Dark Places(32)

The next day she waited for him outside art class and asked him if he’d sit in the stairwell with her, and he said OK but just for a second, and they’d joked around for a whole hour on those shadowy stairs. At one point she grabbed his arm and leaned into him and he knew he should tell her not to, but it felt so sweet and not at all weird and just nice, not like Diondra’s sex-crazed scratching and yelling or his sisters’ poking and roughhousing, but sweet the way a girl should be. She wore lipgloss that smelled like bubblegum, and since Ben never had enough money for bubblegum—how f*cked-up was that—it always made his mouth water.

So they’d gone on like that for the last few months, sitting in the stairwell, waiting for her dad. They never talked on the weekends, and sometimes she even forgot to wait for him, and he’d be standing in the stairwell like a dick holding a packet of warm Skittles he’d found cleaning the cafeteria. Krissi loved sweet things. His sisters were the same way, they scrounged for sugar like beetles; he came home one time to find Libby eating jelly straight out of the jar.

Diondra never knew about the thing with Krissi. When Diondra did come to school, she beat it straight home at 3:16 to watch her soaps and Donahue. (She usually did this while eating cake batter straight from the mixing bowl, what was it with girls and sugar?) And even if Diondra did know, there was nothing wrong going on. He was like a guidance counselor in a way. An older guy advising a girl on homework and high school. Maybe he should go into psychology, or be a teacher. His dad was five years older than his mom.

The only iffy thing with him and Krissi happened just before Christmas and wouldn’t happen again. They were sitting in the stairwell, sucking on green apple Jolly Ranchers and jostling each other and suddenly she was much closer than usual, a small nudge of nipple on his arm. The apple smell was hot on his neck, and she just clung there against him, not saying anything, just breathing, and he could feel her heartbeat like a kitten on his bicep and her fingers squirm up near his armpits and suddenly her lips were right there on his ear, that breath turning his ear wet, his gums twitching from the tartness of the candy, and then the lips were trailing down his cheek, sending chills down his arms and neither of them acknowledging what was going on and then her face was in front of his, and those little lips pushing against his, not really moving, and the two of them just staying there with identical beating hearts, her entire body now fitted between his legs and his hands kept rigidly down by his sides, gone all sweaty, and then a small moving of his lips, just a little opening and her tongue was there, sticky and lapping and them both tasting of green apple and his dick got so hard he thought it might explode in his pants and he put his hands on her waist and held her for a second and moved her off him and ran down the stairwell to the boy’s bathroom—yelling, sorry sorry behind him—and he made it into a stall just in time to jerk twice and come all over his hands.





Libby Day





NOW





So I was going to meet my brother, all grown up. After my beer with Lyle, I actually went home and looked at Barb Eichel’s copy of Your Prison Family: Get Past the Bars! After reading a few confusing chapters about the administration of the Florida State Penitentiary system, I flipped back through the foxed pages to the copyright: 1985. How not remotely useful. I worried about receiving more pointless bundles from Barb: pamphlets about defunct Alabama waterslide parks, brochures about smithereened Las Vegas hotels, warnings about the Y2K bug.

I ended up making Lyle handle all the arrangements. I told him I couldn’t get through to the right person, was overwhelmed by it all, but the truth was I just didn’t want to. I don’t have the stamina: press numbers, wait on hold, talk, wait on hold, then be real nice to some pissed-off woman with three kids and annual resolutions to go back to college, some woman just wiggling with the hope you’ll give her an excuse to pull the plug on you. She’s a bitch all right, but you can’t call her that or all of a sudden there you are, chutes-and-laddered back to the beginning. And that’s supposed to make you nicer when you phone back. Let Lyle deal with it.

Ben’s prison is right outside Kinnakee and was built in 1997 after another round of farm consolidations. Kinnakee is almost in the middle of Kansas, not so far from the Nebraska border, and it once claimed to be the geographic center of the forty-eight contiguous United States. The heart of America. It was a big deal back in the ’80s, when we were all patriotic. Other cities in Kansas made a grab for the title, but Kinnakeeans ignored them, stubbornly, proudly. It was the city’s only point of interest. The Chamber of Commerce sold posters and T-shirts with the town’s name cursived inside a heart. Every year Diane bought all us girls a new shirt, partly because we liked anything heart-shaped, and partly because Kinnakee is an old Indian word, which means Magical Little Woman. Diane always tried to get us to be feminists. My mom joked that she didn’t shave much and that was a start. I don’t remember her saying it but I remember Diane, broad and angry as she always was after the murders, smoking a cigarette in her trailer, drinking ice tea out of a plastic cup with her name written in log-cabin letters on the side, telling me the story.

Turns out we were wrong after all. Lebanon, Kansas, is the official center of the United States. Kinnakee was working from bad information.


I’D THOUGHT I’D have months before I got permission to see Ben, but it seems the Kinnakee Kansas State Penitentiary is quick with the visitor passes. (“It’s our belief that interaction with family and friends is a beneficial activity for inmates, helping them stay socialized and connected.”) Paperwork and bullshit and then I spent the few intervening days going over Lyle’s files, reading the transcript of Ben’s trial, which I’d never mustered enough courage to do.