Privilege (Privilege 1)

NEVER

"It's not fair."It wasn't a whine or a complaint, just a statement. A statement of the obvious, as far as Ariana Osgood was concerned. As she stared out the window of the Brenda T. Trumbull Correctional Facility for Women, it was all she could think to say. Outside, the leaves on the trees swayed lazily in the warm summer breeze--a breeze she would be allowed to feel against her skin for exactly fifty-five minutes during midday recess. Recess. That was what the warden called it. Who ever heard of a teenage girl looking forward to recess?

"It's just not fair."

Across the wide oak desk, her "therapist" smirked. Shifting in his seat, Dr. Meloni leaned back, forcing his expensive leather chair to let out the loud creak that he knew made Ariana's skin crawl. Just outside the fence that encircled the grounds, about a hundred yards from where Ariana now sat, Meloni's precious Doberman, Rambo,

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barked nonstop, as always. The inmates of the Brenda T. listened to that damn dog bark all day long, every day. It was as if Meloni was trying to remind them that he was always there, always watching, even when they weren't in session with him. The man also couldn't be away from the dog for more than two hours at a time. He was always going out there and feeding him treats, cooing to the animal like it was a newborn baby and the apple of its father's eye. Revolting. Someone should have been analyzing him.

"What's not fair?" he asked.

Ariana flicked a glance at Dr. Victor Meloni, sitting there in front of his elaborately framed diplomas from Johns Hopkins and Stanford. Thick, leather-bound books sat on the shelves to his right, most of which she was sure he hadn't even opened, let alone read. Her lip curled at the sight of his fake tan. His overly gelled salt-and-pepper hair. His heavily starched blue shirt. His capped teeth.

Two hundred dollars a tooth, but can't spring for a pair of shoes with leather soles. Ariana could ascertain everything she needed to know about a person through his or her footwear. In the sixteen months she had been in residence at Brenda T. Trumbull just outside Washington, D.C., she had only seen Dr. Meloni wear two different pairs of shoes. The same exact style, one pair in black, one in brown. Clearly, the man thought that everyone he met would be so dazzled by the veneer of his face, they wouldn't take the time to notice his shoes.But Ariana did. And they screamed white-trash-turned-scholarship-student-turned-poseur. He'd probably taken this job because it meant

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he'd have the chance to torture the daughters of all the deep-pocketed classmates who had never accepted him into their inner sanctum. And torture them he did. He smiled when they cried. Laughed in the face of their desperation.

Smirked... all... the... time.

"It's not fair, me being here for twenty years," Ariana said slowly, stating the obvious. Stating the point she'd made four thousand times before.

"Twenty years to life," he corrected, his blue eyes taunting.

"I don't think about that," Ariana said, averting her gaze again. Outside the window, the lake glinted in the summer sun. A lone sailboat sliced across the window frame and disappeared.

"About what?" he asked. "The life part?"

He sat forward now. Interested.

"Yes," Ariana said. "It's unacceptable."

That was when Dr. Meloni laughed. Not just his usual amused chuckle, but a big, hearty, guttural laugh. Ariana tried not to cringe. She reached up and casually ran both hands through her soft, chin-length blond hair, securing it to the nape of her neck with an alligator barrette. She waited patiently for him to stop, curling her toes inside her state-issue white sneakers. It used to be that she would grab her own arm when she was tense, letting her fingernails cut into the flesh. Then one day last year Dr. Meloni had noticed this habit and pointed it out to her like he was oh so insightful. She hadn't done it in his presence since.

"Unacceptable," he repeated.

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She looked him in the eye, her gaze unwavering. "Yes."

"You do realize you killed someone," Dr. Meloni said, in the tone adults use when scolding naughty children.

Ariana blinked, just barely betraying her internal flinch.

Thomas's blood. Thomas's blood. Thomas's blood. Just like that, she saw it on her hands. Under her fingernails. In her hair. She had made them chop it all off when she was waiting for trial and hadn't let it grow past her chin since. All that blood...

No. She mentally wiped it away. Gone. Back to the present. She focused in on Meloni's quote-of-the-day calendar. Today, for the twenty-ninth of June, was a Moliere quote: "The greater the obstacle, the more the glory in overcoming it." Not a bad point.

"Yes. I do realize I killed someone," Ariana said, in a tone she reserved for idiots.