.

Flattened Taco Bell cup full of ants.

Right-handed mitt.

Mike’s hat for first base.

My shoe for second base.

Scrubby dandelion in the dust.

Working my way around the playground, I fill out the list just as she claps her hands.

“Pencils down,” she says like we’re taking some big test. “Now we’re going around the room, and each of you will share one thing from the list. You get to pick which thing. It can be the most important thing, or the least. Big or small. Anything you want.” She nods toward Teke. “Go ahead.”

Teke’s nervous. Sweating. It’s weird to see him this way. He could crush her as soon as look at her. That’s how f*cked up prison is—it reverses the natural order of things.

“There was a pistol,” he finally says. “A Beretta. But not just any gun. It got me through some tough times, you know. Kind of like it was lucky or something.”

She beams at him, all proud that he came up with something meaningful. It makes my gut twist. If the gun had been lucky, he wouldn’t be here.

Each of the guys has her full attention as they share their piece. It feels faintly like jealousy, watching her. I want her attention on me, but it never comes. We hear about a plaid couch. A hat. A key chain.

I pick up a pattern—she likes the personal stuff. The embarrassing stuff. She lights up on stuff you feel shitty about.

She never calls on me. Every guy here shares something except for me.

“Now I want you to pick one item, whatever you feel the most strongly about, and write a paragraph about it.”