The tray is stainless steel and dull. He sets it down on the table, aligns it with the straight edge I have made from the corner.
“Breakfast,” Mrs Vale announces, as if breakfast were a topic and not one of the few highlights of my day.
She does not sit. I do not stand. We are versions of decorum facing each other with knives behind our teeth.
I lift the dome and find obedient food: oatmeal without sugar, an overly boiled egg, half a grapefruit whose red is so intense it feels indecent. A glass of water, which is the only thing that tastes of anything that wasn’t made in a laboratory.
I have decided I love grapefruits in here, the way prisoners love their guards because their faces are the only intimate thing they see. I learn the shape of the rind under the knife; I carve it into the segments I want, not the ones they assume a girl will accept.
“You’ll want your strength.”
She often says that. As if strength is something you can pack into your body like luggage for the trip we both know I’m about to take. As if the trip were a choice, as if her words are not a spoon forcing my mouth.
“Strength,” I echo, letting the syllables rest on my tongue until they are pulp.
Her mouth flickers. “Your father…”
My fork hits the table without a sound because I take care to set it down.
“My father is dead,” I say. Dead or as good as. “Your point?”
She looks as if she tastes something sour and isn’t sure if it came from the grapefruit or from her own throat. “He would want you to be strong.”
“My father,” I tell her, “did not want me to be sold.”
That is the closest I will ever come to an indictment she can log under hysteria. I am careful with my rage, decanting it the way my father used to decant wine, letting the sediment stay in the dark where it belongs.
For a moment we stare at one another, the silence becoming almost a thing of beauty and then she tsks, swiping her hand, motioning me to continue my breakfast.
I eat half the grapefruit slowly. I leave the other half on the plate, as if it were an offering that I have declined. I am not hungry, but hunger is a tool they can use against me. I decide to eat the egg and count each chew. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. The camera hums again, as if pleased with my compliance.
I could have double the time left in this place and it would still feel like a ticking clock, a bomb above my head, waiting to go off.
“You have your studies,” Mrs Vale says, tapping the tablet. “You’ll find the reading materials amended to be relevant to your situation. There are supplements. Please continue the breathing exercises. Dr. Mercer will log in at ten for your consultation. Do you require anything?”
Do I require? A question that pretends to be generous and is actually a leash. All my requiring is pre-approved. If I told her I require my father’s hand or my mother’s voice, she would blink and mark me down for refusing the game. If I asked for a window, she would simper. If I asked for air, she would cite the flow rate through the vents. If I asked for silence, she would tell me it already exists. In this way, I am gaslit by an institution that knows how to make black look like white and pain a thing of mercy.
“Yes,” I say, tilting my head like I am tracking some bird only I can see. “I require the door.”
She smiles with her lips. It is broken, her smile. She knows I know it is broken. It is the smile a snake would make if a snake had cheeks. “Very good. I do enjoy your sense of humour.”
“Do you?” I lift the glass of water, take a sip then swallow.
“It is in your interest,” she says, “to modulate that tone.”
“They are buying a woman,” I say softly, glancing up at that ever-focused camera lens. “They may as well know what it is they are buying.”
A smirk stretches across her face. She inclines her head with a savagery that feels like a slap and then she turns, clapping her hands for the boy to come and take the tray.
“She is done eating.” She announces. “Perhaps some quiet reflection will temper that attitude.”
Reflection. That’s all I have. Nothing but these four white walls. I think they mean to make me crazy, to drive me insane. Solitary confinement is a form of torture after all – if they keep me like this for the next four years, I will surely be as rabid as a dog by the time I’m brought out.
Perhaps that is whattheywant. The Blakes. They want to show what we are, what my family is. They want to shame me, shame the last Ratcliffe that still has blood in their veins.
I let out a wail then slap my hand to my mouth, quickly silencing it.
I will not break.
