She shrugs. “I practically run this place. Been here longer than anybody. I’ve seen three wardens, a couple dozen guards, hundreds of girls come and gone, and here I am, rock steady through it all.”
Angel’s bashed-up fingers rest on the table, the hard skin on her knuckles split open like grapes.
“What about Benny?” I ask.
“I got here when I was twelve. Benny was the first person I met. If anybody raised me, you could make a pretty good case for Benny.”
? ? ?
Dr. Wilson visits the next day after breakfast. Immediately, he eyes the new additions to my cell: two stuffed animals and a paper crane. I have recently been inducted into the complex trading system in juvie. Angel gave me a pack of gum Benny gave her for helping clean up puke in the cafeteria, and at lunch I traded the gum with a redheaded girl with a neck tattoo for a powder-blue stuffed bear. Later, I got a red turtle whose stomach had been removed to smuggle something inside, and an elaborate origami crane an albino girl hands out to everyone as part of her counseling.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” he says.
“Decorated it myself.”
“And might I compliment you on your choice of stainless steel.” He nods toward the toilet. “Timeless yet functional.”
I almost laugh but in the next moment he’s opening up my file and scanning his notes.
“I heard the guards talking about your roommate. Said she got into a fight.”
“She was defending me,” I say.
He nods. “You should be careful with lifers like Angel. They have less to lose.”
“Lifers?” I ask.
“Angel’s here on murder charges, and she’s not getting out anytime soon. Inmates with longer sentences sometimes like to groom other girls. Get them to do things for them on the outside.”
“She’s not like that.”
“Maybe not. Just be careful. You’re out of the Community, and that’s a good thing. That’s the best thing, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t people here who’d take advantage of you.”
“No,” I mutter, and I feel my brain tip sideways. His words smack me as something obvious, something basic that I should’ve come to on my own. Since I’ve learned all the wrong the Community held, I’d begun to think of the cities as peace-realms, places I might really be safe.
It’s not true. No place is ever safe.
“When do you want to talk about what happened with Philip?” Dr. Wilson asks.
I look up quickly. “How about never?”
“You’ll have to at some point. He’s part of this, too.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to talk about him ever again. Ask another question.”
“All right,” he says, leaning back. “Tell me about losing your hands.”
“That?” I shrug. “I barely remember it.”
He lifts his eyebrows.
“Fine,” I say. “But I want to tell it my way.”
“Of course.”
“No interrupting,” I warn.
“I’ll do my best.”
? ? ?
When I woke up that morning, my bedroom was humid with the breath of my ten sisters. The plastic sheeting stapled over our only window was beaded with moisture.
I smelled the smoke before I opened my eyes. Everyone knew what it meant when the purple smoke unfurled from the Prophet’s chimney and smudged the sky. It meant that, at that moment, the Prophet was in his house, talking with God, hearing the whisper of it inside his ears, and writing everything down into the Book of Prophecies.
Everyone was a little on edge, waiting for the prophecy. We tried to go about our daily chores—the women milking, the men carving new tools out of fallen pines—but it was difficult with the smell of that smoke filling our nostrils. Prophecies could be meaningless—“And lo it is Commanded that thee plant wild onion in ampler supply.” But prophecies could also change everything. It was a prophecy that brought us to the wild. It was a prophecy that named each deacon, and it was prophecies that punished us.
In the courtyard, I did laundry with my younger sisters Martha and Regent, both raven-haired like their mother Vivienne, until the Prophet rang the little silver bell on his porch that meant he was ready to speak the message that God had told him. He waited for us to congregate, his long black robes shaking in the cold breeze, arms stretched in the air.
“God has sent me a message,” he called. “I am to take another wife.”
The crowd exhaled. The Prophet had received this message many times since we moved to the Community. He already had eight wives. They were huddled close to the porch railing, looking lost. No children jostled into their calves like the other women. None of them, not a single one, had managed to bring a baby to term. They’d produced some crooked little skeletal things that might’ve been babies in some daydream of God’s, but that’s all.