The Knife and the Butterfly (18 page)

“Just woke up with my insides in a mess. Feels like I’ve got a hangover from too many hits of this place.” I try to smile.

Gabe shakes his head and puts two extra pieces of toast on my tray. “Drink plenty of water, now,” he says. “You’ve got to hurry up.”

He’s pointing a shaky finger at last night’s dinner tray, so at first I think he means I shouldn’t take so long handing it to him.

“Here,” I say.

“You don’t get it, son. You got to make some choices.” He gives me this look like I ought to know what he means.

“Gabe—”

“Time’s running real short,” he says.

I feel what he means even though I can’t understand it with my head. I want to hurry, but I don’t know how. I lie back down on the cot and fall asleep chewing the crust of the toast. Dreams swarm over me like flies. Most of them are dark, and the me that’s dreaming is praying I will forget them before I wake up.

I’m sick for two whole days, slipping in and out of a crazy, tripping sleep. At first I’m too out of it to care, but once I feel a little better, I realize that Pakmin hasn’t come to see me even once. On the third day, I ask Gabe about it when he brings breakfast. He frowns and repeats the stuff about hurrying up. But before he leaves I make him promise to see what he can do.

Another day passes without a visit from Pakmin, and I start to get scared that my days of observing are over. How am I supposed to figure anything out from my cell? What do they expect me to do?

Finally Pakmin shows up. I’m curled up under the blanket half asleep with my black book tucked between my legs when I hear his footsteps. I barely have time to hide my stuff before he gets to my cell.

Even though it feels like it’s been ages since I saw him, he acts like nothing’s different. Like I haven’t been going crazy in here. I watch his face for any changes, but he keeps it blank. He lets me into the observation room and then leaves without saying a word.

Lexi’s in the meeting room across the table from Janet. I’m kind of pissed to be walking in on the middle of the session, but I’m not about to complain. I pull one of the plastic chairs close to the window and listen.

“What about family?” Janet is saying.

“Mostly I think about him,” Lexi says.

“Your father?” Janet asks.

“No,
him
. Azael. I think about him a lot.”

“As family?”

Lexi shrugs. “I don’t know what as. He’s just there. I can’t stop thinking about him. What do you think that means?”

“It means you’re telling the truth about your feelings, for one thing,” Janet says.

“You think that really matters? Saying how you feel?”

“It’s the starting place for knowing—for knowing who you are. And that’s everything.” She stretches her thick arms out, and I can see the big sweat rings under her armpits. I can tell that Lexi notices, too, because she looks away. But she doesn’t say anything about it.

“You know what I feel the worst about?” Lexi says.

“What?”

“After everything that happened, I went and ate Mexican food with my friends. Had chips and salsa and talked shit like nothing was different, like nobody—I don’t know why I did that.”

Janet watches her for a minute. “Would you do it again?”

There’s a moment of silence, then Lexi shakes her head. Just barely, but she does. “The people I did it for, I haven’t heard from them. Nothing. Like I don’t even exist to them. But knowing that, knowing they don’t care about me, it doesn’t change anything. You still can’t take things back.”

“No, you can’t. But you can own up to your mistakes.”

“But who to? Who do you tell?”

“That one’s on you, Lexi.”

“Maybe I could—”

I’m holding my breath, thinking, this is it, this is finally it. Here’s where I find out what’s going on. But then some middle-aged guy busts into the room, and a tall guard comes in behind him. The first man is wearing a suit. Is this the guy Lexi calls Gray Suit? His face looks like a tomato, and he’s moving so fast that his tie whips behind him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouts at Janet. He’s got Lexi’s notebook in one hand. He turns to her for a second. “Not another word, Lexi. This session is over!”

I stand up and put my hands on the window. I look hard at the notebook that the suit is waving around. I wonder, is the necklace in there? I wonder, what did he see in what she wrote that I missed? Then I remember that I’ve been out for a couple of days. She’s had the notebook back for a while. Plenty of time to take the necklace out. Plenty of time to write more. But what did she write?

“How could you do this to her?” he demands, getting right in Janet’s face. His mouth moves like he’s chewing on his own lip.

“Stop it, stop it!” Lexi shouts at the suit, but he doesn’t listen to her.

“Do you want her to stay locked up? Is that your idea?” he asks Janet.

Janet’s face goes white. “What are you talking about? I only—”

“I know what you did!” The suit slams the journal down on the table. “Get up, Lexi. You won’t be seeing her again.”

“You can’t do that!” Lexi protests. “No way. Janet’s helping me. I’m finally getting my shit together. It’s for real. I—”

“Get up!” he repeats.

When she doesn’t, he grabs her by the wrists and pulls her up. He turns back to Janet. “What you did is so unprofessional, so outside the bounds of your position. I’m going to see to it that you never pull a stunt like this again.”

“All I wanted was to show her how to be honest with herself,” Janet says real quiet, never taking her eyes off of him.

Then the suit and the guard are dragging Lexi out of there. She’s crying hard, and she shouts over her shoulder, “I’m sorry, Janet!”

I don’t even get what any of it means. I feel like I’m about to fall over a cliff, but I don’t know which way to step to stay safe. What does Lexi know about me? What did she see?

I walk to the other end of the observation room and stare through the window onto Lexi’s empty cell. I think, don’t do me wrong, Lexi. Please don’t. I think about Eddie and how he needs me on the outside. I think about winning Becca back. I think about Regina and how I don’t want her to have to tell her friends that her big brother is locked away for good. It’s almost like praying except, really, I know I’m just talking to myself. I keep it up even when Lexi comes back and falls crying onto her bed. After a while, she gets out a pen and starts scribbling inside the pages of a fat book with the covers stripped off, probably her grandma’s Bible. I guess the suit kept her notebook, but she’s still got to write. I draw to know my mind. Lexi writes to know hers.

After maybe an hour, Lexi’s mom, the pretty woman with dark hair, comes into the cell with the suit. It’s just the three of them, no guard. Who knows how they got permission to have a visit like that, but anything’s possible if you’re white.

The man goes on for a long time about how Janet is crazy, how she’s trying to ruin Lexi’s life. He says how Lexi’s testimony is key in the trial, how she’s got to know every word of it perfectly. He says the same things over and over. Lexi nods, even says “yes, sir” once, but I think his words are rolling right off of her. Or maybe I just hope they are.

Then her mom starts in. “Listen, Lex, Mr. VanVeldt told me what happened. You’ve got to think hard about this. Do you really understand the charges? Do you understand what can happen if they find you guilty? You’ve got to think hard, peanut.”

Lexi bites her lip and looks her mother in the eye. But this time I don’t think she’s trying to pick a fight. This time, I think she’s just trying to get her mom to see her. Really see her.

“Look, honey,” the mom says, softer now, “I believe in telling the truth, but maybe you should tell God the truth and trust your lawyers about court. You’re scaring me, sweetie.”

Lexi stands up and walks over to her mother, placing her hands on her shoulders. “I love you, Mom,” she says. It’s the first time she hasn’t called her mom “Shauna,” at least as long as I’ve been watching. And from the look on her mom’s face, I’m guessing she hasn’t said “I love you” in a long time.

“Can I see Meemaw?” Lexi asks. “In here, like this?”

Lexi’s mom looks at the man in the suit. He just throws up his hands.

When Pakmin leads me out of the observation room, I wish I could talk to him, ask him questions, but I’m afraid of giving away how little I know. From watching Lexi and her mom, I know she’s being tried for something, but I don’t know what it is—or what she has to gain by dragging me into her shit. For now, the question is, will she frame me, or won’t she? What I really want to know is what I can do about it. Or is this part of some sicko torture where I’ve got to watch myself get screwed over?

CHAPTER 34: NOW

It’s been two days since Pakmin came for me. Sometimes he passes by on his way to get other guys, but when I call to him, he acts like he can’t hear me.

I get lonely, especially when I wake up first thing in the morning. It gets harder and harder for me to remember what it felt like to be out in the world, free to move around, touch people, eat whatever I want. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like just to hear a familiar voice. Not to be free or anything, just to have that sound in my ears. First I think of Becca, her laugh all sweet and low.

But that always makes me sadder, so I decide to imagine someone I wouldn’t get to see even if I was on the outside. I think about dialing the number for my Grams out in Cali and asking for Regina. But this place even messes with my daydreams, because when I imagine Abue picking up, things go wrong.

“
Quién habla
?” she asks me.

“It’s me, Azael.”

“Who?” Abue asks again. “You must have the wrong number.” Then she hangs up. When Gabe brings me breakfast, I want to ask him, what does it mean if not even my grandma remembers me? But I don’t. I take the tray without saying anything. I sit on the cot and eat my banana and cereal.

Finally Pakmin comes for me. “Where you been?” I ask him.

He ignores my question. “This one might be your last, my friend,” he says when he lets me into the observation room.

I walk straight to the window onto Lexi’s cell.No time for kicking back in the crappy plastic chairs now.

Instead of her county issues, she’s wearing a skirt and a jacket, high-heeled shoes. She sits on the edge of her bed combing through her wet hair with her fingers. Her hands fall like she’s forgotten what she’s doing, and her eyes are all red and puffy. She looks around the room until her gaze finally settles on the corner of the room where the sink is. When she kneels down, I realize that she’s unscrewing one of the bolts that anchors the toilet to the concrete. Once she’s got it loose, she gets down under the sink. That’s where she carved her name. I remember that from her notebook. If I squint, I can even make out the double lines of the S and the L together.

The wannabe badass formerly known as Sexi Lexi is looking shaky as shit this morning. She steadies one hand against the concrete blocks, then starts scratching. She’s spelling something out when there’s a knock and her door opens. She palms the bolt and spins around all surprised, but it’s just her grandmother. So she’s not really busted.