I was sitting there in the living room with my new roommate, Nathan, and a friend of mine we’ll call Brian. Brian had been a sex worker. What else are you going to do when your parents throw you out at sixteen. I remember they were watching Veronica Mars, and I borrowed Nathan’s computer to check my email. I opened an email from Rhonda to find a fucking itemized bill for every meal, every coffee, every vacation, and every gift she’d ever bought me. I jumped back from the computer like it’d slapped me. When the guys asked what was wrong, all I could do was point at the screen.

Nathan didn’t waste any time. He nudged me out of the way, opened a spreadsheet, and asked Brian, “Hey, how much is oral anyway?”

“Giving or receiving?”

“Both. Lauren, what else was there? What did you two do?”

And so we sent her another bill in return, for every sex act I’d ever performed. Turned out she owed me. Never heard from her again.

   Fact is, there are more than two doors, forgiveness or Kathy Bates. The third door is, you don’t have to forgive at all. You can just go right on living your life with one less asshole to deal with.

* * *

—

The last time I talked to Gabe was right after my mom left him. She called me from her new apartment. She’d been complaining of the quiet, the shock of living alone for the first time, and I’d sent her a CD player and a bunch of CDs I burned off Napster—Neil Young and Emmylou Harris and Townes Van Zandt and Bruce—the essentials. She was calling to thank me. She said she was sitting out on her porch with a glass of wine, listening to Emmylou. And it was just “so wonderful, Lauren. Gabe never liked Emmylou. Never. I should’ve known then.”

I told her I’d never dated anyone who liked Emmylou either. She said we should make a pact to never make that mistake again. (I broke it immediately. But in fairness, I was twenty-one, still in the Air Force, hadn’t even met Rhonda yet, let alone the rest.) I said, “Well, he never liked me much either.”

I heard her muffled sob while she tried to find words. Eventually, she said, “I hope you forgive me someday.” I told her I already had. I told her it wasn’t her fault. She was like me, or I was like her. We learned how to survive. She said, “I was so lonely. And now I have Emmylou.”

There’s a difference there too, between loneliness and solitude. One wretched. One peaceful. Solitude’s easier to get to when you don’t have to listen to some asshole’s shitty music. I wrote Gabe a letter that night. Only needed three sentences. “I’m glad my mother’s free of you. I’m a lesbian. Go fuck yourself.”

Cell Block

On the third day, the woman in the next cell stopped screaming. On the third day I punched the wall. Maybe it was the second day. Hard to tell. We liken things to a cell, to jail, to prison. But there’s no metaphor for actually being locked in a cell. You just are. The door doesn’t open and the air doesn’t change. There’s no day and no night, no sunrise or sunset. In a cell it’s always bright light and piss yellow, hard edges and corners and walls, steel and concrete, concrete and steel. Nothing gives. Nothing bends. Nothing breaks. But something has to break. It’s the purpose of the cell.

So I hit the wall that won’t break. The first hit is weak. Some part of my mind, the part that keeps you from sticking your hand in a fire or hitting walls, slows my arm. I mime the action a few times. Manual override. And I hit the wall again. I taste copper. The pain like that first hit of weed that clouds your head and wraps the panic in cotton. I hit it again and felt my skin burst. Again and a warm trickle of blood. Again. More skin. The next hit leaves an imprint of blood on the wall. The next smears the bloody imprint on the yellow cinder block. Again. And for the first time in three days, I can breathe. Maybe it was just two days.

   I shouldn’t have been in that cell. That’s what everyone in a cell says. The screaming woman in the next cell says she isn’t supposed to be in a cell. She’s supposed to be at work. She’d felt a pain in her back, couldn’t take off work. No one in jail has a job that hands out sick days. Had a job. No one in jail has a job anymore.

A friend gave her a few Percocets. One Percocet’s a felony, felony possession of narcotics. A cop pulled her over for swerving when the pain pierced through. She was a good driver. Not even a traffic ticket. Now she’s locked in the cell next to mine. Now she’s passing a kidney stone. That pain in her back.

This isn’t gen pop. This is the SHU. They don’t hand out aspirin in the SHU. A magistrate set her bail at a thousand dollars—a hundred to a bondsman. Her husband didn’t have a hundred dollars. The maid service where she worked, used to work, wouldn’t hand her paycheck to her husband. Her husband is a tile setter. He’d scraped enough together for rent. Maybe next month, he can pick up some side work.

She’s not supposed to be in a cell. When she isn’t screaming, I hear another woman, farther down the block, the woman groaning or vomiting or dry-heaving into the stainless steel seatless toilet.

“What did you do?” I asked her when she wasn’t screaming.

   It’s better when we talk. I thought so then. Then I wasn’t sure anymore. They don’t let us talk much anyway. We can’t talk if deputies are in the hall. We don’t talk at night, mostly. But after the third meal, we talk. I thought that this is what people talk about in jail.