Chapter 30

"You and Alan are close, huh?"

The raining clatter of tongue depressors landing by her feet cut through Mickey's thought: oh you have no idea. They couldn't get closer considering his tongue had been in her mouth. Or was hers in his?

Avoiding Pendanski's focused gaze and fixed smile, she dropped to her knees and gathered up the planks of wood, fingers searching and scrabbling to get a good hold. Her broken and bitten nails provided little relief, sending some of the depressors a few inches away from her, causing her to crawl across the found until all had been recovered. Pendanski watched the entire time.

It was an initial relief to be moved from working in the kitchens to the medic tent. Pendanski greeted her with the news the morning after…the incident. He patted her on the shoulder and told her with an enthusiasm that needed to be punched out of someone that early in the morning she now was assigned to work the medic tent per his personal request.

It started off easy; all she had to do was take stock of inventory and make notes of what were running low to pass onto Pendanski to then request from the Warden, give out medication, help treat any injury a camper could have at any given moment post digging (she still wasn't sure how a game of charades ended up with an E-Tent camper getting a bloody nose), and document each visit in a binder so worn the cardboard in the cover cracked and bent in half and the metal rings didn't close properly anymore.

Four days in and the job was a cake walk. She only needed to be in the tent for a half hour to go over inventory and the boys did a better job than she expected keeping themselves from getting too injured. And she'd bore witness to some of the bad ideas they came up with from sheer boredom. There was one guy, though—Rattles from C-Tent—who got a splinter from his shovel. It shoved in between his thumb nail and nail bed. But he was known to be very unlucky around camp; he constantly tripped over thin air and once choked on ice…until it melted. His splinter was the most exciting thing to happen.

In the medic tent, anyway.

Not that she had any other incident to compare excitement levels to. …Not that any other incident was exciting. It wasn't boring, nor upsetting, it was…well, it happened. That's all. It was just an incident that happened.

Like dropping all the tongue depressors. It happened, she picked them up, she moved on. Nothing to see, nothing to talk about.

Pendanski didn't get the memo.

"It must be nice having a friend around," he continued when Mickey didn't reply. His rosy, sun-burned cheeks nearly touched his eyes with the force behind his smile. He must have tiny hooks embedded in his cheeks to pull his lips back that far. It wasn't normal.

"Sure," she uttered, stuffing the depressors back into the metal wire cup holder. "We're…friends. Totally friends. Good friends. Just friends." She bit her cheek, focusing on the pain growing on the side of her mouth rather than the swooping her stomach. The same swooping she felt when…the incident happened.

The same swooping that happened every time she looked at him now. Sleeping three feet away from Squid when they hated each other was one thing, sleeping three feet away from him after…the incident was another beast altogether.

The closeness of him remained tattooed on her skin—his warm breath, his fingers curling in her hair, his cradling hold to the back of her neck, the grounding weight of his hands on her hips, the sharp curves of his muscular arms beneath her grip, the brush of his thumbs by her lips. The unexpected, pleasant buzzing beneath her skin thrummed and hummed and kept her awake that night, the incident replaying in front of her eyes like a looped film reel.

What now? Those two words circled her mind like birds around a cartoon character's head. Were they supposed to be together now? Were they together now? Was she his girlfriend? Was he her boyfriend? Was it just…a thing or did they need to do some sort of spit oath, secret handshake to make it 'official'? And what did 'being official' actually mean?

God, she wished Alexis were around.

Not for her scathing commentary or her biting criticism disguised with sweet smiles and fluttering lashes and promises of "oh, you know I didn't mean it like that!" and false pledges of change; Mickey was fine without that. It was her expertise Mickey sought after. Alexis, somehow, always seemed to know how to be around guys and how to talk to guys and what to do with guys. And if there was any time Mickey needed someone to give her insight, it was now.

And something told her The Warden wasn't going to sit down with her and give her some girl talk.

"…We all need that support system. And that's what this is all about. Yes, you all may have done some bad things but we're all here and the only way we can get out of here is together. We need to support one another." Mickey swore she heard something crack when Pendanski's expecting smile got bigger. Hell, she didn't know it was possible to get that big in the first place. It was almost like a clown's smile, painted wider than his lips. She scratched the back of her neck, cleared her throat, and moved around him, setting the tongue depressors back in their rightful place.

There was the downside: Pendanski loved to talk. Silence didn't exist in his vicinity. The minute she entered the medic tent for her new assignment, his jaws worked more than a nutcracker's. Though she wasn't going to complain too much, Pendanski was a better than having to be around Eagle or B-Tent.

She pulled her lip into her mouth. They'd been quiet since Pendanski moved her, almost as if she didn't exist: no smirks, no smarmy comments, no accidental brushes past her in the Wreck Room, no standing too close while waiting to get their shovels at the Library. It was a relief…until it wasn't and she consciously had to remind herself to breathe and to lower her shoulders from her ears and uncurl her fists. It exhausted her running on high alert, allowing her fall into sleep the minute her head hit the pillow. Only to jolt awake in the early morning, heat trapped around her collar, sweat slicking her skin, doing her best to rid her mind of the lingering way Squid looked at her in her dream. Closing that door only let another one open, allowing the weight of the new information surrounding Brett and B-Tent to poke and press at her, squeezing all the air from her lungs.

She couldn't have been imagining everything they did to her, everything they said. Right? She wasn't crazy. If Squid's gentle touch were tattoo remnants, their grimy, greedy hands were smudged stains, indelible. And, like with Brett before, no matter how much she washed, scrubbed her skin, dug her nails in, their hungry grabble itched and lingered. Was this all that life had to offer for her now? To be used and discarded by anyone and everyone to their heart's content? How could she breathe in relief when all it did was allow more water to rush into her lungs and drag her down?

"Your digging has improved, hasn't it?" Mickey kept her eyes to the floor as she swept despite being jarred from her nagging thoughts. She didn't know whether to thank him or tell him to shut up like she so desired. She chose to sweep. She didn't see anything that warranted cleaning, but Pendanski insisted everything had to be sterile. He didn't even want small traces of dirt in the corners. She understood to an extent. They weren't performing surgeries out there; it wasn't as if contamination was that much of a risk. But Pendanski liked things a certain way and, for the time being, she was at his mercy. It was a familiar place to be in. "You're not staying out nearly as late anymore. You must be proud."

She paused. Blew out a long breath, rested her arm against the handle and shot him a look. "…It builds character," she said, with a lazy shrug of her shoulder.

He laughed, flashing the gap between his large front two teeth. Her lips pressed together in a line as she hummed. Did his own bullshit get caught between his teeth? It had to make it easier for his reassurances to flow out, convincing himself they were on the same level. She'd heard that false schtick one too many times. The officers taking her statement lived on that mode of operation.

"We're just trying to get to the bottom of this."

"We can't help you if you don't help us. Help me help you."

"We're all on the same side here."

"We want all this figured out just as much as you do."

Maybe she had too much faith in people. Maybe she was naïve. Maybe her desire to know that the entire world wasn't a lost cause put a rosy tint to her expectations. It couldn't be a stupid thing to think, hope, believe that there had to be something better, could it? Or else, what was the point?

And yet here Pendanksi was, day after day, morning after morning, greeting them with smiles and encouragement, positioning himself as a life preserver in an endless sea rather than a hassle in a hellscape.

"Why are you here?" The question tumbled out of Mickey's mouth before she put her filter in place. Mom would be proud of that. The blanket of shame coming with breaking her mother's instilled rules of respect and acceptance slid off before its barbed hooks dug into her skin. Like water on oil. Puddling at her feet, she stepped over it while she resumed her sweeping.

Pendanski blinked a few times, the crack in his smile making his lips fall to a squished oblong only for him to rearrange a second later. "Well, medicine wasn't exactly my calling, but someone had to step up and—"

"No. I mean why are you here. At Green Lake. Why are you here when you could be doing anything else?"

His blinks turned owlish, and she could almost see the gears in his head grinding to a halt. "Hmm. No one's ever asked me that before."

Big surprise. She placed the broom away from her and pulled it towards her in short, quick scoops, shuffling to the side to continue her journey back to the front of the tent. Her fingers gripped the handle of the broom tighter, mimicking the force she put behind her lips to keep them closed despite the unspoken question sitting on his face. She had gone weeks without talking not too long ago. This wasn't a waiting game he'd win.

"I guess because I wanted to do something different." When he finally answered his words carried a wistful tone, making her take pause. His eyes burned against the side of her head, taking in her stillness and she tensed to keep from shuddering, to keep from showing the shiver rolling down her spine. She truly was alone out in the desert wasn't she?

Not so much. She shook her head, ridding herself of another image of Squid her brain decided to conjure up at the wrong time. He'd probably be on his way to the showers by now. "I spent a lot of time doing things for myself, I thought it was time to give back and help in ways that people are overlooking. I wanted to put myself in a place where I could make a difference."

"And…you decided on a desert?"

"Location doesn't matter. You made choices that weren't so great and I'm here to make you all see that those choices will affect your futures. Because you all still have futures. Being here isn't exactly ideal but if at least one of you walk away from here knowing you still have the chance to turn your lives around, that you have lives worth living and making better, then that'll be enough."

Her teeth clamped together in one quick chomp, stopping from uttering how generous and allowing the disdain to drip between the cracks. Instead, she called up the library in her mind, dipping into the art of conversation that eluded her for years to her mother's chagrin. "What about your family? Friends?"

"They understand what I'm doing."

"They don't miss you at all?"

"I'm sure they do."

"So you don't speak with them."

Now she held his gaze. His mouth dropped open, just slightly, only to snap up a second later. His shoulder shook with a quiet chuckle, and he tucked his hands beneath his arms. "Communication isn't the best out here. As you know."

She held her face still despite the pang in her chest. He knew she didn't receive anything. Or so he claimed. His face didn't reveal any hand in intercepting mail, but she knew, she felt it in her bones, he had something to do with the radio silence. Her parents wouldn't just go back on their promise to appeal her sentence or do everything they could to get her out. Could they? Even with the disappointment dripping from her mother's letter from weeks ago, she couldn't just cut her off right? But there was one person out there who could benefit from her being cut off from her life support.

Swallowing down the nerves threatening to race up her throat, she continued, "But you've never given updates on your time here? To let them know you're okay. After all, you're out here too. Anything could happen to you."

"They understand that you all come first. My job is to help ease you back into society, prepare you for everything that has changed out there and how you've changed in here. That doesn't always give time for me to communicate with them, but I know they're proud of my work."

"You must be close."

"…As close as families could be, I suppose."

She hummed and swept a few more strokes on the ground, and asked as nonchalantly as possible, "What about the others?" She kept her glance to Pendanski's face, spurred on by the curious tilt to his head. "Mr. Sir. And the Warden. What about their families?"

"I'm sure their families understand their predicaments as well."

"Predicaments?"

"E-excuse me?"

There we go. It was a miniscule reaction, the twitch to the side of Pendanski's mouth, the tiny stumble to his words, but she caught it. She'd become a master at reading others' expressions, she needed to to survive the angry halls of her high school. Her survival came down to breaking her day down to five second increments. One quick read gave her the information she needed to make the quick decision of taking a new path to class, a new exit to leave the building unseen, to eat in the bathroom instead of the lunchroom.

He was hiding something, or so she hoped. She needed to get it out of him and it wouldn't hurt to play up her innocence just a little bit to get it, right? After all, it wasn't her fault they chose to underestimate her… "It's just, uh, you said predicament. It's…it's an interesting choice." Mickey raised and dropped one shoulder and hooked her hair behind her ear. The short strands fell forward from their perch and she tucked again. Lowering her eyes, just slightly, she shrugged again, speaking to the handle. "Cause, I mean, that'd mean they don't have to be here. And…and who'd want to be here? You know? If we could, um, be with our families and…and do it all over." She curled and unfurled her fingers on the broom handle, fingers fluttering as her eyebrows knit together. Her mouth twisted to the side and she continued, "Especially the Warden. Being out here all alone. I know she runs the camp but…it's kind of hard being the only girl around." She pushed out a little laugh, tucked her hair again. "I would know."

Pendanski blinked. "Yes, well, the Warden knew what her duties are, and her family supports her."

"Duties?" It was Mickey's turn to tilt her head in curiosity. Her heart thumped against her chest, exhilaration rushing through her. She kept her shoulders rounded and her face open and her eyes innocently wide. She needed him to keep talking.

Pendanski nodded. "This land's been in her family for generations. This used to be a lake, as I'm sure you could have figured out. The Warden's grandfather owned the lake and half the town. Her being here is continuing the family's plans."

"To…dig holes? Are we…looking for something?" Please please please…

Pendanski's smile returned full force and he dropped his arms to his sides, hooking his thumbs into the loops of his shorts to strengthen his stance. "Just the change within yourselves! By the end of your stay here, I'm sure you all will have dug deep enough to reach that level and embrace it." He laughed at that, as if he uttered the funniest thing in the world. Mickey kept her grip on the shovel to keep from slumping over and groaning aloud. So close… "The Warden decided to use the land to give back to others as her father and grandfather had done before her. We want everyone to learn their lesson and thrive here. And, I have to say, that is part of why I asked you to be moved in here with me."

"…Oh?"

"Yes. I know you've been having some difficulty here, what with your disagreements with Eagle"—Mickey coughed to keep from letting her derisive snort from pushing through—"so I thought having you to myself would aid me in finding a way to help you, personally, reach your full potential. Find your place, if you will."

"And it's here in the medic tent?"

"Can't get into any more trouble while you're here." Pendanski shrugged in a what-can-you-do-manner. "You know, boys will be boys. As long as you're around to upset the balance, well, you kind of can't blame them for how they act."

Just like she couldn't be blamed for smacking him across the head with the broom for that comment. "Who are you supposed to blame, then?" Her nostrils flared and she attempted to unclench her fists before she crushed the broomstick in her hands. Go on, say it. Say the actual words to my face. There were only two options, blame her for existing as a girl in the world or blame themselves for keeping her there and leaving her to her own devices. Which card would be play?

Beneath her flinty stare, Pendanski tugged on the hem of his shirt and stood as tall as his diminutive stature allowed. Clasping his hands behind his back, he said, "Don't misunderstand me. What I'm trying to say is this is a boys' space where they are expected to be able to live how boys live. It shouldn't change just because a girl came in. It's not really fair, is it? Making everyone accommodate one person? So, shifting you to an area they can…" he rolled his wrist, as if trying to urge her to fill in the blank in his sentence for her. She remained quiet. His wrist rolling turned to snapping fingers until it came to him. "they can reconcile in their mind not only helps them but you. They can put you in a space in their mind where they're used to seeing a woman thrive and can react to you accordingly and treat you in a way that's befitting."

Were Pendanski and Alexis related? They sure had a knack for throwing barbed words at her and doing it all with a smile and a genial deposition.

He took her flabbergasted silence for acceptance, reaching out to pat her shoulder, giving it a squeeze. "You've made it this far. Before you know it, you'll finish your sentence and ease back into society where you're meant to be. And, in the meantime, we can spend some time together." He chuckled, patting her shoulder again. "I think Squid's been rubbing off on you, you don't talk much during our meetings." She did her best to hold her face straight at the mention of Squid's name, but he caught her small wince, the twitch by her eye, and kept speaking. "I think I speak for all of us when I say we'd like to get to know you better. You have your nickname, you've been brought in, now it's time to participate." His thumb rubbed against the curve to her shoulder, as if to assuage the edge to his words, creating the levity his final say on the matter needed: "It'll make the time go by faster."

Pushing a strained smile, Mickey dropped her shoulder from beneath Pendanski's clammy hand and went back to sweeping, stepping away from him. "A woman's entitled to her secrets."

a/n - This took me an embarrassingly long time to finish because I changed my plans for this chapter five times, each one good but didn't exactly feel right, until I landed on this. While I love it I'm also at the point where I just want to throw it up and quit editing it and picking it to death. Plus, this originally was supposed to be a longer chapter but I split it up to keep it from dragging. I always wanted a good scene with Pendanski and Mickey to show not only his hidden side but hers as well. Hope you like it! Thanks so much for the support! Please read and review!

~CM