Dangerous Girls

She’d given up. On herself, on me.

It would have been different if she’d been terminal, even late-stage, but the doctors said there was a 40 percent chance that another round of chemo would work. Forty percent. That was almost half. A half-chance of beating it again, a half-chance at life. With me. And instead, she gave up. Said it was unnatural, that she didn’t want the chemicals in her body over and over again. Said that it might work this time, but it would only come back again. Said that this was her time, and that she wanted to go gracefully, with dignity and love.

Except there was nothing graceful about the way she wasted away, a thin skeleton dwarfed by covers and cushions and bathrobes, sitting propped and delicate in bed. Nothing dignified about catheters and bags full of urine, and yellowed skin, and choking pain.

Nothing loving about choosing to leave me.

I sit, silent, as they discuss my dead mother, my grief, my desperation. I dig my fingernails into my palms, and wonder when this will ever end.

AFTER THE FIGHT

They put me back in isolation, saying it’s for my own safety, but I know—this is for their sake, not mine. They don’t care that I got hurt in here, only that it makes them look bad, makes me more sympathetic to the outside world, maybe. So they take away what little freedom I could pretend I still had, and condemn me to silence, and dark nights, and long days with nothing to do but think. Slowly, my strength drains away, my earlier resolve and determination waning under the brutal onslaught of day after day of loneliness. Those bleak thoughts I’ve pushed away come creeping back, whispering in the night, slipping their cold arms around my body and their slim fingers around my throat, until the panic is so fierce I double over where I stand, hardly breathing.

I never realized what a privilege it was to get up and leave my cell in the mornings. Now they bring me all my meals, delivered on hard plastic trays, and take me to use the showers late in the morning once everyone else has already had their turn. I still get my few hours in the exercise yard—Gates and my father saw to that—but now I’m escorted out by two guards to a thin strip of land on the far side of the prison, divided from the others by barbed wire and barricades, away from the entertainment of the pickup basketball games and slouching, sullen cliques.

The guy from the American Embassy, Lee, is my only friend. He visits almost every day, bringing me mindless magazines and books to fill the empty hours, a new pillow to try to cheer me, and an old iPod loaded with songs he thinks I’d like, to drown the dark silence and screaming of my bad dreams. He gives me updates on the case, and Gates’s new ideas for trial strategy, going over my statements with me for hours and comparing them to the official police transcripts he managed to obtain from his new contact at the precinct. He listens patiently, taking notes, creasing his forehead in a thoughtful frown as he looks for any new angle or possibility to prove my innocence.

Could Tate have left the bedroom while I was in the shower? Did I mention to anyone else about Juan following us back to the house? What about Niklas—did he make any threatening comments, or jokes that could be seen as creepy and aggressive?

“Sometimes it’s not about proving you didn’t do it,” he tells me when I throw the pages down, frustrated after poring over Chelsea’s and Max’s and AK’s interrogation transcripts all week. “Sometimes, you just have to create reasonable doubt. They don’t have hard evidence,” he reminds me. “They just have circumstantial things, and Dekker’s wild theories. Beyond a reasonable doubt, that’s what they have to prove. But we won’t let them.”

I lean back in my seat, exhausted. I’m sleeping even worse now, every click and rattle echoing through the isolation wing. “How can you be so sure?”

Lee gives me a quiet smile, his brown eyes soft but resolute. “I just am.”

But I can’t accept that, not when it feels like everyone in my life has turned out to have some other agenda, a hidden reason for making me say or do what they want. “No, I mean it,” I tell him. “Why are you here? You said it yourself, the embassy doesn’t want anything to do with me. Aren’t you risking a lot, going against them?”

Lee looks down. “I guess I just want to help. You’re stuck in here alone, and what they’re saying about you . . .”

“Why don’t you believe them?” I ask, insistent. “Everyone else does, even people I thought were my friends. You don’t even know me, and you’re saying you believe me for sure.”

Lee pauses. He’s weighing something, I can tell, and when he looks up, there’s something tired in his expression. “My sister, this happened to her. Not murder,” he adds quickly. “Drugs.”

I wait, and after another moment, he explains. “She was backpacking down in South America after college,” he explains. “It was eight years ago. She wanted to see the beaches, and the jungle, Aztec ruins, you know?” He smiles faintly, and I can see how close they are, that affectionate sibling bond born of shared bedrooms and childhood fighting and all those other tiny moments that add up to something solid and unbreakable. “She was staying in youth hostels, met all kinds of people. They traveled together,” he continued. “And I guess someone slipped something in her bag, because they pulled her out of line in customs in Brazil, found close to half a pound of cocaine rolled up in one of her shirts. She never touched drugs,” he says, looking up at me, emphatic. “Barely even had a beer. I used to tease her, you know, because she was so straight-edge.” He stops, a shadow slipping over his face.

“What happened?” I ask, even though I already know it can’t be anything good.

He looks at the floor. “They charged her, locked her up in some hellhole prison. She didn’t speak any Portuguese, and my parents . . . It took them weeks before anyone let us in to see her. We got a lawyer, but the trial was a sham, and that much cocaine . . . They found her guilty of trafficking.” Lee says quietly. “Ten year sentence.”

My heart clutches in my chest.

“She was stuck down there for three years before we managed to get her out on appeal.” Lee meets my eyes, pained. “Three years in that place.” He shakes his head. “She’s back home now—she got married, had a kid. But, it changed her. She’ll never get those years back, all because they just washed their hands of her. Like she didn’t matter. Nobody fought for her.” He stops and looks away, embarrassed. “I guess, I figure if I can help stop that from happening to you . . .”