A Deeper Love Inside Read Online Free PDF Page B

still raced, one blanket raised up in the air. The body hidden beneath was floating like a ghost. The blanket was the only colorful crocheted blanket in the big room. When the hands popped out of each side, I saw glow-in-the-dark little lights. No! I saw glow-in-the-dark nail polish and little fingers waving me to follow her. I was Michael. So she must have been the pretty girl in the video who was afraid but still friendly.
    “Follow me,” she said. I did.
    She stopped at an open bed so suddenly that I bumped into her back. She giggled.
    “I saw you first,” she said. “So let’s you and me be friends before the rest of these monsters wake up. Don’t be afraid. You’ll never like it, being here, but you will get used to it.”
    She sounded nice and didn’t stink. She didn’t try to say or do nothing slick. She wasn’t bossy either. She touched my hand. On the bed, she laid down beside me. “What’s your name?” she asked.
    “Porsche,” I whispered, trying to get my lips close to her ear so no one else would hear.
    “Pretty name,” she said. “I’m Siri. We’re gonna be best friends,” she predicted.
    “Do you like music?” I asked her.
    “I like you!” she responded.
    That’s how me and Siri met. That night all I saw was white teeth and pretty fingers. I liked her because she liked me. She only spoke to me. She showed me things about the other girls that maybe I would of missed if she didn’t say nothing at all. When two girls in a nearby bed were acting fly by speaking some language that no one else knew, Siri and me igged ’em. Then, we made up our own language. We worked on it for my first seven nights there at dinnertime, since we both wasn’t eating. We made up our own alphabet using our own symbols. Each symbol stood for a sound just like each letter in English stands for a sound. We would write words and then sentences out of our symbols. If anyone found our notes they would not know what we were discussing because they didn’t know our code or symbols. That meant we could write curses or our secrets and fucked-up things about the authorities.
    At first, we didn’t figure out how to speak our secret language out loud. So we only wrote it down after waiting in line to use one of the three pencils available in the dorm. One time when the authorities searched our stuff in our dorm, which didn’t happen often but once is more than enough, they found our paper stacks. When they looked at the pages with all kinds of neatly written symbols lined up in neat rows, they asked us, “What is this about?” We didn’t answer, just shrugged our little shoulders. They stole our pages and never gave ’em back.
    One day at my session with the psych, she showed them to me. I was surprised to see them, so I did have a reaction on my face. She started speaking to me in the aggravating sing-song voice that I hated more than I hated her.
    “Let’s talk about this,” the psychiatrist said, holding up a page and asking me to explain the meaning.
    I told her, “It’s graffiti. Ever heard of that?” She smiled that stiff smile that looked like her lips were stitched and held together bysome strong string pulled tightly on the ends to make a fake smile curve.
    “No, not exactly,” she answered. She was never able to admit that there was just some shit she didn’t know.
    “It’s just a bunch of pretty designs. Don’t you think it looks pretty?” I asked her.
    She stared at the page, paused, and then said, “I’m the one asking the questions here.” She was mad that she couldn’t figure me out. She couldn’t get comfortable with being outsmarted by the girls she thought were the lowest, dumbest, and most craziest little things ever.
    When we were around the girls on our dorm, especially the ones who were speaking their unknown language out loud, me and Siri would start speaking to each other in a foreign language that even we did not know. It made everyone pay attention to us. It made everyone