By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 10: So Good for You to See Me

It was an interesting conversation—so interesting that now it was even harder for me to sleep in my bunk at night.  A few months before, I would have dismissed his prison shit right away–nothing but weirdness.  Now I was confused.  Why was he telling me this stuff?  Was it to make me love him, or warn me not to?  The sight of Paul in his convict suit, indistinguishable from the other cons—that was me, wasn’t it?  Wasn’t that what he meant?  And if I loved him, that’s how I’d end up?  But that’s how I already had ended up!  I flipped up my badge and looked at the picture.  That gray little blob might as well be “Paul.”

So now I was playing with my badge when I should have been sewing.  And at night, it wasn’t enough to jerk—yeah, I was doing that, what do you think?—but I had to dream, too.  One dream I remembered: I was outside the Pen—they’d let me out!  I was so happy!  At last I was free!  I walked off down the street, and I looked back at the walls, which I knew, even in the dream, I was mainly just making up in my head, because I’d only seen them once from the outside, and then I was squinting through the bars of a prison bus.

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