Sapphire's Place - Rebecca A.'s " Wild Horses "

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Although it takes a true story from a newspaper as its starting point (see the note at the end), it uses fictional characters and events in the development of the narrative, and all characters appearing in the story are the writer's invention. Where the names of real people appear in the narrative the characters that represent them are entirely fictional, and no disrespect is intended toward the real people in the use of their names or reputations. The events have been substantially altered for dramatic effect and places and names changed to respect the rights of the people involved. The institution called James Brand is fictional, although there are many like it across the country.

One warning: there is a rape scene in the story, and like all the rapes I know of it's not even vaguely erotic.

Thanks: I want to say thanks to Hiromi and Akiko and Bill for all the help with 70's culture, and Bob for the education about 70's music -- here I was thinking it was mostly 'Hotel California' and Kiss! I don't think I could have even attempted to write this without their help.

I must also give special thanks to Geoff for his invaluable assistance as editor. He provided focus at times it was desperately needed, and he understands grammar. :)

Becky

***

Wild Horses

A novel, based on a true story.
by Rebecca A.

Chapter One.

Maybe times have changed enough that my story couldn't happen today. I read in the newspaper a few weeks ago that the officials at one of the state juvenile facilities are under investigation for abuse right now. That would never have happened when I was a kid. They just got away with murder then. Okay, maybe not quite murder, but they sure got away with screwing with people's lives. Perhaps the way I acted made things worse, but I was young and confused and I think they took advantage of that.

That makes me sound like I'm some kind of victim. I'm no victim. I've never been totally happy about what happened to me all those years ago, but I'm not dragging the memories of it around like some ball and chain. Life was not as bleak as that first paragraph suggests.

Let me begin the conventional way, with childhood:

When I was twelve there were only two things to be in Cabrini Green if you were a white kid. You could be a Blue or you could be a Thin. Once you hit puberty -- if you wanted to be sociable -- you had to be a member of a group, either the Blues or the Thins. If you were a boy you were one or the other. If you were a girl you hung out with one or the other. The Blues were so named because they wore blue sweaters or t-shirts under their jackets. The boys had skinhead haircuts, wore big, thick boots and lots of leather. The girls had long hair, and wore anything short and revealing. The Thins wore the same kind of clothes as the Blues, but both the boys and the girls had androgynous David Bowie-style haircuts, short all over except for at the back. Thin girls almost always bleached their hair, and wore tight knitted tops and miniskirts with thick platform shoes. The Blues liked to hang out on trains and at stations, for some reason I never figured out. The Thins hung out in cafes, pool joints and bowling alleys.

I don't know where the name "Thin" came from, but there were inevitably jokes about a few overweight members.

Even in the seventies the rest of the Lincoln Park area was better than Cabrini, and so school was a kind of jumble of races and classes. Of course there were kids who weren't Blues or Thins, who dressed like 'The Brady Bunch' and did their homework and answered all the teacher's questions and are probably stockbrokers today, but the kids from the projects knew that these kids were really robots, not kids at all. Okay, so we were a minority, but we knew we were the only people who really understood the world.

Being a Thin or a Blue wasn't just a matter of joining a gang. It was a style thing, sure, and there were gangs, but most kids dressed a certain way first and then gradually drifted into one of the informal social groups. From there you could become a gang member, or not. The group my older brother Danny was in was the Division Thins, named for the location of the cafe they mostly hung out at on Division Street.

I thought Danny was pretty cool. He was four years older than I was, and he was a tough kid. All the older boys I knew were -- it was just one of those things that went with where we lived -- but I think Danny got that way just from standing up to our old man. He and Dad would have big arguments about anything, even when Dad was sober. When Dad was drunk the arguments got violent, and he'd hit out at Danny. Danny just took it -- he didn't fight back. After a year of that Dad changed his target. He would come home stinking drunk nine times out of ten, and beat the crap out of Mom before striking out at anyone else who was around. Mom would pick herself up along with whatever remained of dinner, and try to pretend he hadn't done anything.

Most of the time when this happened Danny and I would try to get out of the apartment. We'd sit on the front step of the building and wait for the noise to stop. After a while Danny wouldn't even hang around to listen to Dad hit her, he lit out for the Division Cafe and hung out with some of the older kids. He started to dress like they did, which made Dad angry. "Damned faggot kid," he'd say, even though there was nothing about Danny you could think of as faggot-like. Dad just didn't like the long hair at the back that ran over Danny's collar. It was hard to figure out why, this was the 1970's and most guys were wearing their hair long. Danny's was short everywhere else except the back. I don't know, my father was a strange man.

I liked to be at home when Dad wasn't around. Mom was great. Even Dad thought she was great at those rare times he was sober. That was what made it so awful when he hit her. When he wasn't around she was smart and funny and caring, and she was someone I could really talk to. I couldn't talk to Dad; no-one could. As I got older I noticed she smiled less and less, and after a while she never smiled when Dad was around. I couldn't say I blamed her. I liked to try to make her smile, by bringing her home things I found in the street and making up stories about how they'd got there. They were silly stories, about stuff like bottle tops and the people who'd thrown them on the ground as they were on their way to a ball game where the guy whose girlfriend threw away the bottle top caught the ball on the home run that decided the game, or the one legged man who had lost the sock I found outside the supermarket and then won the lottery. Mom seemed to like to hear my stories, I guess because they were always optimistic, and after a while, when things got worse with Dad, she would always ask me to tell her something about my day whenever I got home. I was too young to know it at the time, but I think she felt almost imprisoned in the house, increasingly isolated from the world around her. I've read that victims of domestic violence get like that.

Although she was frequently bruised from Dad's beatings, Mom was a very beautiful woman. She had creamy smooth skin, and perfect, delicate features, which made the bruising even more obvious. Although she had no money to buy clothes she always managed to dress in a way that was more stylish than the other women in the neighborhood, and I was very proud of her for that. It wasn't so much the clothes she wore as the way she wore them.

Mom liked music, too. She never liked television very much, but she and I used to listen to the radio a lot when I was young. She especially liked English pop music, and on the rare occasions when something had made her especially happy she would do her housework while she sang Dusty Springfield songs. When I was a little kid I'd follow her around the house singing along with her. I was probably totally off-key, but she never complained. I loved the sound of her voice, which was rich and throaty and sweet at the same time. When I was really lucky she'd sing me little songs she made up herself. Although I know she loved Danny I think I was her favorite.

When he hit his teen years Danny got right in with the other Thins. They spent most nights hanging out together, just walking around the neighborhood or hanging out playing video games, which had only just been invented. Sometimes they'd see a Blue gang, and a fight would ensue. Danny hated the Blues. "Fuckin' Nazis," he'd say. A couple of times he came home with bruises, black eyes or minor wounds from fights he'd been in. Once he got a broken arm. He had it in a cast for months, because he kept using it as a weapon in fights and the arm wouldn't heal properly.

Danny got into occasional trouble with the police, too. It was never anything really serious, but the cops were convinced that all the Thins were troublemakers. It usually sent Dad into a frenzy whenever they bought Danny home, or called for Dad to go down to the precinct to get him. Usually Dad would hit him worse than the cops. I don't know why, really. Everyone in the projects had some kind of police record by the time they were eighteen. Heck, even I had one, from a fight I was in with Danny and from another time I stole the washing off Mrs. Bronowski's line on a dare. The washing incident had been embarrassing, because the police report detailed everything that had been taken, "brassieres, other lingerie, two dresses, one pair of shorts," and the cop had read it out really loudly when my Dad came to get me. Anyway, Danny's scrapes with the cops seemed pretty run-of-the-mill to me. But the more he hung out with the Thins the more the cops picked on him, and the worse our old man got as a result.

The first item on my record occurred when I got arrested with Danny one night when I was twelve. We were on our way home from the cafe, and two Blues jumped us. Danny beat up both of them with only a little help from me. I wasn't much of a fighter, since I was very small for my age, and anyway I really didn't like all that aggressive macho crap anyway. But I provided enough distraction to one kid so that Danny could take out the other one. Danny was still pounding on my opponent while I held the limp form of the first one when a cruiser went by. We tried to run through some people's yards to get away but the cops got us in the next street.

Dad was really pissed when he came down to get us out, but I think he was secretly pleased that Danny beat the shit out of the other guys.

We got charged with assault because the father of one of the kids Danny beat up wanted to push the issue, but all we got was stern lectures from the judge and a caution on our records. No time in juve or anything like that.

When I was thirteen Danny got a girlfriend, Maria, a chunky dark Italian girl with a great smile. He never brought her home but I saw them on the street together a lot. He wasn't allowed to see her for about two months after she cut her hair into a Thins' style look that made her father freak, but they figured out ways to sneak around together anyway. I thought she was dynamite. Big breasts, big dark eyes -- she could have shaved her head entirely and it would have been okay with me.

Danny kept a couple of pairs of Maria's panties in the table between our two single beds in the room we shared. He used to take them out some nights and tell me stories about sex, and what girls were like. I hadn't gone through puberty yet, so I didn't understand a lot of what he said, but it excited me all the same. A couple of times when he wasn't around I snuck a look at the panties myself. They were kind of cute, not like the big, sexless cotton things Mom wore. Touching them got me kind of excited, in a new way I didn't understand.

Even though Danny told me all this stuff about sex, I figured he was still a virgin. He had Maria's panties, but I don't think she had put out for him yet. She was a Catholic girl, even if she was kind of rebellious, and Danny complained a couple of times about how "the fucking Pope" had made all these girls "think they were gonna fucking die if they opened their legs." All the stuff he told me about girls had a kind of abstract quality. I never questioned his authority on the matter, but I wondered how far Maria let him go. Maybe he'd felt her up, I thought.

He had quite a few porno magazines, which he hid in a space in the wall in back of our closet. Most of them were just Playboys, but some others I thought were kind of disturbing, even though I didn't understand everything that was in them. There were a couple which had pictures of women being whipped and chained, which I didn't like much. One that disturbed me a lot had photos with a chick who had a johnson. I couldn't figure that out. She was kind of pretty, but there was this enormous schlong between her legs. Danny used to laugh at me when he showed me that one, because he said it turned me on. I knew it didn't. But it did make me confused. That seemed to provoke Danny into bringing home more of that kind of thing to taunt me with. He developed a big collection of really weird stuff. "That gets you off, huh Mickey?" he'd say, just to get me riled.

All the hanging out each evening with Maria and the Thins meant Danny never did any homework, so he started failing at school, and he quit school before he graduated and took a job pumping gas over in the next suburb. Imagine that -- this was before self serve, even. It was a shitty job, but he had a little money and that made him an important member of the group.

I saw him, and Maria, quite a lot after school. They used to hang out at the Cafe together, early, before all the others would get there. I liked Maria. She was the only one of Danny's friends who didn't tease me about my height, or the fact that my voice hadn't broken yet. And she made me laugh. She was really good at doing imitations of Danny when he wasn't looking, and that cracked me up. "You and I both know Danny better than he does," she used to say to me conspiratorially. She'd wink at me and smile whenever Danny was big-noting himself to his friends. I think I was almost in love with her. Danny told me a couple of times to "watch it," and said if I was older he'd have to take me out the back and whup me for the way he caught me looking at her, but I think he misunderstood. I thought Maria was wonderful, but I wasn't into sex properly yet and I wasn't really thinking of her that way.

She fascinated me in a new way. Sometimes I caught myself staring at her, or she caught me. I was amazed by everything about her, the way she moved, the way different parts of her body moved when she walked, the way she smiled, the soft, lilting quality of her voice even when she was coming down hard on Danny. I watched her, almost obsessively, every chance I got. I thought she was a goddess.

Danny dropping out of school made my old man even worse. He blamed Mom instead of Danny, and he started drinking more, something I would never have thought possible. Because Danny wasn't home much Dad would lay into me if I was around. He used to get mad at me because Mom liked me so much. "Momma's boy," he'd say as he lit into me. Like Danny, I just took it. He was a lot bigger than I was, and the one time I raised my hand to hit him back he just laughed at me, which was worse than being hit.

I wasn't very good at making friends, so I never joined the Division Thins even though I hung out at the cafe some nights. Danny had let me know he wasn't too keen on having his little brother around anyway. I cut my hair the same way, short at the front and long at the back, but mostly I just kept to myself, sitting outside on the front steps of our house to do my homework, or walking around Harrison Park on my own. I didn't like a few of the other Thins anyway. Danny's best friend in the group was this thuggish Italian guy called Tony. He and I instantly disliked one another. He kept calling me "Pussy," even in front of Danny, and I was annoyed that Danny didn't stick up for me. I spat in Tony's food a couple of times when he wasn't looking, and made faces at him a few times, but I soon got bored with that. The funny thing was I didn't think Tony thought much of Danny either, and he was always staring at Maria in a really creepy way. I stared at Maria all the time, but this was different. Couldn't Danny see that?

I think my dislike of Tony was the first time I was had a visceral response to someone's personality. If Tony had a soul it would have been bitter, dark, oily. He gave me the chills in a part of me I hadn't noticed before.

I didn't make many other friends, either. I was small and kind of wimpy back then, and so I didn't get to hang with the jocks at school, and I didn't pay enough attention to schoolwork to be with the brains. Even though I got a Thins haircut, because I'm a redhead with wavy hair and really pale skin I never looked at all tough. I was part of that great amorphous mass that makes up the majority of the school population, the ones that aren't real smart or cool or good looking. The ones that just are.

The truth was, I guess I really didn't fit in well with anybody, even the other 'average' kids. I always felt like there was some barrier between me and everyone else in the world, like nobody could see the real me. Maybe part of it was that people expected me to be more like Danny, but I think another reason was that I didn't feel very comfortable with trusting people. Our house wasn't a good environment for that sort of thing. It's kind of hard to explain, but I think that it was because I could sense little things about people that seemed to make me self-conscious around them, or made me distrust them. About the only person I trusted was my Mom.

I didn't make many friends, but I didn't make too many enemies except for Tony.

After my father hit my Mom badly enough to put her in hospital, Danny stopped coming home. He wouldn't tell me where he was staying, but he said he wouldn't be in the same house with Dad, because Danny thought he might kill Dad next time he hit Mom.

With Danny and Mom away I took to staying out of the house almost entirely myself. I spent most of the time just walking around, and I took some blankets a couple of times and slept on a bench in the park a couple of nights. I don't know if Dad knew, or if he did know whether he even cared. He was usually drunk anyway.

After Danny had been gone a week or so I went to look for him at work one afternoon, just to talk. His boss told me he'd been fired a few days earlier, for stealing from the register.

I was devastated. Not Danny, I thought, Danny would never steal. He did lots of other things that were questionable, but he wasn't a thief. I knew that in my soul, but I could tell that his Boss honestly believed Danny had taken the money. I went down to the Division Cafe, but none of the Thins were there both times I called in except Tony and an idiot guy called Pete who hung around with him all the time. I asked Tony if he'd seen Danny, or Maria. Tony just told me to fuck off.

It was a day later, while I was out in the park late one night, that I came upon something terrible. I was taking a short cut back home, through the bushes on the West side of the park, when I heard the sounds of the bushes rustling and saw a figure sprint away toward the road.

As I saw the person running, I knew that there was bad shit going down. That's probably not really profound, in retrospect, but I knew, I could feel before I looked, that there was something inside the bushes that was unspeakable. Try as I might, I couldn't help myself from walking over to them.

Inside the bushes I could hear a strange sound, kind of like a person gargling mouthwash or something. I parted the branches, and in a small clearing between the bushes there was a girl laying on her back, moving slightly, something dark and fluid on her chest and arms. I pushed through, and saw her skirt had been ripped off, and was caught on a nearby branch, and her panties were lying on the ground a few feet away. I looked at her crotch, first, and was amazed to see the hair there. Then she gurgled again, and I dragged my eyes away and realized, slowly, like it was some kind of movie I didn't understand too well... Her throat had been cut. The dark stuff all over her was blood, and it was still spurting from the side of her neck. On the ground beside her neck was a knife, also covered in what I assumed was blood. Without thinking I picked it up, then, repulsed, threw it into the bushes.

Then I froze. There is no way to describe how I felt when I saw the girl's face. It was Maria. Even today, twenty-five years later, I remember that awful feeling as I looked into those deep dark eyes and the bottom fell out of my stomach.

I collapsed to my knees, grasped her head, and tried to lift it up to support her. Blood continued to gush, all over me, into my lap. I tried to staunch it with my hands, but it seemed to come right out of her no matter what I did. Despite my first impressions, this wasn't like seeing people die on TV. It was awful. Paralyzing. I was shocked and desperate. I didn't think to call out for help or anything -- no-one else would be in the park this time of night anyway and besides I was preoccupied with trying to stop the blood from coming out. I tried to plug the wound with my handkerchief, and it stopped the spurting but the blood still seemed to be coming out from somewhere.

After a few moments, I really don't know how long it was, her twitches became less frequent and eventually she stopped moving. I held her head in my lap for a while longer, then, sickened, I stood up and forced my way back out of the bushes. I staggered away a few steps and then started to run.

I ran, and ran. I didn't run toward home. I just ran away from Maria, away from the park, away from everything. It didn't make any sense, but nothing that night made any sense.

I figured afterward that I ran about eighteen blocks that night without stopping. A car almost hit me once when I crossed the street. I was still running blindly through the shopping strip when someone grabbed my shoulders and threw me to the concrete sidewalk. I was dazed for a few seconds, then tried to stand before a boot came down on my back and held me there. "Whoa, kid. Hold it right there."

He dragged me to my feet, and threw me up against the side of a car. "Okay, kid, what's up?" he said, as he began to pat me down. "Jeeesus," he said softly as he saw the full extent of the blood all over me. "Are you all right?"

I wanted to say something but my mouth didn't want to work, and I was still winded from when he had stood on my back. I could only shake my head, which he thought meant I was hurt, and I still couldn't talk. I tried to turn around to look at him, but he slapped my head straight ahead, so I stared into the flick-pulse of the red strobe stuck on the roof of the car.

He pushed my back again, then leant in the window next to me and reached for something. I could hear him talking on the radio, but I can't remember what he said. The events of that night are still kind of hazy for me.

Eventually I found myself in a small green-painted room with a table and two chairs. I was there on my own for a while. Then a couple of guys came in and asked me questions. I answered them as well as I could, but I can't remember what I said. Later on I found out that I didn't say anything they could make any sense of.

After they left a long time passed. I'm not sure how long. Then a woman came in and asked me some more questions. After she left I couldn't keep my eyes open any more, and I lay down on the linoleum floor and fell asleep.

I woke up in a strange bed. The room was gray, and there was nothing in it except the bed I was laying on. There were bars on the window. A quick inventory showed I was sleeping in my jockeys and t-shirt.

Eventually I got up. My other clothes were not in the room, and I discovered the door was locked from the outside. So I went and sat on the edge of the bed and waited. After a while, I don't know how long, a large woman came in, gave me some gray pants to wear and a gray shirt, and waited while I put them on. She didn't say anything when I asked her where I was, or who she was, so I dressed and she led me down a long, bare corridor, past lots of closed doors, to a little room like the one I had been in the night before, except this one was gray instead of green. I sat on the chair she indicated, and then waited.

About a dozen people came and talked to me that day. I didn't understand a lot of what they said because they used pretty big words a lot. These days I'm okay at understanding most things, in fact for a while people used to joke about me and call me "the brain," I guess because after that day I discovered that if you don't know what's going on people can screw you. But back then when I was fourteen I wasn't real good at understanding older people.

The first person to see me was a fat old guy. I didn't know how old, except he was older than my Dad which meant very old. He reminded me of that Ed guy on Johnny Carson, only he wasn't funny. He told me he was my lawyer. He asked me a couple of questions about Maria, and about what had happened. I told him as clearly as I could remember, but it was hard. I had to try to stop shaking when I thought of having her head in my lap like that, when she went still.

After a few minutes the old guy got up and went into the corridor, then came back with a thin blonde haired woman who said she was a social worker. I liked her; she seemed reassuring. She mostly just sat there while the lawyer talked, and she held my hand when I started shaking again.

After we'd been talking for a while a couple of other guys came in. They said they were cops, which figured after what had happened to Maria. I found them really hard to understand, because they were very formal and cold, but the guy who said he was my lawyer said it was okay to talk to them so I told them most of what had happened.

Then they dropped a bombshell on me. Danny was dead, too. They'd found his body in the river last night. He had died around the same time as Maria, maybe a little before, drowned. I stopped listening to everything else they said, and after a while the cops gave up and left.

I was stunned. Danny dead. I couldn't imagine it. I knew Maria was dead, I had held her in my arms as she died, but I couldn't believe Danny was dead.

Finally the lawyer left, and they took me back to the room with the bed in it. I lay there for hours, crying softly. I knew tough guys didn't cry, but Danny had been the tough guy, not me.

Late in the afternoon the social worker came in and asked me if I wanted to see my Dad and I said yes.

About an hour later I was taken back to the interview room (I knew what it was called now) and a few minutes later Dad came in. He walked in with the social worker and a guy in some kind of gray uniform. I stood up. I could see straight away that Dad was pissed with me, even though he seemed sober. Probably, I thought at the time, it was because he'd been called away from work. He walked straight up to me and hit me in the face. Blam! Right in the nose. "Fucking pervert!" he screamed at me. Then he hit me again, in the side of the head and the chest, and after I fell to the floor he started kicking me until the guy in the uniform dragged him away.

The social worker gave me some tissues to stem the blood from my nose.

I never saw my father again.

Over the next couple of days I spent most of the time in the room I had woken up in, except for when people wanted to talk to me, when they led me back down to the interview room. A doctor came and examined me on the second day, then on the fifth day a woman who said she was a psychologist came to see me and asked me a lot of questions about my childhood.

The social worker asked a lot of questions, too, but seemed friendlier than the others. I think that maybe she was the only one who believed my story. She told me that the police thought I had murdered Maria. I was dumfounded. She said it was because I had handled the knife, and I had Maria's blood all over me, and because people thought I was jealous of Danny.

My Dad believed the cops. Now that Danny was dead, my Dad had had some kind of change of heart, and it was like Danny was the perfect son -- and I was the faggot creep who was jealous. I don't know, I still can't figure my Dad out, even now.

They couldn't pin Danny's murder on me because they didn't have any evidence, but they wanted to get me for Maria. The police had found Danny's stash of porno magazines in the back of the closet, and were convinced that since Danny no longer lived there they had to be mine. I think that's what my Dad told them.

The whole thing sickened me. I couldn't believe it. How could they believe I could have killed anyone? I was fourteen years old for chrissakes!

Years afterward, while I was doing a covert review of my case history, I discovered there were several odd things about the two deaths. For one thing, Maria had not been sexually assaulted, though her dress and panties were ripped off her. Whoever had done it had probably lost control of themselves, or she had struggled too much, and they had killed her before getting what they wanted from her. I often wondered whether that figure I saw running away was Danny. I've always figured it was more likely Tony. I figure Tony for killing Danny, too, though one of my lawyer friends once said he thought it was more likely suicide.

I didn't believe Danny would ever kill himself. I still don't.

In really dark moments I wonder if it wasn't my Dad who did it all. The figure running from the bushes didn't look like him, but... I try not to think those kinds of thoughts.

The next couple of days are still a blur. I was taken to juvenile court, where my lawyer said I was pleading not guilty, and I was taken back to the place they'd been holding me to wait a few weeks until the hearing. My Mom came to visit me, still bruised on her face from where Dad had beaten her. She cried a lot, and spoke with my lawyer and the social worker, but she was too emotional to talk to me much. Mostly she just tried to hug me, and cried.

My social worker, who I discovered was called Angela, brought me some stuff to read, and though at first I didn't feel like it the boredom of being locked in the small featureless room soon got the better of me and I read everything she brought me avidly. The books all featured middle-class kids complaining about how tough they had it. One was about this kid called Holden who wanted to be some kind of wheatfield hero, saving his kid sister from going over a cliff. I liked it even though I didn't understand all of it. Angela also brought me some magazines about car racing, which depressed me. Danny had always liked fast cars. He liked to help Tyrone, a guy who lived down the block, polish his Camaro every Sunday. On the cover of one of the magazines was a car just like Tyrone's, only more tricked-up. I kept thinking Danny would have enjoyed the magazine more than I did.

Eventually it was time for my next appearance in juvenile court. My Mom was present, but my Dad didn't show. My lawyer didn't want me to say anything. The police went on endlessly, and I could sense that they were making me out to be some kind of weirdo even though I didn't understand all the stuff the lawyers and cops said. A lot of it was about the blood on me and my fingerprints on the knife. But they also mentioned the time I had been arrested with Danny, and the time I was caught stealing the laundry. They made it sound like I was violent, and like I had a fetish for women's underwear or something. They kept mentioning Maria's underwear in my room and all the porno magazines there.

Angela, my social worker, made a brief speech to the judge, saying that I had a difficult home life and appeared to be traumatized by the events, and that she thought that if I got probation she could put me in a foster home. My Mom burst into tears when she heard this. As Angela sat down again I looked at the judge. I didn't think she had made a very big impression after all the stuff the cops had said.

Finally the sentence was handed down. I wasn't going to jail, exactly. It was a juvenile correctional facility. Same thing, really, except they dress it up with fancy words to make it sound like it's not so bad. Let me tell you, I've seen the insides of prisons, and they don't get a lot worse than 'The James Brand Juvenile Correctional Facility'.

***

Chapter Two.

The first few days at Brand were pretty bad. I knew lots of tough kids from the neighborhood back home, but there were some kids inside that made them look tame. Part of my problem was that, having only just turned 14, I was one of the youngest kids inside. Most of them were 16 or older. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, but Brand was small enough that people came looking for me, the new kid, anyway. The first day I was there a slick looking kid, sleazy way beyond his 18 years, stopped me after lunch to tell me Nick Pangianis wanted to see me. I didn't know what that meant, but I was soon to find out.

After I was inducted into the center they did the usual things; cutting my hair ultra-short and checking me for lice and diseases and so on. Then I got read a lecture about the rules and regulations, most of which just passed in one ear and out the other. They gave me some clothes to wear, the same standard issue everyone else got: a couple of white t-shirts, some pale blue cotton shirts and some dark blue pants along with socks and underwear. They all had 'Illinois Department of Corrections' printed on them. I'd seen movies about guys being inducted into the army, and it seemed a lot like that.

Then they led me inside.

I was put in a two-bed room with a guy about five years older than me, Steve Hammond. He was pretty tall, well over six feet, and he was really solid. He looked like he worked out a lot. Despite his imposing size he didn't seem so bad, really, at least not compared with the other guys there. He was civilized enough to explain how he thought things would work, the rules of the cell as it were, but it was clear he wasn't going to accept any argument from me.

After a brusque opening to our relationship, I decided I like him. He came from Mississippi, and had a broad accent and a careful way with his words that relaxed me immediately. I'd only ever heard someone talk that way on TV before, never in real life, and I kind of liked it.

The room was nothing special, at least not for a place that I was going to be spending so much time in. Two of the walls were almost completely covered with posters, mostly of either the Rolling Stones or of topless girls. Steve was evidently a Stones fan. The pictures of the girls were about as risque as you could get while they were still wearing panties. Totally nude pictures were forbidden.

Steve motioned to the bottom bunk and I put the blanket the center had given me on it.

The rooms at Brand weren't totally like a prison cell. They had the same concrete-block walls, but there were no bars to the corridor, only solid steel doors that could be locked from the outside. The windows had bars and mesh on them, and were too high for me to see much out of. Not that there was much to see around the facility, just institutional buildings and a flat landscape stretching off into the distance. There weren't any trees. Inside, the walls were painted in a pale gray, and there were no decorations other than those the inmates put up themselves. Inmates were allowed to have a few personal possessions. Most opted for a radio as the main thing, and I noticed Steve was lucky enough to have a guitar and a cassette recorder. Apart from that the place was pretty spartan.

The regime was pretty prison-like, though. We were subject to random inspections, including in the middle of the night, and we were confined to our rooms except for showers, meals, exercise time and classes or workshop. Every so often Grieves and the teachers would dream up some activities that were supposed to keep our morale up, which everybody took part in just to get out of their rooms. Meals were taken in the mess (they used a lot of military terms at Brand) and there was a strict pecking order that governed where you got to sit. Nobody knew me those first couple of days and so I sat on my own, at a table at the front of the room. Otherwise we saw a lot of the same concrete block walls.

I asked Steve what it meant that Nick Pangianis was looking for me and Steve told me somewhat cryptically to watch out for myself in the showers, that all new boys got an initiation. I figured Nick must be a fag. That's strange, I thought -- at school nobody was afraid of fags. They were the ones who got beaten up.

I was never really comfortable showering with anyone back then, mostly because of my size. I was kind of short, still around 5'4", and pretty thin and weedy. The truth is, I hadn't hit puberty yet, really. Oh, I got a boner every now and again like every guy, but I was still mostly hairless, and when I did jerk off nothing came out yet. I still pretty much looked like a kid, too. Most of the others at school, and all the guys at Brand, were men, or at least well on the way to being men. At school I had always tried to be last one in the showers after gym, just so the other guys wouldn't notice me so much.

That was my general strategy in life -- just kind of fade into the background and try not to be noticed. It worked most of my life up until then. Especially since people were always expecting me to be like Danny, loud and brash and confident. If they knew Danny they always got a big surprise when they met me.

None of the guys at Brand knew Danny, of course, so they didn't have any preconceptions of me. I had decided when I was going in that I would just play things cool, at least until I found out how the place worked. But that second day, in the showers, I was new, and I suppose I was an object of curiosity. There was no possibility of a later shower -- I was in there with others like it or not. So I tried to act cool, like I wasn't afraid. Mostly I just tried not to make eye contact. I had a very bad feeling about what was going through the heads of a couple of the boys in there, and I didn't need to look at them to confirm my suspicions. I turned to the wall, and raised my face to the stream from the shower. That was probably a mistake, but then again they'd probably have grabbed me whether I was looking or not.

Two guys wrapped my arms behind my back and marched me to the far side of the shower area, near the benches were a half-dozen guys were dressing. They stood me behind a guy who was toweling his near-shaved head briskly, his back to us. This was Nick Pangianis, although I didn't know it right away. He turned around and smiled at me, as though he wanted to put me at ease. The two goons holding my arms didn't ease up on their grip, though. "Hey, Red," Nick said, in a deep voice that gave me shivers.

Nick was a big guy, maybe bigger than Steve was, and he looked much too old to be in a juvenile facility. He sure didn't look like a fag, I thought to myself. He was a mean-looking son of a bitch, and his thin smile couldn't hide that. That first time he confronted me, I could see him look me over thoroughly as I stood there naked, and he smirked, as though finding me wanting. Then the goons thrust me to my knees, and Nick advanced upon me as he began to unwrap the towel around his waist.

I was young, but I wasn't all that naive, and I knew what was coming. I struggled, breaking my right arm free momentarily and striking out blindly as Nick dropped his towel and I saw his cock rising toward me. That was evidently something he hadn't expected, and he doubled over in pain. Immediately I was hit from behind, and my face was ground into the concrete floor. I felt a foot strike me in the side, and then another, and another, and finally another blow to the back of my head before I lost consciousness.

I woke up in the infirmary. Nobody asked me what had happened, how it was that I'd suddenly had my nose all banged up or my ribs so badly bruised. I decided not to volunteer anything. That had always been the code in our neighborhood. Never Say Anything.

The doctor was a creep, I decided after he had seen me. Not just ugly and grumpy, but kind of sleazy, too. I didn't like the way he looked at me, or touched me, when he examined the bruises, and despite my trepidation about going back out with the rest of the guys I was relieved when they sent me back to my room after a few days.

"You said no, huh?" Steve said to me when I showed up at the door to our room. I tried to smile, but it hurt. I told him I didn't want to talk about it, so we lay on our respective bunks for an hour or so in silence. It was Sunday evening, and there were no set activities or chores. After a while, out of curiosity, I started asking Steve about himself, and he answered most of them, out of boredom I guess.

The question everyone asks inside when he first meets you is "what did you do?" Kind of like the way people on the outside ask what kind of job you have soon after they meet you, to get a feel for the kind of person you are. It's taken for granted most times that everyone inside is innocent, even though almost nobody is. It's almost a joke. "I'm in here for murdering my parents, but I didn't do it," a mousy high-voiced Polish kid told me while we were in the queue for dinner. Steve was a little different. He was inside because he had stolen a car one night, and been involved in a high-speed chase with the cops in which another kid had been killed, and he'd been convicted of second degree murder as a result. He freely admitted that he'd done it, and that he was sorry he'd done it.

I told him my story, and that I was innocent, but I suppose he received this information with the same grain of salt everyone inside gives 'innocence'.

I was pleased Steve was prepared to talk with me. It was unusual for an older guy like him to waste time with a kid like me, and I appreciated the gesture of friendship. "You're okay, Mike," he said. He didn't need to add "for a kid" -- I knew that was part of it, but I liked the company anyway. We talked for most of the evening, and I came to like him more and more. Something in him, maybe the way he paused to make a point or the twist to his mouth when he was going to say something funny, reminded me of Danny. I was going to tell him that before I went to sleep that night, but I thought it would probably sound kind of sappy, so I shut up.

Next day the incident in the showers was repeated. Nick's goons grabbed me, and dragged me to him. Once again, he tried to get me to suck his cock. I refused again, and so I ate concrete a second time. "You got guts, kid" I heard him say as feet went into my back and ribs. "You're fuckin' stupid, but you got guts."

After they let me out of the infirmary that time I went back to my room. I didn't say anything, just went to my bunk and lay down. After a few minutes I heard Steve sigh and fold the magazine he was reading, then saw him swing down to take a look at me. "Turn over," he said. I stayed put, until I felt his hand at my shoulder, beginning to turn me anyway. I rolled over to face him. He whistled. "I don't know if your face can take too much more of this."

"We'll see," I said, with as much conviction as I could muster.

"He only does it once," Steve said.

"Huh?"

"He does it to everyone, once. Then he mostly leaves you alone. It's not a sex thing really. He has some kid Cary takes care of him that way. It's just his way of letting you know he owns this place."

"He doesn't own me," I said, and rolled over again.

"Suit yourself," Steve said, climbing back onto his bunk. "But he's gonna keep trying until you let him do it, or until you can beat him and his goons in a fight. You're an okay looking kid, Mike, you don't want to screw that up for life."

I lay awake for hours after lights out that night, thinking about what Steve had said. Perhaps if I did it, just the once ... but visions of Danny taunted me. I knew what he would have said. It would be better to be dead than to suck some guy's cock. 'Is that true, Danny?' I wondered. I thought of Steve. Had he sucked Nick's cock, just for peace? I was going to ask him, but something made me hold back. He had been nice to me, before, and that was the first time anyone at Brand had been nice to me. And I had a good feeling about Steve. I didn't know whether to trust my feelings, but there was something about him that was -- good. We had talked for hours again that evening, and I had felt a real bond with him. It was almost the same bond I had felt with Danny. No matter what terrible things either Steve or Danny had done, they both felt like guys I could trust.

Next morning I was going to skip showers, but Gonzales, the guard, came looking for me and told me in no uncertain terms to get my butt in there. As I walked down the corridor I was growing increasingly nervous, but to my surprise Gonzales followed me in to the showers.

In the showers nothing untoward happened. There was only the sound of the running water. I could see Nick's goons on the other side of the room, though there was no sign of Pangianis. They eyed me the whole time I was in the shower, and when one of them thought Gonzales wasn't looking he made a motion with his finger across his larynx, like he was going to cut my throat. I finished my shower in peace, dressed, and went back to my cell escorted by Gonzales.

"Thanks," I said to him as we walked back, but he just grunted, as though he could have cared less what happened to me. At the door to my room he spoke for the first time since the shower. "Downstairs in five minutes for breakfast."

Steve walked with me downstairs, but separated from me as soon as we hit the mess hall. "No offence, but I have a regular place," he said. I knew what he meant from my experience during the first couple of days at Brand. All the guys were crowded around nineteen of the tables, with no seats spare. The one table at the front of the room I had eaten at last time was vacant except for a fat kid who kept his eyes on his food.

I got in the food line, picked up a tray and was served what passed for breakfast, and began to make my way back to the table with the fat kid. I knew I would have to earn a place with anyone else, and I hadn't had a chance to do that, yet.

I sat and ate breakfast, deliberately avoiding eye contact with anyone else. I had a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, but I wasn't sure if it was just the unfamiliarity of the place or any real threat, so I just focused on the tray in front of me. So rigorously was I focusing on my food that I didn't notice that half the hall had emptied out, and I was startled when I noticed two guys had sat down beside me. Looking up and to my left I could see one of them was Pangianis. On the other side was Sonny, a stoned-looking thug of his. The fat kid hurriedly stood up and nervously took his tray over to the clean-up area. I flicked my eyes toward the serving area but noticed there was no-one there, and the guard who had been at the door was occupied talking to three guys about something, his back to me. Pangianis observed me scoping the room, and smiled. I did not like his smile.

"Wanna do it here?" he said quietly.

Just by reflex, because the idea was so ridiculous, I said "huh?"

"You heard me, fuck. Get under the table."

"Fuck you," I said.

I waited for the thump, but none came. Instead, he and his goon grabbed my arms. I was going to cry out, to attract the guard, but the goon grabbed my mouth as well, and it came out muffled. Then I felt a strange sensation on my left wrist, a sharp pain that burned, and then felt it again. Wrestling myself around to the right, I tried to bite the goon's arm. I felt the same sensation on my right wrist. What was going on? Were they trying to tie me up? It didn't make any sense. Eventually I got one of the goon's fingers inside my mouth, and I bit hard. Really hard. He let go of my arm in surprise, and took his hand from my mouth. Immediately I lashed out at him with my right hand. It was hard to get at him, since he was on my right, but I hit him a glancing blow across the face and he overturned his chair. I was aware as I hit him that something was wrong with my arm, and that Pangianis had let go of me as well, but it didn't stop me. I lashed out with my leg, kicking, then spun round to hit out at my main oppressor. Pangianis was gone. He was at least a table length away. Then I saw the guard coming for me, and I ran toward Pangianis, wanting to hurt him before the guard could break us apart. Something was wrong with me, I thought dimly as I started to move. I felt weak, and my arms were wet. Especially the left one. I have a dim memory of looking down, seeing my left hand covered in blood, before I passed out within a few feet of Nick Pangianis.

I woke up in a room that wasn't part of the Brand facility. I knew that right away. For a start, it was cleaner, and also better finished. All the walls at Brand were roughly rendered brick, and these looked like plaster, or at least good quality concrete. There was a more obvious guide to where I was: the IV dripping into my left arm.

I lay in bed for a while before I remembered the events that had led up to where I was. I extracted my left arm from under the quilt and saw that my wrist was wrapped in a bandage, and further up the arm from the bandage was a leather cuff and a chain to the side of the bed. My right arm was bandaged and restrained in the same way. My face felt kind of numb, but I discovered that I couldn't bring my hands up far enough to touch it, since the straps restrained my arms. Running my tongue over my lips I felt a bandage above my upper lip.

I was still exploring my circumstances when a nurse came in to the room. "Oh, you're awake," she said.

"Uh huh," I nodded, trying to sit up. It was impossible because I couldn't move my arms far enough back in the bed. "Can you help me sit up?"

"You have to stay in the bed until the doctor says you can move," she said, but she helped tilt the bed up so I was more or less sitting. I tried to engage her in conversation about where I was, and what had happened, but she said, in a friendly way, that I'd have to wait until the doctor talked to me. "And Mr. Grieves," she said.

I found out who Mr. Grieves was immediately after she left. A tall, graying and conservatively dressed man walked in to the room. He looked like he was about to come to the side of the bed, but then he seemed to change his mind and stood at the foot instead. I was glad I was sitting up so I could see him properly.

"Good afternoon, Michael. I was hoping to meet you in somewhat different circumstances." His voice was polished and resonant, like Charlton Heston's.

I nodded hello, unsure about what he was talking about, but not getting a good feeling from him.

"I'm John Grieves, Michael. I run James Brand," he said, sensing my confusion. "Ordinarily I would have met with you on your second day with us, but you have had a rather, ah, unorthodox few days with us so far, wouldn't you say?"

"I wouldn't know," I said.

"I like my boys to say 'Sir'," Mr. Grieves said firmly.

I thought about bucking this, but in the circumstances -- what with hospital and feeling strange and all -- I decided against it. "Yes sir"

"That's good, Michael. Am I going to have a problem with you?"

"Pardon?"

"I am, it seems."

"Pardon, sir," I corrected myself.

"I was just wondering whether I was going to have a problem with you." His eyes flicked over me as though he was appraising livestock.

"No, sir"

"Well, you're off to a bad start so far," he said. "We don't often get boys for sex offences, let alone boys your age, and --"

"-- I didn't --"

"-- I don't like people interrupting me" he continued, his mood souring. "We've never had a boy involved in as many fights as you in such a short time. You've spent more time in the infirmary than you have out of it so far."

I said nothing. There didn't seem any point in explaining that I had nothing to do with Maria's death. Nor that I had never had any sexual experience at all. Mr. Grieves had made his mind up about me from reading my file.

Mr. Grieves seemed to weigh my silence and find it wanting. "I can't allow this behavior at James Brand," he said gravely. "You must realize that. It disrupts the discipline of the other boys." He raised his hand as though to forestall another interruption from me. "Now, I don't care what the reasons for your fighting were, or whether you were actually trying to kill yourself ... "

What? It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the cuts Pangianis had made to my wrists. Shit. How could anyone be stupid enough to think I had been trying to kill myself? I was flabbergasted!

"... But I take a very dim view of sharpened knives and such like," he went on. "Your possession of such an implement is, on its own, sufficient for me to keep you away from the other boys, and keep you out of the mess hall. You'll eat alone, with plastic implements."

"Sir?" I said timidly.

"What?" he said impatiently.

"I didn't have a knife, sir. I didn't cut myself, someone else cut me."

"We found a knife beneath the table you had been sitting at. Quite expertly sharpened, I must admit. Who do you think cut you?"

Once again I couldn't say. The code of the neighborhood. Never tell. Not even on Pangianis. "What about the others?"

"Taylor saw you attack two other boys before you went down, he didn't know why," Grieves said. "They said they were trying to stop you hurting yourself"

"It was my first time in the mess hall, sir. Where would I have gotten the knife?"

He considered this for a few seconds. "You could have had it in the infirmary. It would probably be easier to have obtained it there. In any case, it doesn't excuse your behavior in the preceding days." His mood was even uglier, now that I had questioned his version of events.

I was screwed. I saw that. He had made up his mind about me, and changing it was going to take action from me, not words. If I could ever change it. I looked down at my hands, glumly.

"You weren't feeling remorseful about what you did to that girl?" Grieves continued.

"I didn't do anything to her." I knew this was the wrong thing to say but there was no way I was ever going to admit to something as hideous as that.

"You are clearly a very, very disturbed boy, Michael. On the basis of your offence alone I would have referred you to the counselor, but since this attempted suicide and your consistent fighting and aggressive behavior I'm afraid I'll also be referring you to Dr. Blaha for regular therapy. You will see him every week, starting tomorrow."

Almost as an aside, Grieves changed his tone and said lightly "Quite apart from anything else, it reflects badly upon us to have you look like this. Imagine if you had a visitor, what they would think to see you look this way! Of course, I've forbidden you any visitors for the next three months, as punishment for this."

And then he was gone. I lay back in the bed and thought about where my life had gone to in the past three months. To shit, I thought. My life was shit.

The next day I met Dr Blaha for the first time. He swept into the room soon after breakfast, accompanied by a nurse. "Untie him immediately," he said brusquely to her, and my spirits improved. At last, someone who thought I was a human being. But then he turned to me, and flipped the file he had in his hand briskly through the air, as though he was about to toss it away.

"You have given a lot of people cause to dislike you," he said to me severely as the nurse undid the chain on my right arm. He had a peculiar accent I couldn't put a name to. It wasn't difficult to understand, but I figured it was something European. "This ..." He motioned to the file. "This is shocking, I must say. At your age. I have had some troublesome adolescents referred to me before, but never one as young as you with such a record, Michael."

The nurse released my other arm and I rubbed my face lightly. I had a bandage across my nose and on my forehead. It seemed to cover most of my face. Dr. Blaha seemed distracted by my actions. "No need to worry about that, I'm sure Dr. Singh did a good job on it." He turned to the nurse then and lowered his voice. "Would you give us some privacy, please?"

The nurse left and he continued in a lower voice. "You don't need to worry about the bandage, the surgeon just fixed your nose and stitched up the cut above your eye. I'm assured you won't notice anything after a few weeks." He lowered the bed slightly and pulled over a chair so we were more or less level as he continued. "I am Dr. Blaha, I believe Mr. Grieves has spoken to you about me?" I nodded, and he went on. "I am a psychiatrist, Michael, and I have been asked by Mr. Grieves to talk with you to see what is at the heart of your problems."

I didn't say anything, just waited for him to continue. He talked for a while about his expectations for me, and then warned me against any uncooperative behavior. "You must understand, Michael, that although you are only in a juvenile facility, I have the legal authority to do anything I feel is necessary to rehabilitate you. Anything. Are you clear on that?"

Again, I didn't say anything, just nodded. I had pretty much made up my mind that he was going to be no help at all. Untying my hands had just been a gesture to try to win my confidence -- this guy was a part of the system that had put me here.

He went on for a long time after that, asking me lots of questions about my life, about how I felt about girls, lots of other stuff about how I felt about life in general and about my feelings toward suicide. I tried to explain that I had not been suicidal, and I almost told him about Pangianis, but there was something about him that I didn't trust, and I held back.

After Dr. Blaha left I went back to total boredom in the hospital room. The next day they transferred me back to the infirmary at Brand, and then a few days after that removed the bandages. They gave me a mirror, and I could see that although my nose and eyes were still very swollen they looked like they would heal up without any scars.

I was given my own room at Brand, and -- as Mr. Grieves had said -- kept entirely separate from everyone else. There were three rooms in the isolation section but I never saw anyone else in the corridors in the time I was there, or heard anyone but the guards. I showered alone in a single stall shower in the block, and had my meals brought to me in my room. There was a small outside space -- hardly a courtyard, more like the bottom of an air shaft -- at the end of the corridor of the isolation section where I was allowed to spend an hour a day in the open air, although sunshine never seemed to hit the ground there.

Even though I had only been at Brand a few days, I kind of missed Steve. He had helped me fit in with a lot of things there and I missed having someone to talk with to fill in the long days. Grieves came to see me my first day out of the infirmary and explained that I would be excluded from the general activities the other boys were involved in, but that he would expect me to do some reading so I could keep up with studies when I went back into the general population at Brand.

The days were very long and boring, so I started reading some of the books, just out of desperation. I had been neither a good or bad student when at school -- good because I was reasonably smart I guess, but bad because I didn't much care about it. Studying was what the Brady Bunch crowd did. But I got through the books Grieves left pretty easily. They were just novels and a couple of history books. There were some textbooks but I didn't pay any attention to those.

I saw Dr. Blaha a few times in a small room off the infirmary, and he got me to tell him a lot of details about my past and my family. He was a strange man. There was something about him that made me uneasy, although he was always polite with me. At the end of the second session I had with him I felt somehow dirty, almost like there was something about him that was rubbing off on me. Perhaps it was the way he looked at me. I felt like he was looking past me to someone who wasn't there, even when he looked me straight in the eyes.

Each visit with Dr. Blaha lasted about an hour; one or two ran longer. Otherwise I only got to see the guards when they woke me, escorted me to the small shower block in the isolation wing, or brought me my meals. Each week they sprung a random inspection on me, looking through my room for drugs or something I guess. I also saw the guards when I got an hour in the yard by myself every day, but otherwise it was just me, in that room, by myself.

A few weeks after I was released from hospital one of the guards came to fetch me to see Grieves. Maybe he had relented, I thought, and I was going to be allowed to rejoin the rest of the guys. The idea gave me mixed emotions. I was lonely, but I still hadn't worked out a way to deal with Pangianis.

It was Dr. Blaha who opened the door to the office. Grieves was sitting at his desk, but he stood as soon as the guard and I came in. The atmosphere in the office was bad, gloomy, and I knew immediately that Grieves hadn't summoned me there to tell me everything was going to be okay.

"I have bad news," Grieves began.

I don't remember too much past that point. Dr. Blaha said later that it was because of stress or something. Grieves went on to tell me that my mother was dead, that my father had finally hit her one too many times and she had died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Dr. Blaha said later that my father's rages had become worse after Danny had died and I was locked up.

Whatever the truth was, I did not take it well. Though I don't remember it, I've been told I didn't say anything, just stood there with my head hung for about two minutes, and then I went berserk, rampaging across Grieves' office, heading straight for him and destroying everything on his desk until the guard was able to restrain me. I had dim memories of it later, when I lay in my room, but I think that was mostly because I felt sore from the bruises from where the guard had hit me. As I rubbed my aching arm I thought again of Mom, and of the way she used to be, when she was happy, singing along to Dusty Springfield. I knew tough guys didn't cry, but I couldn't help it then, and I blubbered for at least an hour while I thought of how life should have been for her.

Dr. Blaha came to my room an hour or two later, and wanted to talk to me, but I was still in turmoil from what had happened. I was over my tears, but I wanted to find my Dad, and hurt him, badly. I hadn't felt this way since Maria had been killed, and now there was the same small dark hard thing at the bottom of my soul that wanted to explode outward in retribution for this injustice. My mom had deserved a better life. I refused to say a word, and eventually, after a small, ill-tempered lecture from Blaha about needing to cooperate, he left.

I was called out on the following Monday to see Dr. Blaha again. We got off to a bad start with the session. I had decided I would start talking to him, but instead of talking about Mom now he wanted to ask me questions about Maria and what had happened that night, and wouldn't believe me when I said I was innocent. Instead, he got off into a rage about how we could never have a relationship of trust so long as I could not be truthful, and that it was just my screwed-up relationship with sex and women that was impeding my therapy.

I couldn't help myself after that. Although I had mostly always been respectful to adults, I said the same thing I would have said to anyone who insulted me that way in the old neighborhood -- I told him to go fuck himself.

Immediately he stopped ranting, and his face took on a calmer but more calculating look. "If that's the way you want this to be," he said, and he called for the guard to take me back to my room.

The following day I was led by a guard to the infirmary, where the nurse took some blood samples. The day after that I went back there again, only this time Dr. Blaha was there to greet me. "It gives me no pleasure to do this, Michael, but since you have shown no willingness to cooperate, and since you are still extremely aggressive and show some disturbing attitudes so far as sexual development goes, I have no alternative."

I had no idea what he was talking about, but he went on.

"Drop your pants, please."

Huh? I didn't say anything, but I didn't move, either. This guy was a shrink, why did he want to look at my butt? When I didn't move the guard came over and grabbed my wrists behind my back while the nurse undid my pants. Then the guard forced me over the examination table. A few moments later I felt a sharp prick as Dr. Blaha jabbed me in the butt with a needle.

"This is the only alternative I have left to me, Michael. You may find it slightly extreme, but I am sure it will make the difference we need to move on."

***

Chapter Three.

The next week was as uneventful as most of my time while I was kept in isolation. I read, exercised and ate alone. About the only difference in my life was that I seemed to need a lot more sleep than usual. I slept most afternoons. I just didn't seem to have any energy.

At our next meeting Dr. Blaha asked how I was, and was almost apologetic about having to have me restrained the week before, but I was still angry with him and wouldn't give him more than yes or no answers. I still wanted to ask him what it was he'd injected me with, but I figured -- with the state of our relationship as it was -- he wouldn't tell me anyway. The way he looked at me gave me the creeps, and I had a really bad feeling about what was going through his mind. Trust was not on the cards.

Life proceeded in this manner for some time. Dr. Blaha and I had standoffish encounters at every meeting, and I was bored most of the time on my own. I was gradually making my way through the better books in the library, and I was exercising to try to keep myself in shape, but I was still very tired and finding a lot of things harder going. I figured the shot he gave me was a tranquilizer, but I was surprised it lasted so long.

In the third week after Dr. Blaha gave me the shot I noticed my chest was kind of painful, at least around my nipples. They felt very painful in the cold air at night and in the morning. At our next meeting I asked him about my tiredness, but I didn't feel comfortable about mentioning my chest. "Yes, I would expect you to feel more tired, it's a side effect of these drugs, and they will help to calm you down," Dr. Blaha said. "I want to make you less aggressive, and this will help." I got another shot at the end of the session. This time I just gave in, and didn't need to be restrained. He seemed mildly pleased.

My tiredness didn't decrease, and nor did the uncomfortable feelings in my nipples. By about three weeks after that I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me. There was a definite small growth under each nipple, and they were puffy and very sensitive to every touch. The rough texture of my shirts rubbing against them made any kind of exercise feel very painful.

Gradually Dr. Blaha seemed to thaw, and I suppose I did too. Every two weeks he gave me another shot at the end of the therapy session, and I gradually came to accept it. After a few months I had even come to look forward to the sessions, if only because they got me out of my room and just being able to walk the corridors to the session seemed like a pleasure. Dr. Blaha and I had a session together on my fifteenth birthday, and he was friendly and wished me well and gave me a small box of chocolates, which he said he had cleared with Grieves. In return I agreed to tell him a little bit about my childhood, and he was smiling by the end of the session.

Grieves came to see me later on my birthday, too, and told me that Dr. Blaha had told him I was "coming along well" and might soon be allowed to rejoin the rest of the guys at Brand "depending, of course, on your continued progress." He gave me a small parcel. "I realize that now that the weather has gotten colder you might need something more to wear than the shirts you have, I hope these are alright."

I mumbled a kind of thank you and he left. After he had gone I opened the parcel. Inside were a couple of soft cotton vests, for wearing underneath my shirts. They looked kind of thin, which made me wonder about their value as far as keeping me warm, but I was glad to have something to keep my nipples from scratching.

After about my eighth or ninth shot I realized with some horror what was happening to my chest. I was growing breasts. As soon as I made the connection in my mind it was obvious. At first I was at a loss to figure out why. Looking at me, it was obvious that the small swellings on my frame were just like the ones I had been so intrigued about on Mary Wozecky two years or so ago when she stopped playing with the boys in the neighborhood. I was mortified. Breasts!

Frankly, 'mortified' doesn't even begin to describe how I felt. My first thought was -- well, it was more an absence of thought. I was stunned. My second thought was to try to deny it. But there they were. It was unmistakable. I thought of the comments I had heard guys make about breasts, the comments I had heard Danny make. He was a real tit man. I sank into depression as I wondered about my manhood, and about what he'd think of me if he could see me now. It didn't bear thinking about.

Next time I got to request some books I asked for a bunch of medical reference texts. The library only had about four books like that. They were all mostly pretty basic biology, but one was a kind of encyclopedia of medicine, and although it had a lousy index I skimmed through a lot of it from the beginning, looking for anything to do with breasts or puberty, until I found a reference to gynecomastia. It said this was a condition that a lot of guys got, especially around puberty, which resulted in them growing breasts. Most times, it said, the development passed after the initial hormonal burst that marked puberty, and the guys grew up perfectly normally. This relaxed me a little bit. I read the entry so many times for reassurance that I knew it by heart by the time I returned it to the library.

As my breasts continued to grow I started to be glad I was on my own. What would the other guys say if they saw me in the showers now? My breasts were not especially noticeable under my clothing, but I was very conscious of them, and I knew that they were unmistakably female. The encyclopedia had said that the condition was quite common, but I'd never seen anything like this happen to other guys.

I was also worried about other parts of my body. I seemed to be putting on some weight, but only on my butt. The tiny mirror stuck to the wall in my room didn't let me get a decent look at my body, since I couldn't stand back far enough from it to take in much of me. All I had to go on was what I could see by looking down at myself. From that perspective my breasts looked enormous, but I couldn't really get a good idea about my butt.

The way my body looked was only part of it; the way I felt was more disturbing. My nipples were ultra-sensitive, way beyond anything I could have imagined. Sometimes at night I ran my hands over them and around my budding breasts, and found the sensations excruciating and yet wonderful. As time went on some of the excruciating element receded, and all I was left with was a feeling of intense pleasure. Part of me loved it, but another, maybe dominant, part of me knew that boys weren't supposed to experience these feelings, and that probably what I was doing when I handled my breasts was wrong.

My hair also bothered me. It had not been cut since it had been shorn when I first arrived at Brand, and it was now a mid-length shag beginning to hang in my eyes, and coming in very wavy and even curly. The red seemed to be deeper in color than it had been when I was younger, although I might have been imagining that since I had never had as much of it as this before. Lots of the guys at Brand had longer hair -- it was a kind of badge of resistance after everyone's hair was cut so short on arrival -- but I had never had hair past my ears before. I kept trying to brush it back with my hands, or comb it into place when it was wet, but whenever I did that I thought from what little I could see in the little mirror that it made me look kind of girlish. Not that it mattered much while I was in isolation, and there wasn't much I could do about it while I was there anyway.

In the midst of all these other changes there was one compensation. I had started to develop a small amount of hair around my cock and balls, and a little in my armpits. It was only fine, and kind of sparse, but I felt encouraged that my masculinity hadn't completely gone on hold.

Gonzales got assigned to the isolation wing three days a week about ten weeks after I was put in. Not that I cared much about the guards, but at least his was a face I'd seen before I was separated from everyone else. It turned out he liked to talk, and pretty soon I knew all about his wife and kids and his mother who lived with them and his younger brother who was no good and mixed up in a shady importing business. Hearing about this big Hispanic soap opera helped to pass the time.

The other two days a week Gonzales worked back in the general area at Brand, where I'd first met him that time he took me to the showers, and one day he told me he had a message for me, from Steve. It wasn't very specific, or if it was Gonzales had forgotten the exact words, but he passed it on as a sort of general encouragement.

Steve had asked after me, at least. That was nice. It seemed pathetic to think of a guy I'd only spent a few days with as a good friend, but really Steve was my only friend in the world, and I guess you latch onto whatever you find when you're down.

Since Gonzales couldn't remember much more than two or three sentences at a time the message I sent back to Steve was a short one, just saying I was okay and would be glad to get out of isolation.

Gradually Gonzales took more and more messages between us, I think because he liked me. Maybe I was the only person in the world who would listen to him bitch about his family troubles all the time. Now it seems kind of hard to believe that someone would confide all to a fifteen year old boy, but at the time I just went with it.

Whatever it was, Steve and Gonzales and I struck up this weird slow-motion conversation. "I could get in trouble for doing this" Gonzales said to me a couple of weeks after the first message. That was true, because he wasn't supposed to talk to us much. What the hell, it must have been a really shitty, boring job; he had to talk to someone. I reassured him, pointing out that I valued the communication and wasn't likely to complain to anyone.

Out of the blue one day, after I had been listening to him talking about how his son wasn't doing well at school for about an hour and just saying uh huh and nodding every now and again, Gonzales said "You know, Mike, I don't care what you did, you are a better kid than most of the kids in here -- better than some of the ones outside, too." Then he seemed to regret saying it immediately, like he had overstepped he mark, which I guess he had. I changed the subject for him quickly, since I was embarrassed as all hell anyway. It was such a strange outburst from a guard at a place like Brand.

The visits to Dr. Blaha continued, and so did the shots. I began to worry about all the weight I was putting on in my butt. Although I couldn't see that part of me properly, it was getting more and more difficult to get my pants on even though my waist hadn't grown. My jockey shorts stretched out pretty tight around my butt. Plus the shots were still making me really tired and I was sleeping way too much.

Dr. Blaha kept telling me he thought we were making good progress, and that soon I would be able to rejoin the rest of the Brand community. I didn't get much out of the sessions at all except for a growing feeling of unease at the way Blaha looked at me as my body developed. He really gave the creeps, especially at those moments when I had to drop my pants so he could give me a shot. A couple of times his hand lingered on my butt, and I was pretty sure he had a boner whenever he did that. I tried not to let my unease show when we talked, because I didn't want him to think he was getting to me. Mostly in our sessions we talked about me, about what it was like growing up. A couple of times he asked me to talk about Danny, and that was pretty hard because I cried, and I hated crying in front of him.

For some reason, I seemed to cry very easily ever since I'd been seeing Dr. Blaha. I put it down to the shots.

In a couple of sessions Dr. Blaha recorded what I was saying. Once or twice he played some of our earlier conversations back to me, to illustrate how he thought I was becoming less aggressive and hostile. I didn't notice any change in the way I spoke, because I was always fixated on the way I sounded whenever I heard myself on tape. I wanted my voice to break so badly.

That didn't seem like it was going to happen anytime soon, though. My problems with my breasts got worse. They were definitely noticeable now. They *seemed* huge. I tore up one of the cotton vests Grieves had given me and used the fabric from it to bind myself up. Even though there wasn't really anyone except Gonzales and the other guards to see me, I wasn't comfortable with what had happened to my body. I especially hated the way they had begun to jiggle when I moved suddenly. Binding them up at least stopped that.

Bob, an older guard who was rostered on weekends, started giving me the strangest looks, and even made some creepy comments about me. He called me 'pussy' from the first day he was assigned to isolation, and I wasn't sure whether that was just a general term of abuse from him or something specific to the way I looked that he might have noticed. I tried to make sure the binding was on extra tight when he was around.

Mostly it was other guards, but sometimes it would be Gonzales who would escort me to see Dr. Blaha. Once as we were walking there Gonzales tried to cheer me up by attempting to imitate the way Blaha talked. It worked -- there was no way Gonzales's Hispanic speech patterns could come close to Blaha's strange middle-European accent.

Twelve months after I had been sent to Brand I was still in the isolation wing. I mentioned this gloomily to Gonzales one afternoon as we were making the pilgrimage to see Dr. Blaha.

"It's been a long time," he admitted. "Almost as long as Hammond spent here."

"I didn't know Steve was in isolation," I said to him.

"Oh, yes, twice. They let him out after three months the first time and he got into trouble again. He went back in for another six months," said Gonzales. "And then another six months." I was about to ask what Steve had been sent to isolation for when we arrived at the door to Blaha's office. Gonzales opened the door for me and I went in on my own, as I usually did. "He and Pangianis were always fighting," Gonzales said quietly, in answer to the question I hadn't asked. "Pangianis spent almost a year in the wing as well."

Inside the session proceeded badly from the start. Dr. Blaha gave me the shot at the start of the session instead of the end like he usually did, which put me in a bad mood. Then right off after that he started asking me to talk about how I felt about Maria, and whether I felt any remorse.

Naturally I clammed up. There was no way to respond to those questions. In the past I would have gone into a rage about it, but now I just got kind of sad and stayed silent. I wasn't angry any more -- Blaha's questions seemed more pointless than maddening.

The doctor changed his approach to the discussion. There was one big barrier that was preventing him from telling Grieves I was coming around, Blaha ventured. "You still don't trust me," he said.

That was true. I didn't really trust anyone. Blaha thought I didn't trust him because I wouldn't talk to him about Maria, and that was true, too. But the reason I wouldn't talk to him about it was that he didn't believe me when I said I didn't kill her.

"You don't trust me, either," I said.

He weighed this up for a moment. I guess he realized it was true. "It's not about me trusting you, Michael. It's about working out how you can survive here without being a danger to others and to yourself. A big part of that is reconciling you to take responsibility for what you've done to get yourself sent here."

He paused, and sighed, and looked at me very directly. "Okay, Michael. Let's try doing this step by step. How are you feeling these days?"

"I'm okay, I guess"

"You're not as angry as you were?" he continued.

I had just been thinking about that a minute or so earlier, and I shook my head.

"Good. Well, that's progress. You don't feel these violent rages any more?"

"I didn't --," I began, but he immediately cut me off.

"-- I don't want to hear excuses today, Michael. Are you feeling anger now?"

"Uh, no," I admitted. "I mean, I've never --"

"-- Let us stick to me asking questions and you answering. Good. No rages. That means the therapy is working." He even smiled a little. "What about your feelings toward girls? Have you been thinking about girls a lot?"

"Uh, no ... " I realized I hadn't been thinking about them much at all. Not that I've ever been weirdly obsessed or anything. But it occurred to me that I hadn't thought about sex lately. I hadn't even had a boner these last few months. Before I had come to Brand I got a few, and I thought a lot about Mary Wozecky and even Maria sometimes when I jerked off at home. Recently I had jerked off a little bit, but it was while I was playing with my own breasts, not thinking of Mary's, and most of the time I stayed soft while I was doing it anyway. What did that mean?

Dr. Blaha was saying something but I hadn't been listening. All of a sudden I was aware of how my attitudes toward sex had changed in the time I'd been at Brand. I mean, I still hadn't really reached puberty according to Danny's measure of it ("once you start spurting, man, that's it," he had once told me) but I had thought about sex much more before I was sentenced than I had since. Maybe it was just that there were no girls around. Yeah, I thought, that was it.

Dr. Blaha finished saying whatever it was I had ignored and then looked to me for a response. When I didn't give one he looked at me kind of strangely. "Take off your clothes," he said.

I hesitated. Dr. Blaha was such a creepy guy, and the look he was giving me was one of his creepiest. I sat there until he grew impatient. I could see it was not negotiable, but I was resistant. I hadn't been naked in front of anyone else since he had begun giving me the shots. As I sat there, motionless, he started to approach me, so I quickly stood up and, waving him away, began to undress.

I turned my back to him and undid my shirt. Underneath I had on a t-shirt as well as a vest, and underneath that was the vest I had torn up to bind my breasts. Before I took the t-shirt off I undid my pants and dropped them to the floor. I looked back over my shoulder to see him watching me intently, and he waved his hand at me to continue. I pulled the t-shirt over my head, then turned back around to face him.

"The vest and underwear too, Michael."

I dropped my jockey shorts first, feeling more embarrassed than I usually did when he gave me the shots. Then, hesitantly, I lifted the vest over my head and closed my eyes. I was waiting for a comment about the binding across my chest, but all I heard was a low "And that as well, thank you" from Blaha. I reached between my breasts to undo the knot in the material and then I was standing, naked, in front of him. I folded my arms in front of me, to try to hide my chest, and then slowly opened my eyes.

Dr. Blaha had moved forward to get a closer look at me, and was beginning to circle around me. "Mmmm," he said. He said that a lot when he was pleased. "I must say that the effects are somewhat more pronounced than I had expected. We might have a problem soon... Take your arms down please."

Reluctantly I did so, feeling more naked than I ever had before in front of anyone. I shivered, even though it was not cold in the room, and I felt my nipples get hard and pointy. I blushed, and briefly wondered about his comment about having a problem *soon*.

"So, Michael, perhaps you can see that it is sometimes easier just to -- how do you say it -- go with the flow instead of getting angry."

I had no idea what he was talking about. He picked up a camera and began to take photographs of me. With a shock I realized that the small tent in his pants meant that he was turned on by what he saw. I felt a wave of nausea build.

"Face the door, please," Dr. Blaha continued after he had finished inspecting me. I turned, and for the first time I saw myself naked in the full-length mirror attached to the back of the door.

My mind reeled. I looked like a girl. Apart from my cock, I mean. I looked like a girl maybe a year or so younger than me. I had breasts, and hips, and a little indentation to my waist, and my arms and legs were softer and more rounded than they used to be. My nose looked kind of petite, my lips were fuller than they used to be. My shaggy hair gave my face a kind of elfin quality, almost... pretty. A little shock went through me. I looked like, well, like the kind of girl I used to get knotted up about when I was at school. But I didn't just look like them in the face; I looked like them almost all over.

Even the hair around my cock and balls wasn't particularly masculine; I could see that now. When Danny had reached puberty, he had developed a lot of hair, and it ran up his belly. Mine looked more like the patch of darkness that I had seen on the girls in porno magazines, a little neat dark red triangle, in this case broken by a small, pathetic looking penis that somehow looked smaller than it ever had. I thought of those magazines, and of Danny, and remembered the photograph of the 'chick with a dick' that Danny had teased me about so much.

Was that what I was, now? Was that why Danny was always laughing at me in my dreams?

"This was not my main purpose," Dr. Blaha continued, as he began measuring me around the hips, waist and ... er ... bust. I flinched when I felt his hands contact my skin. "But it's not entirely unexpected. As I explained to you when you first began taking them, it's a side effect of the drugs I gave you. Anti-androgens, estrogens. We give them to sex offenders these days, to free their minds from the urges they have. It also has the effect of calming any other violent urges they have. Usually the side effects of feminization are not as dramatic as they have been in your case, but I suppose since you are young... "

I had stopped listening. I hadn't imagined I had looked quite like this until now. I knew odd things had been happening to my body, and they had been happening for a long time, but I hadn't realized what the overall effect would be. Then I realized I was crying.

The way I responded in to the image of myself in the mirror probably sounds like I'm really stupid or something. I had known that my body had been changing -- how could I not have known? My breasts were so obvious. What I hadn't seen before was how completely it had changed. Naked before the mirror, I finally assembled all those things I had noticed in the months before into a coherent image of myself. It wasn't the image I had been expecting, no matter how often I had worried about the growth of my breasts and butt.

Dr. Blaha wrapped my shirt around me and put his arm around me gently to lead me back to my seat in front of his desk. I didn't even flinch when I felt his hand drop from my back to my butt as he steered me toward the chair, I was so dazed from what I had seen. Then he returned to his own chair on the other side.

"I'm sorry it's such a shock, Michael... you may remember I said that you might find the treatment extreme. It has been necessary so that we could move forward. You can see now that I am prepared to do whatever it takes to get your cooperation with me. Now that your violent urges seem to have subsided we can think about returning you to the main part of the center."

Despite my shock the last part of the sentence penetrated my sobbing. "Return me to the center?" I could imagine what Pangianis would think of me now. "I can't..."

Dr. Blaha nodded. "I can see there could be some complications, Michael, but we will do our best to ensure you are safe. You will shower separately, and I will get you something to hide your, ah, breasts, ah, better. Now that you are not as prone to violence yourself perhaps you will be less inclined to get into trouble."

I shook my head. "He'll kill me," I said desperately.

"Who will, Michael?"

I thought of the code of silence, and then I thought of what lay ahead for me. I felt lost. No matter what I chose, my life back with the other guys in Brand was going to be misery. I swallowed, and said nothing as I went to gather up my clothing.

Blaha let my statement ride but then added to my fears. "Of course, we will need to continue the treatment for a while," he said. "I know the side effects are distressing, but you have made excellent progress, and I don't want to lose that."

"Distressing!" I was astonished that he would consider sending me back to the rest of Brand, but I was speechless that he wanted me to continue getting the shots. Was he really so clueless that he didn't know what would happen to me, or did he still harbor some ill will towards me?

I briefly thought of fighting with him, but it seemed pointless. He had Grieves, the guards, the entire institution and even drugs on his side, and I was at his mercy no matter what I did. Plus he seemed to have a real bee in his bonnet about me being a troublemaker already. I slowly dressed, and waited for him to dismiss me. He was gazing out the window as I was dressing, and then he turned and smiled.

"You know, Michael, you shouldn't feel so bad about this. The changes do seem to... well... suit you, and while I'm sure you find them inconvenient we will make sure you are taken care of." He went to a cabinet at the side of the room and retrieved a small pack of tablets, then approached me with one in his upturned palm. "Take this. I'll see to it you get two every day. It will help."

I looked at him with alarm. What was the pill for? I was already in enough trouble with the drugs he'd been giving me. What did he mean by "the changes seem to suit"?

Blaha saw my reluctance and sighed. "It will make you feel better, Michael. There are no side effects like the shots you've had, alright?" Reluctantly, I took the pill and swallowed it. "Thank you," he said. He even smiled. "I'll see you weekly from now on," he continued. "I think we can make some very good progress from here."

As I stepped into the corridor Gonzales looked at me very strangely, but I was still confused by the things Blaha had said to me and didn't pay any attention to the odd expression on his face. Blaha had known all along that my body would change this way, and yet now he was going to send me back out with the other guys, who were certain to kill me. My mind went around and around this in fear, without seeing any way I could save myself. Such was my distraction that I didn't notice Gonzales speaking to me, either, until he said my name more loudly.

"Mike!"

"Uh... huh?"

"You are alright?" Gonzales asked, looking at me solicitously.

I nodded. "Yeah, I guess so. Sorry, I guess I was distracted"

"You are not having the best of times" Gonzales continued. It was then that I became aware that he was looking at my chest. When getting dressed in Blaha's office I had forgotten -- for the first time ever -- to bind myself up. Gonzales noticed that I had caught him looking at me and glanced away, as I turned bright red.

"No, I am definitely not having the best of times," I said softly.

Neither of us said anything more as he returned me to my room in isolation. A few hours later he came by with a small parcel from Doctor Blaha, and we both looked embarrassed when we made eye contact. I don't know which of us was more embarrassed, really. I shrugged and Gonzales smiled at me. "It will be alright," he said to me gently. "I will see to that."

***

Chapter Four.

In the package that Blaha had sent me were a few rolls of bandages and some safety pins to secure them. I didn't need instructions to tell me what they were for, and as soon as Gonzales left I began to bind myself up again. The truth is, I felt much more comfortable with my breasts free, but I didn't want anyone else to discover what was happening to me and I thought it was better to be safe than very sorry. Also in the parcel were another vest and a new center uniform. I tried on the pants first, and immediately noticed that they fit me a lot better around the butt. The shirt wasn't much different, I thought.

After dinner Bob came to take me and my meager bundle of belongings back to the main facility. For once he was polite when he spoke to me, and although he didn't use my name he didn't call me 'pussy' like he usually did. Although Bob didn't say anything to confirm it, I figured that Carlos Gonzales had been true to his word, and had talked to Bob about what was happening.

I had mixed feelings as Bob led me up the corridor toward the main wing. Happiness that I would have company again, and fear at what my new physical status would mean if I was found out. The fear was completely overwhelmed, though, when I saw he was leading me right back to my old room with Steve. The guard opened the door and I went in, immediately disappointed because Steve wasn't in. I slowly unpacked and then lay on the lower bunk. Each time I thought about the way I'd looked in that mirror I cried a little, but gradually I think I wore myself out, and eventually I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up a while later when Steve came back from dinner. He saw me and broke into a wide grin. "They finally decided you weren't such a threat to the rest of us, huh?" he teased. I was about to jump up and give him a hug, I was so pleased to see him, but I restrained myself.

Why had I wanted to hug him? That was definitely not the way to approach Steve. Although I always felt better the few times I had been in his presence, I knew that Steve was a tough guy at Brand who wasn't given to expressing emotion. Instead, I stayed on my bunk in the shadow of his bunk above, and he sat on the edge of my mattress and we talked and talked, catching up on what had been happening.

After a few minutes, though, he stopped talking and looked at me carefully, squinting as though he couldn't quite make me out in the shadow. "You look different, kid," he said uncertainly.

"It's the hair," I said immediately, wishing the wall behind me would dissolve so I could flee. "I haven't had it cut since I've been in here."

"Yeah, I guess," Steve said, though he seemed unconvinced. A couple of times through the rest of the evening I caught him scrutinizing me again, but he tried to pretend he wasn't doing it each time I met his gaze.

I mentioned to him that I was going to get my hair cut now that I was out of isolation, but he asked me not to. I thought that was kind of odd, but he said he thought having it longer suited me and I should keep it that way. I wasn't sure I wanted to have it really long, since I'd never liked my hair -- or at least its color -- anyway. But I figured I still had a way to go before it was as long as a couple of other guys' anyway.

We kept on talking and talking. Even though he was a lot older than I was Steve seemed to have no problems relating to the stuff I had to say, which I was glad about. I needed to talk about anything other than my problems with Blaha. Most of our conversation was Steve filling me in on other guys who had arrived or left, and most of the names didn't mean anything to me. After all, I'd only had a short time in the general population at Brand. Steve had even had a new cellmate come and go in the time I'd been in isolation, some jerk he didn't like much named Brian. I had a feeling -- from the way that Steve described him -- that Steve hadn't made Brian's stay very enjoyable.

Even though most of the discussion was about people I didn't know, it was good to have someone to talk to, and I liked listening to Steve. There was something about the tone of his voice, and his ready smile, which cheered me up. We continued talking until well past lights out. I undressed down to my t-shirt, unwilling to take it and the bandage beneath it off even in the dark.

It was only as I was going to sleep that it occurred to me that the one person neither of us had mentioned was Pangianis.

Next morning Blaha was true to his word. At breakfast a guard escorted me to eat, and stood only a few feet from the table where I sat. As I entered the room, the light conversation that had been buzzing around stopped completely, as all eyes turned to take me in. I could see Pangianis and a few of his goons glaring at me, but there wasn't much they could do. Eventually the conversations started up again. The guard escorted me back to my room and Steve joked that I was the most popular person at Brand, just because I had managed to irritate Pangianis so badly. I wasn't sure whether getting a psychopath riled was a good thing or a bad thing.

Everyone else had showered before breakfast, but I got mine afterward when Gonzales arrived to escort me. I stripped off and got under the water quickly, noticing from the corner of my eye that Gonzales was having a hard time trying not to stare at me, though he was trying hard to be discreet. I turned my back to him and finished rinsing myself off, then toweled myself dry and began dressing, carefully re-wrapping my bandage. Then we went back to the room. Neither of us said anything.

The days went on in a similar fashion, one after another. As Dr. Blaha had promised, the pills did seem to make me feel better, or at least less anxious about the threat I faced from Pangianis (or anyone else who found out about my weird new body). Dr. Blaha's other promises held up, too. I was escorted everywhere by a guard, almost always Gonzales if he was on duty, and I never showered with the other guys. Steve started to ask me about this one day, but then seemed to think the better of it and didn't finish the question. Every morning I made a point of getting up earlier than Steve so that I was dressed in more than just my t-shirt and jockey shorts when he saw me. I was very conscious of the lack of hair on my body, and didn't want him to see that, and besides I wasn't sure how well the t-shirt hid the bandage beneath.

Every day that I watched him get up I marveled at the way his body looked in comparison to mine. He wasn't super-hairy, but there was a fair bit on his chest, and he had very broad shoulders. Although he frequently reminded me of Danny in his actions he was taller and possessed the kind of good looks that I knew would have prompted the girls back at the Division Cafe to throw themselves at him. He seemed relaxed with his movements, unhurried, and I had to admit that, coupled with his accent and the slow, gentle way he spoke, there was a lot of appeal to that.

I guess at Brand there was nothing much to hurry to.

Although at first I knew he was watching me like a hawk, each day that went by I noticed Pangianis seemed to pay less attention to me. One of his goons hissed when passing Gonzales and me in the corridor, and another tried to embarrass me by saying "cute" every day when he passed my table at lunchtime, but the one time anyone tried to do anything to me Gonzales was onto them like a flash. Pangianis's offsider Sonny, the one who had helped cut me, came at me from behind with a sharpened shim of steel he'd gotten from somewhere as I was walking out of the library. I think another of the thugs was supposed to distract Gonzales, but something went wrong in the timing, because as soon as Sonny was within about three feet of me Gonzales had snapped out a deft kick to Sonny's wrist and disarmed him before he threw him to the floor and stood on Sonny's back with one foot.

Sonny did about two months in isolation for that. I wondered whether he was going to get one of Dr. Blaha's special programs for aggression too, but unfortunately justice isn't something you often find in juvenile detention centers.

Months went by. Each night as I went to bed I thought of all that had happened to me, all the strange changes that had taken place. It felt as thought the old me, the one from the old neighborhood, was slipping away. Back then I was teased for being small, but I knew who I was, and I got some respect from my friends because I was tough enough not to take shit from people. Here at Brand I was taking serious shit from the doctor. As I twisted and turned in bed some nights I saw Danny's face in my dreams, and each time he was laughing and jeering at me and calling me a sissy. In the mornings when I woke after these dreams I usually wanted to die.

Steve kept watching me closely when we were together. At first I was very self-conscious about it, afraid that he had noticed the bandage I wore or something else about the changes that had happened to me since Dr. Blaha's bizarre therapy had begun. Once, not long after Sonny's attempt on me, everyone was awoken in the middle of the night for a random search of our rooms. Fortunately it was a while after the lights came on before the guards got to our room, and I was able to secure the bandage fairly quickly before Steve dropped down from his bunk. But I noticed after I rose, in my t-shirt and underwear, that he eyed my legs strangely. During the search we had to stand against the wall in the corridor, and after I walked back into the room ahead of him I realized from the rather startled expression on his face that he had probably been studying my butt and legs from behind. I flushed red, but he didn't say anything, and I tried to pretend it hadn't happened. When in the next few days he still hadn't said anything I thought maybe I was mistaken, or the changes weren't as obvious as I had thought. Gradually I relaxed around him again, and came to accept the way he unconsciously flicked his eyes over me sometimes as just part of his everyday behavior. I even began to like it a little bit, but only when I didn't think too much about what liking it might mean.

My new freedom to mingle with the other inmates at Brand was constrained by the fact that I always had a guard nearby, which meant almost all the other guys avoided me like the plague. The first time I ventured out I was left entirely on my own, and I stood in the corner of the yard feeling like some kind of leper. The second time, this effeminate-looking kid who was maybe seventeen years old approached me. I could see the guard who was escorting me eye the kid warily as he approached, but since I didn't know who this fairy was I didn't get my defenses up too much.

"Hi," the fairy said boldly, in a singsong kind of voice.

"Uh, hi," I said, unsure what to make of this kid.

"I'm Cary," he said, putting an emphasis on the second syllable, stretching it out. Cary. I remembered Steve's comments about Nick Pangianis's 'partner' of choice. "Cary Philips. Some people call me Cee."

I knew who some people might have been.

"Mike," I said in return. I didn't proffer a second name.

"You don't look much like a Mike," Cary said.

"Huh?" I didn't know how to respond to that, or if I even wanted to. There was an awkward silence for a moment.

"Nick just wanted you to know that he didn't know you were with Hammond," Cary said abruptly. "He doesn't want any trouble."

I neither believed this nor felt inclined to comment on it. Nick Pangianis had shown every sign of wishing me all the trouble he could so far. And I was confused. What did "with Hammond" mean? I didn't see what Steve had to do with any of it.

"Why should I believe him?" I asked.

"Ooh, you are a feisty one, aren't you," Cary said archly. "I'm just passing the message on. You are with Hammond, aren't you?"

"We're in the same room," I said. Despite my feelings for Steve as a friend I resented our relationship being portrayed the way Pangianis and Cary's was.

"Really? Heck, honey, you are missing out big time, then. Steve Hammond is the only other guy in this place worth pissing on. And Nick does respect him, you know."

Eventually, after a few half-hearted attempts at conversation, Cary sighed. "What a pity. I thought you and I could get to be real good friends." Then he flounced off, swinging his hips as he walked, conscious of the snickers of some of the kids he passed but seemingly proud of prompting them. A couple of them glanced at me as Cary passed them, and I could see I was tarred with the same brush. That kind of took away any enjoyment I ever had from being outside after that. When exercise time was called I started going to the library instead most days.

I started taking some classes, since Brand required everyone to continue some study until they were 16, but fortunately Pangianis and his goons weren't in any of the same groups as me. I don't even know if Pangianis bothered taking classes since he was older, or if it even occurred to him that he could easily have got at me there. Three of the classes I took were with Mr. Danielson, a sour old bastard who seemed always to be looking at me kind of sleazily. He gave me the creeps, but even though he bugged me a little I was more relaxed around him than around Pangianis.

Because I could relax in class I really started to get into some of my studies. Danny would have laughed at me, called me a brain or something, but really Brand was such a mind-numbingly boring place to be that reading almost anything was preferable to just hanging out in the yard where nobody would talk to me anyway. All the time I spent in isolation meant that I had already read a lot of stuff that was set for classes anyway. When I look back on my time there now, I think my time at Brand had a big impact on the kinds of things I was interested in. Back at school I had always hated study.

Steve used to kid me from time to time about the stuff I read, which meant he reminded me even more of Danny. It was exactly the same kind of thing he would have done. I think Steve was kind of impressed that I could understand some of the books, in a funny kind of way, though he would never have said it. He didn't take classes, since he was old enough to be exempt. Instead he worked out a lot, and hung out with some other guys when we had yard time. He spent most of the rest of his free time playing his guitar.

Steve was a great guitarist, I guess because he put in so much practice. Because of that he didn't get complaints from the other guys, even though the music carried down the corridor and could be heard by all. He could play anything, even jazz. Once another guy tried playing a guitar, too, at the other end of the block, but he wasn't very good and so everyone started yelling at him to stop after a short while. Nobody ever asked Steve to stop, and nobody ever played his radio over the top of Steve's guitar, either. A lot of evenings he would play and I would listen until the guards called for lights out.

I think those evenings are some of my favorite memories of my time at Brand, me laying on my bunk with Steve sitting on the edge of my mattress playing his guitar. He liked to play a lot of different stuff, but sometimes he'd bow to a picture of Keith Richards on the wall and pay mock homage before trying a Stones song. "Greatest songwriter in the world," he'd say. Even though it was hard to make some of that music sound interesting when he only had an acoustic guitar, he was pretty good, especially on some of the slower songs like 'Wild Horses'. I told him I liked that one, and he played it a lot after that.

One night I kind of forgot myself and sang along to 'Wild Horses'. When the song finished he didn't say anything for a few moments, and that made me very self-conscious. I became aware that there wasn't a sound anywhere else in the whole block. I blushed a deep crimson, and then Steve said softly "You sing really beautifully, you know?"

What I was aware of was that my voice hadn't broken -- it had changed in quality since I'd been at Brand, and become just a little bit more throaty, but it had hardly dropped in pitch at all, and I had sung up kind of high in the last chorus. It wasn't really a sound I wanted the other guys to hear. What an idiot I was.

I rolled over on the bed and put my face in the pillow. Then I felt Steve's hand on my shoulder. "It's okay," he said. "Really. That was beautiful. You should sing more."

I turned my head slightly and looked over at him. He had put the guitar down and moved closer up the bunk to be nearer to me. His eyes met mine and he reached out a hand and stroked my hair away from my face. It was a strange and beautiful moment. A tingle went through me when he touched me. I had never felt anything like it before. I dropped my eyes from his gaze, and he brushed my hair a few more times. Then he stood up and walked to the door of our room. I think he was suddenly embarrassed.

At that moment the bell rang that let us know it was five minutes to lights out, and he turned and came back and sat on the edge of my bunk again.

"Mike?" he said. "How old are you now?"

"Fifteen," I said softly. There was something about the way he was looking at me that made me very self-conscious.

"I'm twenty," Steve said. I knew that. I nodded, and he went on, hesitantly. "It's funny, you seem kind of older than that in some ways, but you look younger. Uh, have you... Do you...? Uh..."

I knew what he was searching for. He was trying to find a polite way to ask me how come I wasn't like the other guys at Brand. Maybe he wanted to know how come I didn't have any signs of a masculine puberty yet.

I guess there wasn't a polite way. I reached up to him and put my finger in front of his lips in a gesture of silence. "You don't want to know," I said softly.

"Yeah, I do," he said equally quietly. "Uh... don't take this the wrong way, I like you and all -- you know that, right?" I nodded. "It's just ... well, you're more like... sometimes you kind of make me crazy, and I don't know why," he said.

Just then Gonzales opened the door. "Lights out," he said, smiling. He saw Steve sitting on the edge of my mattress, with me lying down, and his eyes narrowed. "You okay, Mike?"

"Fine thanks," I called, grateful that the spell between Steve and I had been broken. I liked Steve a lot, but this kind of conversation was getting way more intense than we'd ever been before. Steve put his guitar in its case and Gonzales hit the switch.

I could hear Steve starting to get undressed. There was always a dim light in our room from the exterior lighting in the yard outside coming through the small window, so our room was never completely dark, but I could never see by it until a few minutes after lights out when my eyes had time to adjust. I started to take off my own clothes too, confident Steve would be unable to see too much in the time that it took him to get undressed. I stayed on the bunk to get undressed, and had to kind of shake my hips a bit to get my pants down over them while lying down. Then I took off my socks and unbuttoned my shirt. I thought Steve was just about to climb onto the bunk above me, but then he seemed to change his mind and he came and sat on the edge of my bed again. As he was sitting down I quickly got under the blanket so he wouldn't see too much of me when his eyes adjusted to the light.

"Sorry about before," he said. "I'm not, uh... " His voice trailed off as though he was embarrassed and thought better of completing the sentence.

"It's okay," I said, conscious again in a strange way that he was so close to me. I was nervous. I guess I should have just shut up then, but in my zeal to make him feel better I asked, "Why do I make you crazy?" I already half knew the answer to that, and I really didn't want to hear him say it, but my nervousness was tinged with an odd fatalism and I couldn't keep my mouth shut. Embarrassed, I continued getting ready for bed by taking off my shirt. Now I had only the t-shirt, jockey shorts and bandage covering me.

"Uh...," Steve began again. It was tragic how inarticulate he could get when he was nervous, and in my slowly returning awareness of light I could make out the side of his face, and the slight tilt to his head which indicated he was very embarrassed. "Have you... have you ever thought about, you know, with a guy?"

My immediate feeling was revulsion. Ugh! My deepest fear. There was a long, deep stillness between us, and I thought Steve would just get up and walk away, since he probably regretted saying that. But then despite myself I couldn't help smiling. He really was kind of sweet when he was embarrassed like that. It was strange to hear someone normally so strong and self-assured make themselves so vulnerable, and although I wasn't sure how to deal with the question I understood that by even broaching it Steve was trusting me in a very special way.

"No way," I said quietly, but I couldn't look at him when I said it.

"I just wondered," he whispered. There are some things you do..."

"You think I'm queer?"

"Maybe not. Sorry, It's just..."

I felt Steve's hand at my neck, gently brushing my hair back again, and I jumped. Evidently he could see me better than I could see him. And once again, after the initial terror, the feeling of him touching me, even in such a seemingly trivial way, was electrifying, and I was momentarily disoriented by the small buzz that went through me. When I didn't pull away from his touch, or say anything, he continued, his voice even softer. "Sometimes I look at you, and I wonder why I get these feelings. Like, I don't think I'm like that, you know? This place gets to a lot of people that way, but not me. But... I don't want to offend you, but the way you move sometimes, and the way you look when you're sleeping..."

Steve had been watching me sleep? That was news to me. I felt his hand go down the back of my neck and then his other hand touch my shoulder. Despite my nervousness I almost wanted to purr. I could sense him shifting slightly closer to me, and feel his hand beginning to move across my back.

"Ah, Steve..." I began.

The hand on my shoulder was immediately withdrawn, as though he feared from my voice that he'd crossed a line. But at the same time his other hand had dropped just slightly further down my back, and his hand made contact with my bandage beneath my t-shirt.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Shit," I said, reality suddenly returning to me. What had I been thinking? I had been enjoying the way he had been touching me. I hadn't had another person touch me in such a long time. Maybe I was a fag after all. Did the pills Dr. Blaha was giving me change that about me, too? I didn't want to think so, but...

I liked Steve. I liked him a lot. I liked the way it felt when he touched me. I'd even started to get to like the way he looked at me sometimes. It made me feel... well, just liked, I guess.

No, I told myself, I wasn't a fag. Neither was Steve. He didn't act like a fag or anything. I thought we were probably both going to regret this in the morning. I turned away from him again, and collapsed down into the bed. In a moment I realized I was crying.

"What?" asked Steve. "What's wrong?" He reached over to touch both my shoulders again. Despite my misgivings only a moment earlier, I lay still, wondering how in the world I would explain to him the full weirdness of what I had become at the hands of Dr. Blaha. I sensed that the events of the evening had gone far enough that explaining it to him was somehow inevitable, but I felt a curious sense of powerlessness. It was almost as though from then on whatever happened that night was going to be not quite real, and therefore too hard to deal with consciously. Perhaps it was the sexual charge that still lay in the air.

Whatever.

While I cried, Steve slowly began to massage my shoulders, and then gradually to work further down my back to the bandage again. He felt the bandage once or twice and then reached down the bed to the bottom of my t-shirt and tried to pull it up. I didn't say anything, but I shifted slightly to let him. When he saw the bandage he was briefly solicitous.

"Are you okay?" he asked gently.

When I didn't say anything again he reached for the safety pin I used to fasten the bandage on my right side and undid it. I felt the pressures in the bandage begin to release, and then Steve tried to unwind it around my side. He couldn't do it while I was laying on my front like that, and I had to stop him.

"Steve. Just wait for a moment, okay?" I whispered.

I felt him release me and I began to unwind the bandage myself. It was about eight feet long, so it took a few twists and turns to get it off while I was lying in bed. Finally I cast it aside and sat up, facing him. I waited for him to say something, sure that he could see me properly in the dim light. There was no reaction at all from him. He seemed stupefied by what he was seeing.

That was the worst response he could have made. I was suddenly terrified that he hated me because I was a freak. Despite my fears I had to find out what he thought. After he stayed motionless and silent for a few seconds more, I gently guided his hand to my left breast.

"Omigod," Steve said softly. "H-How? I mean, uh..."

"The wonders of medical science, I guess," I whispered. Steve had moved his hand around my breast so that his thumb was at the edge of my nipple, which immediately stiffened at his touch. It felt good. A little pit opened in my stomach, and my insides threatened to tumble into it in a warm, gooey free-fall. I felt his other hand on my right breast, doing the same thing. Mmmm. I knew I shouldn't be doing this, and shouldn't be allowing Steve to do it, but it felt so good. Much better than when I touched myself. There was something about Steve's hands, and the attention he was paying to me, that made this special. Strangely enough, the sensations were nothing like the ones I used to have when I jacked off. They were spread more throughout my body, deep into my belly. In fact I didn't think I was even a little bit hard, even though I became aware that I had moaned softly when he traced his fingers around my breasts.

After a few more minutes of this I found myself laying down fully, with Steve beside me, running his tongue around my nipples and down my chest to my belly. He paused, then started flicking his tongue over me again, beginning up behind my ears and around my neck before concentrating on my breasts again. The feeling was kind of calming and exciting at the same time, and I writhed in pleasure. My body had a motion all its own, and my hips began moving, slowly, rhythmically as I grasped Steve's shoulders. I moaned again and he put a hand over my mouth to quiet me. Then, after several more minutes of touching and kissing me until I was almost becoming delirious, he rolled me over onto my front. I didn't know what I needed, I still wasn't hard, but I felt better than I had ever done even when I was jerking off.

"Sweet Jesus, you're a girl," Steve said softly, wonderingly. "What the fuck -- "

"-- No. Maybe. I don't know," I said, confusedly. "No, I'm not. Not a girl."

"Are you? Do you have...?" I still couldn't see him well, since he was between the light and me, but from his voice I knew what he was talking about. I felt his hands running down my back, then removing my underwear. His hand started to go around to my crotch, and it was then that I reached around and stopped him. That was too much. I didn't want that. He stopped trying, and then he kissed me some more. Then I felt him caressing the cheeks of my butt. I heard him make a small "mmm" noise as he did so, then felt him slipping his hand between the crack. It was wet, with what seemed like saliva. I had a momentary flash of panic. This was what fags did, right? The panic passed in the pleasure as Steve bent down to kiss the small of my back and then lay himself down again and kissed behind my ears. I liked the behind the ears thing especially. Then he lay on top of me more directly, and I felt his hardness laying in the crack of my ass. He continued to kiss me, and then I felt him put his hand, coated in saliva again, between my legs. He fingered my hole, gently. I must have gasped, because he kissed me and told me gently to relax. Then I could feel him shift his weight, and he was poking into me.

It hurt, a lot. He felt so big. I felt for sure that he was going to tear me apart. Again I must have made a noise, because he withdrew slightly and waited until I had relaxed. Then, in one quick thrust, Steve was all the way inside me. It hurt in that moment and I squealed in pain. He put his hand over my mouth again. It hurt *so* much! But then in a few moments the hurt was replaced with a different feeling as I felt him moving inside me. He grunted a few times, in a way that didn't sound like him but which I knew meant he was enjoying himself. I tried to relax and go with what was happening, and in a few minutes I felt him spasm inside me, and then relax on top of me.

For the next half-hour or so after he withdrew Steve caressed me, and kissed me, and gently played with my breasts, which seemed to fascinate him like he'd never felt a pair before. We lay together all through the night, his arm around me, while he slept heavily and I wondered what all of this meant for the future.

***

Chapter Five.

It was starting to get light outside. I gingerly untangled myself from Steve and began to wind the bandage around my chest. As I did so I looked over at the bunk. Steve lay stretched out along it, his body clearly visible in the slowly brightening room. He really did have a good physique, I thought. Even though I told myself wasn't attracted to him that way, I could see that girls would go for it. I thought back to the events of the night and began fastening the bandage before I reached for the t-shirt. Then I noticed he had woken, and was watching me.

"Uh uh," he said softly, shaking his head slightly. "Take it off again for a minute, just for me."

My first ridiculous impulse was to turn myself away from him so he couldn't see much of me, but then of course he had a great view of my butt. I held one hand to block the view of my crotch, and held my other hand up to the bandage stretched across my chest.

"You look amazing," he said. "Really. I noticed some things about you, but who'd a guessed?" His smile got broader. He was very persuasive when he smiled like that. He sat up in the bed, and motioned for me to come closer to him. Softly he began to talk to me, to tell me that although he didn't know why these things had happened to me, he loved the way I looked and felt. I blushed, and he reached out for the safety pin and undid it. As he unraveled the bandage again I stood nervously. Finally it was undone and my breasts were free.

"So beautiful," he said. "So perfect."

At about that moment the stress of my conflicting emotions got the better of me, and I began crying.

"Hey," Steve said. "What's the matter? I didn't hurt you or anything, did I?"

I sat back on the bed and told Steve everything, about how the events when I first came to Brand got all screwed up and how they, connected with what had happened to me outside, convinced Grieves and Blaha that I was a violent and aggressive kid with a problem. And how Blaha had kept giving me these shots, and now pills as well.

Steve put his arm around me as I cried. After about twenty minutes I had cried everything out, and I began to dry my eyes.

"So how do you feel about it?" Steve asked. "I mean... don't take this the wrong way, but you... you look great."

"You just haven't seen a girl in ages," I retorted.

"I was just wondering, like, what it feels like," he said.

"At first I hated it. I hated everything that was happening," I said. "Steve, I didn't choose this, you know?"

"I know," he said, caressing my shoulder with his hand. "It's kind of hard to understand, though, you know?"

"Yeah, it's fucking weird," I said bitterly, and then regretted it when he stiffened a little. "I mean..." I tried to correct myself. "I just don't know what to think," I said. "Sometimes I just want to die, sometimes it doesn't seem so bad... I even like some of the feelings when you... you know."

"So you don't mind?"

"Mind?"

"Last night?"

"No." There. I had said it.

"Good. Now you can bandage yourself back up before the goon comes."

I dressed, and we went about the day in our separate ways as we usually did. A different guard accompanied me for the first half of the day, and then I had Gonzales in the afternoon. I kept thinking he'd notice something different about me. I felt different. Apart from feeling sore where Steve had been inside me, I also felt much more conscious of my body than usual. It felt rounder, softer, kind of ... I allowed myself to think about it. Maybe it felt... sexier. Was that it? I found myself thinking of Steve, and the way he had held me and talked to me softly, all through the day. But all Gonzales seemed to notice was that I was more distracted than usual.

In the afternoon I went out to the exercise yard and stood at the side, watching Steve and his friends tossing around a baseball. He grinned at me, and I blushed and turned away. But I stood there a while longer, watching him. I liked that he looked at me, even in front of his friends. After a short while I became aware of the gazes from the other guys, and of the way they looked at Steve as if to gauge where I stood. It got a little uncomfortable, all that attention, but Steve kept smiling at me, and as I was walking back to our room I realized that no matter what I thought, he wasn't ashamed of me.

That night Steve slept with me again. At first I was awkward. He sat at the edge of my bed, stroking my hair. He had been playing guitar again, be