“Are you listening to me, Jonathan?”

He couldn’t even nod.

“You’ll get your GED, and then you’ll go to college, okay?” She took his hand in hers. His wrists were still bruised where the men had held him down. One of the guards stepped forward, but didn’t break them apart.

“You will not give up in here,” she told John, her grip tight, as if she could force some of her strength into him, take the pain away and carry it herself. She had always said that she would rather suffer herself than see her children hurt, and John saw for the first time that it was true. If Emily could, she would trade places with him right now. And he would let her.

“Do you understand me, Jonathan? You will not give up in here.”

He hadn’t spoken to anyone in four and a half weeks. The taste of his own shit and other men’s come was still stuck to the back of his throat like molasses. He was scared to open his mouth, scared his mother would smell it on him and know what he had done.

“Tell me, John,” she had said. “Tell me you will do this for me.”

His lips were stuck together, chapped, bleeding. He kept his teeth clamped tight, stared at his hands. “Yes.”

Two weeks later, she asked him if he had been studying. He lied to her, said he had. John was celled up with Ben by then, not sleeping at night because he was terrified the older man was biding his time, playing out some game as he waited for the right moment to make his move.

“Sweetheart,” Ben had finally said. “You flatter yourself if you think you’re my type.”

In retrospect, John was his type: young, dark hair, slim build, straight. Ben had never crossed that line, though, and there were only two times that John had seen him truly angry. The most recent was when the planes had been crashed into the Pentagon and World Trade towers. For days after, Ben had been too livid to speak. The first time he showed his anger was years before, when he had caught John with drugs.

“You will not do this, boy,” Ben had ordered, his hand gripped so tightly around John’s wrist that the bones felt ready to break. “You hear me?”

John looked into his eyes, knew that the last man who had seen Ben Carver this angry had ended up floating naked and facedown in a shallow pond outside an abandoned church.

“I will turn them loose on you, son. Like a pack of jackals. Do you understand me?”

The protective custody wing had ten cells with two men each. Six of them were pedophiles. Two liked girls, four were stalkers of young boys. At night, John could hear them jerking off, whispering his name as they moaned their release.

“Yes, sir,” John had answered. “I promise.”

The rest of the offenders in the wing were like Ben. They preyed on adults on the outside, so John felt fairly safe around them. But sex was sex, and on the inside, you took fresh ass where you could get it. He had found out later from Ben that all of them had at separate times offered various trades for a go at the new boy. Prison etiquette dictated that as cellmates, Ben had first dibs. As time wore on and Ben didn’t take his due, some of the guys got twitchy; but every last one of them, from the baby-rapers to the child-killers, was afraid of Ben. They thought he was a sick bastard.

Those first few years in lockup, John blocked off every day in his calendar with a big X, counting down until he was released. Aunt Lydia was working on his case, trying to find every angle she could exploit to get him out. Appeal after appeal was rejected. Then, Aunt Lydia came one day with Emily and they both told him that the Georgia Supreme Court had refused to hear his case. Lydia had been his champion, the only other person aside from his mother who had insisted he fight it out in court and not take the plea the state offered.

Her expression said it all. It was the end of the line. There were no other options.

The state plea had been fifteen years no parole. Lydia had told him not to take it, that she would fight for his innocence with every bone in her body. Now he was looking at twenty-two to life.

Aunt Lydia shook with sobs. John ended up being the one to comfort her, trying to soothe her with his words, absolve her from the guilt she felt for not saving him.

“It’s okay,” he told Lydia. “You did your best. Thank you for doing your best.”

When John got back to his cell, he started reading his latest issue of Popular Mechanics. He didn’t cry. What was the use? Show his emotions so some murdering child rapist in the next cell could get off on his pain? No. John had toughened up by then. Ben had shown him the ropes, how to make it in prison without getting knifed or beaten to death. He kept to himself, never looked anyone in the eye and seldom spoke to anyone but Ben.

What John found out in prison was that he was smart. He didn’t come to the realization out of vanity. It was more like an epitaph, a sort of eulogy to the person he could have been. He understood complex formulas, mathematical equations. He liked to study. Sometimes, he could almost feel his brain growing inside of his head, and when he solved a problem, figured out a particularly difficult diagram, he felt like he’d won a marathon.

And then the depression would set in. His father had been right. His teachers were right. His pastor was right. He should have applied himself. He should have—could have—put his brain to work and done something with his life. Now, what did he have? Who cared if you were the smartest convicted murderer in prison?

Some nights, John would lie awake in bed thinking about his father, how disgusted Richard had been that one time he’d visited his son. John was learning other things about life while he was incarcerated. As bad as Richard was, he had never hurt John the way some of his fellow inmates had been hurt. His father may have been thoughtless, but he wasn’t cruel. He had never tortured him. He had never beaten him so badly that a lung collapsed. He had never put a gun to his son’s head and told him to choose between letting some old bastard suck him off so daddy could have a bag of dope or getting a bullet in his brain.

Years passed, and John saw that he had adapted. He could take prison. His days were long and drawn out before him, but he had learned the patience, had built the capacity, to do hard time. The possibility for parole came up for him his tenth year in, and then again every two years after. He was a week away from his sixth parole board hearing and a year and a half away from completing his twenty-two-year sentence when Richard visited his son for the second and last time in prison.

John had been expecting Emily in the visitors’ room, and he’d been staring at the metal detector, waiting to see her come through, when Richard had blocked his view.

“Dad?”

Richard’s lip curled in distaste at the word.

John had barely recognized him. Richard’s hair was a shock of white, still thick and full, a sharp contrast to his well-tanned face. As always, his body was fit. Richard saw obesity as a sign of laziness and he was a health nut long before it became a national obsession.

Emily had divorced Richard a year after John’s conviction, but the two had stopped living together under the same roof the day John was arrested. Richard did not go to the trial, did not pay a dime for his son’s defense, refused to testify on his behalf.

“You’ve finally done it,” Richard said, not sitting at the table but looming over John, his disapproval and disgust raining down like a summer shower. “Your mother has end-stage breast cancer. You’ve finally killed her, too.”