Mind Games

But he did like the new sneakers.

“You need to get him two pair, Grammie. He’ll get one pair all wet or full of mud, so he needs another while the first get dry or cleaned up and dry.”

“How’d I forget that?” Smiling, Lucy tossed back hair she’d left loose today, and the white streak shimmered like a wave in a black sea.

“Your uncle Waylon was just the same. Caleb, he could play just as hard, and his shoes would look fresh from the box. Pick another pair, Rem, then this old grammie needs some lunch and sit-down time.”

As they drove home, Thea thought about starting school. She’d made a couple friends—Maddy for sure—but she’d still be the new girl.

She’d never been the new girl in school before. And Redbud Hollow had a small school. Everyone knew each other already.

She didn’t think she was shy, but she didn’t want to wear the wrong thing, or do her hair the wrong way. She just wanted to fit in, and she was already taller than most of the boys her age.

So she stuck out.

And she barely had breasts. They’d come out a little, but not like Maddy’s.

“What’s on that mind of yours, darling?”

“Oh, I’m just thinking about starting school. I don’t know how any of it works here, or if I’ll fit in.”

“My girl fits in anywhere she wants to. And she happens to be friends with Madrigal McKinnon. You trust me, Maddy’ll breeze you right through the first awkward day.”

“Are you sure?”

“You know how I say your granny’s a force of nature? Maddy’s pint-sized, but the same.”

“I’m a force of nature.”

Lucy flicked a glance in the rearview. “Oh, you are that, Rem. You are all of that.”

At home, Lucy helped Rem put his new things away because he didn’t care where anything went. Thea cared, so it made her feel better about school starting to put everything in its place. She hung tops and shirts the way her mother had liked to: by color. Then pants that weren’t jeans. She’d have hung her jeans, too, because she liked to, but she didn’t have room for those and for skirts and dresses.

In Virginia her closet had been a walk-in with an organizing system. When she thought of it, grief for her parents rose up sharp and quick.

She sat on the floor of the skinny closet and cried until the worst of it dulled.

As it lessened, she stood on a hard floor with terrible sounds echoing.

Some men walked around her, men in uniforms, but didn’t see her. She saw big cages. A man in prison blues paced in one, muttering to himself.

And his thoughts, thoughts that pelted her like little rocks, were dark and bitter.

Riggs, small, skinny, so white he looked like a ghost of a man, sat in another big cage on a bench.

Riggs didn’t see her, he didn’t feel her, not while he pushed his mind toward the other man, toward those guards.

He zeroed in on a guard named Douberman, so she piggybacked on what he read.

His wife’s knocked up with their third kid, and he heads over to West Virginia every other Tuesday on his day off. He’s got a regular whore over there he hires to meet up with him in a motel. He gets off on the dominatrix thing.

Maybe, maybe find a way to use that, shake him down.

Bored, Riggs glanced toward the other inmate. Crazy bastard. Pacing, screaming the other twenty-three hours a fucking day. Always getting his meds adjusted.

Maybe I can get him to kill himself. Maybe I’ll just take a mind walk tonight and get him to strangle himself with his sheets.

That’d be fun.