Page 58

When I step into the Box alone, the photo tucked into my shoe, I’m the hero. I’ve rescued the production. I’ve saved the day.

One of the reasons I’m so frustrated with my memory isn’t just the whole getting stuck thing, as much as I hate it.

It’s also that my brain didn’t even do a good job of forgetting.

On one hand, there are lots of missing memories that would’ve been useful at some point or another. When I transferred to Winthrop Academy, my placement exam revealed I’d lost two years’ worth of math instruction. I’m also aware that my grandparents used to visit before they passed, but I have no recollection of their faces, or voices, or much of anything, especially now that Mom refuses to talk about them.

Then, on the other hand, there are horrible things still lodged inside me. Moments with no context, no reason, only the shock of it lightning-flashed into my brain. Lauren Ray on the floor. Finding bloody lace underwear under the mattress. Trying to get a decent grip on a tooth with a pair of pliers. Standing in the corner of the room, Dad and the girl just feet away, trying to figure out how I’d explain this with a pair of anatomically correct courtroom dolls—

I imagine it’d be better if the mental removal, so to speak, had gone well. If my psyche had pulled it off with surgical precision. Good things stay, bad things go. I’d still feel the wrongness in my bones, trapped in my DNA and epigenetics where it’ll live forever, but at least I wouldn’t be left with this.

No wonder I always feel filthy.

The Box is different.

I stop inside the door as it bangs closed.

The Box is different. And not because two of Daniel’s cameras are mounted on tripods, set up to perfectly capture both sides of this cramped coffin, or because the set lights have turned the room into a perpetual flash-bang.

It’s the bulletproof glass. The divider that usually cuts the Box in half.

It’s missing.

Dad is only a few feet away from me. If I leaned across the table, put my body right past the line that betrays where the glass used to be, I could touch the rough fabric of his jumpsuit.

My chest is tight, uncomfortably close to mimicking the symptoms of a heart attack.

“It’s different,” I say.

Dad, nonplussed as always, tilts his head. “No hello?”

“Why is it different.”

Dad holds up his hands. A chain zips loudly through a metal ring and clacks taut. His handcuffs have been affixed to the table, allowing for a foot of slack in either direction but nothing else. He gives one of his legs a knowing jiggle, and it makes the same noise.

“They’ve got me locked down, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Dad says. “Come on. Sit.”

I sit. The usual uncomfortable stool has been replaced with a slightly less uncomfortable chair.

Dad has taken his time getting ready. He must have shaved this morning; spent too much time perfecting his graying hair in the cell mirror. Without the glass, I can smell the generic products offered by the prison commissary. Sold at a criminal markup, according to him.

“That’s not recording, is it?” Dad asks, leaning forward to meet one of the cameras’ dead gaze.

“No.” I point to where the little red recording light sits, unilluminated, in the plastic body of the camera. “Answer my question.”

Dad spreads his hands in surrender, as much as he can with the chain. “Your mother’s friend out there has some buddies in high places. Same reason there’s no officers breathing down our necks at the moment. You can get anything done if you shake the right hands.”

“You would know.”

“So would you.”

My heart rate spikes.

He knows Daniel tipped him off on purpose.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Dad sighs. I’m not sure what expression is on my face, but I wipe it away in an instant. “I figured you wanted something. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. Which is fine—a good father understands his place in his daughter’s life, and I accept my role. No hard feelings.” I don’t believe the no hard feelings bit, but he settles in, makes himself comfortable. “So. What can I do for you, Bug?”

For a moment, I try to find the trap. He always starts off cordial enough, before one wrong word sends him careening off into vicious cruelty. There’s never been any doubt where I got it from.