Only the Moon Watching

Chapter 27: Ignore Mike Rotch

I build a barrier wall with my milk carton, mini cereal box, and apple, drawing a dividing line between myself and the rest of our lunch table.

Then, I unfold the note, one inch at a time, in my lap, hunching over to read it.

To whom it may concern:

Your roommate seems to have sent me a stolen love letter.

(And whom would that concern? Everyone. I think everyone in the world would be concerned and vengeful and pissed at hell over that. Please don't be mad at me for reading it. Don't shoot the messenger, and all that.)

I don't know Shiv well but I think I understand what she meant by stealing it: she's looking out for you. I don't want to hurt your feelings, incase Mike Hawk's note made you feel special, but we've all gotten letters like his in here. And none of us, absolutely not a single one of us, has ended up with the person who sent those letters when we got out. The letters aren't for us, actually, they're to clear the guilty party's conscience. Mike Hunt could have written it, slathered the paper in peanut butter and eaten it and that would have been just as effective. He could have finished the note, tied it to a balloon, and let it float away. Burnt it in a fire. Dropped it into the ocean.

Mike Rotch wrote that letter to himself, not to you, and I know that sounds super shitty of me to point out but it's the truth.

I had my own Mike on the outside. I'd prefer to tell you why I'm in here in person, and I'll get to that part soon, but let me give you the gist by saying: I sold drugs to kids who needed them but couldn't get them from their parents, and I had a girlfriend who told me she supported me and would do anything she could to help me, and then when I really needed her to be there for me she wasn't.

There's not a single person in the world who's good or bad. We've each done something shitty that we wouldn't tolerate in a partner. We all have a story we could share that would end a date in an instant, or make the person we love see us differently. For three years, I was dealing Adderall and she thought I was some kind of superhero – and then I got caught, and in her eyes I was a scumbag. A criminal, a convict, a fuckup.

But nothing changed about me except where I was living: I wasn't in jail and then I was. (I guess my clothes changed too, and my diet, and my lifting routine – but I couldn't help any of that. It's not like I had fundamentally changed anything about me.)

I bailed out at first. Got to wait for my court date at home. I thought when she'd said she'd be by side for anything she meant she'd sit next to me on the couch while I played my last round of video games before my hearing.

I didn't see, hear, or talk to her again until I'd been in here four months.

That's how long it took for me to get The Letter – The Notebook one, the "I've been thinking of you everyday since we left" blah blah blah. "I fucked up. You're the one in jail but I fucked up." There's never a followup, Jos, that's the sad part. You can write back, you can confess you still love them too, but you're not going to get another letter, because there's only ever one.

It's like they're doing a twelve step program: first you apologize to everyone you wronged, then you don't date for a year. Oh, not that she's not dating – just she didn't have any plans to start dating me again, no matter what the letter said –

Tangler slams her tray across from me. "I'm the only one who never got The Letter," she says, "because my guy got locked up with me! I've read enough of them to know, though. He really is a scumbag for sending it. If his feelings were real he'd've protected you in the moment."

I let her sit next to me, and eventually the rest of our crew trickles over too. I keep Steak's letter to myself and it takes me the rest of the day to finish it, stealing glances at his neat, perfect, oblique handwriting whenever I can. He tells me more about his ex-girlfriend and I'm relieved to know he is truly over her, and he says he wants to meet me in person and he'll find a way to do it. He's a trustee, and he explains a little more in-depth what that means, but basically he gets to leave his floor to clean the girls' and he can probably steal a conversation with me, maybe as soon as tomorrow, if I can be ready.

Back in our cell that evening, I let Shiv braid my hair so she knows I'm no longer mad at her (and so I can look good in case Steak finds a way to see me in the morning).

"Our fight wouldn't have even lasted two pages in one of my books," she says, sniffing. "Would hardly have made the summary."

"Our fight?" I ask, exaggerating the word. "You mean, me not letting you read my personal love note?" Shiv's eyes go wide and I correct myself: "I mean, my letter. My new letter, after you sent the old one up the bowl."

"Whatever," she says, separating my hair into two halves. "I make things happen. I'm the story master."

"Tell me a different one," I say, rolling my eyes exasperatedly. "I'll be in charge of my own. Tell me one you made up, instead."

Shiv laughs and lowers her voice. "You want to hear how I'd kill Garda Girdle, then? I have others, too, I was writing even before I was in here but she holds a special appeal – I've never met anyone else so obnoxiously self-centered and rude."

Shiv hands me one finished braid and I admire it, smoothing it between my fingers and thumb.
"Is that enough to make Girdle a villain, though?" I ask. "Or is she the victim? You know – the first murder that gets the story going? The one on the cover?"

"She wishes!" snorts Shiv, pulling the other section of my hair tighter than she means to. "She's part of the twist," she says, her eyes sparkling. "She's not the main villain, but she's just as evil. Thinks she's helping the detectives at first, 'just doing her job' 'following orders' – like a Nazi –"

"Does this mystery take place in a prison? Is she herself?"

"It's–" Shiv hands me the other finished braid and moves to sit beside me. "It's a noir in an old insane asylum. We're the wards, she's our nurse. Except none of us are really mentally ill, she's just been dosing our Pruno–"

"They make Pruno in asylums now?"
"Whatever," says Shiv. "Suspend your disbelief for a second. Girdle's dosing us, because she's got some Florence Nightingale syndrome thing, she wants to make people sick so she can save them. Just like in here, she wants to make us fuck up so she can punish us. Hey – speaking of Pruno, hand her to me?"
I crawl off the bed and retrieve the bag. It's swollen with gas and I pass it to Shiv carefully.

"Gotta burp the baby – anyway, Nurse Girdle kills a patient. Detectives come to investigate. She goes all flirty, plays nice, pretends like she's helping them solve the mystery. Really, she's planning to make the Detectives go crazy too. But there's a rebellion amongst the patients, with her distracted we're finally able to rise up and show the Detectives we didn't deserve to be in here! I mean, in the asylum–"
In her excitement, Shiv slops Pruno onto my bed.

"Fuck. Anyway, I don't deserve to be in jail and my characters don't deserve to me in the asylum. They stab Girdle through the eye with a pair of surgical scissors, it's not sexy or the most original idea I've ever had, but damn, imagining it is such a mood lifter! Even better than the drugs she was giving us in the book–"

I roll my eyes at Shiv, thinking maybe she should be locked away after all...

She bounces the Pruno bag on her lap like a baby, crooning, "There you go! That's right, little Prunie... You're almost ready, my baby..."