42. Utterly Outmatched
Utterly Outmatched
Elias
I thought the first day would be the hardest. I was wrong.
The first day of incarceration is all shock, a series of jarring, unnatural moments.
The loud slam of a metal door, the flash of white light, the stale chemical stink.
The first day, you’re still in denial, you still think this is temporary—that someone will make a call, fix the paperwork, tell you it was all a misunderstanding.
The first day, you still have the energy to ask questions.
By the third day, you’ve stopped asking, and by the fifth, you’re no longer wondering. You start bargaining with yourself. If I can get through this day, I can make it through the next. If I make it through one week, I can make it through a month.
By the seventh, the hopelessness has well and truly set in.
Every day is harder than the one before, not because anything changes, but because nothing does.
The same walls, the same lukewarm air, the same plastic meal trays, the same fluorescent lights buzzing endlessly.
You know it’s supposed to be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—but it could be the same twenty-four hours looping endlessly.
They took everything on the first day: my phone, my clothes, even my shoelaces. They handed me a pair of grey sweats and a plastic toothbrush. I tried to comfort myself by thinking that at least I had my pride and dignity left—then they made me stand for the mugshot.
Turns out they can take that, too.
The whole process is chilling because it’s antithetical to the nature of the universe, where everything is organic. Here, everything is pure machinery: ugly, efficient, unnatural and utterly impersonal. A system that doesn’t need to hate you to destroy you.
Hatred would make it personal, and this isn’t personal. It’s paperwork. Sign here. Stand there. Hands behind your back. Step forward. Thank you for your cooperation.
Except that they say cooperation when they really mean surrender.
And let’s be honest: surrendering is the one thing I could never teach myself to bear.
I try not to think about her.
But every time I tell myself, Don’t think about Desdemona, my brain conjures her instantly: the cut-glass syllables of her perfect diction, the faint smell of sunshine and soap on her skin, the little lines between her eyebrows when she’s frowning at me.
I tell myself not to imagine what she’s doing right now—and of course that’s exactly what I do.
I picture her sitting perfectly straight at a desk, her blazer immaculate, pretending she’s fine.
Maybe she is fine. Maybe she’s forgotten me already. She told me she loved me, but her heart is young and elastic. Even if it breaks, it will mend. And that would be better, wouldn’t it? My pain would only be made more unbearable by hers.
At least now, only one of us is suffering.
I press the heels of my palms against my eyes until the red light blooms behind my eyelids, until I see nothing at all. It’s just seven days, I tell myself. I’ve survived worse, haven’t I?
But I’m not so sure anymore.
On the eighth day, I’m lying on the flat hard bed with my hands crossed behind my head, trying to find the golden ratio in the rectangles of the walls and ceilings, when the custody sergeant knocks on the cell door.
“You’ve got visitors.”
I know it’s not Desdemona and I don’t expect it to be.
I stand up, resigned and hollow. I’m taken down a corridor that smells like stale bleach, the floor slick and dull at the same time, the lights above humming, a constant mind-numbing droning.
When we reach the door at the end, the officer swipes his keycard, and I step into a room so bright and sterile it hurts my eyes.
There’s a long table in the centre and a single chair waiting for me on one side.
On the other, well—
An entire army.
I could almost laugh at the overkill.
There’s the Hastings’ lawyers, three of them, indistinguishable in their navy suits and bland expressions, armed with notepads and shiny pens.
Next to them sit the Pearsons, composed and immaculate as ever, their posture that of people attending a board meeting rather than an eighteen-year-old’s inquisition.
They have their own lawyer, who looks identical to all their other staff members: posh and white and obedient.
There’s a police superintendent by the door, belly stretching his uniform, and finally, at the far end, my court-appointed solicitor—who looks young, helpless, and utterly outmatched.
Well. That makes two of us, then.
The door closes behind me with a dry click.
One of the lawyers—Hastings’—opens proceedings by offering me a thin and perfunctory smile.
“Mr Lennox. Thank you for coming.”
He says it with a straight face but the joke writes itself. At least the universe’s still got a sense of humour.
He opens a folder and begins to read. The rustle of paper sounds deafening in the expectant silence. Everyone’s eyes are on him, except mine.
Mine are fixed on the floor as I let the words wash over me.
Most of it is dense legal jargon, but the key concepts are clear enough. Malicious intent, grievous bodily harm, premeditation. They’re not even here to interrogate me—they’re here to stage a grand performance, to paint the narrative they’ve been sketching out between them for weeks, probably.
In their neat little morality play, I play the role of the low-class villain, the corrupt scholarship kid who finally snapped under pressure. A tragic fable, a cautionary tale that will confirm everything people like them have ever believed about people like me.
The Hastings don’t want justice because justice is for people who actually need it. What they want is spectacle. My public dismemberment. They want the world to see that no one, no matter how clever or hardworking or desperate, ever climbs out of the mud without being dragged back down.
And the Pearsons, of course, are ready to cosign. They’ve recalculated the angles, reworked the narrative, rerouted their path to success—bulldozing me right out of the way.
“We did everything we could for him,” Mrs Pearson says, voice thick with the sweet syrup of parental disappointment and regret. “But some children simply can’t be rehabilitated. It’s terribly sad.”
Her husband nods solemnly, as though he’s mourning the idealism they both lost through my action.
My solicitor clears his throat, but whatever he says is immediately crushed under rebuttals, brick after brick in a wall that’s steadily closing in around me.
They talk about Birnam’s phone, about fingerprints, about my pattern of criminality.
They drag up my school records, my care worker reports, my detentions, my fights.
The reasons behind my actions don’t matter to them—they weren’t there and they’ll never understand the kinds of choices kids like me have to make every single day.
And so, just like that, every survival instinct I’ve ever had has been neatly reclassified as evidence of guilt, my entire young existence an indictment.
And I’m so fucking exhausted of it all.
The solicitor next to me fumbles through his notes, trying to find an angle, a foothold, anything—but there isn’t one.
You can’t fight people like this. You can’t reason with them, or appeal to their morality, because they don’t believe in all that.
They believe in hierarchy. In their inherent right to win.
When the lead lawyer finally slides something across the table, I glance down, numb. A national newspaper. My own face stares back at me, grainy and unflattering, printed beneath the headline: SPEARCREST SCHOLARSHIP STUDENT ARRESTED FOR VIOLENT ASSAULT.
That’s the real punishment, then.
They’re going to strip me of my future, my reputation, my name.
They’ll make sure I never set foot in a university lecture hall again, never cross a door that doesn’t lead to another cage.
They’ll turn me into a lesson, a warning to parents and teachers and politicians: this is what happens when you let someone like him in.
I don’t know why I’m surprised; Mrs Pearson told me this would happen.
The room feels smaller with every breath I take. The cage closes in, layers of it spreading out in ripples to encompass me, then the next week of my life, the next years and then decades. My entire future.
I think about saying something—anything—but what’s the point? Even a glib joke would come across hollow. I have nothing left.
So I stay silent.
My appointed solicitor clears his throat again, trying to regain control.
“My client maintains that—”
“Your client,” one of the lawyers cuts in, voice dripping with quiet disdain, “is a violent young man with a history of aggression, whose pattern of behaviour speaks for itself. What you need to realise is that—”
The door behind me opens. I don’t hear it, at first—I feel like I’m a thousand miles away, watching the universe from inside a black hole.
But then something happens. The air shifts.
The Pearsons stiffen immediately in their chairs, exchanging a sharp look.
Every lawyer in the room starts, eyes going wide.
I turn around.
And for the first time since I got here, I smile.