Criminal by Terra Elan McVoy Page A

be much worse for him. And I didn’t want that either. I really didn’t.
    An unexpected wave of anger took over me then. Toward Bird. For making me leave her house and for making me tell. For never, never once giving Dee a chance. At first it felt strangeto blame Bird, but the more I thought about her, the righter it became. She was always so convinced she was the only one who knew anything. She never even tried to understand. When she got high and mighty, there wasn’t even a shred of kindness or mercy in her. It was her way and her way only, and it made a person feel more than small. Worthless underneath her judgment. Her bossiness. Her needing to do things so holy. If Bird had just left things alone, trusted me even a little, none of this would have happened. It would’ve blown over, like Dee said. It didn’t have to be any of her business. But she had to be the boss of everything, had to make everyone hold to her strict standards. She could never accept anyone for just what they were. She could never really just let me be me. With her, I always had to be more than that. I couldn’t just exist, the way I did with Dee. Instead I always had to be the me she wanted. The one who fit her requirements. And she’d push me toward it over and over, no matter how clear it was to both of us that I was always going to be too weak and too stupid to come anywhere close to being like her.
    The guards called for cleanup, and breakfast was over. I hadn’t talked to anyone, though I was aware of Priscilla trying to include me a little in her conversation with the other girls at our table. As they stood up around me, getting ready for whatever was next, I looked at my plate.
    My hash browns were severed into tiny bits.

THEY DON’T TELL YOU THAT JAIL IS BORING. ALL MORNING after breakfast I was on edge, watching, afraid something was going to happen. That someone would pick on me or there’d be some kind of trouble. But all that happened was we got taken into the common area, and right away five or six girls started in on some card game tournament. Four other girls parked in front of the TV, two of them taking turns with the remote every hour, in some kind of system. It was annoying shows, and the girls controlling the remote mostly talked to the TV the whole time, but nobody else said anything about it, so I didn’t either. Priscilla was reading a book most of the morning, until she got a visitor and came back with four days’ worth of crossword puzzles from the paper. She sat there with her pencil and her glasses, lookingmore like some kind of nerd college kid than a woman in jail.
    I tried to read too. Some beat-up romance paperback. But almost every page made me think of Dee, and eventually I pressed my head on the table and my thighs together, trembling with want. How—how?—was I going to get through day after day without him if I could barely make it an hour?
    Lunch was worse than breakfast. Priscilla had been right about pickles being almost the only vegetable, besides some sorry too-old lettuce if you dared a baloney sandwich. I struggled with some soup that had a few bits of chicken floating in it, but that made me think of making soup for Bird and Jamelee and eventually I shoved it away. I was both hungry and not. We’d be given commissary rights tomorrow, where you could get some better food. But I didn’t have any money. Not more than the maybe fifteen dollars I’d had in my purse when I came in. And I wasn’t sure they were going to credit me that anyway. If they did, I was going to need a few sundries before I even thought about chips. But I didn’t know if I’d be able to eat those either.
    A couple of hours after lunch, one of the guards hollered, “Dougherty,” over by the main desk and the phone. “Lawyer here to see you.”
    Lawyer. I’d forgotten that I’d get one. But then suddenly it was frustrating they’d taken