After (8 page)

She’s still here. It wasn’t a dream.

She can smell herself, an intense combination of greasy hair and BO overlaid with the sick spiciness of soured milk and blood that had seeped through her clothing and dried. She’d never taken a shower last night, even though the psychiatrist had told her she could. At dinnertime, she’d gotten a fresh jumpsuit and undershirt along with her tray, but it hardly mattered now.

She pushes herself to the edge of her plastic bed, kicks off the sheet. Gloomy daylight hovers in the room, leaking through the three window slats over the stainless steel toilet. It could be morning, but she’s not sure. Once the staff had given her back the bedding last night and she’d finally fallen asleep, she’d slept hard. Like the dead.

She hears noise coming from outside her room. She stiffens, straining her ears. Muffled voices. Movement.

The girls.
Is she going to have to go out there now? Have them follow her with their eyes and wonder? Hear them whispering about her?

She sits very still, listening. Everything is reduced to her heartbeat and her breath and the indistinct sounds outside. No one is coming for her, she decides. She pushes herself off her bed and creeps toward the door, toward the slim rectangular window there, and peeks out.

The olive cell doors bordering the large room are opening. Girls in orange jumpsuits emerge from them. They slink to divergent corners of the room, like cats. One girl has a mop, another with a bucket joins her, and together they clean the vinyl tile. A black girl Windexes the glass door leading out to the courtyard. A tiny blonde stands before the control desk and talks to the staff there, but it’s not the one from yesterday. This staff is older with dark skin and short dark hair.

Devon stands watching for a long time, careful to remain unseen. Some of the girls congregate around a cardboard box beside the control desk, pulling out large ziplock bags containing toiletries. They carry these bags back to their rooms, then return them to the box sometime later.

Everything appears calm and orderly, and this helps Devon relax. Take away the orange jumpsuits, and this could be a dorm at soccer camp—doing light chores, getting dressed, preparing for a day of scrimmages and skills.

Soon a male staff rolls a cart into the room from the entryway. The girls abandon their activities to line up and in turn retrieve a cafeteria tray from the cart. Each carries her tray, either to one of the two round plastic tables or back to her cell.

Breakfast.
Devon’s stomach groans as she watches the girls move their plastic sporks between their trays and their mouths. When was the last time she ate? Back in the hospital, she remembers. Scrambled eggs and English muffins. A lifetime ago.

She wishes now that she’d eaten the sloppy joes and potato salad the staff had brought her last night. Her stomach had been too jumpy to keep anything down. As the tray sat, the food turned cold and unappetizing, orange grease coagulated on ground beef.

Devon’s back aches from standing in one place so long. And her bladder is stretched tight and throbs. She hasn’t yet dared to use the toilet in the corner of the room—too gross. But she can’t avoid it any longer. Not unless she wants to add urine to her already dreadful stench.

She turns from the door and shuffles the ten or so steps to the toilet on the other side of her room. Her pelvis is still stiff, and the place between her legs feels hollow and sore, and this amazes Devon. Will she ever feel all together again?

Devon pauses to scrutinize the toilet, a look of disgust on her face, which she catches in the tiny mirror at eye level above the toilet. It’s very small and scratched, but she stares at it for a long moment.

Her present reflection fades and, in her mind, another materializes. A similar look of disgust on her face, but then the mirror before her was wide and the bathroom spacious and bright. And the look was directed at herself.

She had crept away from his bed, leaving him asleep across the jumbled sheets. She’d closed the bathroom door softly behind her. Standing naked before the mirror, she’d stared at the girl she saw there. At the disheveled hair and smeared mascara and lips that he’d kissed. Slowly shaking her head at the image in the mirror, the thought played over and over in her mind like a scratched track on a CD:
Why? Why did you do it? Why did you let it happen?
Then she’d turned away, covered her face with her hands, and cried. She would never again be the same person. She’d been irreversibly changed.

Devon backs away from the tiny scratched mirror now, rubs at her eyes to clear away the memory. When she drops her hands, she notices the toilet paper roll, stuck into the round cubby on the side of the stainless steel toilet. Her tight bladder reminds her of why she’s standing there. She steels herself for the job, then pulls a length of the paper, folding it over, and then pulls another, meticulously covering every inch of the rimless seat. The toilet isn’t as filthy as she’d feared; it’s pretty clean, actually. But still, Devon won’t take the chance of catching something gross, like lice. Or something worse, like an STD. Devon’s seen the girls who use these toilets. They’d laughed at her. Yeah, they’d be the kind to have lice and STDs.

She unsnaps her jumpsuit, letting it fall to her ankles, then tugs down her underwear. Her thick maxi pad, badly needing replacement, sticks to her pubic hair, and she winces at the discomfort and the mess. She lowers herself to the seat and waits for the relief to come.

When she’s finished, she sinks her forehead into the palms of her hands.
That wasn’t so bad.
With her forearms pressed into her sore and heavy breasts, she remembers that she’s still braless beneath her undershirt.

The door to her room scrapes open, and Devon jerks upright.

A short, slight woman, the staff from behind the control desk, steps through the doorway, holding a food tray in one hand.

The woman looks at Devon, and Devon yanks her jumpsuit up over her knees. Sweat breaks out everywhere.

“Caught you in the act, huh?” the woman says. “Don’t think this is a first for me, okay? You girls need to get over yourselves.”

Devon watches as the woman continues inside, shoving the crumpled sheet out of the way and placing the tray at the foot of Devon’s bed. “This is your breakfast, but don’t expect room service every day, okay? After today, you’ll be coming out of your room like everybody else. We always keep the new residents in their rooms for twenty-four hours after Intake, okay? To get used to things. It’s called Orientation Status. That’s a rule, okay?”

From her mortifying spot on the toilet, Devon, in a funk of disbelief, observes the woman. She can’t understand the woman’s absolute disregard for her privacy, moving methodically as she does in her shapeless Seattle Mariners T-shirt and black Adidas sweatpants and speaking in that crusty lilting tone of hers with a hint of an accent that Devon can’t place. She could be Mexican or Native American or even Indian, judging from her skin color and short black hair, straight and flat and shapeless on her head, and her chiseled facial features. She could be forty, or she could be sixty; Devon can’t guess.

The woman glances around the room, nodding to herself, like she’s doing a mental inspection. Then she turns her dark eyes on Devon. “My name is Henrietta, okay? You’re going to be seeing a lot of me. Most of the time I work nights, okay? But today, I have the day shift, too. Back-to-back shifts. So you better not mess with me, okay? I am not in a mood to be messed with.”

Devon nods.

“Good.” Henrietta also nods, satisfied that she’d gotten across whatever she’d intended to communicate. She drops a thin booklet on top of the food tray. “You need to read this, okay? If you have any questions, just ask. I make cell checks every fifteen minutes, okay? That means me looking into your window to make sure everything’s all right. By lunchtime, you need to be ready for my test, okay?”

Devon nods again. “Okay,” she whispers. She doesn’t want to tell Henrietta that she’d already received the booklet from the staff woman last night, that it’s stashed in the cubby under her bed. She’d fallen asleep memorizing it. That was before the doctor had shown up, waking her.

“And you need to pass it, okay? So don’t blow it off.” Henrietta studies Devon for a moment. Devon averts her eyes to the floor, feeling miserably uncomfortable under the woman’s gaze, wishing that she would just move along and give her some privacy. And quit saying “okay?” every five seconds. How annoying. Devon shifts on her seat, her butt growing painfully numb.

“After you eat, you’ll need to take a shower, okay?”

“Oh.” That makes Devon feel better, something positive to look for. She glances up. “Okay. That would be . . . really great. Thank you.”

“Thanking me makes no difference. It’s a hygiene issue with you, okay?” Her voice turns scolding now. “Let me tell you, I would have made sure you got one last night, even if I had to drag you out of your cell myself.” She clamps her mouth shut, says nothing further for a moment. “But we’ll wait—okay?—until the other girls start school for the day. That way we won’t be violating the twenty-four-hour rule of no contact with the other residents, okay? The shower is right across the common area. So it’s just better if no one’s around then, okay?”

School
?
They have school here
? Well, whatever. She won’t have to see the girls, at least not in the near future. And maybe not at all. She may be gone soon, hopefully before tomorrow ever comes. She’ll be back at Stadium High School, sitting in her own classes. Turning in her critical analysis on
The Taming of the Shrew
that’s due for Mr. Andrew at the end of the week. She’d already finished it two days after he’d assigned it.

The woman steps toward Devon. Her face is intent, almost like a hawk’s on the hunt.

Devon shrinks back, her spine touching the cool stainless steel behind her.

The woman pulls a thick maxi pad out from somewhere and tosses it on Devon’s lap.

Devon stares at it. She can feel heat crawling across her face.

“You have a meeting with your lawyer at ten.”

Her lawyer? Devon feels her heart pick up, beating fast. Maybe she
is
leaving here. Soon. No, today! Is that the reason for the shower? So she can leave all fresh and clean?

Devon looks up, smiling slightly, her embarrassment momentarily forgotten. “Thank you.”

But the door’s clanked shut. Henrietta is already gone.

The first thing Henrietta says when Devon steps outside the shower room is, “Comb your hair.” She shoves a black plastic comb into Devon’s hand, then leads her to the door labeled CONFERENCE ROOM, two doors down from the shower and directly across the common area from Devon’s cell. “Let me tell you, first impressions are lasting impressions. You only get one, so make yours good.” She opens the door and moves aside. “Okay?”

Devon takes a step inside and stops. Who she sees isn’t who she’d pictured. This person isn’t old and balding or wearing a shabby, dandruff-sprinkled suit or hunching over a stack of files, barely acknowledging her presence.

Instead, this person is a woman. And young. In a dark, perfectly pressed suit, cream cuffs peeking out of her jacket sleeves. A tight, neat updo, almost like a beehive. Blonde hair, but not like her mom’s fake blonde straight out of a box. This woman’s hair is almost gold, with too many colors weaving through it and catching the light to be fake. Tiny, wire-framed glasses. And she’s looking right at Devon.

Devon feels the teeth of the comb biting into the palm of her hand. She’s acutely aware of her own sloppy appearance, her hair still wet from the shower, dripping onto the shoulders of her jumpsuit and leaving wet tracks.

This must be some mistake
, Devon thinks. This isn’t her lawyer. This person belongs in an episode of
Law & Order
, not here with her. Devon turns back, but Henrietta is gone. The door has clanked shut, probably locked.

“Devon?”

Devon turns back around. The woman half-stands, smiles, and offers her hand across the table. “Hi. I’m Dominique Barcellona, your attorney. You can call me ‘Dom.’ How are you doing today?”

Devon stares. She can detect a faint whiff of the heavy sweetness that clouds over the makeup counters at Nordstrom’s. It’s like what her mom sprays, thinking it will mask the cigarette smoke. Devon feels her heart twist, then harden, with the thought of her mom. Always hiding something and never present when Devon needs her. Devon frowns, looks at this coiffed woman with suspicious eyes: so, what is
she
hiding?

“Okay.” The woman’s voice has an edge to it now, but she keeps her lipsticked smile in place. “Mind sitting down?” She lowers her unshook hand slightly, indicating the stool across the table from her.

Devon realizes then that she had been rude; she hadn’t taken this woman’s hand and shaken it. So much for first impressions. She opens her mouth to apologize but then quickly shuts it. Why should she apologize? She’d been taken off guard, hadn’t she? And this woman . . . Devon feels an uneasiness growing inside. What will this woman want from her anyway?

“We have a lot to discuss today and, unfortunately, not a whole lot of time in which to do it.” The woman checks her thin watch on her wrist for emphasis. “So, we should get started right away.”

Discuss?
Devon doesn’t move.

The woman frowns slightly, then her hand disappears behind her back, smoothing her skirt before sitting down herself. “Uh, is there a problem, Devon? You seem a little . . . confused.”

Devon looks down at the comb in her hand, runs her thumb over its teeth. It tickles. “You’re not a man,” Devon whispers, then glances back up at her.

Something flicks in the woman’s eyes, and her frown is replaced with a smile. “Your powers of observation are impressive.” She laughs. “This
is
the twenty-first century. News flash: women have been attorneys for quite a while now, Devon.” She clicks her tongue. “Wishing for a man to rescue you—not a great way to make friends.”