The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  The girl opens her eyes, grins, and glances down between her legs. “No wonder you can’t get a date, T-Bone, if that’s the closest you can get.”

  The other bikers all start laughing, and one of them extricates the girl from the darts. She walks toward me, and holds out her hand to help me to my feet. “I’m sorry. I thought they were hurting you,” I say.

  “Them?” She glances over her shoulder, at the bikers who have gone back to their arm-wrestling and their drinks. “They’re pussycats. Come on, then. Heroes drink on the house.” She ducks beneath the counter and pulls the tap, filling up a long glass of beer for me; I realize that she is the bartender.

  She asks me what I’m doing here, and I tell her about my car. I say that I am missing my final. “Ever wonder why it’s called that?” she says. “It’s not like everything stops when you’re done with it.”

  I don’t tell Eric how I found myself watching a shaft of sunlight play Elise’s skin like the bow of a violin; how she could talk to one biker about basketball stats and make change for another and smile for me at the same time. I don’t tell him how she made fun of me for nursing my beer, and then shared it with me. I don’t tell him how she locked up early; how I drew the patterns of molecules for her on cocktail napkins, then between the stars, and finally on the flat of her bare back.

  I don’t tell Eric that until I met Elise, I had never stayed awake till dawn just to watch the sky burn a hole through the night, that I took my first go-kart ride on a track beside her. I don’t tell him that she led me through graveyards to lay down flowers for people she had never known. I don’t tell him how she would decorate the inside of my car with rose petals for me to find when I came out of class. That she would call me up to ask me what color I would be, if I were a color, because she was so completely purple and she wanted to know if we’d match. That she was like no one I’d ever met, that when I moved inside the kaleidoscope heart of her, I saw how dreary my life had been.

  I don’t tell Eric this, because it’s all I have left of that girl. “What happened?” he asks.

  “She drove me home from the bar,” I say simply. “A month later I found out she was pregnant.” She’d used words like should and too soon and career and abortion. I had looked right at her and asked her if she wanted to get married instead.

  “What made you get divorced?”

  There were a whole string of things, if I want to be honest about it. And yes, there was a trigger. But I should have known that someone who was such a child herself would not feel comfortable taking care of one. I should have been more supportive after our son was stillborn, instead of clutching Beth like a shield to ward off the grief. But most of all, I should have admitted to myself far earlier that the things I loved about Elise, the impulsiveness and the craziness and the spur-of-the-moment outlook, were not really part of her personality, but a product of the alcohol. That when she didn’t drink, she was so insecure that nothing I said or did was enough to convince her that I loved her.

  Eric nods; he has been there himself—on both ends of the equation. You cannot depend on an alcoholic, so you learn to live for the moments when they are present. You tell yourself you’ll leave, but then they do something wonderful that reels you back: host a picnic on the living room floor in January; find the face of Jesus in a pancake; celebrate the cat’s birthday by inviting all the other neighborhood cats for tuna. You use all the good times to paint over the bad, and pretend you can no longer see the grain of the wood that she’s made of. You watch her wade through sobriety and secretly wish she would drink, because that is when she turns into the person you love; and then you cannot figure out who you hate more: yourself for thinking this, or her for reading your mind.

  Eric stares at me, putting together everything I’ve said so far. “You loved her. You still love her.”

  “I never stopped,” I admit.

  “Then you didn’t take Delia because you hated Elise,” Eric says slowly.

  “No,” I sigh. “I took Dee so that she wouldn’t.”

  * * *

  Broadway Gangsters, West Side City Crips, Duppa Villa, Wedgewood Chicanos, 40 Ounce Posse. Wetback Power Second Avenue, Eastside Phoeniquera, Hispanics Causing Panic, Hoover 59. Brown Pride, Vista King Trojans, Grape Street 103, Dope Man Association. Sex Jerks, Rollin’ Sixties, Mini Park, Park South. Pico Nuevo, Dog Town, Golden Gate, Mountain Top Criminal. Chocolate City, Clavalito Park, Insane Born Gangster, Vista Bloods, Casa Trece. There are three hundred street gangs in the Phoenix area; these are just a few represented at Madison Street Jail.

  Crips dominate the Phoenix area; Bloods rule Tucson. Crips wear blue and call Bloods “slobs” as a sign of disrespect; they don’t write the letters CK in succession, because that stands for “crip killer,” and will spell a word blacc or slicc instead. A Blood wears red and calls Crips “crabs”; he will cross out all c’s in his writing to show disrespect.

  Members of two different Crip gangs who meet on the street will try to kill each other. In prison, they join in solidarity against the Bloods.

  There is only one way to get a Crip and a Blood to stop fighting: Put them in front of an Aryan Brotherhood member and they will suddenly be on the same side.

  * * *

  Long before I get out of Disc Seg, there are rumors. About Sticks, returning to the maximum security pod and talking of retribution. About Blue Loc, who has become my staunch supporter. Watching me take the blame for something one of the blacks did has, apparently, set me squarely in their esteem.

  When I am moved back down to maximum security, Concise is lying on his bunk, reading. “Wuzz crackalackin’?” he says, a homeboy greeting that could mean anything. He doesn’t really speak until the detention officer leaves. “They treat you all right up on three?”

  I start to make up my bed with sheets and a blanket. “Yeah. I got the cell with the Jacuzzi and the wine cellar.”

  “Damn, they always give that one to the white boys,” he jokes. “Andrew,” he says, the first time he has ever used my name. “What you did . . .”

  I fold up my towel. “It was nothing.”

  He stands up, reaches out slowly, and clasps my hand. “You took the fall for me. That was somethin’.”

  Embarrassed, I break away. “Well, it’s over and done with.”

  “No it ain’t,” Concise says. “Sticks is gonna beat a lesson into you in the rec yard. He been plannin’ it for days now.”

  I try not to let on how much this terrifies me. If Sticks nearly beat me to death as an afterthought on the first night I was in jail, what might he do with preparation?

  “Can I ask you somethin’?” Concise says. “Why’d you do it?”

  Because looking out for yourself sometimes isn’t about you at all. Because contrary to what inmates seem to think, situations are never black or white. But I just shake my head, unsure of how to put this into words.

  Concise leans down and pulls out a box beneath the lower bunk; it is filled with an arsenal of makeshift weapons. “Yeah,” he says. “I hear you.”

  * * *

  The morning of the fight, Concise shaves my head. All the inmates involved do, because it makes it harder for the DOs to sort out the participants afterward. The disposable razor leaves patches of hair, so I look like I have been attacked by a cat. I glance at Concise’s smooth, dark skin. “Well,” I say. “I’m going out on a limb, here, but I think the guards might be able to tell me apart from the rest of the Crips.”

  There will be thirty men in the rec yard at once: ten Mexicans, nine blacks, and ten whites, and me. For the past week, a steady stream of smuggling has enabled Concise to build up a weapon supply. We have stayed up late to fashion them: clubs, rolled out of National Geographics and secured with the tape the kitchen uses to mark a special dietary meal; saps, a sock filled with two bars of soap or, in one case, a padlock nipped from an ankle chain, which can be swung at an enemy. We have broken out the single-edge razor blades we are given every morning, reset them