The Innocents

Chapter One

My story truly began on a bus. It wasn't one of those big yellow ones with the cushy seats and it didn't have a bunch of kids throwing paper airplanes either. It was musty, everybody was as silent as the dead and my feet were shackled to a bar under my seat. If you knew me at all, you would think, now what does a straight A student with a passion for music and all things literary do to get herself thrown into prison? Well, I'll get to that in a minute. First things first.

I woke up on that bus with a stiff neck, sitting at the window seat. I saw the sun peek in and out of trees as we rode. I was groggy and there was a metallic taste in my mouth. How long I had been asleep, I didn't know, but judging by the not-so-clean feeling in my mouth, I was supposing it had been hours.

I thought of the needle they had given me after the sentencing and swore I could see the little dot on my bicep from it. That was when I thought, I am at their will. They can do anything to me now.

I was still dressed in the clothes I had worn to court that day. A black pant suit with a white blouse underneath that my mother had gone out to buy. I would have never owned anything that. I was more of a jeans and t-shirt girl. Boy jeans, mostly ripped and far too big on my waist. The t-shirts had to have something on them be it a band or just a godly amount of color or writing. This outfit itched and the arms were too tight. I wanted to burst out of it like the Hulk, but the situation didn't call for such dramatics.

There were three other girls on the bus with me. None of which I would ever see again and were totally forgettable. A balding man drove and a wirey-haired woman guard stood by the door. There were empty seats available, but she stayed holding onto the steel bar above her head, steadying herself every time the bus jostled.

She stared at us. She spent no more than ten seconds doing it before she moved onto the next girl. She wasn't really trying to figure us out or make sure we weren't trying to escape the shackles were pretty damn tight. She was trying to prepare us. Eyes would be on us from now on no matter where we were and what we were doing. She was trying to tell us that there was no privacy in prison.

I slumped in my seat hoping I would disappear. This was one of those times when I thought bravery would get me through somehow and I'd come out of this unscathed. Rainbows and cookies and in the words of Lady Macbeth, We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place, And we'll not fail. I laughed at myself. How could I not have failed? Look at me.

We slowed and pulled in through a menacing barbed wire fence that remember feeling like an idiot in thinking, from the movies, that something like that could easily be scaled. It was at least fifteen feet tall with curls of spikes that resembled the crown of Jesus Christ. Well, at least in the photos I've seen.

The gate was manned by a pasty looking guard in blue who waved us through. The paved road turned into gravel and ground under the bus's tires and rocked us a little before it came to a halt. I couldn't see anything but trees and the massive building looming over them that said, The Iron Rose Corrections Facility carved across the entryway. From the outside, it seemed very much like a one of those old museums or even a school. Except school didn't have bars on their windows and crowns of our good Lord Jesus safeguarding it.

As soon as I was off of the bus and in the compound of the prison, panic surged through my body. I was then ordered to undress and I did, slowly and unwillingly, right there with the other girls from the bus. The door hadn't even closed behind us. A draft chilled my spine.

The good thing was that they didn't leave us standing there naked as mole rats for long.

I was alone by this time, save for a hefty woman guard with yellowish eyes. We stood in a damp room that was eerily quiet with severe fluorescent lighting and low insect-like buzz that arose from them. The walls were cinder-blocked and white. The floor was as clean and spotless as a hospital. Metal shelves lined the walls and on them stacks of towels neatly folded. It looked like Bed, Bath and Beyond in here, I thought and even managed a little internal laugh before the strip search began and snatched away all of my dignity. I was told to lift my arms, bend over and cough and open my mouth as if she was looking for tonsillitis. Satisfied that I wasn't hiding anything in any crevice of my body, she led me out and into the showers and I followed her feeling more vulnerable than I ever have in my entire life.