Chapter One
The Girl from Hell
Prison is a lot like high school. The same institutional beige hallways, the same long hours of sitting in forced silence, and the same rigid social pyramid of cliques upon which your life depends. In both prison and high school, I’ve been a total loner.
Boarding the prison bus this morning feels uncannily like getting on my school bus almost two years before. There’s the same sudden silence from the girls already cuffed in, and their eyes follow me in the same sidelong glances as I shuffle down the aisle to the same place I sat on my old route: the way, way back.
Of course, we’re all in orange and beige jumpsuits, but you wear uniforms in high school too. I wore black jeans with the same thrift store leather jacket every day back then, layered my neck with thin black chokers and cheap silver chains, circled my eyes all the way around with black lines like they were key words in a poem, and kept my hair a violent blue. It’s now faded to the color of old jeans, with my roots grown out almost to my eyebrows.
What’s missing is the laughter. Starting freshman year, whenever I’d pass by a knot of people, there would be a sickening three-count of mounting tension and then the snickers would burst out behind me. Even Rose, when she was with her other friends, would laugh.
Now no one laughs. They’re too scared.
It turns out being feared is lonelier than being ignored. It’s ironic, all the effort I spent trying to look “scary” in high school when now I’d give anything to sit across from someone whose skin didn’t crawl at the sight of me, Signal Deere, “The Girl From Hell.”
“Assistance up front! We need an escort!” the driver calls to Officer Heather, who’s clipping my handcuffs to the latch on my seat belt. She swears softly under her breath and cinches my restraints with a final tug before turning down the aisle.
Correctional officers are, by the way, worse than even the worst high school teacher. Imagine the bossiest, pettiest kid in your class being put in charge for a day. That’s a correctional officer. Or at least that’s how they are at Bellwood Oregon State Juvenile Penitentiary, the beige and concrete labyrinth I finally got out from under this morning.
When Officer Heather lands at the bus door, her expression sours, her voice rising loud enough for me to catch “… not in my job description!” about her latest charge, a figure hidden from my view by four massive male security guards.
“Is that NOBODY?!” one of the girls whispers a few rows ahead.
“What? Nobody’s not real, she’s like the bogeyman.”
“Yuh huh, look at her! With the ski mask and everything!”
“I’m not riding on a bus with Nobody! They can’t just stick her in with Gen Pop, that freak is dangerous—”
Silence falls abruptly as Officer Heather leads Nobody, who is maybe six feet tall, down the aisle by her cuffs. Like the rest of them, I’ve heard the stories, and they’re all looking true: she is unnervingly gaunt and lanky, and her long pale arms are crisscrossed with ugly, shiny red burn scars.
“I’ll put you with Blue,” Heather says for the benefit of the whole bus, which is on the edge of mutiny at this apparition from prison folklore. “You two Class As can chat.”
The completely silent bus erupts into hissed whispers at this:
“Class A?!!”
“Blue hair is a Class A?!”
“They can’t be in here with us!”
Correctional officers are never supposed to reveal our Wylie-Stanton Index Classification. If other inmates find out you’re a Class A, it’s a death sentence. Though I’ve been “lucky” enough to spend most of my incarceration in a single concrete cell in Diagnostics, in my few brushes with General Pop I’ve kept my head diligently down. But with these words, my cover is blown.
Although where we’re going, I guess it won’t matter.
Nobody folds her tall frame into the brown vinyl bench beside me, her broad shoulders pressed against mine, so close I can see the loose threads blown by the slow, ragged breath through the hole cut in her ski mask. Officer Heather’s hands shake as she fastens her in.
And then, in a sly gesture as she turns to go, Officer Heather plucks off Nobody’s ski mask.
Nobody rockets forward, howling, shaking her bleached blonde hair over her face, which is a blur of hot pink in my peripheral vision, and the entire bus gasps as one.
“What are you doing?! Give it back!!” I yell.
“No nonregulation clothing during transfer!” Officer Heather barks, fleeing up front.
Nobody whimpers like a kicked dog as she strains to cover whatever is left of her face with her scarred hands, but her cuffs are too short and she can’t reach. I look away and see the man who’s just boarded the bus, the same man who met me in a holding cell in the bowels of Bellwood this morning. “DAVE!” I scream to be heard over the wild girl beside me. “Dave, can’t she keep her hat?!”
Dave frowns under his unmarked baseball cap. He looks from Nobody to Officer Heather and leans toward her, consulting.
The girls in front of us take advantage of the moment, twisting around in their seats to gawk.
I lean forward and hiss: “Turn back around. Right. Now.”
And here is the real difference between prison and high school, here is the difference between being Signal Deere, loner goth, and Signal Deere, the Girl From Hell: the second I say turn around, they do. They whip around in their seats and hunch, frozen in fear like startled rabbits. Like I could somehow break loose from my cuffs and claw their shocked faces right off their skulls. Because I’m a Class A, and who knows what I can do.
The brakes shriek and sigh as the bus rumbles into gear and I turn toward the window as much as my restraints allow, to give Nobody some privacy. Still, her pain is inescapable—as is her harsh, chemical smell, which gets stronger as she rocks back and forth, back and forth. They must hose her down with antiseptic instead of letting her shower. Might as well get used to it, though, because if Nobody is the other Class A, then we’re headed for the same place.
* * *
Dave described it as a brand new “program” for young Class As when I met him this morning. My first impression of him was that despite lacking any official insignia, he was more in uniform than the prison guards who herded me into the room. He was calmly cycling through calls on something like an Apple Watch as they cuffed me to the table and withdrew. I could hear him say “affirmative” before he pulled his sleeve over the gadget and fixed me with an appraising stare.
When I’d asked if he was there for my appeal, he threw back his head and laughed.
“You tested Class A on the Wylie-Stanton, and you plan to appeal?!”
In case you haven’t been in prison recently, the Wylie-Stanton is a profiling algorithm run on everyone convicted of a felony now, sort of like a personality quiz (“Which Kind of Criminal Are You?”), except you don’t have to answer any questions. No, the Wylie-Stanton just takes all your available data—and there’s a lot: they have your emails, your grades, your medical records, your internet browsing history, your purchases, your texts and tweets, and whatever other binary trail your ISP has made through digital space—and runs it through an algorithm.