I sit in the now vacated seat and try not to sneer at the slop they have the nerve to call food. Pete sits across from me, and Jagger takes a seat beside him.
“The green shit isn’t half bad today,” Dex says before shoveling in another mouthful.
“Yeah,” Pete agrees, staring at his fork as if he can make out what’s in it.Good luck with that. “It tastes extragreen today.”
“Green isn’t a flavor,” I inform him.
“How would you describe this?” he asks, holding up another forkful.
“Disgusting.”
“Disgustingly green,” Pete says in thought.
“Green globs of… greeness,” Dex says with a nod.
I roll my eyes and slowly eat my meal. It might taste unappealing, but I need to eat.
A tap on the table has us glancing at Jagger. He looks at me, then his eyes move across the room, then back again. Tensing, we all look at what he wants us to see, worried there’s a brawl about to start. My shoulders relax when I see it’s just Bowman pushing the mail cart into our wing.
I look back at Jagger, and I swear I see the barest hint of a smile tug at his lip. A letter from Wren is the only thing that can do that.
He was the first one to arrive in Stoney Creek. From what he’s tried to explain, he was here only a week before I arrived and was placed in a cell with him. He never spoke a single word to me, and I thought he was going to try to kill me in my sleep.
Instead, he actually protected my back when another inmate tried to slash my throat at lunch time on my second day here. Since then, I know he has my back, and I have his in return.
It was about a month later when Dex and Pete arrived, only days apart, and thanks to overcrowding, they were placed in the same cell as us. At first, their constant chattering and derogatory humor had me thinking I was either going to go mad or murder them in their sleep. But after a week, there was a full-out brawl in the cafeteria, and the twoof them turned into two of the most savage fighters I’ve ever seen.
Pete never lost his humor, laughing as he punched a guy so hard that several of his teeth went flying. Dex, on the other hand, seemed to have blood lust, and it was as if a switch had been turned on in his head. He tore through the room, fists flying, feet kicking, and snarling like a rabid beast, all the while clearing and protecting the flanks of his three cellmates.
When the fight was over, he switched back in an instant, grabbing some leftover food before we were thrown back in our cells.
That’s when we started talking—or at least Pete, Dex, and I did; Jagger communicated as best he could with no voice. It turns out we had something significant in common: we were all wrongfully imprisoned. Not that we were innocent, just innocent of the crimes they convicted us of. And although they still irked me with their constant chatter, impulsiveness, and lack of insight, I at least knew they had some honor and could trust them in here.
Now, though… now we have several things in common, the most important being Wren. It didn’t matter that she cared about all four of us; in some ways, it made it better—we could share our obsession of her together. There’d never be another person on this earth who could understand her like we do.
I’m brought back to the present as the buzzer rings out, signaling the end of lunch. We all stand quickly, eager to get back to our cell for once.
Pete runs ahead, and when I step inside our cell, I see him frowning down at a single envelope.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, immediately sensing something amiss.
“Just one letter today,” he says, shaking the envelope in the air.
“Who’s it for?” Dex asks as he and Jagger join us.
“All of us.”
He turns it around and shows us the envelope with all four of our names on it.
“Maybe she ran out of envelopes?” Dex asks, as Pete rips it open and pulls out a single sheet of paper. My heart sinks.Why is there only one?
“Fuck me,” Pete whispers.
“What? What does it say?” Dex asks, trying to grab it, but Pete jumps up on his bunk to keep it out of his reach.
“Hold on, I’ll read it aloud.”
My dearest Dex, Jagger, Pete, and Sly,
