“HUUUH-HUH-HUH-HUUUH, huh huh huh.”

Ten more minutes. I just had to keep my shit for ten more minutes, then I’d be out of here.

“Huuuh-huh-huh-huuuh, huh huh huh.”

My cellmate Co, who lay on the bottom bunk with headphones drilled to his ears the last few months he’d been here, slapped his chest and stomach for a drumbeat while he sang along.

Nine minutes and forty-five seconds, then I’d get to see the sun, inhale air that wasn’t infested with farts and rotten teeth, stare at something other than Co’s ridiculous number of Lego “spaceships” swinging from the ceiling. They weren’t even glued together, so pieces rained down on the floor all the time. Nothing brought thoughts of violence and murder quicker than leaping from the top bunk in the middle of the night to take a piss and landing on a deadly Lego piece. But I’d pushed passed it, breathed through it, whatever it took to be released on time. And in nine minutes thirty-one seconds, I would be.

The game of teeter-totter politics made the last few months into a media circus. Hill’s fuzzy video of me not shooting Alex had been trumped by the crystal clear video Tony’s camera had taken. Hill hadn’t been expecting that, I was sure, or the found gunpowder residue that corroborated my story over his. He had hundreds of pictures of me standing at 131^st and Chestnut, but none of them showed my face because of my hood. It had been my word against his that he had been blackmailing me, because all of his texts had been from pre-paid phones. The police were still investigating him for an unrelated drug charge at his club, the Underground Hill. I’d been cleared of the two murders, but not drug possession with intent to sell the heroin in my backseat, fleeing from police pursuit, resisting arrest, or assault against Senator Rick Chambers. The judge told me I was getting off easy with six months in jail and a $500,000 fine. I didn’t argue.

Riley, on the other hand, was in deeper shit than me. Taking bribes from Rick in exchange for campaign funding, soliciting bribes to Hill, campaign finance fraud... The list went on. I honestly didn’t know when I would be seeing my big brother again, but at least his and Dad’s dick pics were secure. So hurray for that.

Mademoiselle Goldfinch gave an anonymous tip to the police, and they found Rose’s little black book at Rick’s house. She had made sure they checked for tampering, because somehow my name had been written in it. Riley had ripped part of it away from Rose when he’d visited. He’d given it to Rick so he’d help fund Dad’s campaign, as part of the deal he and Riley had made. Then, Rick had erased some poor schmuck’s name in it and stuck mine in, the fucking bastard, with clipped on photos that kind of looked like me, but weren’t. Every listed name in the book had been investigated. With Rose’s knowledge of who was and wasn’t in the book, as well as more pictures she’d kept hidden to prove it, the resulting scandals lit up every news channel. Mademoiselle Goldfinch was a household name. Needless to say, Dad’s bid for presidency ended before it began.

“Huuuh-huh-huh-huuuh, huh huh huh.”

“Co,” I shouted from my seat at the desk. I leaned forward and waved a hand in his face, not hard to do since we lived in a six-by-eight-foot room, but his eyes were closed. So I snatched at the wire and yanked.

He snapped upright, two huge feet thudding against the tile, his wide, coffee-colored nose pulsing like a pissed-off bull’s. His fists, which were about as big as my head, clenched against the thin blanket on his mattress.

“Sorry, man.” I held his headphones out to him. “It’s time to say goodbye.”

Co’s shoulders drooped a little. He tucked his chin, but his brown eyes never left my mouth.

Dude was a master lip reader. He could see a conversation across the room and retell it in his own unique voice. It served me well on more than one occasion, once I learned how to understand him. I didn’t know sign language. I was pretty sure he didn’t, either. He didn’t seem all that excited to learn, even though there were signing books in the library, because he said he’d be made fun of, said it was best not to talk at all, except to me. Maybe he was right, but what would he do when I left? Become mute?

“Don go,” he said, his tongue thickening the words.

“I got to, dude. But look.” I grabbed a knitted hat off the top of my bag and tossed it to him. It had red and black stairstep stitching in it like Legos pieced together. “My sister made that especially for you.  I didn’t measure your head or anything, so if it doesn’t fit, you can wear it on your fist like a boxing glove, okay? And I’ll send you another for your other hand. And a bigger one for your head if she has enough yarn.”

A big, goofy grin lit up his face as he ran his fingers over it. “She mae it fo me?”

“Yeah. Try it on.”

He did. It didn’t fit, not even close, but I wasn’t about to tell him that because of the look on his face. I’d given him a hat, but I might as well have given him a million bucks. Two red puffballs on strings hung down both sides of his head, just past his ears. He shook his head a little so they’d sway back and forth.

“You like it?” I asked, even though I didn’t need to.

He didn’t answer because his eyes were aimed at the ground between us while he concentrated on making the balls smack his head. I sat back and watched him for a while, trying not to think about what his new cellmate could be like. We’d both lucked out in that department.

A guard walked up to the bars and banged them lightly with his clipboard. “Cleary, let’s go.”

Seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds early. Hell yeah.

I stood and leveled my gaze with Co’s so he’d finally look at me. “See you, big guy.”

Swing. Swing. “See you at dinnah, Sam.”

I didn’t correct him. No matter what I told him, he didn’t seem to get that I was never coming back. Maybe it was better to leave him to exist with his hat and the expectation that he’d see me later. I didn’t know what else to do but leave. I sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around, not when I had so many wrongs to put right.

But it was the weirdest sensation walking out of there a free man. Already dressed in my regular clothes the guard had dropped off earlier, I could almost believe the past six months had been a dream. But the closer I got to the exit, the faster I walked because I had a plane to catch.

At the end of a long deserted hallway, my guarded escort stopped at a glassed-in counter and waved at the female guard behind it before retracing his steps back down the hallway. The female guard’s dark hair was pulled too-tight behind her head, giving her a constant surprised expression.

“Cleary, Samuel,” she barked, and her breath fogged the glass between us.

“Uh...present?” If she wanted to see some form of identification, I was afraid I couldn’t help her. I had literally nothing except the clothes on my back.

She rolled her wide eyes at her own version of rollcall, then slid a plastic bag into a curved metal pocket underneath a gap in the glass. On a ragged piece of masking tape, big, block letters spelled Cleary, Samuel. Inside the bag were my cell phone, wallet, and keys. My phone was likely dead, but that didn’t keep me from checking anyway. Yep. Dead.

A beep sounded to my left, and the door there clicked as if it had unlocked.

I pulled open the door and hesitated, just in case this was some kind of sick joke and guards would come after me with tasers. I should’ve just run if that was the case, but I wasn’t about to screw this up, too. The door latched shut behind me. About twelve feet away, daylight slanted through the windows of the double doors. Freedom. I could practically taste the cotton-candy clouds hanging in a bright blue sky. It had only been six months, but it felt like decades.

No one needed to buzz me outside these doors, and as I went through them, a shock of winter air slammed into my face. Looks could be deceiving from the inside out. It was ball-dropping cold out here.

“Sam!” a familiar voice shouted from the direction of the parking lot.

And then there she was, weaving between cars, her hand thrown up to her forehead to ward off the winter sun’s glare off all the windshields. A smile lit up her whole face. When she raced toward me at breakneck speed, she seemed just as free as me. Whole again. That lifted the inside of my chest with relief.

I spun my sister up in a bear hug, laughing at her squeal, but quickly dumped her on her feet again so we could get out of here.

“It’s fucking cold out,” I said, in case she didn’t know. “Where’re you parked?”

Rose pointed with one of her own puffballs that dangled to the bottom of her coat from the knitted owl hat perched on top of her head. “Over there. Where’s your coat?”

“I left it next to my toothbrush shank and soap on a rope.” I started in the direction of her car because there was some major shrivel action happening.

“Don’t joke, SamRam,” she called.

“Fine. Can we go?”

She huffed out a sigh. Loose gravel rolled under her feet as she ran to catch up. Those two sounds together brought a grin to my face because it was so normal—me pissing her off but her running to keep up anyway. It was soothing somehow. Normal. I missed normal.

Once we were inside her car and the heat dial was cranked to hellfire temperature, we got on the road toward the airport. I turned in my seat to face her, not even trying to hide my stare. The cold had painted her cheeks a bright red. Several strands of blonde hair had static-clinged themselves to her owl hat. And crawling up past the collar of her winter coat was something I had never noticed before. Birds. A whole tiny, black and yellow-inked flock of them permanently marked on her skin.

“I don’t like it,” I announced.

“Well, you’re an idiot,” she said, shrugging.

I narrowed my gaze, trying to read the inside of her skull. “Why?”

“Because. You know how I feel about birds.”

The corners of her mouth lifted, and I decided right then and there that I didn’t care about her tattoo. She’d marked herself with a symbol of freedom. If it set in stone the way she looked, the way she acted, the way she should always be, forever and amen, then I could learn to deal. As long as she didn’t get a tramp stamp. Mademoiselle or no, I had my limits.

She glanced at me then shook her head, her face serious. “Dad says he likes it.”

Dad had said a lot of things. He came to visit a few times with tears in his eyes. At first, I didn’t know what to say to him. He talked while I grunted one-syllable answers because he was such a stranger to me. But when he mentioned finding some old Ozzie Osbourne records in the attic I never knew he had, I snorted all over the table between us. The thought of my dad, a one-time presidential hopeful, listening to a guy who chewed on bat heads for fun was wrong on so many levels. But it had helped kick through a chunk of the wall separating our very different lives.

“And Mom?” I checked our progress on the road and compared it to the dashboard clock. My flight left in two hours.

“Well,” Rose said on a sigh, “the last time I saw her, she’d found Jesus at the bottom of a tequila bottle and had launched into Bible verses, so...I don’t really know. She did say she was going to move out and find her own place, though.”

I nodded. Before all this, I’d felt so far removed from my parents that I didn’t think we shared the same planet anymore. They were strangers, but now that all our lies had been laid bare, maybe we could finally get to know each other again, whether married or divorced, together or separate, as the family we once were, as sappy as that sounded. Start new, like I hoped to do with Paige.

“SamRam?”

“Rose?” I said absently.

“Do you want me to stop for a baconated cheeseburger?”

My mouth began to salivate at the mention of bacon. It’d been too long. “We don’t have time.”

“Wow,” she said, her eyes as large as her owl’s on her hat. “You weren’t kidding when you said you loved her.”

I just hoped she loved me back. I’d lived with her for six weeks, but in that short time, I’d become a man blinded by a bright future. With her. It had been a very real possibility in every move she made closer to me, all grace and honey perfume, every laugh, every time I was inside her. It was all I wanted. Paige Sullivan was everything I ever wanted.

And I had thrown it all away to try to save my family who refused to be saved. Or maybe they hadn’t been the ones who needed saving in the first place. Either way, Paige deserved more than the bitter betrayal and disappointment I had left her with. Both had wrapped around her voice when she’d called me in jail, and I couldn’t stand to hear it. Telling her that it would be better if she didn’t call again was my lame-ass way of letting her go be with someone who deserved her. Not me. Not then.

“You’ll come back to see me?” Rose asked.

“Probably not.”

Her fingerless-gloved hand karate chopped into my arm, close enough to my almost-healed bullet wound and hard enough to make me sit up and take notice. She had a lot more gusto than when I last saw her in rehab.

“I’ll come and visit you on one condition,” I said.

“No, Sam, I will not do any more heroin,” she said and slid me an angry glare. “How many times are you going to make me promise?”

“Not that,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean yes, that, but another thing, too.”

“What?” she asked with a sigh.

“Sorry, not sorry. What the fuck does that even mean? And why was that your last tweet before your overdose? Was that some kind of vague warning or some bullshit?” When she didn’t answer, I stared at her. I planned to stay just like that until she cracked from brotherly annoyance.

“It means...at that particular point in time...I had a moment of clarity.” She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth. “Even though heroin took over my life, I knew exactly what path I was headed toward. And I knew the only way out was down. I knew that in order for me to stop, I had to hit rock bottom. I was sorry that I put you and the fam in that situation, but I wasn’t sorry for myself. That was me taking responsibility for my own self-destruction.”

I turned toward my window, not really seeing the city roll past while her words twisted themselves through the memories of leaving her alone in our backyard long enough for her to get her first hit. “I left you alone with him, Rose.”

“But you didn’t make me do anything. I did it of my own free will.” She tapped her thumbs against the steering wheel. “I can slap my own Band-Aid on myself to give me superpowers during yellow bird tag or the game of life or whatever. You can’t protect me forever, you know.”

I glanced over, and sure enough, underneath a knitted half-finger of her glove was a yellow Band-Aid wrapped around her knuckle. My sister was a walking symbol of strength and freedom. I briefly considered shuffling through the radio stations to find something patriotic. We were in D.C., so the national anthem shouldn’t have been too hard to find. Instead, I turned back to the window, smiling. If the super-powered Band-Aid and bird tattoo helped her stay my little sister and not the zombie demon that had entered rehab, I wouldn’t judge.

“Well, you’re Mom and Dad’s favorite, so yeah, I do have to protect you forever,” I said.

She laughed, and it sounded so bright and airy that it instantly lightened my shoulders. She didn’t blame me. Not that I thought she would, but I had spent months blaming myself enough for the both of us. While that feeling would probably never go away, maybe in time I could eventually forgive myself for turning my back on her for a second too long.

“Please come to visit me soon,” she begged.

I grinned until I felt like my whole damned face hurt. “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

* * *

TWO CONNECTING FLIGHTS later, I fumbled in the back of a cab for my wallet as it pulled up in front of a plain yellow house, my hands more than a little shaky. The address matched the folded up letter in my pocket that I’d memorized while in jail. The letter contained two more words in flowery handwriting: Done. ~ Kay

I had no idea who this Kay lady was, or what she looked like, but a woman opened the door of the yellow house as I walked up the sidewalk and gave me a stern once-over with her arms folded across her chest. She wore sweatpants and a stained T-shirt, and her blonde bangs matched the little boy’s who bounded up next to her. He had a high-heeled shoe sticking out of his mouth. Weird kid.

The woman rested a protective hand on top of the boy’s head, but her uncertain gaze never left me. I could guess why. My mug shot had graced every major television news site for weeks. The rest of my family...well, that would always taint how people saw me for the rest of my life, even if they didn’t know me. Especially if they didn’t know me. I didn’t expect her to throw open her door and invite me to play shoes with her son. Still, I wasn’t used to being judged with such a critical eye. This would take some getting used to.

The woman’s eyebrows disappeared behind her bangs. “Sam?” She drew my name out, like she’d been waiting for me to say or do something other than stand there.

“Yeah,” I said and stuck my hands in my pockets like some awkward-ass freak. Like some awkward-ass freak who’d just been released from jail and was standing on a stranger’s porch with no direction to go but up. Because like my sister Mademoiselle Goldfinch, I had hit rock bottom, too. And right then, Kay was part of my springboard. I gave her a smile I hoped would put her at ease. “Kay, right?”

She nodded, and thank Jesus, her harsh expression faded some. “It’s about time you got here.”