He sat back down.
“Please stand, Ms. Baill,” the judge said. “Teen drinking and driving is an epidemic in this country. Toxicology reports confirm that you were intoxicated when you decided to get behind the wheel of a car. At the end of the night, a girl was dead and a community and a family are left to grieve.” He looked at Zach. “Others might share moral responsibility for this tragedy, but the legal responsibility for this crime is yours alone. Obviously, no amount of prison time can make up for Mia’s bright light or bring solace to the Farraday family. But I can make sure that other teens see this case and understand the risk they take when they drink and drive. I sentence you to sixty-five months in the women’s correctional facility in Purdy.”
And the gavel fell.
*
Lexi heard her aunt cry out.
Guards moved toward Lexi; one pulled her arms behind her and clamped handcuffs around her wrists. She felt her aunt’s arms come around her. Lexi couldn’t hug her back, and, after all that had happened in the last weeks, that was when it really sunk in.
For the first time, she was really, truly afraid. All she’d thought about was her soul and atonement, but what about her body? How would it be to spend more than five years behind bars?
“Oh, Lexi,” Eva said, tearing up. “Why?”
“You took me in,” Lexi said. Even now, with all that was happening, that sentence meant so much. Lexi found it hard to say more. “I couldn’t let you waste your savings on me.”
“Waste?”
“I’ll never forget what you did for me.”
Eva started to cry in earnest. “Be strong,” she said. “I’ll visit as often as I can. I’ll write to you.”
“That’s enough,” the guard said, and Lexi felt herself being pulled away, led out of the courtroom and down a long hallway and up two sets of stairs. Finally, they put her in a room that was about ten by ten, with cement walls; no window; a metal, seatless toilet; and a metal bench. The place smelled of urine and sweat and dried vomit.
She didn’t want to sit down, so she stood there, waiting.
She didn’t wait long. Soon, the guards came back for her, talking to one another about something that had happened at lunch as they led her out of the back of the courthouse to a waiting police car.
“We’re taking you directly to Purdy,” one of the guards said.
Purdy. The Washington Corrections Center for Women.
Lexi nodded and said nothing.
The guard shackled her ankles and snapped her handcuffed wrists to the chain around her waist.
“Let’s go.”
She hobbled along behind him, her head hung low. In the police car, she was buckled into the backseat. The chains around her waist bit into her back, so that she had to sit forward, with her nose almost pressed against the grill that protected the officers in the front seat. As they drove to the corner, they came to a stoplight.
In front of them, the Farradays were crossing the street; they looked like paper-doll versions of themselves, thin and fragile and bent. Zach was in the back, alone, his shoulders slumped downward, his chin dropped. From this side, his shaved head and burned jaw turned him into someone she hardly recognized.
Then the light changed, and they drove away.
*
Purdy prison was a monolithic slab of gray concrete set behind a wall of razor-wire fencing. All around it were green trees and blue skies. The surrounding beauty only served to make the prison look darker and more menacing.
As she moved toward this life she’d never imagined, Lexi wished suddenly, fervently, that she had pled not guilty as her lawyer had suggested.
Inside the prison, they put her in a big cage. Crouched inside like an animal, she could see some of the prison. Bars of steel and walls of Plexiglas and women in khaki gathered in groups.