By Joshua Ryan

The party happened at a really nice steak place (“top ranked,” my brother said), and Wyatt and his friends ate and drank, and you could tell that in five years they would all be totally fat.  Not that I don’t like to eat steak and drink.  Because I do.  But anyway, they were going on and on with all this sports talk that is totally uninteresting to me, while I kept ordering drinks with my fake ID, which made me feel like the kind of person the Department of Corrections calls “an offender”! although everybody at Kingston does it, and they’re all on their way to boring jobs, and finally I heard something that sounded like an interesting story.  Which was that Donald so and so, who was in their class at St. Swithin’s, had fallen on hard times.  His dad had gotten in all kinds of complications and Donald had to leave his job, which was “nothing to brag about anyway,” and come back and live at home, and now he had this terrible job that was barely enough to pay the mortgage.  It was some manager job with, “get this!  The Department of Corrections!”  They all laughed at their friend Donald.

Then Wyatt said, “Hey Collypus!  Maybe that’s the job that you should train for!”  I blushed and squirmed, and they wanted to know why.  Wyatt said, “Because he spends his time taking pictures of convicts,” and I had to explain that OVER A YEAR BEFORE we’d been on the ferry to Maskawa, and I saw something interesting, etc.  “Yeah?” one of them said.  “Sure you don’t have a boyfriend in prison someplace?”

Continue reading The Prison Writer – Chapter 16 →