Chapter 4
Saturday, the two-hour drive up to Suffolk County Prison gives me plenty of time to regret my decision.
Half an hour on the road and the radio becomes nothing but garbled static, leaving us with just the sounds of the car clanging along for entertainment.
Our car was banged up and rusty when we got it off the used lot ten years ago, and it’s only gone downhill from there.
With every passing road sign, I consider telling Mami the truth.
About the dance, the cabin, Kai. Every time I open my mouth, a new image appears on the empty stretch of road in front of us.
Mami pulling over to shout at me until her throat is hoarse.
The car veering off the road from the shock of Mami processing what I just said.
A lightning bolt striking the car the second the truth slips out of me.
There’s no point in asking when there’s no possibility that it ends well.
Which leaves me with two options: let Kai down again or sneak out.
The idea of going out without permission feels like less and less of a possibility the longer I linger on it.
I’m not the girl who slips out her window in the middle of the night.
I’m the kind of girl who knows to keep her head down, smile, and follow the rules.
When Mami told me I couldn’t go to the mall with the few friends I’d made in middle school, I didn’t protest. When she didn’t let me go to their birthday and slumber parties, I didn’t argue.
Staying home was easier—safer, she said. And why wouldn’t I believe her?
Now, me avoiding my peers truly is the safest option, not just for me but for all of us. Even if Kai can see the real me, there’s no guarantee that the others will. To them, I’m probably nothing but a ticking time bomb.
Mami has always told me I’m not like the other girls in Millcreek—not the type of girl who twirls her hair around boys or parties with her friends. But lately, I’m not sure if that’s who I really am or just who she needs me to be.
Still. Sneaking out would break Mami’s heart. And I don’t know how much more of that she can handle.
As always, the prison is bursting with noise.
It’s welcome, for once. A distraction from my dangerous thoughts.
The reception area is packed with misty-eyed women and crying babies.
Every week there are new faces between the ones we’ve come to recognize.
The sister visiting her baby brother who’s ten years into a twenty-year sentence for burglary.
The single mom struggling to keep her band of toddlers in line as she writes their names on the sign-in sheet, warning them to “be good for Daddy.” Sometimes the old faces fade.
Gone either because whoever they’re visiting is free now, or because they stopped caring.
We’ll never be able to stop coming. No matter how much I wish we didn’t have to, that Papi would come home with us one day. This will be our lives until the day he dies.
We’re able to get through security quickly.
By now we’ve come enough times to have a routine.
Baggy cotton clothing like sweatpants and sweatshirts.
No underwire bras. Nothing in our pockets, not even loose change.
We line up neatly in the waiting area, claiming our usual trio of corner seats as we each wait for our turn.
Mami goes first, as always—rocketing out of the room the moment Papi’s name is called out by the burly guard at the entrance.
There’s a new slump in her posture by the time she returns.
As if another dozen pounds have been added to her shoulders.
She keeps her head down, eyes averted from the two of us as she wipes at her nose with a crumpled tissue and mutters something under her breath about us going ahead.
Mikey offers the second slot to me with a subtle jut of his chin.
I give him a tight smile before heading in.
The room is a stark, almost blinding white.
All it does is draw attention to the cracks in the ceiling and the smudges on the wall.
Years of grime that no one’s bothered to clean up.
The familiar hum of whispered conversations isn’t loud enough to drown out my thoughts as I approach the booth on the far end of the room.
“Don’t look so excited to see me,” Papi teases as soon as I slump into my seat and pick up the banged-up phone on the wall beside me.
I can’t help but smile as I toy with the phone’s cord. I can feel my cheeks warm as I focus my gaze on a squashed bug on the edge of the table instead of facing Papi. He’s always had a way of seeing right through me.
“Something happen?” he asks without missing a beat, proving my point.
Lying has become a regular part of our conversations.
Mami always warns us not to tell him about the words painted on our house.
The things thrown at our windows. The whispered taunts whenever we linger outside for too long.
Things are hard enough for him. We all know how guilty he feels for everything that’s happened—we don’t need to weigh him down with another burden.
Still, there’s something different about giving him a plastic smile when I know I’m planning something that would tear Mami apart.
“Something at school?” Papi presses when I don’t answer, leaning as close to me as he can without pressing himself up against the glass. Somehow, I can still feel his warmth.
Against my better judgment, I glance up at him. While it sucks coming here, I can’t find it in me to turn down the chance to see him. To memorize the lines of his face just in case they start to slip away from my memory.
He’s aged a dozen years in the few months he’s been here.
The gray strands that used to peek at his hairline have taken over, thick and coiled tight like my curls in high summer.
His light brown skin is worn, blisters lining his cracked palms. Once the only wrinkles he had were from laughter—lines around his mouth from all the times he let out those big belly laughs that were sometimes funnier than the joke itself.
There’s a new strength to him, too. In his arms—the muscles tight beneath the sleeves of his faded brown uniform.
In his jaw—probably from the twenty pounds he’s lost since he got here.
It’s strange, how much he looks both like the Papi from my memories and a stranger.
Prison has made him into the type of man people expect him to be—someone with worn hands and hard edges.
“Things okay with your mother?” he asks, and my stomach tightens.
I still don’t say anything—just the thought of coming up with an excuse makes my gut churn painfully.
Hard as I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to pull off lying to Papi.
He can tell something is off, though, given the way he sighs.
“Go easy on her. You know how hard things have been for her,” he says.
Making more excuses for her, the way he always does.
Things have been “hard” for Mami since they first met.
Him, the golden boy of Millcreek High despite his troubled past, and her, the wallflower who could go an entire school year not speaking more than a dozen words to anyone—a wallflower that began to bloom after they met in the rec room of the group home they were both placed in.
They’d only overlapped for a matter of days—him between fosters, her in temporary custody while her mom waited to hear back on a DUI charge.
But a matter of days was all it took for them to fall fast and hard.
He loved her endlessly—more than even her own family ever did.
“He was my family,” Mami told us a dozen times when we begged her for fairy tales before bed and got their story instead—it was our favorite happily ever after.
While their classmates taunted her for her secondhand dresses and her mother punished her with bruises and burns for daring to take up space in their cramped apartment, Papi saw who she could be when someone treated her like a person instead of an annoyance.
Lifted her up instead of punching her down.
He’s been protecting her with all his strength ever since.
I know better than to argue with Papi when he’s defending Mami, so I stay quiet. I’m sure he’d find a way to justify her forgetting about my birthday. That she’s overworked and struggling, or she’ll probably remember later, even though we both know she won’t.
We hold each other’s gaze for what feels like hours.
We don’t say anything, just look into each other’s eyes—mine a perfect mirror of his.
Part of me has always been comforted by how much people say we look like.
That we have the same nose and eyes and laugh.
That I inherited his kind soul and easy smile.
As hard as it might be now, I don’t think I’ll ever regret all the things that tie me to him. That I’ve inherited all his best parts.
Something shifts in his expression, and for a moment I wonder if he’s going to finally, finally break down like I’ve been expecting him to ever since they took him away, but instead he leans in with a smile.
“Go get something from the vending machine,” he says with his signature mischievous smile, nudging his head toward his outstretched hand.
I glance down and bite back a gasp. Through the slot in the glass between us, he’s slipped me a tightly folded stack of dollar bills.
“But—”
He holds up a finger to his lips before I can protest, smirk still in place as he points toward the vending machines lining the opposite wall.
Quickly as I can, I pull the money through the slot and shove it into my pocket—making sure none of the guards perched at each end of the room noticed before rushing over to the wall of machines.