There were ones she could have liked, the ones who had been unlucky or stupid. Like
Sylvia, her cellmate. Slim and pretty in a sad sort of way Sylvia had gone out to celebrate her
21st birthday and had accidentally backed over her best friend. She was rich, or daddy was at
any rate, and he'd hired all the best lawyers but her friends parents had been richer. Before she
knew it she'd watched her two years involuntary manslaughter charge become 3rd degree
murder and a ten year sentence.
Faith had shared a cigarette with her one night, an unexpectedly friendly gesture that
surprised them both. "They won't speak to me anymore" Sylvia whispered flicking the ash to
the floor with a gesture that proved how infrequently she smoked. "Some of them came to the
trial but it wasn't for me." she blew out a long trail of smoke, paused for a moment, "It was for
Tracy". Sylvia took a long drag on her cigarette, kept her eyes firmly on the wall ahead of her.
Faith shifted a little. Faith knew first hand what it was like to screw up and then have to pay
for it. Not by putting in your time but by being forgotten, made to pay in silence and contempt
so that it wasn't just the person you'd killed who'd died that night, but you. Like you'd stabbed
yourself through the heart and watched yourself bleed to death before your own eyes. Like
both of you had died in that alley.
Faith wanted to say something to her, to tell her she understood,
that she deserved to be spoken to, to be remembered. Instead she shifted forward, picked up
the pack from the floor and lit a new cigarette off the old. Tossing the stub of the old one away
she offered Sylvia a second smoke. She was gone before the week was out, transferred to a
minimum security facility closer to home. Faith guessed that daddy's money hadn't been
completely useless after all.