Chapter 24: A Different View

24. A Different View

So I should have been ashamed and embarrassed that I was caught by my girlfriend with my face practically in another girl’s crotch, but I wasn’t. I was pissed. I was pissed that she had come barging in like that, and I was pissed that Phyla seemed to have this idea that she owned me or something just because I was so attracted to her. And I was pissed that I hadn’t listened to the voice of reason much earlier in the whole relationship. Yes, she was beautiful from the start, but I had really taken the time to get to know her? And wasn’t the whole idea of a serious relationship while in prison absurd? Eventually one or the other of us would be released, or moved to a different facility.

And for that matter, I had no idea what Phyla could have done to land in jail at all. She seemed so level and quietly confident in her life, nothing like the mess that I had been when I got myself thrown into Holshue. Which again brought up the whole question of how she knew so much of everything going on. There was plenty of reason to think that she was some kind of plant, a spy to keep an eye on me, or perhaps on Michele. Or on all of us.

Still, I felt very exposed and alone when I slipped out of my room and began moving through the halls towards the staircase. It was somehow different this time. The corridor felt colder and more empty, as if I were more vulnerable than on my previous trips. Those other nighttime exploits had been before the whole incident at the river, before the warning from Slanick. And it also felt like I was cheating on Phyla, in spite of all my misgivings about the relationship. And without her, my movement was jerky, stopping as I came into the range of each camera trying to watch for it to swing away while counting to make sure the current camera didn’t find me.

When I got to the stairwell I knew I was in trouble. There was no way to see the camera without opening the door, and Phyla could pull that off because she had the watch and she had memorized the rotation schedules of each camera. I opened the door and stepped inside anyway, daring myself to be brave and then instantly regretting it. The camera had caught me before it swung around. I froze. The air in the stairwell felt colder and I was sweating, soaking my pajamas, breathing harder.

I still had the presence of mind to count the seconds, and when I knew the camera was facing the wall, I launched up the two flights of stairs to the third floor. I wondered for a moment if anyone was really watching those camera feeds, and then I wondered who it might be. Holshue House seemed too quiet to believe that anyone was awake anywhere. Would Phyla somehow be informed of this little expedition of mine? Would she think I was doing this for a romantic tryst, something sordid with Michele? I couldn’t allow myself to care. I was too curious about what Michele had to show me.

Finally I slipped quietly into Michele’s room, without knocking on the door. It was completely dark. Of course. It was nearly an hour after Lights Out. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the dim light slipping in through the uncovered window I could see that Michele was sitting in her desk chair, watching out the window, still fully clothed. She motioned me over to sit beside her, to watch with her out the window. I could smell the gentle dampness of her skin, a smell so different than Phyla’s, as we sat close together on the wooden desk chair with our shoulder’s touching.

This room was on the opposite side of the building from mine, which meant she had a completely different view from what I saw out of the window that Phyla and I shared. Unlike the night of our little adventure in the river, there was no moon, so at first it seemed that all I could see was the darkness and a faint white line in the glass from the light leaking in from the hall under the door. The closeness of Michele, the warm odor of her skin, made me nervous. The word “nefarious” crept through my head, even though I don’t know if I had ever used it before, but now I worried that she had nefarious purposes. I didn’t know if I was worried that she would try to seduce me because she now knew I was gay, or if she might try to harm me. The image of that word burned into her flesh flashed in my brain, the thought of the painful iron that had searing her skin. Did burning skin smell like your hair when you accidentally caught a bit on fire with the hair dryer?

I was turning towards her to make an excuse to leave when she grabbed my forearm and whispered, “Look.” I could feel her eyes directing my gaze back to the window.

There was a building out there, perhaps it had been a part of the original plantation, or maybe it was newer. It was impossible to tell in the darkness, but it did have lights on, faint through the high windows, with occasional bursts when someone opened the door to go in. I turned to look over at Michele, but her attention was completely focused on the structure. Straining my eyes to look more closely I could see the silhouette of the fence across the lights, so the building was on the outside of chain-link fence that imprisoned us, perhaps two-hundred yards from Holshue House itself.

“Who?” I started to ask, but again Michele quieted me with the touch of her hand on my arm.

“Watch,” she said. She reached across the desk and retrieved a empty cardboard tube of the kind that is used to hold a roll of paper towels. Resting her elbows on the desk she sighted through the tube as another car door opened and a few seconds later there was the burst of light as the door to the building opened. I could see only the edge of the person’s face, but I could tell by the walk that it was a man.

“Here.” She handed me the tube. I was suddenly aware of how utterly white my skin was as I saw it next to the blackness of hers. It was mine that seemed out of place in this dark endeavor or whatever it was we were doing.

As I had seen her doing I put my one eye to the tube and closed the other, only to be completely confused about what I was seeing. I could move it around and see the flashes of light from the windows and knew that she wanted me to focus on the building. Once I finally held it steady I figured out what was confusing me. The images were upside down, but definitely magnified.

“Try to look at the doorway. Someone else is getting out of their car,” she whispered in my ear, so close I could feel her breath.

I found the door of the building, still upside-down, just in time to see it flash open, revealing the strong clean-shaven face of a man, no one I recognized, and without enough time to really process the face.

“It’s a telescope,” I whispered back to her. The image had definitely been magnified.

“Yes, of course,” she answered.

“But how, or where?” It was obviously homemade, but I knew it was also something we probably weren’t supposed to have.

“I borrowed a couple of magnifying glasses out of the science lab downstairs - the stuff we never use because we don’t really have a science class, just that stupid computer class. Like we really need someone who needs to us how to use a computer.”

“Cool,” I whispered.

“The telescope was just so I could see their faces better. Making it was no big deal.”

“So what are they doing in there?”

“I have no idea, but they gather every Tuesday and Friday night at about this time. The thing is, I recognize most of the faces.”

“And?”

“They are the men from the house, the place where I was kept those two years. And now I know why I was  sent to this fuckin’place instead of real prison. They want me close - they want to watch me, or kill me.”

“Shit,” was all I could say at first, and then it occurred to me to ask the question we weren’t really supposed to be asking each other, at least not according to Judy and our therapy program. “Michele, what did they send you here for?”

“Murder,” she whispered, and then just let the word hang there. “Except I didn’t do it.”

“Then why?”

“Another girl in the house, Alliyah, but they called her Nattie because they thought it sounded more like a slave name, she OD’d on something. When the police came I told them I gave her the drugs, and that I on purpose gave her too much on account of we were fighting. But none of that was true.”

“Then why did you tell them that?”

Out at the building it looked like the group was completely gathered because cars had stopped arriving and the front door at quit opening.

“To escape. I figured prison had to be better than what I was putting up with there. I mean, I know girls get raped in prison too, but at least it wouldn’t be constant, every day. It wouldn’t be like that. I even thought I might get a chance to tell them the truth.”

“But it didn’t work out that way?”

“No. Everyone works for them. The cops who strip-searched me and had so much fun sticking their fingers up inside me, and the lawyer they found for me, and even the judge. I even recognized the judge - he was one of them.”

“Shit,” and this time it was all I had to say.

“I figured I would do real time, in a real prison, orange jump-suit and all that. But instead they sent me to this place, and now I know why. And the last thing my lawyer said to me was that I had better fuckin’ not tell anyone about the house, or I was going to be dead real fast.”

“But you told me?”

“Yeah. I know I give you shit about being a white girl and all, but still you pulled me outta the river, and you stand up to Erika. Eventually you gotta trust someone - I had to find someone to tell the truth.”

“And I’m the only one you’ve ever told?”

“There’s one other person, but I can’t tell you who. That needs to be a secret. But yeah, for the most part, you are the only one who knows.”

We sat in silence for two or three minutes, as I stared out at the lights of the building and listened to Michele’s breathing. It was almost like I could feel her trembling. Finally I asked, “So you think it was one of them? One of them pushed you into the river.”

I could feel her shoulders shrug, her bare arm sliding along mine. “I don’t know. But I know they are the ones that want me dead. But they would still hafta to get into the fence and be able to deactivate that alarm and I never seen anyone of the staff or teachers go in there.”

“Oh.” There was a long silence before I asked, “How long do they stay there?”

“’Til real late. And you had better get back to your room. I might watch for a while, but I need my beauty sleep too.”

I nodded and whispered as I stood up, “Thank you for …” but then I wasn’t quite sure what I was thanking her for.

She just nodded, and then, before I moved away from the desk grasped my forearm and squeezed a little. “Just be careful, okay?”

I nodded once more and then went to the door, opening it just a little at first so I could watch the camera before stepping out into the hallway and starting my journey back down to my own room.

Even though the lights in the hallways were dimmed at night I felt very exposed after the total darkness of Michele’s room. I paused a moment, wanting to think about all I had just learned, but then I remembered that I had to focus on the cameras, and that required careful but continuous moving. Still I felt I was getting better at slipping from one camera to the next, while also very aware of my bare feet on the cold floor of the corridors and the stairs.

Once I was back in my own room and had closed the door behind me I let out a long breath and walked over to the window. It seemed like it might have been an illusion – the building, the men and Michele’s whole bizarre story. I looked out my window to confirm that there was nothing similar on my side of Holshue House. There wasn’t.

Then I heard Phyla voice whispering at the window on her side of the wall. “You really are a total slut, aren’t you?”

I wanted to scream at her, and tell her that she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about and that there was no fucking reason for her to be jealous. But I didn’t. Instead I was just silently pissed at her, that she would make assumptions like that. I threw myself down on the bed, shaking with nervous anger and refusing to think about any of it so I could finally get to sleep.