The Notorious Pagan Jones. Nina Berry

bitten her nails, and annoyed Mercedes by constantly pacing their tiny room like a lion in the zoo. But inevitably the necessity to get the hell out, to prove she had a choice, had become unbearable.

      So she’d started planning her escape, and Mercedes had asked to come along. Their careful, months-long strategizing had soothed Pagan’s anxiety, but their climb over the barbed wire fence had been interrupted by Miss Edwards’s inmate enforcers. By the time those girls had sauntered up, Pagan had made it to the other side of the wire. Mercedes had not.

      Mercedes had ordered Pagan to go, but then Susan Mahoney pulled a knife. No way would Pagan have left her best—her only—friend behind to face that alone. She’d climbed back over the fence and dropped into the fray only to be pummeled nearly unconscious by Phyllis Lawson and Grace Lopez.

      That didn’t matter. What mattered was that Susan had viciously stabbed Mercedes in the shoulder with her stiletto just before the guard rushed in, gun drawn. Pagan had heard nothing about her friend’s condition since they’d carried her away, trailing blood.

      “You’ll be here in solitary for two weeks,” Miss Edwards said, her beady eyes happily taking in Pagan’s shaking hands. “One meal a day. If Mercedes survives, she’ll get the same. I’ve asked the judge to review both your cases. He could decide to extend your sentences past your eighteenth birthdays. I hope you’re both eager to see how they deal with escape attempts from adult prison.”

      That was enough to shred Pagan’s attempt at detachment. “They can’t do that! It was my fault, not Mercedes’s—”

      Miss Edwards didn’t let her finish. “You may have noticed,” she said, backing toward the door, where a guard waited in case Pagan got any ideas, “I had them take away your shoelaces, your girdle, and your belt.”

      Pagan had noticed, and she knew why. “I’d never try to kill myself,” she scoffed.

      Miss Edwards’s shiny upper lip curled in disbelief. “Why not? Your mother did it and didn’t even leave a note.”

      Pain ripped through Pagan as if Miss Edwards had stabbed her perfectly manicured nails into Pagan’s chest and pulled out her heart. It took all of Pagan’s training as an actor to keep her face blank.

      Obviously, the matron of Lighthouse had never lost anyone she cared about to suicide or she would’ve known that, once it happened to you, you would never go down that road yourself. It led only to darkness. Not an expansive velvet black like the sky at night. No, this was a suffocating, heavy dark, a nauseating mass that dragged you down to drown. Once that weight landed on you, all you could do was to keep holding it up, hoping it wouldn’t touch anyone else.

      The weight clouded her mind again as the door locked behind Miss Edwards. The matron had taken the single bare lightbulb with her and left Pagan with only the line of light slithering under the door. Pagan fixed her eyes on it as she lay down and clenched her fists against the smothering black, the pain in her head, and her racking worry about Mercedes.

      She woke up sometime later knowing only one thing. She was getting out.

      Her headache had dimmed, and Miss Edwards had not thought to confiscate Pagan’s bobby pins. There was no time like now, now, now. Remembering how Mercedes had showed her to bend the pins into a tension wrench and pick, she got busy with the lock.

      Luckily, because the solitary cells had once been closets, there was a keyhole on her side of the door that she could rake. Once out of this room, she could sneak into the parking lot and maybe crawl into the trunk or backseat of a car. Outside the walls she could find the hospital where they’d taken Mercedes.

      She focused on the lock, ear to the door. The tension wrench gave a bit to the right, so she slid the pick in and began tapping the pins in the lock. There. That one. Push that one down and—

      A key was shoved in from the other side, pushing her pick out of the cylinder. It dropped to the floor.

      No time to be terrified. She felt the floor frantically for the pin and palmed it as the door opened to reveal the rigid form of Miss Edwards, silhouetted against a shaft of morning light.

      So. The night had passed.

      The narrow crimson lips turned up in a tight smile as the small glittering eyes took in Pagan’s flushed cheeks and the curl of her fingers as her hands slid behind her back. Quick as Pagan had tried to look nonchalant, wreathing her face in habitual resentment, Miss Edwards was no fool.

      “Your right hand, please.” She held out French-manicured fingers.

      Trying to hide or drop the pins would only delay the inevitable. Pagan all but threw them into Miss Edwards’s palm and braced herself.

      The painted mouth curled. Miss Edwards put the pins in her pocket and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes and her favorite lighter, a silver Zippo engraved with the Ace of Hearts in red. The “students” at Lighthouse weren’t allowed to smoke, and Miss Edwards took pleasure in flaunting her privilege in front of them. She drew out a cigarette, put it between her lips, and formed words around it. “Adult prison’s too good for you.”

      “Would you be sad to see me go?” Pagan was pleased at the insouciance in her voice, because her knees were watery, her throat tight. Every fiber in her wanted to demand how Mercedes was doing, but she’d rather die than endure another smug, withholding smile.

      Miss Edwards had just had her hair done, the roots retouched to a glowing blond much like the fashionable color Pagan’s had once been. She was wearing eyeliner today, winged out at the corners like Marilyn Monroe. “It’s always a tragedy when a young life takes the wrong turn.” She flicked the Zippo and lit her cigarette. “Which brings me to why I’m here. You have visitors.” She exhaled the smoke into Pagan’s face.

      Those last three words turned Pagan’s next smart remark into something like a hiccup. She struggled to keep her face blank. Only immediate family members were allowed to visit “students” at Lighthouse.

      “I killed all that was left of my family.” Her voice was thicker than she liked. The smoke smelled like her old life, and she tried not to suck it in with a deep, appreciative breath. “Are you making an exception for second cousins once removed?”

      Miss Edwards’s heavy eyelids lowered in a look of self-­satisfaction that made Pagan’s hands curl into fists. “These men have Judge Tennison’s permission to see you,” she said. “I sent my request in to him yesterday to reconsider your sentence. Perhaps this has something to do with that. Come.” She pocketed the Zippo and click-clicked down the hallway without looking back.

      Pagan followed slowly through the still-open door into what the students called the Haunted Hallway. Its adobe walls stretched thirty feet down then turned right, but through some trick of acoustics if you stood at this end you could hear the slightest whisper taking place around the corner another thirty feet, where the hallway ended near Miss Edwards’s office and the stairway descended to the first floor. If a girl desperately needed to hear word of the outside world, she’d volunteer to mop this hallway to try and catch a sentence or two as it bounced up the stairs, passed the office, and rebounded around the corner.

      Pagan hurried after Miss Edwards, using her fingers to comb her dry, overgrown hair into a semblance of neatness, stuffing down a desire to plead for more information. The hallway stretched on forever. The walls around her were scuffed gray, the barred windows allowing in brief glimpses of azure sky, a dusty green palm frond swaying in the breeze. Nine months here had been an eternity. Prison would be infinitely worse.

      She tried to swallow, but it was as if the bent bobby pin had lodged in her throat. She’d figured on a beating, bread and water, some solitary at worst. And she’d gotten exactly that.

      But what if that was just the beginning of her punishment? The escape attempt had happened Friday night. This was Sunday morning. Surely judges didn’t come in on the weekends to change the terms of a juvenile’s sentence.

      But maybe what was about to happen was justice. Pagan had done far worse things than try to escape