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

controlled drug deals done behind bars; they tattooed one another with shamrocks and lightning bolts and swastikas. To be jumped into the gang, you had to kill someone sanctioned by the Brotherhood—a black man, a Jew, a homosexual, or anyone else whose existence was considered an affront to your own.
    The sound became deafening. Alma walked past my cell, Smythe following. As they passed Shay, he called out to the officer, “Look inside.”
    “I know what’s inside Reece,” Smythe said. “Two hundred and twenty pounds of crap.”
    As Alma and the CO left, Calloway was still yelling his head off. “For God’s sake,” I hissed at Shay. “If they find Calloway’s stupid bird they’ll toss
all
our cells again! You want to lose the shower for
two
weeks?”
    “That’s not what I meant,” Shay said.
    I didn’t answer. Instead I lay down on my bunk and stuffed more wadded-up toilet paper into my ears. And still, I could hear Calloway singing his white-pride anthems. Still, I could hear Shay when he told me a second time that he hadn’t been talking about the bird.
     
    That night when I woke up with the sweats, my heart drilling through the spongy base of my throat, Shay was talking to himself again. “They pull up the sheet,” he said.
    “Shay?”
    I took a piece of metal I’d sawed off from the lip of the counter in the cell—it had taken months, carved with a string of elastic from my underwear and a dab of toothpaste with baking soda, my own diamond band saw. Ingeniously, the triangular result doubled as both a mirror and a shank. I slipped my hand beneath my door, angling the mirror so I could see into Shay’s cell.
    He was lying on his bunk with his eyes closed and his arms crossed over his heart. His breathing had gone so shallow that his chest barely rose and fell. I could have sworn I smelled the worms in freshly turned soil. I heard the ping of stones as they struck a grave digger’s shovel.
    Shay was practicing.
    I had done that myself. Maybe not quite in the same way, but I’d pictured my funeral. Who would come. Who would be well dressed, and who would be wearing something outrageously hideous. Who would cry. Who wouldn’t.
    God bless those COs; they’d moved Shay Bourne right next door to someone else serving a death sentence.
     
    Two weeks after Shay arrived on I-tier, six officers came to his cell early one morning and told him to strip. “Bend over,” I heard Whitaker say. “Spread ’em. Lift ’em. Cough.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “Infirmary. Routine checkup.”
    I knew the drill: they would shake out his clothes to make sure there was no contraband hidden, then tell him to get dressed again. They’d march him out of I-tier and into the great beyond of the Secure Housing Unit.
    An hour later, I woke up to the sound of Shay’s cell door being opened again as he returned to his cell. “I’ll pray for your soul,” CO Whitaker said soberly before leaving the tier.
    “So,” I said, my voice too light and false to fool even myself. “Are you the picture of health?”
    “They didn’t take me to the infirmary. We went to the warden’s office.”
    I sat on my bunk, looking up at the vent through which Shay’s voice carried. “He finally agreed to meet with—”
    “You know why they lie?” Shay interrupted. “Because they’re afraid you’ll go ballistic if they tell you the truth.”
    “About what?”
    “It’s all mind control. And we have no choice but to be obedient because what if this is the one time that really—”
    “Shay,” I said, “did you talk to the warden or not?”
    “
He
talked to
me
. He told me my last appeal was denied by the Supreme Court,” Shay said. “My execution date is May twenty-third.”
    I knew that before he was moved to this tier, Shay had been on death row for eleven years; it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen this coming. And yet, that date was only two and a half months away.
    “I guess they don’t want to come in and say hey,