Fractured Freedom(10)
I was all on my own and embracing my very own life. Yet, she begged me to fly back to Springfield, our little town, with her for a couple days to visit family.
My baby twin sister had a knack for finding my weakness. “The family misses you, Lilah. You went from UCLA straight off to nursing and you never visit. Mom cried the other night, I swear.”
Was any of that even true?
“You want to admit to anything else?” He smiled wide, and I knew he’d probably pat himself on the back as he walked out of the interrogation room.
“I think I’ll want to talk with a lawyer before I say anything else.”
He sneered at me. “You’re going to be in jail a long time, young lady.”
I cleared my throat, trying not to panic. “I get to make a phone call, right?”
Like I had anyone to call other than my mom and dad. If I called them, they’d probably panic too. I needed a plan of action. My mom watched court TV and my dad worked most days marketing beer, but that was about all the knowledge I was going to get from them.
The TSA officer leaned forward and put his hands on the table so he could look down at me sitting there, like I was the scum on the bottom of his shoe. “You’re under arrest for the possession of cocaine and smuggling. It’s a felony. You don’t get your phone call yet. Now, hands behind your back.”
Two other officers came in, like I was going to fight them.
Me. Delilah Hardy. Valedictorian of my high school class. I’d graduated summa cum laude from UCLA, for crying out loud. I’d never even so much as served a single detention in my entire academic career.
He read me my rights as I tried to suck in air and breathe it out slowly, methodically, and in the same rhythm.
The only person I knew to be calm in a terrible situation like this was a man I tried not to think about anymore. He was the reason I avoided going home. And yet every second I needed to take a relaxing breath, I thought of him. Dante.
He’d been sixteen when I was eleven and had locked myself in the dark basement of the neighbor’s house.
“Let’s count to seven, one breath out and one breath in, huh?” he’d said as he jiggled the lock. My brothers had left me, and Dante had found me ten minutes later, probably by hearing me hyperventilating.
We counted together. I heard the soft numbers rolling from his mouth, and by seven the door had opened for me to jump into his arms.
Seven was my number with him from then on. When they sent Izzy to juvenile hall for being high and stealing from a store while I was still in it, Dante and my brother Dom had been there to pick me up while my parents went to the station. We counted to seven. That time, I made him do it with me seven times.
I was probably going to have to count to seven, seven hundred times to feel better about this one.
Jesus. I was going to jail.
I wasn’t ready for that. I’d taken this job after college had delivered next to nothing of an experience. I found myself unfulfilled and completely scared that I would care about nothing my whole life, that I’d do nothing in it that would warrant someone looking twice at me.
I’ll admit to having smoked weed once with my sister in the woods. And it had been through a freaking apple because we didn’t have a pipe. We used a pencil to carve out a makeshift tube and bowl area to stuff the tiny bit of weed into. Honestly, my sister had done most of the work. I had sat there wide-eyed the whole time.
She’d graduated, obviously, to smuggling drugs and using me as a distraction since then. I’d graduated from nursing school. I was only trying to smuggle a good time out of my nurse gig.
I didn’t know whether to feed my rage or my panic at that moment.
I was going to jail.
And I hadn’t even done the goddamn crime.
“Bend over and cough.”
Why did I want to cry right now? It wasn’t like the woman was doing anything outside her job. Still, standing there naked and having to cough to see if I’d stuffed you-know-what you-know-where was degrading to say the least. I wanted to scream at the officer that this was a violation of my rights or my freedoms or my privacy or something.
I knew I’d be wrong, though. To them, I was a felon.
And they really believed I could have done it. I’d said as much with my own mouth. I’d claimed the bags as mine, never denying the smuggled drugs shoved in shampoo bottles—lots of them. I wasn’t sure what kind or exactly how much, but I was going to jail for it.
I didn’t know when I would get to make a call or if I would find my sister in here with me. Had they let her go? Would she come for me?
My mind raced as I was handed a grayish-white sheet and a pillow. “Hold on to those if you want to keep them.”
The clothing I put on was scratchy against my damp skin.
It was nothing like the movies. There were no calls allowed, no people I could talk to. I was sent to my cell, just given the number and pointed in that direction. A few women rolled their eyes at me and turned the other way when I nodded to them. Instead of engaging, I tried to keep calm and told myself, “One foot in front of the other.”
I’d figure everything out once I knew where my new home would be. Tears sprang to my eyes at the thought. As I got to my cell, the white bars of the door were a stark indicator that this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.
To think I’d cried over things in my life before being here seemed trivial. All those tears seemed spoiled now. Is this how Izzy had felt all that time in juvie?