THE JASPER E. CONRAD

ARKANSAS REFORMATORY FOR GIRLS

BOLTON, ARKANSAS

I slid my hand into Anton's as the train approached. He squeezed it tightly as the whistle announced the train's arrival. Although the sound blasted both of our eardrums, we stood erect until it was time to crouch down in the embankment. Anton glanced at me and mouthed 1…2…3…

He let go of my hand as we vaulted up to the train and began running along its big cylinder wheels. I could hear the scraping of medal on medal and gulped my fear down. I kept my gaze forward to Anton's shadow running in front of me. I had to keep looking forward because I'm pretty sure I heard dogs barking not too far away. His hand was stuck out ready to grasp the side of the open train car's door.

Anton grabbed at the medal but his hand slipped. He quickly stuck his hand out again and increased his speed. I was becoming winded trying to keep the pace behind him. But we were both running for our freedom. Anton grasped the medal side once more and managed to pull himself up with ease. He knelt down in front of me, hand waiting for me.

But something happened. The growling of dogs became all I could hear, even over the roar of the train.

"Patty, quickly!" Anton yelled.

I raced forward to grab his hand, but a noise exploded in my ear. The rocky gravel consumed my body as I landed harshly on the side of the tracks. I thought I had been hit, but there were no holes in me that I could see and no pain.

Horrified, I gazed at the train and all sound disappeared. Something fluttered from the open car door. I grabbed it before it could be sucked under the trains' wheels.

In my hands, was a blue buttoned down shirt. But the shirt had a hole in the breast pocket where my father's initials should have been. Blood stained the shirt. Briefly, Anton's scent washed over me before the wind of the train took it and Anton's body away.

My heart beat raced in the dark, and I ground my teeth together to keep myself from out right screaming. The cell was still dark which meant it was sometime in the middle of the night. I just didn't know what time. Mavis McCall, my roommate, slept soundly as if the night hadn't been shattered by blood and a blue shirt.

I rolled toward the wall to block out her figure and the rest of the room. I didn't need another friendly reminder that I was still a week away from getting out of this place. Early on, I had discovered that if I shut my eyes real tight, I could pretend that Ruth was there. I could feel her rubbing my back and singing one of her gospel hymns.

I hummed quietly to myself.

"Op-pressed so hard they could not stand. Let my people go…"

In the morning, I woke up as usual, thirty minutes before seven, our official wake-up time. I would have thirty whole minutes to myself. I took the chain out from under my standard-issue white nightshirt. The gold crest glinted in the just rising sun.

I pressed the ring to my lips and whispered, "Anton, here comes another day. Today, I will try to be what you said, a person of value."

Pushing the chain back into my pocket, I rolled over and pulled out one of Charlene Madlee's articles. She knew that I would be getting out soon, so she had been directing the subject of her articles toward the war and how it had affected Everyone in America. She was very adamant on that fact.

Adamant, word of the week. It means a stone formally believed to be of impenetrable hardness. I would be sure to use it in a letter to Ruth. I would right that tomorrow morning for pick-up on Wednesday. But, right then, the morning was mine. The article had been sent out in the newspaper yesterday, Sunday's paper.

After I read her article, I flipped over to one written by Antonia Alexander, my nom de plume or pen name. It's the name I chose to be able to write articles in secret so no one would know they were written by a Jew Nazi or so they called me. I had to see my words in print again, and they seemed even better in that black newspaper ink. It's the real reason why I had forgotten all about Charlene Madlee's article. I felt kind of bad, too. She's the reason why I had this job at all, and she was going to restore America's faith in me.

Finally, after reading as many articles as I could, I heard Mavis snort in her sleep. It was a sure sign that she was about to wake up. She always did that. I had grown accustomed to it. It was like my own timer letting me know that the day was no longer just mine. I quickly put the newspaper into my metal box for safe keeping and stashed it under my bed.

Down the hall, I could here whistles begin to erupt and doors being slammed open abruptly. The sounds of cranky girls being startled out of sleep soon filled the air too. Mavis muttered a few obscenities after our door was thrown open by the always angry Miss Laud. She always saved me and Mavis for herself. She was a cook like that.

We only had one small mirror in our room above a private sink that didn't work. We had to go down to the latrine anyway if we wanted to brush our teeth which is where I was headed. I was always the first dressed because I had already gotten use to the morning light I guessed. The bathroom was filling up though by the time I arrived. Girls were elbowing each other to get a good view. Amazing what we still cared about even after we'd been thrown in jail. It wasn't technically a jail, but I had to guess it was pretty darn close.

I didn't need a mirror to brush my teeth. I only needed a little water from the sink, and I could spit in the toilet. After my teeth felt somewhat clean, I took one glance in the corner of the mirror which was all I needed. My hair, although no longer a frizzy mess, was a flat, mat color from malnourishment and no sunlight. It wasn't that they didn't feed us; it was just that the food wasn't exactly edible. I guess I wasn't hungry enough to subject myself to that. Plus, I always looked forward to Ruth bringing me a basket full of treats once a month.

Anton's words, "You're going to have it all," echoed in my ears. I snorted to myself as I made my way to roll call which we always did before breakfast. I didn't know why we ever did such a silly thing as roll call. It's not like anyone snuck out in the middle of the night. As if the barbed-wire fence wasn't discouragement enough, there was always the early March cold to bite at our legs.

March. I had one more week to go before this place would be dust. Anton's ring seemed to burn a circle onto the skin of my chest. I grinned a wide grin that wouldn't go away until Miss Laud smacked me over the head with her clipboard as she passed by.

Mavis found me in the line in the cafeteria. She pinched me on the arm so I would have her attention. She eyed my eggs meaningfully, and I dumped mine onto her plate and she gave me her toast. We retreated to our separate corners of the cafeteria. Mavis didn't want to let anyone know that she sort of liked the Jew Nazi. Everyone had gotten use to my presence, but they weren't exactly welcoming.

There was only one girl that, despite her small appearance, had a brave heart. She slid in next to me, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. Her name was Sandy, and she was the first and only one to ever sit with me at my end of the table. In the beginning, every time I sat down, people would get up and switch tables. That's when I moved to the corner; so the switching would be less obvious.

We didn't talk about much. We just had a mutual understanding. Sandy was a thief back in her town which definitely wasn't the worst thing that anyone here had done. But she happened to have a bad rash that spread across her arms and legs and especially itched when she got nervous. We were both social outcasts in a reformatory school if that's even possible.

Something had begun to gnaw at me sometime after lunchtime. I say lunchtime because it was technically around that time, but they never fed us. Apparently, we're pretty low on the list when it comes to food rationing. Our budget had been one of the first to be cut in the state. A terrible feeling set in my chest distracting me so much that in the middle of class, I had been looking out the window past the barbed-wire fence while the instructor repeatedly called my name.

Finally, a ruler was slammed down on my desk. "Miss Bergen!"

I looked up to find Miss Perkins standing over my desk. She was another one of the hopeless singles in the penitentiary. Her narrow mouth held a terrible grimace, and her eyes were narrowed to slits.

"Get up!" She barked.

I obeyed her having long learned my lesson not to talk back. It would only gain me more raps on the knuckles. They were fully healed for once which was odd because in the first week alone, I had received the ruler everyday if not more than once a day.

Holding my breath, I walked over to her desk and laid my hands on her desk. I exhaled as she rapped away. I received ten that day.

Later in my cell, after I had woken up from another nightmare about a blue button down shirt, I sat underneath the small window. I strained my eyes to see the paper and tried to steady my still sore hands. I wrote to Charlene asking is she would print something soon. Then, I sealed my article which I had been writing for the past week into the envelope.