Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page A

for weeks.
    “So,” she said, as she was let into my cell by CO Smythe. “I hear things have been pretty exciting on I-tier. You gonna tell me what happened?”
    “Would if I could,” I said, and then glanced at the officer accompanying her. “Or maybe I wouldn’t.”
    “I can only think of one person who ever turned water into wine,” she said, “and my pastor will tell you it didn’t happen in the state prison this Monday.”
    “Maybe your pastor can suggest that next time, Jesus try a nice full-bodied Syrah.”
    Alma laughed and stuck a thermometer into my mouth. Over her back, I stared at CO Smythe. His eyes were red, and instead of watching me to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, like take Alma hostage, he was staring at the wall behind my head, lost in thought.
    The thermometer beeped. “You’re still running a fever.”
    “Tell me something I don’t know,” I replied. I felt blood pool under my tongue, courtesy of the sores that were part and parcel of this horrific disease.
    “You taking those meds?”
    I shrugged. “You see me put them in my mouth every day, don’t you?”
    Alma knew there were as many different ways for a prisoner to kill himself as there were prisoners. “Don’t you check out on me,Jupiter,” she said, rubbing something viscous on the red spot on my forehead that had led to this nickname. “Who else would tell me what I miss on
General Hospital
?”
    “That’s a pretty paltry reason to stick around.”
    “I’ve heard worse.” Alma turned to CO Smythe. “I’m all set here.”
    She left, and the control booth slid the door home again, the sound of metallic teeth gnashing shut. “Shay,” I called out. “You awake?”
    “I am now.”
    “Might want to cover your ears,” I offered.
    Before Shay could ask me why, Calloway let out the same explosive run of curses he always did when Alma tried to get within five feet of him. “Get the fuck out, nigger,” he yelled. “Swear to God, I’ll fuck you up if you put your hand on me—”
    CO Smythe pinned him against the side of his cell. “For Christ’s sake, Reece,” he said. “Do we have to go through this every single day for a goddamn Band-Aid?”
    “We do if that black bitch is the one putting it on.”
    Calloway had been convicted of burning a synagogue to the ground seven years ago. He sustained head injuries and needed massive skin grafts on his arms, but he considered the mission a success because the terrified rabbi had fled town. The grafts still needed checking; he’d had three surgeries alone in the past year.
    “You know what,” Alma said, “I don’t really care if his arms rot off.”
    She didn’t, that much was true. But she
did
care about being called a nigger. Every time Calloway hurled that word at her, she’d stiffen. And after she visited Calloway, she moved a little more slowly down the pod.
    I knew exactly how she felt. When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the one person who doesn’t.
    “I got hep C because of you,” Calloway said, although he’d probably gotten it from the blade of the barber’s razor, like the other inmates who’d contracted it in prison. “You and your filthy nigger hands.”
    Calloway was being particularly awful today, even for Calloway. At first I thought he was cranky like the rest of us, because our meager privileges had been taken away. But then it hit me—Calloway couldn’t let Alma into his house, because she might find the bird. And if she found the bird, CO Smythe would confiscate it.
    “What do you want to do?” Smythe asked Alma.
    She sighed. “I’m not going to fight him.”
    “That’s right,” Calloway crowed. “You know who’s boss.
Rahowa
!”
    At his call, short for Racial Holy War, inmates from all over the Secure Housing Unit began to holler. In a state as white as New Hampshire, the Aryan Brotherhood ran the prison population. They