25. Battery
CHAPTER 25
Battery
KEY
Eight Years Ago
L ogan wanted to know my secret. Wanted to know how I made it look so easy. How I could survive here in this hell. The truth is that I’m hardly even here. I’ve switched off. Tuned out. If I don’t think, it can’t hurt. If I don’t think, they can’t hurt me . So I turned back into Keith—the boy I was at eleven before I ever met Dusty. Before she bulldozed into my life and opened my eyes to a world of Technicolor.
Now, I’m in black and white, like when Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas. Maybe it never really happened. Maybe I never really knew her. Never met my best friend. Never fell in love. Never proposed. Never thought I was going to have a baby. Maybe it was just a dream.
Maybe I’ll wake up and I’ll be eleven years old again, and I just fell asleep in a stifling hot church pew.
There’s a crash of doors, and I jolt in my bunk as officers escort a boy into the room with tan skin and a fresh black buzz cut. The boy tries to fight, and I want to tell him it’s no use. That fighting back here will only make your life hell, and that you’ll eventually give in anyway, so why not skip ahead so you don’t suffer. But I suppose that’s part of why so many of us are here. We enjoy suffering on some level.
“Get off me!” he shouts, and I keep still even as I can tell the rest of the bunkhouse is up and watching the scene.
The bunk next to me is empty, the last one in the row, and I know that’s where he’s headed. I hear the squeak of the rusty springs as he’s tossed on the bed.
“You’re expected to be dressed and ready at oh-six hundred hours,” the officer says.
“Fuck you.” The words are followed by the sound of him spitting on the floor.
There’s a sharp smack, and the sound of skin slapping something wet, followed by a grunt of pain. “Don’t be late,” the officer continues. “Or there’ll be worse than that tomorrow.”
He’s quiet this time, and after a long moment of heavy breathing, the door locks behind the officers.
“Shit,” the boy murmurs, and I open my eyes again, turning to see him dabbing at his lip, which is split open and bloody. He collects himself and looks around. His jaw is sharp, but there’s still some baby fat in his cheeks and his dark eyes are alight—even after being beaten. Even after being sent here.
Then the most miraculous thing happens—he smiles. It’s not a full one, but it pulls at the corner of his mouth as he shakes his head, as though he thinks this is all a joke. Or maybe he’s smiling because he knows it’s not. That he can only cope with the reality of this through laughter, and that smile lights him up, even in the darkened room.
I stare up at the ceiling and take a deep breath. My eyes have been dead since that night at the bus station four months ago. The light they once carried died that day, and I haven’t been able to look at myself since. But this boy, he’s not broken, and I’m not sure why, but something makes me want to protect him.
Logan never had that light. He was still fighting when I came, but even then, he didn’t have this spirit. Maybe if I can keep this boy’s light alive, it’ll keep me alive too.
I look over at him again. He’s wrapped his arms around his knees protectively but I can still see the remnants of that smile on his face. For a few minutes, we’re quiet, and the rest of the guys seem to have gone back to sleep.
Finally, he looks over, and our eyes meet. It feels like forever that he holds my gaze, even as his eyes turn glassy with unshed tears.
“What the fuck are you staring at?” he asks, springing to his feet, his fists clenched at his sides.
I don’t say anything. I can’t. I also can’t look away.
He steps closer this time. “Knock it off, asshole,” he says, his voice rising.
My eyes widen as he closes the distance between us. I don’t move when he grabs my shirt and yanks me out of my bed. I don’t even flinch when he raises his fist over his head and stares down at me with wild, tear-filled eyes.
“Stop looking at me!” he shouts, then punches me in the face—his knuckles slamming into my right cheek bone. Searing hot pain flares across my face, but I relish it. It’s the only time I feel anything.
I stare up at the boy who snarls back at me like a bull readying itself for attack. He shakes me and raises his fist again. “Do something! Fight back!” he screams.
I shake my head. “No.”
He blinks at me, his fist lowering an inch at a time. “Wh-why not?”
“I’ve already lost everything. I have nothing left to fight for.”
There’s a silence that descends upon us as his erratic breathing settles. He lowers his fist completely, releases his grip on my collar. I fall back against my bunk with a squeak but never take my eyes off him.
He stands then glances around the room at all the others who by now have sat up in their beds. “What the fuck are you all staring at?” he asks the room at large.
No one says anything. No one gets up. And after a moment, they all lose interest. His eyes shine in the darkness, holding my gaze, and that’s when the tears finally fall. His lips tremble as he cries, his face fighting against the urge to sob. Still he watches me—and I watch him. It’s as though he needed this. Needed someone to see his pain. Finally, after a time, he wipes the wetness from his face and walks over to his bunk at the end of the row.
“This is such bullshit,” I hear him mutter.
He sniffs loudly, climbs into bed, then rolls over facing away from me. I turn onto my back and stare at the ceiling once again.
I need to help him. I need to protect him.
Because I need him to save me.
* * *
“You’re doing that wrong,” I whisper the next morning as we’re awoken by reveille.
The boy’s cheeks darken and I suspect he must feel embarrassed about last night. He doesn’t need to, though. We’ve all been there. “Fuck off,” he says back, and continues to butcher his technique.
“Fold the corners, then tuck them under. Like mine,” I whisper again.
“Dude, did I fucking ask for your help?”
I sigh. “No, but they’ll beat you until you learn how to do it right.”
He stops and stares at his messy sheets.
I lean over. “Maybe you’re into pain, but I don’t exactly want your blood all over my stuff.”
For a moment he seems like he’ll continue to argue with me, but I’m pleased when he crouches down to fold and tuck the corners. He glances at my bed for reference and adjusts his own, then fixes his uniform before joining the rest of us at the end of our bunks.
When the lieutenant bursts through the doors he heads straight for the back like I knew he would. He wants to make an example of the new guy. He always does. It’s how they break us. Jokes on them, though. I’m already broken.
He stops at the boy’s bunk next to me and inspects the bed. I watch out of the corner of my eye and inwardly cheer when all he gives is a rough grunt of approval. The lieutenant steps right into the boy’s face and narrows his eyes.
“Wipe that smirk off your face, Thanger,” he says, then turns to the rest of the bunkhouse. “ Move out, ladies! ”
We make two straight lines and head out the door into the sunlight, our hands coming up to shield against it. I feel a tap on my back and look over my shoulder.
“Thanks,” the boy mutters. “And sorry about last night.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m Joel, by the way,” he says.
“Keith Prentiss,” I answer. “And if you want to keep your face from being smashed in? You’ll listen to me.”
I expect him to laugh, to scoff even. Instead he says nothing and simply follows behind me. Throughout the first day they test him. I know all their tricks by this point, and at every opportunity I fix whatever Joel does incorrectly enough that by nightfall, the officers haven’t been able to find a single thing to punish him for. They beat the shit out of him anyway, and that evening, he goes to bed with a smile under his bloody nose.
But in the middle of the night I hear him crying, and the little I have left of my heart aches for him. I still can’t fully explain why. I’ve never cared about the others. Not like this.
After that, he joins Logan and me at meals and during study time but doesn’t say anything for the first week, other than tell us to fuck off when we try to initiate conversation, until that fades too.
One afternoon, around week three, when Logan and I are messing around with our guitars, I spot Joel watching us from the bunkhouse door.
“I heard he brought a bass guitar with him,” Logan whispers to me. “Maybe when he gets it back, he could fill out the band.”
Like the Grinch, my heart expands at this new information. A bass guitarist would really be something. Don’t get me wrong, Logan is a fairly decent guitar player, but he’s terrible at improvising. The guy doesn’t have a creative bone in his body, so all we do is play covers of our favorite songs. I never feel like I want to share my original music with him. Maybe it’s because I’m still broken, and I can’t bring myself to open up the floodgates that might come from playing the music I wrote for Dusty. Logan wouldn’t understand it—he wouldn’t understand me.
But maybe Joel would.
A few weeks pass and still, I see the aftermath of Joel’s silent tears in the mornings. The red puffy eyes and the raw nose. If only I could do something to make him feel better. Then, while we’re scrubbing the showers one day, it hits me. A radical idea that will probably prove to be something I have to suffer the consequences for, but it’s been a long time since I cared about anything.
The next afternoon, I find Joel sitting on his bed in the bunkhouse alone. I knew he would be. He always comes in here after classes to read the comic books he borrows from the library on campus.
“Hey, Joel,” I call, and I’m pleased at the way his face lights up when he sees me. “I, uh,” I stammer. Why am I nervous? “I got something for you.”
His eyebrows pull together, but when I reveal his electric bass guitar from behind my back he jumps to his feet, a look of complete disbelief on his face.
“Holy shit!” He bounds over to take it from my hands. “I—how did you—I thought for sure they chucked it,” he rushes out.
I sit on the edge of my bed and watch him pull the strap over his shoulder. I’m mesmerized by the way he so deftly handles the body of the guitar. How nimbly his fingers move, quickly and precisely. The way he slaps and plucks the strings while his other hand dances down the frets catches me off guard and for the first time in months, I smile.
“Damn, Prentiss, didn’t know you had teeth,” he says, grinning.
I shrug. “It’s been a while since I’ve smiled.”
He sits down opposite me, the guitar pulled into him as though he’s afraid at any moment it might disappear. “Where did you get this?” he asks.
“The officer’s quarters,” I admit. “Logan heard they had your guitar held hostage there and . . . well, we thought if you got yours back, you could play with us—you know, if you wanted.”
“Really?” he asks, leaning forward.
I get to my feet and lift the mattress, revealing the electric guitar I managed to score for good behavior.
“Radical,” Joel says meekly. “Hey, let’s play something.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Now?”
Joel laughs. “Well, shit, yeah now.”
Taking a deep breath, I say, “Okay . . . what were you just playing? I don’t recognize it.”
“Oh, nothing. I was just fucking around, it’s not a real song.”
I stare at him and he shrugs.
“What? Was it that bad?”
I roll my jaw, tamping down my rising excitement. “No, the opposite actually. It was awesome.”
He jerks his chin at me. “Okay, Prentiss, show me what you got. I’ll play along.”
My stomach twists. “Right, um, this is one I wrote,” I say, and adjust the tuning knobs.
I strum once, my fingers pressing into the frets. It starts slow—like a trickle of water from a crack in a dam. He watches with rapt attention, barely blinking as he follows the movement of my hands. He props his bass on his knee and starts to slap his strings. The sound gives new life to the song. The way he adds depth and feeling to each line—I’ve never experienced it before. Not on my own. Not with Logan. Never. The music speeds up and just like the dam, it’s as if my heart is cracking open and everything I’ve been repressing starts to gush out. I press the strings until my fingers hurt and when I sing the words I wrote for her, that’s when the tears begin to fall.
I let them run down my face. I don’t hide from it, and I don’t wipe them away. And he watches me. Just like I did for him that first night.
When the song ends, I’m panting. My voice feels hoarse and my face is swollen. “Sorry,” I mutter as I place my guitar on the bed so I can wipe my cheeks with my shirt. Joel sets his guitar down and for a split second I wonder if he regrets playing with me. I’m half expecting him to tell me my song is garbage and he never wants to jam again. But he doesn’t. He does something I never would have guessed.
He hugs me. Really hugs me.
Who knew a hug could bring someone back to life?
When he pulls away, his smile is small. “You wrote that?” he asks.
I huff out a laugh. “Uh, yeah. What’d you think?”
He shoves my shoulder. “Fucking killer, man. Seriously, that shit was rad. You got more?”
I grin. “A lot more,” I say, leaning forward to kick a box under my foot for a better playing position.
“Where’d you get that?”
His eyes are trained on the necklace that has come loose from my collar.
“Is that a ring made from guitar string?”
“Oh, uh . . . yeah.” I quickly tuck the chain back inside my shirt.
“Epic. Did someone give it to you?”
I fight against the urge to flinch. The memory of her like a knife slicing across my skin. “No, I umm . . . I made it. It’s just—” Say something. “It’s just a reminder of someone special, that’s all.”
Joel glances at the hidden spot on my chest, his lips parting like he’s going to ask more questions, when a whistle sounds in the courtyard outside. I jump to my feet, nearly knocking him over. “Quick, hide your guitar under your mattress.”
He follows my lead, but as we stand straight at the ends of our beds for the approaching officers, he whispers, “What the hell is going on?”
“I may have done something stupid to get the guitar back.”
His face falls. “What? Are you crazy?”
“Prentiss!” Officer Pettey shouts as he stomps toward me. “You’ve got some explaining to do, you little shit.”
“Is there a problem, sir?” I ask, aware that Joel is watching intently.
“Yeah, you fucking locked us in the latrine.”
“That was a latrine?” I ask, innocently. “My bad, I thought it was your bunkhouse. Smelled just like you.”
Joel snorts out a laugh and I smile wide . . . right before I’m punched squarely in the face.
* * *
It took a few days to recover from the brutal beating I got for locking the officers in the toilets. It was all worth it though when Joel stopped crying in the night. It’s surprisingly easy to be friends with the kid. By some miracle the higher ups didn’t notice his guitar was missing and at every opportunity, we jam together. Even more surprising, I share more of my own music with him and even Logan. Once the floodgates were open it seemed I couldn’t stop it.
I show him the chord progressions, and he develops the bass melody, but Logan struggles to keep up. The two of us sound like magic. Like real music. And maybe it’s cruel, but it’s easier to be creative when Logan isn’t there. It’s like Joel is the power source, and I’m a dead battery slowly being charged back to life. Joel is my other half, so when Logan pulls away to spend more time on his own, I let it happen. I’m actually relieved that maybe this trio will break apart naturally.
That is, until the unthinkable happens.
Walking into the barracks I’ve lived in for almost a year, I stop as a chill races down my spine. At the end of the row of bunks, where Joel and my beds are, sits Logan.
“Hey, what are you doing here? You know you were supposed to report to the mess hall ten minutes ago,” I say.
For a second he blinks stupidly at me, but then something hard crosses over his face, and with a quick look past me at the door, he sets his jaw and stands. “You’re cutting me out, aren’t you?”
I pull back, confused, before looking around for some context. “Uh, what?” I step closer and realize my trunk is open.
“Carnal Sins?” he asks, a piece of paper crunched in his hand. “Really?”
I shrug and glance down at the crude logo Joel drew during class after we thought of the name together. “Joel and I came up with it. Killer, right?”
He scoffs, his fingers tightening around it. “I can’t believe this. You and your fucking boyfriend are doing everything without me. I see the two of you together. You’re cutting me out of the band. You’re cutting me out of Carnal Sins .” He spits out the last two words like they’re poison on his tongue.
I cross my arms. “Hardly in a position to cut anyone out of anything here,” I say with a laugh, gesturing around us. “Not like I can hold auditions for another guitarist.”
His face reddens. “You see? You see ? That. Right fucking there, Prentiss, you asshole.” He steps toward me with his finger outstretched. “You think you’re so goddamn superior than the rest of us. But you’re just an arrogant prick who wants to take away the only thing I have going for me.”
I hold up my hands, stunned. “Dude, what the hell are you talking about?”
“The band? The songs? Everything we worked on together? You can’t just take that from me,” he says, his voice rising. “I won’t let you.”
But my head is trying to piece broken information together. “We haven’t kicked you out of the band, Logan.”
“And what about everything else?”
My eyes narrow. “What else?”
“The songs, Prentiss. The songs!” he shouts, his face turning redder and redder. “They’re mine!”
In what world does he think he has any ownership over songs that I wrote? Then it clicks together and my eyes widen. “Wait,” I say, stepping toward him. “Wait, wait, wait. You don’t think you co-wrote those with me, do you?”
“I sure as hell do,” he spits.
I do something that I know, even in that moment, I’ll regret one day. I laugh. I laugh so hard that I clutch at my stomach, the muscles aching while he seethes in anger. “Samuels, are you out of your mind? Since when does you writing down lyrics as I dictate them to you make you a cowriter? That’s like saying you co-wrote Romeo and Juliet because you copied a verse line by line in your notebook.”
I laugh some more, but as it dies out, I understand he’s serious. “Logan, you can’t think that’s what that was,” I insist, stepping forward again. “I mean, I appreciate you helping me get them on paper, but I wrote them. I composed them. Me. All by myself.”
The reality of what he’s suggesting starts to eat away at me, the fragile friendship we’ve had for months fraying rapidly. Was it ever real? Did he just use me? And while he wouldn’t be my pick for my best friend now that I’ve met Joel, he’s still my friend. At least, I thought he was. The betrayal stings like the prick of a hundred wasps.
“I thought you just wanted to help me,” I say, so close now I can feel his rage radiating. “You know I have problems writing. You told me it shouldn’t stop me from becoming a real musician. A real songwriter.” I push him hard in the chest. “But this whole time, you wanted them for yourself? Was everything you’ve ever said bullshit?” I push again and he stumbles, his face hardening before he strikes back and lunges for me.
We go down hard. A tangled mass of limbs and fists and boots. I try to get up but he grabs me by my belt to pull me down again. He kicks the back of my knee hard and I cry out as he gets to his feet. He steps over me, but I dummy sweep his legs out from underneath him and he falls like a sack of bricks into my open trunk.
As he tries to scramble away, I shoot to my feet and fall against the support beam in the center of the room, between the rows of beds. My leg kills, and my cheek and arms are tender to the touch as I try to catch my breath.
“What’s this?”
I roll my eyes, thinking maybe he’s trying to distract me, but when I see what he’s holding my throat tightens.
“Who the hell is Dusty Connors?”
“Give that to me,” I say, reaching for it, but he rips it away at the last second, and I know now he’s got me—I gave too much away.
His head tilts. “Is this . . .” His eyes focus on the letter and my stomach sinks.
“Give me that,” I say through gritted teeth.
His smile is malicious. “All this time, I could never figure out why you were sent here,” he says. “Mister do-gooder who always follows the rules. But it finally makes sense. You were never the perfect little church boy after all, were you? Never in a million years did I think you were sent here because you knocked up some slut.”
My hands are fisted in his shirt the next second, slamming him into the wall behind Joel’s bed. But he manages to raise the test result over my head. The only proof I have left that there ever was a baby. My baby. Our baby.
“Where’s your bastard baby now, Prentiss? Huh? Where’s your whore?”
The anger seems to boil me alive, and something inside me snaps. I wrap my hands around his throat, his eyes bulging as I squeeze. It’s a strange feeling. It hardly takes any effort at all for his face to turn red. I’ve never considered killing someone before, and it frightens me how quickly I make the decision to do it. It’s only the sound of something clicking above that pulls me out of the bizarre rage.
He has my letter in one hand and a lighter in the other. I have no idea where it came from, but the lighter bursts to life and he holds it close to my letter.
“No, don’t!” I beg, releasing him with a shove, but I see it in his eyes as he gasps for breath. See the hurt he feels. The hurt he wants me to feel. I sink to my knees before him, silently begging him not to do this. But he shakes his head as he coughs and walks toward me, still holding the letter hostage.
“It . . . didn’t have . . . to be like this,” he gasps out, standing over me. “We could’ve been . . . a great team. All three of us. But you had to go and . . . fuck that up.”
I’m vibrating with rage and sorrow when I look up at him. “You better watch your back,” I say in a low voice. “There’s only so many places in this godforsaken hellhole you can hide.”
He tilts his head. “You think I’m staying? Oh, Keith, you’re stupider than I thought.”
My eyes narrow. What the hell is he talking about?
He kneels so we’re level. “You think I’d go through all this just to stick around? No. I’m getting the fuck out of here.”
At my confusion his eyes lock on something over my shoulder.
“There’s my ticket out of here,” he says, that sick smile appearing again, and before I can move, he sets the letter ablaze.
The air around me is silent. All I can hear is the crackling of paper. I reach for it, crying out as I desperately try to stem the flames. But it’s no use, and as I watch the remnants turn to ash, a part of me dies. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I must be drowning. I don’t know what to do. Do I fight him, or try to repair something I know is futile? My body is locked into an internal turmoil that seems to both happen over a millennia and in a fraction of a second.
Joel’s voice pierces my consciousness, raised and shouting at Logan. His fist makes contact just once and he’s down, the spray of blood arching into the air.
Time passes like sand through an hourglass as the officers stomp into the bunkhouse. As they take in the scene and wail on us with closed fists. As they scream at us about insubordination and discipline and choices .
The ashes of the letter rain down on my scarred hands and face, the pain so incredible I think it’ll drag me under, but through all of it, I can see Joel. His light keeping me from sinking beyond all hope into a never-ending darkness.
“It’s going to be alright, Key,” he shouts at me over the commotion. The name acts like a defibrillator. Restarting my heart and keeping me alive. “I’m here, Key. Stay with me.”