IN PRISON THEY CALL IT the hole, at least if you want to believe prison movies, and if you can’t believe the movies, then half of what I know about the world is bullshit. But in prison movies, the hole is just some cell like all the others. At Horizons, it’s a fucking hole in the ground.
In the dark place, you tell yourself, This time I will hold on. This time you’ll keep it together, remember that time passes and there are no monsters hiding in the dark. When the slab creaks open each day and the food drops down, you’ll fling it back in their faces, along with fistfuls of your own shit. When they lower the rope and offer to lift you back into the sun, if only you’ll apologize and say thank you, you’ll laugh and tell them to come back later, you were in the middle of a nap. This time the dark place will be your gift, your vacation from the torments of daily life. This time will be your time.
Bullshit.
The dark place is always the same.
First it’s boring. Then it’s lonely. Then the fear washes in, and when that tide ebbs, there’s nothing left. Silence fills with all the thoughts you spend your daylight life trying not to think. The bad things you’ve done. The blue of the sky. The bodies rotting away in coffins, the maggots feasting on skeletal remains. What happened to the body when you left it behind, and whether now is your time to return. Your food is damp with tears. It tastes like shit and piss, because that’s all you can smell, that and your rotting sweat and shame. The air is hot and stale, thick with your own breath. When the darkness breaks and a voice cracks the silence, you tell them whatever they want to hear.
No, not you. That’s cheating. I don’t know what you would do, Dex. This is what I did.
“I accept Jesus into my heart.”
“I renounce Satan.”
“I have sinned and I will sin no more.”
I always gave in—and that’s something I’ll never not know about myself—but at least I held out longer than most. It was because of Kurt. He was down there with me. Down there is where he lives. Singing was better than screaming. I sang with him; I remembered you. I lived for you, down in that dark place, and I survived knowing you were somewhere up in the light, living for me.
DEX
About a Girl
YOU’RE GOING,” MY MOTHER SAID. “We both are.”
I felt ancient, but when it came to my mother, apparently I’d never be too old for because I said so. We went. A mother-daughter pool party, awkward purgatory of small talk and cellulite that only a Drummond could dream up.
“It was lovely of them to think of us.” My mother navigated our beat-up Olds into a narrow slot between a Mazda and an Audi, tapping the bumpers of each of them once, as if for luck. Nikki’s house couldn’t have been more than a five-minute drive from mine, but it felt like we’d passed through a portal—or maybe through a TV screen, because the sidewalk maples, the colonnade-lined porches, the impeccably pruned rectangles of green all seemed too perfect to be anything but a set. Tragedy or farce, that was the only question. “And it’ll be lovely for you to spend some time with your friends.”
Okay, farce.
“How many times to do I have to tell you—”
“All right. Girls who could be your friends. If you would only give them the opportunity.”
How was it, I wondered, that the mere act of growing older precipitated radical memory loss? Here was my mother, naively expecting not only that a coven of PTA moms who’d snubbed her for a decade would spontaneously open their arms to her un-manicured charm, but also that their daughters would follow suit.
“You really want me to go to a party? After what happened the last time.” It was a mark of my desperation that I was willing to come so close to explicitly referencing it. “Aren’t you afraid of what I’ll do?”
For someone with no sense of humor, my mother had an expert wry smile. “Why do you think I came as your chaperone?”
It should have been worth something she was willing to be seen in public with me—but then she was my mother, so that was worth about as much as her telling me I was pretty.
“You can’t control what people think of you,” she said. “You can only do your best to prove them wrong.”
“Guilty until proven innocent? I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“Life isn’t LA Law, dear.” She turned off the car. We were actually doing this.
“Lacey’s gone,” I said, the last-ditch effort worth the pain of saying the words out loud. “No more bad influence. No need to sucker me into making new friends.”
She put her hand over mine—then pulled away before I could. “You know, Hannah, my issue with Lacey was never Lacey. Not entirely.”
“Is that one of those Zen things that make no sense?”
“I know how it feels,” she said. “To invest everything you have in another person. But no one’s dreams are big enough to be worth giving up yours, Hannah. If you don’t figure that out before it’s too late, you can wake up inside a life you’d never have chosen for yourself.”
“I don’t know what any of that has to do with me.”