I drank some ginger ale, which tasted good. Miss Sara carried the box outside. When she came back in, she said, “Do you want to play some of Keith’s video games?” Which is how I started playing Mega Warrior.
Now I shot another Mega Warrior and then a Super Mega Warrior, which are the ones with the arrow things on their heads. At least it was a school day and Keith wasn’t home. Keith was one of the people I couldn’t save at the fire. Mom said he could actually die at first, but he didn’t. He got scars, though. His hands and his arms look like they have maps on them, only without the country names. One of his hands is scrunched up, kind of. Part of his face has that map look on it, too. He got held back and now we’re both juniors. He hated me even before I couldn’t save him. I felt sorry for him, though, because of his scars.
The phone rang in the kitchen. I could see Miss Sara pick it up. She made a face.
“You said no later than one-thirty, Laurel!” she said. Laurel was my mom.
One of the regular warriors killed my littlest man. That happened when you forgot to concentrate, like I was doing because I wanted to know what Mom was saying.
“All right,” Miss Sara said. She hung up the phone without saying goodbye, which was rude.
I wasn’t doing so good at Mega Warriors now, but I had good determination and kept trying.
Miss Sara came in the room again. “Your mom said she won’t be back till around four-thirty,” she said.
“Okay.” I killed two Super Mega Warriors in a row. Bang! Bang! Then one killed me.
“Andy? Look at me.”
I looked at her face even though I didn’t stop pushing the controller buttons.
“I need to run to the store,” she said. “Keith’ll be home soon. When he arrives, I need you to give him this envelope, all right?”
She put one of those long white envelopes on the coffee table. It said Keith on it.
“Okay.”
She was in my way. I had to move my head to see the TV.
“Andy!” Miss Sara said. “Look at me!”
I stopped pushing the buttons. She was using an I-mean-business voice.
“Did you hear me?” she asked. “What did I just say?”
“Mom won’t be here until…later.” I couldn’t remember the time she said.
“And what else?” Miss Sara used to be so nice. She’d turned into another lady this year.
“You’re going to the store.”
“And this, Andy.” She picked up the envelope and kind of shook it in front of my face. “What did I say about this?”
“Give the mail to Keith,” I said.
“It’s very important.”
“I’ll give it to him.”
She looked at her watch. “Oh, never mind. I’ll put it where he’ll see it.”
“Okay,” I said.
She walked in the kitchen, then came back again. “All right,” she said. “I’m going now.”
“Goodbye.” I wished she would just go.
I started playing again when she left. Then I got thirsty and my glass was empty. I walked into the kitchen to get more ginger ale. I saw the mail that said Keith on it on the table. She said it was important. What if Keith didn’t see it there?
I took the envelope back in the living room and stuck it in my book bag so I couldn’t forget to give it to him. Then I sat down again to kill some more warriors.
Chapter Two
Maggie
THEY MOVED ME FROM MY CELL HOURS LATER THAN I’D expected because of some paperwork issue Mom had to straighten out. I was afraid they weren’t going to let me go. There’d been some mistake, I thought. A prison official would show up at my cell door and say, Oh, we thought you were in prison for twelve months, but we read the order wrong. It’s really twelve years. It’s amazing the things you can imagine when you’re alone in a cell.
I sat on my skinny bed with my hands folded in my lap and my heart pounding, waiting. An hour. Two hours. I couldn’t budge. Couldn’t open the book I was reading. Just sat there waiting for them to come tell me how twelve months was a mistake and I couldn’t get out today. I deserved the twelve years. Everyone knew that, including me.
But finally, Letitia, my favorite guard, came to get me. I let out my breath like I’d been holding it in for those two hours and started to cry. Outside the bars of my cell, Letitia’s face was nothing more than a dark, wavy blur.
She shook her head at me, and I knew she was wearing that half sneer it took me a few months to recognize as a kind of affection.
“You crying?” she asked. “Girl, you cried the day you come in here and now you crying the day you leave. Make up your mind.”
I tried laughing but it came out more like a whimper.
“Let’s go,” she said, unlocking the door, sliding the bars to the left, and I thought, that’s the last time I’ll ever have to hear that door scrape open. I walked next to Letitia as we started down the broad central hall between the rows of cells, side by side like equals. Two free women. Free. I needed a tissue, but didn’t have one. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand.
“You’ll be back!” one of the women called to me from her cell. Others hooted and hollered. Cussed and shouted. “Yo, bitch! Gonna burn some more kiddies, huh?” BB they called me. Baby Burner, even though the people who died in the fire were two teenagers and an adult. I didn’t fit in. It wasn’t just that I was white. There were plenty of white women in the prison. It wasn’t that I was young. Sixteen was the age at which you were tried as an adult in North Carolina, so there were plenty younger than me. It was, as Letitia told me the first week I got there, that “they can smell the money on you, girl.” I didn’t see how. I didn’t look any different from them, but I guessed everybody knew my story. How I’d laid a fire around a church to let my firefighter boyfriend shine in the department. How I didn’t set the fire when I realized kids would be in the church, but how Keith Weston lit a cigarette, tossing the match on the fuel I’d poured without realizing it was there. How people died and burned and had their lives totally screwed up. They all knew the details, and even though some of them had murdered people, maybe sticking a knife in their best friend’s heart, or they sold drugs to junior-high kids or robbed a store or whatever, they stuck together and I was the outcast.
At the beginning of the year I’d thought about Martha Stewart a lot, how even though she was a rich white woman, she made all these friends in prison and they loved her. Adored her, even. How she came out on top. I told myself maybe that’s how it could be with me.
As Letitia and I went down the wide corridor between the cells, I remembered the first time I’d made that long walk. The hooting and name-calling. I didn’t think of the women as people then. They seemed like wild dogs and I was afraid one of them would break loose and run after me. Now I knew better. They couldn’t get out. I learned it wasn’t when they were in their cells that they could hurt me, but out in the yard. I was beaten up twice, and for someone like me who’d never even been hit, it was terrible. Both times, it was a girl named Lizard. She was six feet tall with thin, straggly, almost colorless hair. She was skinny and her body seemed out of proportion to the long arms and legs she could wrap around you like strands of wire. She let me have it, for no reason I could think of except that she hated me, like so many of the others hated me. I wasn’t good at getting beaten up. I didn’t fight back well. I cowered, covering