It comes and goes. Sometimes I don't hear it for hours, and then it drifts through the wall to my right—thin, sweet, wavering. A melody I almost recognize but can't quite place. A folk song, maybe, or a hymn. Something learned in childhood and carried forward like a stone in a pocket.
Something to hold onto.
It's the third time I've heard it today—or what I think is today—when I finally go to the wall.
I press my bound hands flat against the concrete. The surface is cold and slightly rough under my palms. I can feel the vibration of her voice, faint as a pulse.
It feels silly to speak, but I’m also compelled. I clear my throat, knock the dust off my voice and find my strength.
"Can–can you hear me?"
The singing stops.
Silence. Long. My heart hammers.
Oh, God. I've scared her. She's curled up on her own thin mattress in her own concrete box, and the voice through the wall is just another threat. Another thing to flinch from in a building full of things that hurt.
I wait. Press my forehead against the cold wall. Close my eyes.
"...yes."
My eyes open, my breath hitches.
Small. Barely there. A word made of breath and fear.
"I'm Max." I keep my voice low. Gentle. The voice I used to use with the younger kids in the foster homes—the ones who'd been moved too many times and flinched at loud noises and needed someone to talk to them like they weren't about to be hit. "W-what's your name?"
A pause. The concrete makes everything feel close and far away at the same time. Like passing notes under a door in the dark. I press my ear against the cold to hear better.
"Wren."
"Hi, Wren."
"Hi." A wet sound—a sniff, a swallowed sob. "Are you... new?"
"Yeah." Whenever new started. A day and a half ago. A lifetime. "How long have you been here?"
"Eleven days." Her voice trails off ondays."I think. Maybe twelve now. It's hard to tell."
My stomach drops. Twelve days. In this box. With the fluorescent hum and the protein bars and the Nurse and her needle.
"How old are you?" I ask, because I need information. Any information. Every detail I can pull through this wall is a thread connecting me to something real, something outside the fluorescent hum and the protein bars and the endless loop of my own fear. Talking to her is the first time since I woke up here that the pressure in my chest has eased even slightly.
Another voice. Proof that I exist. That someone knows my name.
"Nineteen."
A year younger than me. One year. She could be in my econ lecture. She could be the girl at the next table in the campus library, earbuds in, highlighting a textbook.
She could be anyone.
Instead she's here. Counting days on the other side of a concrete wall.
"Wren. Can you tell me how you got here?"
She's quiet for a while. I hear her breathing—shaky, uneven, the rhythm of someone deciding whether to trust. I wait. Press my ear harder against the cold wall, greedy for the sound of another person. The silence in this cell has been eating me alive. Every voice that isn't mine is a lifeline, and I'm clutching this one with both hands.
"I was in a group home," she says. "In Bridgeport. It was... it wasn't good. I left. I was on the street for a couple weeks. And then this woman approached me outside a shelter. She said she ran a housing program. Said she could get me a room, a job. She was nice."
