“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
In the back of my mind, it occurs to me that this is something Dr. Wilson might say. And in that moment, he is all I can think about, how he’s been gone for weeks, how I think the reason he must’ve come to Montana was to escape something in Washington, DC, something he lost.
I traverse the packed brown carpet and sit at a computer. Its face is blank and frightening, like the computer from reading class. I raise my arm in the air. Ms. Fitzgerald approaches.
“Yes?” she asks.
“I want to research a death,” I say.
“Like a historical death?” she asks.
“No, something more recent.”
“All right,” she says, drawing out the first syllable. “Whose death?”
“I’m not sure yet. Can you just open up the Internet?”
“Have you ever used a computer before?”
“Why does that matter?”
“You should spend some rec time here,” she says. “I can get you computer literate in no time.”
“I’m barely even regular literate,” I say. “Now can you push the buttons for me?”
She grabs the mouse and opens an Internet box.
“What do you want to search?” she asks.
“I got it,” I say, taking a pencil in my mouth, lead-end in. With the eraser, I type all the words I can think of that might confirm my suspicion: “Dr. Wilson” and “Washington, DC” and “death.” For good measure, I throw in “wife or son or daughter or maybe parent?” Ms. Fitzgerald fixes my spelling and pushes the search button. About a billion results come up. I scan the page and see results about local news events in Washington, DC: murders, car crashes, home accidents. I make Ms. Fitzgerald click on a bunch of links, but nothing adds up.
“Can I ask why you’re searching this?” she asks.
“I just have a feeling about something,” I say. “Just a feeling that something happened, and I wanna know what.”
“Well, your search terms are too broad. You need a full name or a year at least.”
I nod, leaning forward to press the pencil into the delete key.
? ? ?
When I get back to the cell, I go to set my stack of books on my bunk but trip over something on the ground. Angel’s binder. I step around it but see a stapled packet of papers protruding from the top. “The Bridge Program” it reads. With a toe, I push the paper free of the cover.
It’s the application that the girls have been working on. It’s turned to the essay questions. “Why do you think you are a deserving candidate for acceptance to the Bridge Program?” I kneel down and budge the letters with my mind until they form words.
I’ve been through a lot. You only have to Google me to confirm this. And I could make a list of every sad thing that’s happened to me as a case for why I deserve something better, but my guess is you’ve already read plenty of entries like that. I’m not like that, anyway. I try not to dwell too much on the bad that happened to me growing up, in the past. So I’m going to tell you a little about my future. It is beautiful. I write books and get degrees and get married and have babies and go on to do a million other wonderful things that I haven’t even thought up yet. I am deserving because even after everything, I’m still hopeful. The people who hurt me couldn’t kill my spirit. I’m dreaming still. See me, right now? Dreaming. And, given everything, that’s pretty wonderful.
So that’s why I’m deserving. Not because I need your help. But because I am going to make it with or without anybody’s help.
My knees are indented from the grated metal floor by the time I finish reading. I have to run my eyes over the paper several times to understand, sounding out difficult words like Miss Bailey taught me, watching them sit in the air strangely. It doesn’t make sense. Angel told me she wasn’t going to apply. She said she stood a better chance of winning the Nobel Prize. I guess she changed her mind. Maybe she figured it couldn’t hurt to apply.
I pull my lip inside my mouth and wonder, Why, then, don’t I give it a try?
Sifting out the answer is like looking directly into a bright light I’ve been ignoring. It’s just that I don’t think I could tolerate answering those questions, opening myself up the way some girls do with sneaked-in razor blades and the metal edges of rulers, a thousand small wounds that might end me.
I look up from the essay and flinch so hard, my front teeth nip my lip painfully. Angel stands on the other side of the barred door, watching me. The door buzzes and she walks calmly inside, picking up her binder and throwing it onto her bed. She takes the essay from me and doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t move to climb to her bunk like she normally does, doesn’t reach for a book. She stands there, looming above me.
She nods at the Bible on the top of the stack of books on my bed. “What are you doing with that?”
I swallow. “I checked it out.”
“So you’ve gone and done it,” she says. “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”