The Walls Around Us

Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves.

Life. We'd long known it was cruel.

We were alive. I remember it that way. We were still alive, and we couldn't see how close we were to the end.

We were gasoline rushing for a lit match. We bared our teeth. Balled fists.

This is called closure, and it’s also called justice, and they are not always the same thing.

Sometimes it could be the smallest thing that could topple over a whole life, and, in the end, destroy it.

Home is where the heart is, and where the hell is, and where the hate is, and where the hopelessness is. Which made Aurora Hills pretty much like home.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

I knew that just because people on the outside were free and clean, it didn’t mean they were the good ones.

I could tell he wanted the best for me. Of course, he assumed that would be getting out. Everyone always thought that, not of what we had to go back to, at home. Maybe our parents had thrown away our mattresses. Maybe they'd told our siblings we'd been run over by trains, to make our absence fonder. Not everyone had a parent. It could be that nothing was waiting for us. Our keys would no longer fit the locks. We'd resort to ringing the bell, saying we've come home, can't we come in? The eye in the peephole would show itself, and that eye could belong to a stranger, as our family had moved halfway across the country and never informed us. Or that eye could belong to the woman who carried us for nine months, who labored for fourteen hours, who was sliced open with a C-section to give us life, and now wished she never did. The juvenile correctional system could let us out into the world, but it could not control who would be out there, willing to claim us.

It was hoped we might have two lives—the way cats are said to have nine. This life we ruined, and another, for after.

To fit in somewhere in the world, even if there were chains and gates and fences to keep us from running.

They decide as soon as they meet you. Ten seconds in. If you’re poor. If you’re brown. If you’re black. If you’ve got an accent. If your skirt’s too short. If your nose is ugly—sorry, Cherie. If you’re chewing gum. If you’re breathing funny. If nobody from your family is there. If you’re any of that? Or all of that? Have a nice life, because you’re out of there.

It was the most private thing we had left—held even closer than our bodies, because our bodies were searched, all holes and crevices and cavities in every horrible way that could be imagined. But no one could shake out the truth from inside us. They couldn’t search us for that. Our guilt and our innocence were only our own, and she should know to keep it that way.

We kept forgetting. And we also couldn’t let go.

My own drawing was a house made of books, but where there should have been a door, there was a book, and where there should have been windows, there were books, and where the chimney should have been open to let the smoke out, a book was covering the hole, so if anyone was in the house, they couldn't get out. They'd suffocate, to be found years later, a desiccated corpse still marking its place in the book it had been reading with a knobby finger bone, head caved in by an avalanche of fallen books. As I said, I liked books.

When writing fiction, memories still filter in, and these memories twist and distort and transform until they become living, breathing pieces of the story, as they have here.

We have some ideas about the afterlife, about why we’re still here. The thing about a life being cut short, when it’s not by choice and not with any rhyme or reason or hinted at by diagnosis or threat, is that sometimes, some of you will want to hang on. We do. We can’t seem to find a way to leave.

I wondered how they could know so much about my brain without lifting open my skull and poking through it.

The last time I saw my mother, she’d turned her back on me like I was the bullet.

But then the stage showed other things. Bad things. Murderous things. Things I would never really do. And things I would forget about in the morning, because I’d wake up feeling a whole lot better. I knew right from wrong, Ori and I both did. We were not terrible people. We were not fools.

Laughing (they thought we were laughing at them). Walking fast (they thought we were running).

I wonder who drove all the way up here to leave this piece of hate mail for the dead.

But no one fought for Orianna Catherine Speerling.

What I mean is, it reminded me of one of the happiest moments of childhood, before broken wrists and purpling bruises and nasty names hissed when my mother’s back was turned. Before “Who do you think you are? You’re ugly. You’re nobody.

Weren't we all, from girl to guard, from criminal to civilian? We wanted a glimpse at the monster inside. We thought we could catch a peek sometimes, a shiftiness in the eyes maybe. A rumble. Each of us had our own monster, distinct ous. We were all different, one girl to the next, like snowflakes.

Our private taste in books showed a hint of our secret selves, and sometimes I was the only one who got to see those secrets

She wasn’t getting it. They never teased her. They never followed her around with their phones, trying to catch her in a compromising position. They never called her a ho-bag or a troll or said she danced like an elephant on crank. They never, not once, dribbled pee in her ballet bag or stuck shaved pubes in her ChapStick. They never told her she wouldn’t ever be good enough to make the New York City Ballet, and that they’d wave to her from the stage, maybe, one day, if they remembered who she was when they were famous.

The other two weren’t even dancers. They were football players. Which was ridiculous.

Ori made it wanted. She acted like it was lucky. And forever after, it was.