Power Play by Joseph Finder

Author:Joseph Finder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Unknown, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780755374267
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2007-08-20T12:00:00+00:00

32

A long time ago I’d learned that you can pretty much get used to anything.

There was no privacy at Glenview, even at night, in your own room: a surveillance camera mounted near the ceiling, its red eye winking in the dark. No doors on the toilet stalls. But you got used to it.

You learned to create your own zone of privacy, hide your emotions behind a mask of stoicism. To show emotion was to show weakness, and weakness got you hurt.

You can get used to pretty much anything if you have to. The food was inedible—rubbery fake scrambled eggs, bright artificial yellow, sometimes with a coarse human hair coiled around one of the curds; unsalted boiled potatoes with dirt-crusted peel mixed in; slices of stale white bread; rancid bologna, slick and green-tinged—until the hunger pains grew too strong.

If you needed to piss at night, you had to knock on your door until a guard came. Sometimes he’d come, sometimes not. You learned to pee into a towel in the corner of the room.

You learned to fight when challenged. Which happened over and over until your place in the hierarchy was established, until the other kids learned to leave you alone.

But you also learned to respect the natural order.

In the chow hall one day, Estevez “accidentally” bumped into me. I ignored him, kept moving. A mistake: Estevez took it as a sign of fear. But I was hungry, and they only gave you twenty minutes for lunch, which included waiting in line and bussing your tray.

He bumped me again. My orange plastic tray went flying, spilling brown gravy and gristle and peas everywhere.

This time I didn’t wait. I drew back and slugged him in the mouth so hard that he actually rose a few inches off the floor. My fist throbbed in pain: A tooth was lodged between two knuckles.

Estevez crashed against one of the stainless-steel tables, spitting teeth. I saw my opportunity, went after him again, and then my lower back exploded in pain.

Someone had hit me from behind. I sunk to my knees, gasping.

Glover was swinging his baton. “Go back to the dayroom and wait for me,” he said.

I sat on the bench in the deserted dayroom and waited.

When Glover arrived, ten minutes later, he approached me slowly, as if he were about to confide something. Instead, he grabbed my hair, gave me a hard backhand slap on one side of my face, then the other. Rhythmic, almost: one two.

“Hey!” I yelled.

“How’s that?”

He kept at it, one side, then the other. One two. “How’s that? How’s that feel?”

“I didn’t start it,” I croaked.

“I want to hear you cry, bastard,” he said.

His fist crashed into one side of my face, then the other. One two. Blood seeped into my eyes, from my nose.

“Cry, bastard,” he said.

But I wouldn’t.

One two. One two.

I knew what he wanted, even more than he wanted me to cry. He wanted me to hit him back. That would get me confined to solitary for three months. But I refused to give him the satisfaction.

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