The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Pérez Read Free Book Online Page A

enough,” he says. “Let’s pause here. Remember, group is what you make it.”
    One girl calls out, “Then let’s make it a party and get us some shit to smoke in here.”
    “I think you know what I mean, Taneesha,” he says. “Let’s keep going, but focus on experiences that may help us understand ourselves better. Let me give you an example. My dad used to say, ‘I’m going to take you fishing.’ I’d get all excited and think, it’ll be this weekend for sure. I’d get my rod ready and wait. But whenever I asked about it, he’d make up an excuse. The weather, or his back, or he can’t borrow the boat, always something. It got to where I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but I kept on hoping. And he kept on letting me down. That’s what ‘disappointment’ makes me think of.”
    He could be a shrink on a talk show; I don’t believe that crap about fishing with his dad for a second. Sounds like made-up junk he cribbed from some counselor book. He probably knows as good as everybody else that he’s full of bullshit. When he smiles, I see that he’s got teeth so bad that I know his mom must’ve thought DISAPPOINTMENT big time when she saw them coming in all crooked.
    “Candezz?” he asks, tossing the dolphin across the room to the girl next to Taneesha.
    “My mom ain’t showed up even once for a court date. She act like I’m dead instead of her daughter.”
    “Thank you, Candezz.” He nods, and she hands the dolphin over to the next girl. She just stares at a spot on the floor, moving the dolphin from one hand to the other.
    Finally she speaks up. “I don’t get to see my baby but twice a year. There, you happy? Now I feel like shit.”
    It goes on like that until they’ve been around the circle twice. Whenever the dolphin comes to Lexi, all she does is uncross her arms and pass it on.

CHAPTER 13: NOW
    I don’t know why, but it seems like Lexi hasn’t been out of her cell in a couple of days. Just lies there all day long with her notebook, which means that the White Girl Channel has been boring as hell.
    Finally today the door to her cell opens and Janet walks in. She sits down in the chair by Lexi’s desk.
    “You okay?” Janet asks.
    “Why wouldn’t I be?” Lexi doesn’t even sit up; she just stays stretched out on her bed.
    “Sad news, about the girl in C-block.”
    “Didn’t know her.”
    “What do you think about people dying young?” Janet says it easy, like it’s a normal thing to wonder.
    “Don’t matter. You got a game or something for us to do?”
    Janet opens her bag and tosses Lexi a container of Play-Doh.
    “Bad ass, I haven’t played with this since I was like seven,” Lexi says. She peels back the lid and drops a green lump into her lap.
    Lexi sits there fiddling with the Play-Doh, rolling pieces into long ropes, crisscrossing them, mashing it all back together. Janet pulls out some papers and starts filling out forms on the desk. After a while, she looks at Lexi and asks, “You religious?”
    “Hell no. Why?”
    Janet points at Lexi’s lap. She has the Play-Doh laid out in a crooked cross.
    Lexi rolls her eyes, then balls the cross up and squeezes the Play-Doh in her fist. “Better?” she asks.
    Janet doesn’t say anything, and after a while, Lexi goes back to messing with the Play-Doh. She’s making something that looks like devil horns to me, or maybe a moon, but with spikes on the side. Then she mashes that up, too.
    “Your lawyer told me about Theo,” Janet says finally.
    “Yeah, well, Theo didn’t do a damn thing.”
    “But it hurt you to lose him.”
    “No shit, Sherlock.”
    “You think you’re to blame?” Janet asks.
    “I’m in here; how the hell can it be my fault?” she says. But I don’t believe her. Because when Lexi says this, she looks at the drain by the toilet. I swear she’s wishing she could disappear down it and out of her cell, away from that question.
    I’m watching for what will happen next and wondering who this