Alissa Nutting - Tampa

“Pretend you’re going on a date and have to walk past your conservative father to get to the door,” she said. “Transparent peach blush, a hint of neutral lip gloss. The one thing we’ll play up is your eyes. Very clean eyeliner, super-thin lines. The mascara is so important.” It’s ironic to note that her own makeup looked like that of a prospective showgirl who was escorting until her big break came. “It has to be fresh. If your mascara clumps on you, at this trial, it’s like, ‘She’s guilty.’ You know what I’m saying? You can only use the lightest kiss of it. But that tiny amount will also make all the difference in the world.”

Given the reason for their interest, when the trial finally rolled around I thought I would find the reporters unappetizing. But after weeks of being sequestered, it was nice to be outside and have photographers vying for me to look at them. For the most part they were persistent but not cruel—what they wanted most was for me to give them a coquettish smile, which of course I couldn’t do; instead I worked on seeming uncomfortable with attention of any sort. I clung to my attorney and acted as though I had never before been aboveground: never seen a camera or even other people before, never heard my name said aloud.

I have to confess that in the courtroom that first day, even though I truly wanted to pay attention, I caught no more than five words of the opening arguments. Instead I was creating fantasies that incorporated the prison environment instead of ignoring it: they involved the new holding cell I’d be taken to that evening. The image that immediately came to mind was being woken from sleep by the approach of a horde of famished, emaciated young men—orphans, perhaps, in tattered clothing with Oliver Twist accents who approached the bars of my cell and began sticking every erotic appendage they had in between—in my mind I could see them lining up to form a row of erect penises in various stages of growth. Their groping hands would reach forward on arms extended out to where the shoulder’s bulk strained between the metal, their tongues wriggling and searching from eager mouths, as though they viewed me as a food source. How delightful it would be to make my way down their queue, giving each a different treatment: sometimes bending down to suck as the fingers of multiple owners greedily fought to cram inside me, other times turning around to be penetrated while my neck received the frenzied licks of deer tasting salt. At one point I was able to look up and return to the courtroom proceedings when I noticed the prosecutor, a man named Delany, pointing at me with a villainous, outstretched finger: I peered over at the jury with a hurt look on my face that insisted Delany and I had once been best friends but now he’d turned into a terrible gossip. I, on the other hand, sitting silently, had taken the high road.

I soon found that my actual holding cell did not fit the specifications of my daydream. Its entrance was a solid reinforced door that had a rectangular slot for a food tray to enter. This opening was not of a preferable height nor angle for a budding youth’s penis to reach inside, a design flaw that had the effect of irrationally increasing my panic: my hands protectively reached down and held my crotch as I realized how long my obligatory stint of sexual castration might last. Rather than sleeping, I sat in the dark for some time after lights-out and wondered how many months I could reasonably go without any adolescent physical contact, not even the ability to give a shoulder squeeze or a lower-back pat. Prior to arrest, my record on the outside had been perhaps six or seven weeks—though such a drought was heavily supplemented by porn—before I’d go indulge in a flirtatious conversation in the cereal aisle of the grocery store or hit the mall and at least have the visceral pleasure of being close to adolescent males. Even these tame encounters powered up a source of electricity inside me, whether or not our bodies ever touched when we spoke or walked past one another in a crowded store. More than the sexual attacks and harassment I was sure would come, I’d never be able to make it in prison for this reason alone; there’d be no oxygen for the affliction that burned inside me.

The lights in my cell suddenly came on at this epiphany. This supernatural effect was multiplied by the fact that it was the middle of the night—for a moment I thought some divine force had just agreed with me and my cell door was about to crack open, allowing me to tiptoe out and escape. The doorknob did in fact turn seconds later, but there was nothing magical about it: no orgy of foundlings in tiny white briefs grappling for sexual consolation filed in; no masterful escape plot unfolded. Instead, Ford opened the door.

I was still sitting upright in bed with my knees bent open , both hands clutched between my legs.

Ford was drunk, but not as drunk as might’ve been advisable. This was completely Ford’s style: coming finally to make contact at this hour, in this place, to display his wide range of privilege. In fact this was the very first thing he addressed.

“I have some buddies who work the night shift,” he explained. I thought about removing my hands from my genitals but realized somewhat amusedly that their position might give the impression I’d recently been sexually assaulted in the shower room, and it didn’t seem wise to dismiss whatever combination of jealousy and sympathy that might produce in him.

I said nothing; what he wanted most was for me to speak.

He produced a long exhale that was noticeably sharpened by gin. I wished to avoid any scenario where he might start crying; he wasn’t entirely comfortable with tears, so he felt they required long justifications. Now that he was actually in front of me again, all the previous curiosities I’d entertained—that he and I might reunite in the harmonious arrangement of my needing money and Ford’s needing a stunning wife, or the romantic notion that his breakdown might fill me with a sense of victory—disappeared entirely; he was as annoying as ever and I simply wanted him gone. He appeared to be more tan than I remembered, which brought out his wrinkles; he’d doubtlessly been staying home from work to drink conciliatory liquor by the pool. Each one of his square teeth, made highly visible as he squinted in an attempt to withhold emotion, seemed like a separate deficit. They were unmistakably the teeth of a man, and the muscles warping his thin V-neck T-shirt attested to a brute strength that felt obscenely zoomorphic, more animal than human. I realized that Ford, alone with me in the cell, could do whatever he wanted—beat me up, rape me; it might even be possible, if the paid mouths of his friends were shut tightly enough and a plausible story was created, for him to kill me and get away with it.

I actually would’ve welcomed any nonfatal form of battery. I wouldn’t be able to report that Ford had done it—his family, after all, was footing the bill for my attorney—so the implication in the courtroom would be that I’d been beat up by guards or fellow prisoners. This leverage could bring compassion in the eyes of the jury and media, and might possibly allow me to argue for a transfer into a nicer holding area, something less severe than a jail cell.

“Why?” Ford finally shouted. His fists were flexed, ready to pick a fight with the mere idea of what I’d done. Now that we were at the point of artifice finally being over, I saw no need for dishonesty.

“It’s just what I like.” At this point his eyes moved down to my clasped hands. He seemed to be anxiously waiting for me to remove them, like my vagina was a mouth ready to confess to all sorts of atrocities and I was merely gripping it shut in order to silence its cries.