The Last Day of Freedom

The moment Tristan passed through the doors to Cass Detention Center, he felt dirty. Fully-armed guards were stationed at these gates, and thick bars separated the front office from the rest of the compound. Here the receptionist didn’t give Tristan a friendly welcome; instead, he thrust an orange jumpsuit at Tristan and gave him a sour look of scrutiny.

  “Head through the metal detector over there,” the receptionist said gruffly. “Once you’ve been patted down, you can change into the suit.”

  Tristan did as he was told mechanically. He had no possessions, save for a broken watch Marcus had given him to repair shortly before the crash. It had been in Tristan’s pocket that night, and he had clung to it since then, his only relic from home.

  Once the receptionist-guard had examined the watch thoroughly, putting it into a worse state of disrepair than before, he thrust it back into Tristan’s hand. “You sure you want to keep that piece of crap?”

  “Yes,” Tristan said flatly.

  The watch made a comforting weight in the pocket of his unfamiliar jumpsuit. The baggy fabric smelled strongly of chemicals.

  Before long, Tristan could see the huge difference between the kids here and the ones at the temporary detention center. It was the government’s general policy to rehabilitate young miscreants and disrupt their usual lives as little as possible, so the only kids who were sentenced to the secured center were hardened criminals—repeat offenders and those guilty of violent crimes often tried in the adult courts.

  They terrified Tristan.

  Though he felt guiltier than ever, sullied by his association with the worst of the worst, Tristan wanted nothing to do with his fellow inmates. He spoke to them only when coerced, and spent every minute of his free time alone in his cell.

  Not that they had much free time to speak of.

  The detention center’s policy seemed to be aimed at keeping the kids too busy to cause trouble. It mostly worked, too.

  There were classes for everyone in the morning, both regular school subjects and more trade-oriented training. After lunch the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds would head off to work on various community building projects, while the younger kids resumed their lessons and spent a couple hours tending the extensive detention center gardens. Once a week Tristan and the other younger delinquents would join the older kids on their building rounds, and over the course of the next three months, they built fences, helped erect two houses in a low-income district, and spent three consecutive weeks on a trail-building project.

  Most days, Tristan would drop into bed and fall asleep at once, too tired to dwell on his misery. But some nights he would lie awake, haunted with the memories, silent tears dripping down his face.

  Like most of the younger kids, he got his share of bullying and taunting. The older kids loved harassing him about his slowly-healing scars, and were always trying to hit his gashed-up cheek with rocks and forks and other small projectiles. Luckily his hair was beginning to grow out, long enough to hide most of the damage. He had taken to concealing the scars even from himself. If he didn’t look, he could forget how hideous his face had become.

  As the summer days lengthened and the sun grew hotter and drier, a bout of lethargy passed over the detention center. While everyone was too lazy and exhausted to care, Tristan was able to escape to his cell with a book as soon as dinner was over, hiding from the often-rowdy games that started up in the cooler evening air. But he wasn’t always so lucky.

  Security cameras were set to track every inch of the detention center except the toilets. There had been more than one story about assaults and ambush in the toilets, yet Tristan had kept himself out of trouble so far.

  One day in mid-July, just before his shower, Tristan pushed open the door to one of the toilet stalls and found a fat hand locked tight around his throat.

  “Scream,” a hoarse voice rasped in his ear. “I dare you.”

  Tristan could hardly draw breath. He tried kicking his attacker, but the boy’s leg was so solid he might as well have kicked the toilet for all the response he got. Panicking, he flailed out, but the boy had closed the stall door and locked him in.

  He threw Tristan to the ground and pinned him beneath his beefy knees.

  Dizzy, Tristan tried to shout out, but the boy clamped a hand over his mouth.

  Then his fist sank into Tristan’s ribs.

  “Think you’re too good for us?” he growled. “Think you’re a little scholar?”

  He spat on Tristan’s forehead.

  Tristan twisted weakly beneath the boy’s weight, every muscle screaming in protest, but darkness was blossoming behind his eyes.

  The boy jerked Tristan’s head sideways and punched him once more, this time in the gut. Then he staggered to his feet and unlocked the bathroom stall.

  Everything ached. Tristan blinked weakly, trying not to pass out, pain splintering through him. Something warm dribbled down his cheek—his nose was bleeding. After what felt like hours, he grabbed the toilet bowl and used it as a crutch to stagger to his feet. His legs shook, and his insides felt as though they had been forcefully rearranged.

  Stumbling to the bathroom sink, he wadded up a paper towel and used it to scrub away the line of blood tracked sideways from his nose. When he gave his ribs a gentle, exploratory prod, he yelled out in pain. But there was nothing he could do about it.

  He knew what happened to boys who went to the clinic. They were beat up again and again, and bullied in subtler ways too, until they had been reduced to a trembling wreck.

  He would not become one of them.

  The week that followed was one of the worst he had ever known. The boy who had first shoved him to the floor and pounded him nearly unconscious in the toilets—Cob, the others called him—was part of a large posse, and that first incident opened the floodgates to the rest of the gang.

  Tristan was beat up three more times, once by a girl with fingernails so sharp they left his arm bleeding. Each time he refused to go to the clinic, but each time the bruises got worse. His bruises had bruises, and he could hardly lie down at night without wincing. Was there any way to stop the harassment? He dreaded leaving his room in the morning.

  Even that was soon no longer a safe haven. One day he found his pillow soaked with urine, and the next day someone had defecated under his sheets. He went without dinner twice in a row when he reported the two messes, and had to spend his evening stripping the bed and helping out in the laundry room.

  Just when he thought the gang might be getting bored, he escaped to his room only to find a rattlesnake coiled in waiting under his bed. Luckily it shook its tail to warn him before he got too close, but it did not seem eager to leave his room.

  Tristan slept in the cafeteria that night.

  The next day he was in real trouble for his first time since entering the detention center. Other kids spent half their time in a special cell reserved for troublemakers, but Tristan and most of the younger kids avoided it.

  “You’re not allowed to sleep anywhere except your cell,” said the guard who had woken him with a bucket of water. “Are you drunk?”

  They were not allowed alcohol, of course, but Tristan had heard stories of kids fermenting apples in buckets they had stolen to make a sludgy, foul-tasting sort of hard cider. “No,” he said blearily. Immediately he dragged his hair over the left half of his face, hiding his scars. The staff looked at him differently when they saw his scars—they gave him the harsh regard they reserved for hardened criminals despite the fact that he was just fifteen.

  “Come with me. Move it!”

  At the prod from the guard’s mop, Tristan stumbled to his feet. When he stood, he realized that he’d been soaked with filthy, sudsy mop water. A clump of damp hair clung to his stomach, and he plucked it delicately free. It could have come from anywhere.

  They passed the front office and turned into a corridor Tristan had
never seen before. This was lined with high-security cells that more closely resembled a proper jail, with a security guard pacing the hall just beyond the cells. Four boys and a girl were sleeping in the high-security cells, and a second girl sat with her back facing the bars, huddled in a tight, distraught ball.

  “In there,” the guard said, unlocking one of the cells at the end. “You’ll be here until you can behave yourself.”

  Though the bed was stiff and lumpy with wires, and there was nothing to distract Tristan from the tedium of the endless days, he was almost relieved to be taken out of the reach of Cob and his gang. He hoped their interest in him might have waned by the time he returned from the lock-up.

  The worst part of the security cell was the boredom. With nothing to do all day, Tristan couldn’t help but dwell on Marcus. He began to dream that he had deliberately murdered his own brother, his hands soaked with blood as he walked away from the crash.

  He woke from those dreams trembling, and did not trust himself to sleep again until dawn.

  Gradually, as the tedious days went by, Tristan began shutting Marcus out of his mind. He examined the broken watch with intense concentration, imagining how he would fix it once he had the proper tools, and little by little he boxed his memories of Marcus away into a dark corner of his mind where they could no longer hurt him. When memories of home resurfaced, he plucked Marcus from them as though extracting an unwanted hair with tweezers. The re-forged memories stung with falsity, but at least they did not send Tristan crumpling to the ground in misery.

  He could never forgive himself.

  He had killed the only person he had truly cared for.

  But he would find a way to cope, to piece himself back together and carry on. It was the only way.

  Nine days after Tristan had begun his stint in the high-security ward, he received his first visitor. It was not his parents, as he had expected, but Mr. Morrison.

  “What’re you doing here?” Tristan asked sullenly. Mr. Morrison had been escorted to Tristan’s cell to see him, where he sat gingerly at the end of Tristan’s bed.

  “I have news,” Mr. Morrison said. “Your parents have been pushing for another trial.”

  “I doubt that,” Tristan said sourly. They hadn’t come to visit him once, not even when he had stayed at the temporary detention center.

  “They have. I told them about your earthquake story, and they want a seismographer to check the national records just in case your story has merit.”

  Tristan felt a sudden surge of hope. “What if it was true?”

  “They might cut your sentence to a year,” Mr. Morrison said. “Exceptional and life-threatening circumstances will certainly excuse you of blame for driving without a license. A child in the path of a forest fire, for instance, would never be convicted for attempting to drive out of its reach. But it is a terribly slim chance. No one in North Dakota felt an earthquake on that day. It is likely that you were confused.”

  Tristan cursed. “He felt it too. I swear he did. I’m not delusional!”

  “I wish you luck,” Mr. Morrison said. “If we find evidence, we can schedule your next trial for early September. I will keep you informed of their progress.”

  Only once Mr. Morrison had left did Tristan realize he was grateful that his defender had not asked why he had been put in the high-security cell. The last thing he wanted to do was recount his humiliation at the hands of Cob’s gang.

  Two days later, he was freed to return to the main detention center. His bruises were no longer tender, though he still had a nasty black circle at the base of his ribs, and he was relieved to find his room clean and empty of snakes. Thankfully, the bullies had moved on to a new target. He was glad to return to his classes and garden-work and building projects—anything to take his mind off the looped thoughts of despair that threatened to drive him crazy.

  Besides, he had another trial to look forward to. While that was hardly cause for excitement—he was especially worried about what his parents would think when they saw his scars for the first time—it was a welcome surprise to learn that they were in fact concerned for his fate.

  For the first time since he had arrived at Cass Detention Center, Tristan began to hope that he might survive the ordeal. If his sentence was shortened, he could endure it. All he had to do was get through each day, not thinking of his brother, not thinking of how much time remained.

  Chapter 6