Burning Read online

  “I don’t know,” I say, absently touching my own hair. It doesn’t curl as nicely as Cara’s, but I wear it natural anyway and keep it cropped close to my head. My mother never would have coughed up the money to straighten it. “She was tall.”

  Cara taps a slim finger against her alien book. Tap. Tap. Tap. “Like, how tall?” she asks. “Freaky tall?”

  “Dr. Gruen isn’t an alien,” I say.

  “I didn’t say that,” Cara mutters, flipping a page in her book with more force than necessary. Ever since I mentioned Dr. Gruen an hour ago, Cara has attacked me with a nonstop string of questions. What was she wearing? What did she look like? What did she sound like? What did she say again?

  We don’t get a lot of visitors at Brunesfield.

  “She was just a person.” I’ve described Dr. Gruen in as much detail as I can remember, from her pointed face to the tiny gold rose pinned to her suit.

  “She was fancy,” I add. That’s what I really noticed. She was way too fancy for a place like Brunesfield, where the director can’t even afford a new rug.

  “So they want someone to watch over us?” Cara says. Issie snorts. When Cara says “they,” she means the government—people in black suits with perfect gelled hair who carry briefcases instead of guns and can ruin your life with a few strokes of their thousand-dollar pens. Issie and I make fun of her, but I kind of get it. Cara was solidly middle-class before ending up here. She never fell asleep to the sound of gunshots, like Issie and me. She’s used to people who hurt each other in different ways.

  “What about the other one?” Cara adds in a quiet voice. “The girl?”

  “Mary Anne,” I say.

  “Right. What’s her deal?”

  I shrug. “She didn’t say much.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more weirdo government craziness,” Issie grumbles. She turns over in bed, and the bunk sags above me.

  Officer Mateo’s voice echoes outside our door. “Lights off!”

  A mechanical click reverberates through the hallway, and the lights go off as one. Cara makes kissy noises.

  “Shut up,” Issie says. A white flashlight beam sweeps through our door, and both girls fall quiet. Mateo’s heavy boots thump past. For a long moment there’s silence.

  “He even looks sexy in the dark,” Issie whispers.

  “I just vomited in my mouth,” Cara says.

  “Are you two going to talk all night?” I roll over and bury my head in my pillow, trying to muffle the sound of their voices.

  “I’m not tired yet,” Issie says. “Tell us a story, Ang.”

  Cara groans. “I want to sleep.”

  “I know you like hearing them too,” Issie says. “Go on, Angela. Tell it.”

  I’ve been telling Issie stories since our first night at Brunesfield, when it was just me and her in the dorm. Issie was freaked because it was her second time here, and she was convinced she was never getting out. Her brothers are all Los Niños Malos gang members. They’d never let her join, but she was born into a life of drugs and violence.

  That night, I made up a story to make her feel better. I used to do it with Charlie too, when we were kids. He wanted to know why Dad left, so every night I’d tell him a new reason. Dad joined the circus. The government needed Dad for a secret mission to save the world. Dad didn’t actually leave; he just turned invisible and lost his voice.

  I wait for Cara to protest, but she sucks in a breath. “What story do you want to hear?” I ask.

  “Tell the one about us,” Issie says.

  “That’s not really a story,” I say, tilting my head so I’m no longer talking into the pillow. It’s the same story I told our first night here, but Issie never gets tired of it. “It’s what’s going to happen when we bust out of this place.”

  “How are we going to do that?” Issie asks. I hear the smile in her voice. This is part of the story too, the part where she doesn’t believe me. I chew on my lower lip, trying to come up with something new.

  “I was thinking we could steal a soupspoon from the kitchen,” I say, my voice hushed. “And we could tunnel through the floors. That concrete in the corner near the window is all crumbling now. Wouldn’t take us more than a month or two to make a hole.”

  “Or we could try the fences,” Issie adds.

  “Oh yeah. We’ll go over the fences one day at rec.” This is Issie’s favorite way of escaping, probably because it doesn’t involve any planning or waiting.

  “We’ll climb up the fences really quickly, right?” I continue. “And we’ll just crawl over the barbed wire. I don’t think it looks that sharp. The guards probably just put it up there to scare us. So we’ll climb over the barbed wire, and by the time they figure out what we’re doing, it’ll be too late. They’ll open all the security doors and shit and try to run after us, but we’ll make it to the woods first.”

  I pause, and in the silence I hear Issie inhale.

  “The woods are really deep,” I say “All the guards think we’d be too scared to try and live out there, because of the wolves and wild animals.”

  “But the wolves in the woods aren’t any worse than the wolves in here,” Issie adds. It’s part of the story I always tell, the part she likes the best.

  “Exactly,” I say. “The wolves in the woods aren’t any worse than Officer Brody or Peach or Crabby Crane. We could handle them. And the best part is that the woods are big. Huge. We could get lost there.”

  “And no one would ever find us,” Cara whispers, so quietly I almost don’t hear her.

  I’m the only one who knows why Cara was arrested. She whispered the story to me on a night like this, when Issie was in the infirmary with the flu.

  She told me how she set the alarm on her phone for two o’clock in the morning and crept out to the garage to find a hammer. Then she snuck back inside, to where her stepdad was passed out on the couch, and she smashed both his kneecaps.

  When I asked her why she’d do that, all she said was, “I wanted them to take me away.”

  I was supposed to tell her my story next. But I didn’t. I never tell my story.

  The blankets on Cara’s bed rustle as she turns to face me. The moonlight outside our barred window reflects off her eyes. I never asked her why she wanted to be taken away, but it’s easy to guess. Most of the girls in here have sad stories.

  “Right,” I tell her. “No one would ever find us.”

  I pause, letting the words hang in the darkness. I don’t really believe we’d be able to dig through the concrete floor with a soupspoon, and Issie doesn’t believe we’d survive in the woods for longer than a week before dying from hypothermia, and Cara doesn’t believe there’s a place in this world she could run where her problems wouldn’t find her. But I think we tell the story for the same reason people pray. Because we want so badly for it to be real.

  “How?” Cara says into the quiet. I’d just started to drift off, but her voice jars me awake again.

  “What?” I murmur.

  “How would we live out there?” Cara asks. “In the woods.”

  “I guess we’d have to find a cave to hide out in.” My eyes flutter closed. “We could wait there until Brody and everyone stopped looking for us. And we’d have to steal a bunch of stuff from the kitchen before we left. Stuff that wouldn’t go bad.”

  “We could steal all the frozen peas,” Issie says. Cara laughs under her breath.

  “Yeah,” I agree. “We’ll steal a bag of frozen peas, and we’ll heat them over a fire.”

  There’s a beat of silence, and then Issie sighs. “Maybe that doctor person will be good for this place. Things could get better.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Cara says. I don’t say it out loud, but I agree with Cara. It would take a lot more than a volunteer program to make this place better.

  The flashlight flickers into the hallway again, and the dim beam sweeps through our room. We all go quiet. I listen to the clomp, clomp, clomp of Mateo’s boots outside our door.
The flashlight illuminates our room for three seconds—just enough time for Mateo to count our heads and make sure we’re all there. Then the light disappears. Mateo’s footsteps echo down the hallway.

  I ease my eyes back open, but I don’t start the story again. Instead I imagine what it would be like. Hiding out in a cave in the snow while the Brunesfield guards searched for us. Heating frozen peas over a fire. Listening to the wind howl just outside. Never, ever going home.

  My eyes droop. I hear tree branches scratch at the narrow window near our ceiling, but that’s impossible. The trees are miles away. Their branches don’t reach this far.

  This thought circles through my head as sleep pulls me under. I dream of trees tiptoeing through the snow and wolves circling the woods and helicopter propellers beating against the sky. We’re running away, but I hear the Brunesfield guards crashing through the woods behind us. They’re going to catch us. Of course they’re going catch us.

  But at least we got to feel the wind in our hair. The snow crunching beneath our feet. For a little while, we were free.

  Officer Crane shows up after breakfast the next morning. “Miss Davis,” she says in a voice of steel. She stops at the door to the kitchen and folds her arms behind her back, a soldier coming to attention. Her glass eye stares at the wall behind me, like it sees something I don’t.

  “Whoa,” Issie says. “You look totally FBI.”

  I frown, staring at Crane’s outfit. The guards usually wear a polo and khakis—like camp counselors. But today Crane’s dressed in a button-down and black slacks. The silver patch attached to her shoulder reads “Brunesfield.”

  “New uniforms?” Cara asks. Officer Crane gives her a curt nod, her eye still on me.

  “I’m to take you to the Segregation Block,” she says. “Diamond on your back, please.”

  I drop the sponge I’d been using to scrub the breakfast dishes and put my arms behind my back to make a diamond with my hands. Crane absently touches her scar with her thumb as she tucks a gray lock of hair behind one ear. I wonder if she’s thinking of the girl who attacked her.

  “Say hi to my boyfriend for me,” Issie whispers as I shuffle past. I give her a quick thumbs-up behind my back, then make a diamond again before stepping into the hallway.

  We’re not allowed to talk while our hands are in diamonds, so I keep my mouth shut as we make our way to the basement. Brunesfield looms around us. It strikes me that no one, at any point, tried to make this place pretty, or even pleasant. Clumpy paint covers the walls. It’s so cheap that it dusts your hands with white and comes right off when you drag a fingernail over it. Girls have chipped things into the paint over the years. Mostly just their names: Katie, Kendra, Lucy, Jane. Like they don’t want this place to forget them. I stare at the names now, and I’m hit with an eerie feeling that Brunesfield swallowed these girls whole.

  “Down the stairs,” Crane says when we reach the stairwell. The stairs aren’t steep, but climbing down without holding the handrail feels strange, like I might fall onto my face at any second. I concentrate on keeping my fingers together behind my back and take the steps one at a time. If Crane’s annoyed that I’m going too slow, she doesn’t mention it.

  The hall leading to the Segregation Block twists off to the right, into the darkest part of the basement. No one’s scratched their names into the wall down here. Probably they were too scared. These walls might scratch back.

  As we get closer, I swear I hear the prisoners in the Seg Block mumbling, but that’s impossible. There’s still a thick steel door separating them from me.

  “Officer Mateo,” Crane says when we reach Mateo’s post. “I have Miss Davis reporting for her probationary duties.”

  Officer Crane’s always so official when she talks. It makes me feel like I should curtsy or something. I shuffle up next to her, nodding at Mateo since my hands are in diamonds—I’m not allowed to say anything. He’s wearing the same fancy new slacks and shirt as Officer Crane, but on him they look, well, good. I memorize every detail to share with Issie when I get back.

  “At ease, soldier.” Mateo climbs down from his metal stool, setting his crossword on the seat. “Seriously, Jackie, she doesn’t have to have her hands behind her back. I can handle her.”

  I blink, then turn to Officer Crane. Jackie? Crabby Crane’s first name is Jackie?

  “That’s highly inappropriate,” Crane says to Mateo. A vein throbs in her temple, and I swear to God I see her blush. I press my lips together to keep from grinning like an idiot. I didn’t even realize Crane had a first name. She seems like one of those people who’ve only ever been called “Mrs.” or “Officer” or “Ma’am.”

  “Oops. Sorry, Officer Crane,” Mateo says, flashing her a smile that shows off approximately six hundred perfectly straight white teeth. “But I can handle this one. You’re free to head back.”

  “Very well,” Officer Crane says. She pauses halfway to the stairs and looks over her shoulder. “Ben.”

  I don’t know whether to be more in awe of the fact that Crabby Crane made an actual joke, or that Officer Mateo’s first name is Ben, which is adorable. Issie’s going to completely freak when I tell her. I smile so wide my cheeks hurt. Best punishment ever.

  “So. The director mentioned you were supposed to be on cleaning duty,” Mateo says, nodding at the thick steel door to the Segregation Block. The smile slips from my face.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Don’t look so thrilled.” Mateo jabs his thumb into the red button that unlocks the door, and a loud buzz echoes down the hall. “The girls in Segregation aren’t allowed out of their dorms, so the actual hall doesn’t get too dirty,” he explains.

  I nod, trying to ignore the anxiety rising in my chest as I shuffle forward and push the heavy security door open. The burn on my hand tingles, reminding me of what happened the last time I was here.

  The hall looks the same: Pepto-Bismol-colored walls, gray light slanting in from the windows at the ceiling. It’s snowing again. I wait for the radiator at the end of the hall to explode in a shower of sparks, or for the hall itself to kaleidoscope into a new shape. But nothing happens. Thick fluffy flakes drift past the windows, sending shadows across the dimly lit floor. It’s almost peaceful.

  Someone left a mop and bucket leaning against the pink wall just inside the doorway. I reach for the mop, then flinch at the sound of metal dragging across the concrete behind me. I spin around and see Mateo pulling his stool into the hallway. The security door thuds closed behind him.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  Mateo settles himself on the stool, smoothing the crossword on his lap. He lifts his eyes without moving his face.

  “I’m guarding.”

  “No, what are you doing in here?” I motion to the hall around me. “Don’t you have to stand outside the door?”

  “Ah.” Mateo folds the crossword puzzle and nods, like I’ve asked him a real stumper. “Yes, technically I’m required to stand outside the door at all times. But, unlike Officer Brody, I don’t feel comfortable being on the other side of a security door when you’re in here. Some of these girls are dangerous.”

  I know I should just shut up and count my blessings—I don’t want to be in here alone either—but my mouth likes to do this thing where it blurts out whatever I’m thinking without actually consulting me first.

  “You could get in trouble,” I say.

  “Are you going to tell on me?”

  “No.” I pull the mop out of the bucket and slop it on the floor. Brown suds spread across the concrete and soak the paper-thin soles of my shoes. The burns on my fingers still feel tender, making it uncomfortable to hold the mop. I grimace and try to shift so I’m holding the mop without closing my hand, but it’s impossible for me to push it down the hall that way. Guess I’ll just have to grin and bear it.

  I nod at one of the bulky black cameras staring down from the ceiling. “What about that?”

  “Doesn’t work.” Mateo hops o
ff his stool and walks down the hall, stopping directly in front of the camera. “It’s illegal to videotape minors’ private quarters without parental consent. The camera at the end of the hall is the only one recording.”

  He waves at the camera and makes a face to prove it to me, but I’m not paying attention to him anymore. I turn, quickly finding the camera at the end of the hall. A tiny, red light blinks near its lens.

  “That faces Jessica’s cell,” I say. Mateo stops waving.

  “Yeah,” he says. “She’s a ward of the state so they don’t need consent, I guess. Some guys came to fix it this morning. That little light’s been blinking ever since, so someone must be watching.”

  I frown. I told Director Wu and Dr. Gruen about my little accident with the tray last night. They fixed the camera this morning. That’s weird, right? That they’re watching her?

  A chill starts in my lower back and crawls up my spine. I shrug to shake it away. I’m letting the Seg Block creep me out. They probably just want to make sure Jessica doesn’t hurt herself or refuse to eat or make a knife out of a toothbrush. There’s nothing weird about that.

  I push the mop down the hall, leaving a shiny, wet path along the concrete. I’m so focused on the blinking red light that I don’t notice the skeletally thin girl in the cell to my left until she skitters across the floor on her hands and knees.

  “Pretty,” she says, pushing her face against the glass wall. I flinch, and the mop slips from my fingers and falls to the concrete. A girl in the cell behind me claps, and I jump.

  “Pretty, pretty, pretty,” the thin girl whispers, tracing invisible lines on the glass. Raw, angry scratches cut across her cheeks. She presses her face against the door, leaving behind lines of blood.

  “Play nice, Bea.” Mateo is right behind me. I flinch again, nearly hitting him in the face with my arm as I flail around. Great. Five minutes in the Seg Block and I’ve turned into one of those jumpy nervous girls that I hate.

  “Bea?” I try to make it look like I wasn’t so much flinching as leaning over to pick up my mop. “Is that her name?”