“I’m not your ma,” someone said, and I opened my eyes. The ceiling above me was unpainted cinder blocks. In one horrible second, it all came back to me: I was sleeping on a floor in prison. My jaw ached where I’d lost a tooth to my pal Tim. Ma hadn’t woken me up for school in three years.
Right then I hated reality so much.
Blinking a couple more times, I focused on the friendly face above me. Robin. It was still dark in our prison block, and there were no sounds of movement or activity.
“Robin,” I whispered. “What’s up? What time is it?” It felt like only minutes since I had been escorted from the pen back to my prison room, where I had promptly passed out.
“It’s two thirty,” she said apologetically. “But they’re going to be coming for you soon, and I thought it’d be better if you were on your feet.”
“Who’s coming for me?” I said, scrambling to stand up. Pain after pain assaulted my sleep-deprived brain as every bruised muscle strained to hold me upright. I swallowed moans and groans and tried to control my breathing.
“You said you’d done badly on the tests,” Robin whispered, patting her bunk next to her. I shook my head; if I sat down, I’d never be able to get back up. Not without crying. “And you got beaten in the ring.”
It was a kindhearted understatement, and I nodded again.
“When that happens, they put the kid through lessons and training,” Robin went on. Her head turned involuntarily, as mine did, when we heard the doors at the end of our block screech open.
“More lessons, more training,” Robin went on in a whisper. “Starting now.” Quickly she lay down on her bunk and pretended to be asleep. Heavy footsteps marched toward me, getting louder and louder. When the guards reached my room, I was standing there, awake and clear-eyed, looking at them calmly.
They seemed startled, disappointed—no doubt they’d been looking forward to hauling me up from the floor and dragging me down the hall.
“Let’s go!” one guard said roughly, and she yanked my hands behind me to put handcuffs on my wrists.
I kept my balance, walking quickly between them, and amid the almost detached awareness I had of every single cell in my body screaming in agony, I thought: Thank you, Robin.
28
SCHOOL, FOR ME, WAS MOSTLY about seeing my friends. If any facts and figures filtered into my awareness, well, that was just a bonus.
School all by myself at 2:30 in the morning was not a situation guaranteed to bring out my good side.
“Sit!” A woman—not the Strepp, but definitely of the Strepp breed—frowned at me and pointed to the rows of desks. I chose one and sat down.
“Your math scores were abysmal!” she snapped, pacing at the front of the room. “Since your English scores were also bad, I’ll explain that abysmal means very low! As if they’d been found at the bottom of an abyss!”
I nodded, wondering how the hell I was going to stay awake through this.
“Now tell me,” she went on, “what kind of word is abysmal?”
This had “trick question” written all over it. “Um, depressing?” I guessed. “Or… embarrassing?”
A vein in her neck started throbbing, and her face got red. If she had a heart attack, it would definitely perk me up for several minutes.
“No!” she shouted, and threw a marker at me. It glanced off my shoulder and fell to the floor with a clatter. “What part of speech is it?”
Part of speech—I’d definitely heard something like this before. Verb? No. I tried to channel Cassie, who would be trotting out this info like there was no tomorrow. Verb, adverb, present perfect, no—
“Adjective!” I said.
The teacher nodded reluctantly, then started writing on the whiteboard, stuff about nouns and pronouns, blah blah blah. A couple of minutes later she must have noticed my eyelids drooping because she suddenly yelled, “Give me thirty!”
“Thirty what?” I asked.
“Thirty push-ups, right now!” she shouted, pointing to the floor. “Drop and give me thirty. That will help you stay awake.”
Well. Push-ups are actually really, really hard, even for a farm girl. Push-ups when every muscle was already close to its breaking point are just crazy. But she had a fervent, take-no-prisoners expression, and I got down on the chilly linoleum floor. My arms were shaking after ten. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and I gritted my teeth as I somehow got out another five.
After twenty my arms felt like noodles, and at twenty-two I paused, panting.