“What way?”
“Like you’re in church all the time. You don’t talk like the girls here. ‘Godseyes!’” she mocks. “You sound like they dug you out of a time capsule.”
“But I don’t know any swears.”
“Jesus, I’ll make you a list then.”
She stands and rips a square of paper from a spiral notebook on her bed and scribbles out five or six words with a small pencil. She hands it to me.
“I can’t read,” I say.
“You can’t even sound the letters out?”
“Only a little.”
Her mouth shifts to the side. “Here.” She places her finger next to each penciled word and pronounces it, then makes me repeat after her. My heart beats hard, and not only because I’m holding the Devil’s words in my mouth. This is the first time anyone has taught me to read since Bertie.
“Get these ones down and you should be all right.”
“Why are you helping me?” I ask.
“It saves me a headache later on. If you get in trouble, you’ll look over at me with those pathetic eyes and expect me to help you. Well, it ain’t happening.”
She leans heavily against the wall again. “And second, if you don’t understand what someone’s saying to you, don’t respond. Don’t say a word. You’ll get yourself trapped.”
“Like what?”
“Like, if anyone ever holds up their hand like this,” she makes a circle with her fingers, “that means they’re asking if you’re gay.”
“What?”
“They’re asking if you like girls. And if they wanna know if you have a friend on the outs named Britney, they’re trying to claim you, ’cause a Britney’s the name for someone’s bitch, someone to have sex with. A Candy is a coward and a Tricia is someone with something to trade.”
“Gawl,” I say, my head teeming.
Angel scowls at me.
“I mean . . .” I clench my eyes, thinking. “Shit.”
“Better.”
“I guess I can’t ever ask someone if they like girls,” I say.
“Huh?”
“No fingers.”
Angel squints.
“That was a joke,” I say. “Don’t you ever laugh? Even I laugh sometimes and I got a lot more reasons than you to be depressed. About . . .” I hold up my arms and look down to where my fingers had been. “. . . ten reasons.”
Angel carries on, ignoring me. “You’ll be deciding soon what gang to join,” she says. “I ’spect you’ll be with the Christian girls.”
“I’m not Christian,” I say.
“No, but you’re leaning in that direction, I can tell. You got religion in your blood. Trust me, by next week you’ll be quoting Job to me, telling me what Jesus said about this and that. I heard it all before.”
“You were raised religious, right?”
She nods. “Everyone around me was. My uncle . . . he was real religious.”
I don’t ask if this is the same uncle she’s locked up for killing.
“What’re the Christian girls like?”
“Like Tracy,” she says. “You know, fake.”
“Like how?”
“The dumb ones really think they mean it ’cause they’re scared, and they think they can actually turn their lives around. But the smarter ones are only pretending ’cause they wanna look good in front of the parole board. That’s all religion is. Strategy.”
“How are you so sure?”
“I’m good at spotting liars. And that’s all they are. They’re just real good at lying to themselves,” she says, her voice low. “Real good at it.”
Chapter 16
I’ve been wondering if jail does anything it’s supposed to. It’s not true justice, not really. Philip’s organs aren’t knitting themselves together any faster because I’m locked in here, and it’s not fixing me, either. It’s punishment, and for now I probably need a little time sitting under the weight of everything I’ve done. I deserve to feel the blackening caverns of my heart pull inward every time I remember Philip’s blood sketched across the fallen snow. To look my guilt about Jude and Constance straight in the eyes. To sink down in the pain and let myself feel exactly as bad as I should.
“You did nothing wrong,” is what Angel says on the occasions I talk like this, but I know it wasn’t natural or right what I did, and I question how it all could have happened. Not just for me, but everyone in the Community. How each of our hands went from farming and praying to hurting and killing.
It was never supposed to be like that. From the beginning, things were supposed to be better than they’d been.