Chapter 21: Learning Michele

21. Learning Michele

The repel blast that I had thrust at Garish up on the fourth floor must have taken something more out of me than I had thought it would at the time. I felt like crap all the rest of the day, and slept fitfully through the night. And Phyla seemed to be very skilled at avoiding me for the rest of the day, and throughout the following morning. She was strangely absent from both group and from English class. I ate lunch alone and crawled into my bed for naptime alone as well. The whole time I felt crispy inside, as though some circuit at shored and sizzled.

At the end of math class the next day, Mrs. Montgomery handed me a note that told me to report to Slanick’s office before supper. I had to worry about it all the way through science/computer class, fidgeting with sweat rolling down my back and my cleavage. The air in Holshue House seemed to be stifling while outside it was raining again.

Had she finally figured out that I was lying about needing to be downstairs to get a tampon? Had she decided that I should be punished for going outside even if I was perceived as being the hero by everyone for pulling Michele out of the river? Or worse, perhaps my romance with Phyla had been discovered and I was to reprimanded for having an inappropriate relationship with a fellow inmate. Being called to the principal’s office is never a good thing, and regardless of what her title was and all this feel-good friendly stuff that she tried to display, Ms. Slanick was still the principal. That thought reminded me that the real punishment would be an expulsion from Holshue House which would mean spending the rest of my sentence in a women’s prison, locked in a cell twenty-one hours a day and forced to wear an orange jump suit every day.

When I arrived carrying my bookbag, the heavy wooden door was open and Ms. Slanick was sitting at her desk with papers in front of her, but looking mostly at her computer screen. When she noticed me she said, “Allison, come in. And close the door behind you.” Her tone was not harsh and that was encouraging, but authority figures can be like sometimes, all sweet and amicable as they nail you to the wall.

I set my bookbag on the floor and took the padded institutional armchair across the desk from her, trying to smile to show her that I really was a good person, that I had really done nothing wrong.

“Michele,” she began.

I quickly rushed in with my defense, “I really didn’t know anything about why she went out there. I wasn’t part of it. I just heard the sound and …”

Ms. Slanick held up her palm to silence me. “For the time being, I have concluded that there was no collusion between you, and I wouldn’t be honoring this request if we thought that there had been.”

“Request?” I couldn’t think of anything that I had asked for from anyone. My general plan for Holshue House had been to fade into the woodwork by not asking for anything more than what was offered to me.

“Michele has asked to see you, which of course breaks the conditions of her punishment, her solitary confinement. But she has been quite insistent, and has even offered to have her confinement extended by a day for the opportunity to talk to you, to thank you in person.”

“And you’re really going to make her stay a whole extra day just so she can say thank you to me?”

She smiled and nodded, “It wouldn’t be much of a deal if she was allowed to just ask for a privilege with nothing in return. She will serve her extra day, and you will be allowed a full half-hour to talk in private. Perhaps having a friend here will allow her to be less … troubled, and less likely to attempt another escape.”

I nodded, but I was confused. I understood her wanting to thank me, but to feel that it was this important seemed odd. For a moment I worried that she might have some diabolical plan to hurt me, or to drag me into something that I didn’t want to be part of. But then I remembered that she was physically small, probably not able to overpower me. ”Okay,” I said hesitantly.

After taking a deep breath she closed something on the computer screen that I couldn’t see, and looked over her papers as if to assure herself of something. “Come,” she said, gathering her keys and motioning for me to lead the way out the door. After locking her door, she directed me to the stairwell and then up with me leading the way. At Michele’s third floor door she used her key to let me in and then shut and re-locked the door behind me. “You have fifte minutes and then I will be back,” I heard her say through the door.

The room was dim and stunk of urine. I could make out that Michele was lying on the bed on top of the covers. She sat up, slowly. “I’m sorry about the smell. They make me piss in that bucket over there and it only gets emptied twice a day. What can I say?”

I eyed her cautiously. She was smaller than me, but I figured she had a street toughness that might her dangerous in a fight. The door behind me was locked. If we were going to hurt each other it seems that Ms. Slanick had given us the perfect opportunity. “Okay,” was all that I could think of to say. “So what didya want?”

She took a slow breath before speaking, “I owe you big time for the other night, and where I come from that kinda debt shouldn’t be ignored.”

“So what? You will be my slave,” I stopped myself quickly on that word, remembering the color of her skin, and then corrected it, “… servant for a day and then you can go back to hatin’ me for being white?”

“I been fucked by a lot of white people. Literally. Men mostly. So … so is that what you want? Me bowing down and kissing your ass like some good little Sambo, ‘yes, masstah’ kinda thing? Be your slave girl.”

“No, course not.” I was embarrassed that she was talking about the race thing right there, and I knew that she was goading me.

We sat in silence for a long minute. Finally she said, “Listen. It doesn’t hafta be like this between us. I mean, I seen you talkin’ to Erika and she’s the ultimate white supremacist bitch, but maybe … maybe that’s not you. You could have let me die out there.”

I nodded again, replaying the night in my head, the cold water pounding me against the fence, and the heat of her hand as she grabbed onto my forearm.

“Truth.” I finally said breaking the quiet.

“What?”

“Truth. That’s what I want. I ask questions about you, and you tell me the truth, without any bullshit, with any attitude.”

“I don’t know. I mean …” she stopped and stared off into space.

“You say you owe me big time. You think I’m gonna let you off with just doing my laundry for a week? I want to know things.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to just be naked about everything inside me. I done a lot of ugly shit in my life, and I’m not at all eager to tell you, or even to remember some of it.”

“We all got a lot of ugly. Even people who don’t end up being sent to prison got a lot of ugly. It doesn’t make you an ugly person.”

“So … what you want to know?”

Even though Holshue House is supposedly air conditioned the air in her room was heavy with humidity and stink. “First thing, was that really your plan? To swim under that fence to get out of this place?”

“’Course not. I can’t swim. Not at all.”

“You can’t swim at all?”

“Hey, I didn’t have some mom who dressed me up in a pretty bathing suit with ruffles on the butt and took me to the pool for swim lessons or nothin’ like that. I never even had any one taking me anywhere I could swim.”

“So did you just fall in?”

“I didn’t. Someone threw me in. Maybe they knew I couldn’t swim.”

“Why would anyone do that? I think you’re lying.”

“I’m not. You think I was trying to escape by swimming when I know I can’t swim? You think I know enough to turn off that door alarm?”

I had to admit that the door alarm was a good point – there was no reason to think that she would know how to do that. “So who would throw you into the water?”

“I don’t know, they had a hood on and it was dark.”

“A hood? Like a klansman?”

“Maybe. Kinda. It didn’t have the point like a real KKK guy – more like a pillowcase with eye holes cut in it.”

“And they just lifted you up, and … So what were you doing out there. It was after Lights Out, it was …”

“There was a note. Printed in real careful square letters, and it said: ‘I KNOW WHO IT IS. MEET ME BENCH AFTER LIGHTS OUT. VERANDA DOOR ALARM WILL BE OFF.’ So I went.”

“Who what is?”

“I assumed the person who’s s’posed to kill me.”

“Really?” I hoped that she could tell that I was skeptical about all this. It sounded like a bunch of bullshit to me.

“I know things, things I’m not supposed to know. And I figure that’s why they sent me to this fancy hoity-toity white girl jail when I’m nothing but a black whore and a slave.”

“A slave?” I bit my lower lip, frightened that I was walking on shaky ground. I knew that slavery had ended a hundred and sixty years ago

“Yeah, a slave. My aunt – she wasn’t really my aunt, just sister to my second step-dad and didn’t have no rights to me at all, she sold me for seven hundred dollars to a pimp, a white man pimp. She wanted a thousand, and he started out offering her five hundred. They settled on seven hundred, and he probably made the money back in the first night. Then for more than two years I was his property, fucking all the white men who came to this place, a kind of special club. And they liked to slap me sometimes and call me the ‘N’ word, and …” Now she was biting her lip and looking down at the floor.

I wanted to tell her that it still sound like something someone would make up, but the pain in her face said that it had been all real.

She continued, “I was thirteen! I didn’t know anything about that kind of shit. And it went on and on like that because there wasn’t no one who gave a shit about me. I had two abortions before they got me on the pill, and had to be treated for the clap once. I even got a few scars from being thrown around.”

“And then you got out?” I asked, trying to sound hopeful.

“And then it all went bad – real bad.” She stopped and looked at me very intensely. “There’s not enough time, and I’m not ready for that. I’ll do that truth some other time. Okay?” I nodded. “Then they sent me to this place. Of all places, this place. Holshue House, a plantation house, a place where old Mr. Braddock tortured his slaves. You know it’s called Holshue House after the man who made it into a home for girls like us, don’t you?” I shook my head. I had never given it any thought.

“I mean, I thought putting me here in this place with its ugly history and its ghosts would have been punishment enough, but now …”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “You can see the ghosts?” Suddenly we had a connection. I had no idea why she was the only one besides me who could see them, but at least it meant that I might not be crazy after all.

“Yes, Kitch, Ruth Polly, and Luge. Luge is the only one who had come clear up here to see me while I all locked up like this. He’s seen me, exposed and I don’t know if it’s right for a boy his age, but I s’pose it don’t matter ‘cause he’s a ghost. And considering what I been.”

“How do you know their names?” I was getting tears in my eyes, tears of joy that someone else knew about the ghosts, but also sadness remembering the pain that I could feel that they were feeling.

“They talk to me, and I have tried talking back to them, but I’m not sure they can really hear me. You seen them?”

I just nodded.

“And I don’t think they’re going to help me one bit against the person who’s supposed to kill me.”

There just seemed to be so much coming out at once, and I realized that we had already used up so many of our limited minutes. “Why is someone trying to kill you?”

“Because I know things, things someone doesn’t want me to know. I had thought that maybe they would forget me, or think that they had shut me up with fear, once they had me locked up here, and I was ready to be a good girl here, because even with the history of this place and all you white girls acting like I’m some kinda trash, this place is better than having men do … do that to you, one after another, all night long, night after night.

“But now – someone here has been given the job of making sure I never tell.”

I really wanted to know more about the ghosts, but now I had to ask, “So, was this person a man or a woman?”

“I don’t know. It was dark. They were bigger than me, but then, everyone here is bigger than me, and I really was scared shitless. I used to think that I just wanted to die, but now I know that I don’t want to die any more. Maybe you gave me that more than anything else. When you grabbed my arm in that water, you made me want to live. For the first time in a long time. Do you understand? It’s why … why I had to see you and offer you whatever I can.”

A knock at the door and then Ms. Slanick’s voice, “Time’s up, girls. You got thirty seconds to wrap it all up.”

Still slowly nodding, I asked, “And you really bartered another day locked up in here just to talk to me?” I realized that I had tears in my eyes about what she had told me, about what she had endured.

“It’s not so bad in here. That lock keeps people out just like it’s keeping me in. And I got books to read.” She tilted her head to a little stack on the dresser. “Your friend Phyla picked them out for me.”

She looked down at our hands clasped together and smiled again, “Remember, white girl, we all in here acting badass ‘cause we gotta, but inside we’re all just as fragile as anyone else.”

Ms. Slanick key rattled in the lock.

Michele squeezed my hand, which I had forgotten was still holding hers, and said, “Truth exposes our fragility. I need you to keep mine secret, so you can’t tell anyone the stuff that I just told you. Not even Phyla. I’m going to trust you on that.”

Then she leaned in, so close that her cheek was brushing mine and whispered into my ear, “And a bonus. I won’t tell no one about you and Phyla kissing.” She laughed a little as she pulled back.

At that moment Ms. Slanick opened the door and motioned for me to leave, re-locking it as I left and walked silently back downstairs, with too much on my mind.