If the Body Allows It by Megan Cummins

Author:Megan Cummins [Cummins, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000 Fiction / Short Stories (single Author), FIC019000 Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Nebraska

* * *

Dani and I don’t speak in the holding cell. A fluorescent tube flickers, phones ring, cops shift slowly from one part of the station to the other. One by one the kids get plucked from jail by their parents. They look fearful, but I’m not worried for them. They’re first timers; they’ll get court dates and pay a fine or maybe do a bit of community service. That was me once.

Dani doesn’t look at me when she goes—she’s the second to last to leave, and she says nothing to me. Her mother says she isn’t surprised to see me here. I think it might be the last I’ll see of Dani. All she wanted today was a little bit of fun; she didn’t invite me along to rewrite my life. If the cops hadn’t found the drugs I’d brought they might’ve just let us all go. I hold my face in my hands—ashamed and embarrassed and wishing I’d done things differently, wishing I’d never left work, or if I had left, that I’d just gone somewhere alone with Dani. And then I sense that someone is standing on the other side of the bars.

I look up. It’s Mara, but she’s not alone. She has Brian on her hip. Brian looks around in fear, his small face twisted with worry, and then his eyes fall on me, and his face wrinkles with the tears that are about to erupt.

Mara stares at me coldly. She holds her sobbing son—the son she could’ve left at home with my father, who was at the house and who answered the phone when I called. But she didn’t. She brought him here to see me like this. She’s done hiding the father I really am from her son. She’s done hiding the man I really am from herself.

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