In the Wake of Wanting (64 page)

The bus lunges forward as we’re let onto the premises. Anxiety starts to set in. As much as I want to give Asher Knoxland a piece of my mind, I also liked the thought of living the rest of my days without having to see his mendacious smirk ever again. Since I know I’ll still have to face him in court, though, telling him how I feel seems like the right thing to do.

A horrendous smell fills the bus as soon as the door opens. The kids make their disgust known audibly. I literally find myself wanting to gag. My eyes water as I wonder if the air here is even safe to breathe.

- Shit just got real. I’ve got to go. Don’t worry about me.

After turning off my phone, I wait until the rest of the passengers are off the bus before descending its steps onto the blacktop where we all wait to be led in by a guide. After he tells us about the lockers to our right, I put my phone, wallet, and keys into one, keeping only my license, two editions of
The Times
and a page from
The New Yorker
. I’d left my valuable watch and most of the contents of my wallet at home, just in case an unscrupulous person on the outside got access to my stuff. I wish I’d brought some gum or something to distract me from the stench. It’s worse than anything I smelled my entire first year of college, when I lived in a dorm where we had a community bathroom shared by about twenty guys.

“ID?” the woman in uniform behind a glass window asks. I slide my license in the tiny slot at the bottom. After reading it, she looks up at me, surprised. “Jackson Andrew Holland, I-I-I?” she reads aloud. “As in Trey Holland?”

“Yes, officer.”

“Now why in God’s good earth would you be here at Rikers Island?”

“I’m here to interview Asher Knoxland for
The
Columbia Daily
Witness
.”

“Where’s your bodyguard?”

“I don’t have one.”

“You should,” she says.

“Are you for hire?” I ask her with a smile. She doesn’t appear to find it funny. “I’ll be fine.”

“What else do you have with you?” I slide the papers through the hole, too. “We have a library, you know, with much better reading materials than this.”

Ouch
. “I don’t know if they have full articles with all the evidence stacked against Asher in them. I just wanted to make sure he knew what he was up against.”

“This doesn’t sound like a friendly visit.”

“It’s not.”

“We don’t encourage intimidating the inmates.”

“Nobody’s forcing him to read them,” I argue, hoping she’ll let me take them in. “Ma’am.” I swallow hard. She pushes them back through, crumpling them all in the process.

“Here’s your ticket,” she says, handing me a slip with Asher’s name on it. “Give it to the guard inside. He’ll take you where you need to be.” Finally, I get my ID back. “Should have brought a bodyguard. Next!” she yells, looking at the person behind me.

I step aside, then pause, wondering if this really was such a good idea after all. I reach for my phone, remembering it’s in the locker only after I stick my hand in my pocket. A little encouragement from someone would have been nice.

“Plenty of cops,” I mutter to myself, moving forward.

One of the guards snatches the ticket from my hand and passes it off to another. I look him over as he studies the paper. He’s got two guns, plus a nightstick, a radio, and about five other gadgets in holsters. A taser, probably. “This is that Holland kid. Get the warden,” he says, his voice so low I can barely hear him.

I look around everywhere, incredibly anxious and now suddenly afraid that I have to watch my back.

“Step aside,” the other officer tells me, pointing to my right.

I don’t waste any time, getting out of the way of the rest of my traveling companions as they are allowed entrance into the prison to see their loved ones or clients or friends. And here I am, waiting for my enemy.

“Trey Holland!” a woman shouts from ten feet behind the entrance. She approaches with two other uniformed officers behind her, one man and one woman. I stand alert, afraid I might have a heart attack any second with the rapidity of my heartbeat.

“Yes?”

“Officer Hughes and Officer Laurens are your escorts today. Where’s your ticket?”

“He has it,” I say, pointing to the burly man in front of me. He hands it to Officer Laurens.

“Let Mr. Holland through,” the warden instructs, and they open the door for me. When I walk inside, she talks directly to me. “Do not stray from these two, do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They’ll be with you the entire time. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I won’t be held liable for the dead Holland kid in my jail. You should have brought your own guard.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As I follow them through the dank building, I wonder when Asher became such a hardened criminal that I’d have to have so much protection from him. Walking past jail cells, men of all ages and races look out at me, some making suggestions I’d never consider and can’t quite believe I’m hearing. As I turn away from one of the less pleasant offers, a man grabs my forearm, holding tightly.

“Hey!” I yell, trying to pull away from his incredibly powerful grasp.

“You like it up the ass, pretty boy?” he asks, his breath as strong as his grip on my arm.

“In one second, that bone will be in two pieces, Jock!” Laurens says, holding up her nightstick as a threat to him. The prisoner digs his nails into my skin before he lets go. “Hughes, follow the kid.”

The weight of this situation suddenly hits me. I’d planned to gloat. I’d planned to brag about my own freedom. I’d planned to show him our articles that had been picked up by
The Times
and Coley’s poem that was published this week in
The New Yorker
. But that’s not who I am or what I’m about.

Asher’s life is over. It’s a fate he brought upon himself, but it’s not something for me to take pleasure in. These men who are making idle threats against me are likely to act against Asher. Putting myself in his shoes for a second, I am completely terrified for him.

“In here, kid,” Laurens says, holding a steel door open for me. It looks a lot like the interrogation room I was in the night that I was questioned at the police station. Asher sits on one side of a white table, his hands cuffed and chained to it, allowing for some–yet minimal–movement. His head is bowed down, and he makes no attempt to see who’s coming in the room to see him.

“Knoxland, you have a visitor!” Hughes yells. The door slams behind me as I take a seat, startling us both. Once his head jerks up, I can see that the right side of Asher’s face is red and purple. Dried blood sticks to his swollen lips. His hair flops over his brows. I don’t remember the last time I saw him without some sort of product in his hair. His normally green eyes have taken on the gray color of the room.

“You’re more pale than normal, Holland,” he says, breaking the silence. His voice is deeper; hoarse. I don’t even know what I’m doing here anymore. If I was going to interview him, I don’t remember the questions. My biggest reason for visiting was to flaunt my freedom. I think he’s having a bad enough day without that additional slap in the face.

I wonder who did that to him. If it was his own braggadocio that got him into a fight or if it was some sort of standard Rikers initiation. Looking back into his eyes, they don’t shine with his signature Asher arrogance. In fact, I can see the fear in them; I can even sense the fear he’s feeling.

“My lawyer said you were here to interview me. Are you going to ask me any questions?”

“Yeah,” I say quietly.

“He said they’d be school-related.”

I shake my head. “I think you know I didn’t come here to ask you how to publish the paper or anything.”

“You know I can’t answer anything. I’m not going to incriminate myself. I have a right to a fair trial.”

I scoff at that response, but I can’t argue with him. I didn’t expect this to become a confessional or anything.

“Well, why are you here?”

“Honestly? I was going to interview you to see how you were going to spend finals’ week. To find out what your plans were for graduation night, when you should have been moving on from Columbia with your degree. Maybe see what jobs you had lined up in here.”

“That’s a pretty jackass thing to do,” he tells me. “That doesn’t really sound like you.”

“No,” I agree. “It really doesn’t. It’s not what I want to talk about anymore.”

“What do you have there?” he asks, reaching for the papers I’m clutching in my hands. They’re just out of his grasp. Feeling ashamed that I’d brought them, I fold up the pages. “At least tell me what they were? Articles about me?”

“Yeah. Two of the articles
The Times
had picked up from
The Wit
and a poem Coley wrote.
The New Yorker
published it.”

“
The New Yorker
?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s just a freshman.”

“Well, she’s good.
It’s
good.”

“What was it about?”

“The different ways people deal with desire,” I tell him vaguely.

“I guess you two know all about that.” He leans back in his chair awkwardly, restrained by the cuffs.

I start to seethe with anger as I remember being alerted by my uncle and brother-in-law with the news that an intimate video of me and my girlfriend had gone viral. “You didn’t catch us doing anything wrong. I have no idea why you would ever do that to someone who had been your friend. Loyalty meant nothing to you, I guess.”

“You were with the girl I liked, Trey.”

“It’s no excuse for what you did. She never liked you back. Coley and I had been friends all semester. You knew that. You had to know we were getting closer.”

“Too close.”

“I was faithful to Zaina, and as soon as I could break it off with her, I did. And likewise, as soon as I could go out with Coley, I did that, too. I’m in love with her.

“What you recorded and decided to distribute to the world–that was meant for no one else to see or experience but us. So I don’t know what kind of sick pleasure you got out of that, but you didn’t catch me in any sort of compromised position. I was free to be with her. There was no girlfriend whose heart you could break by posting that. You couldn’t destroy my life. You did some damage to Coley’s, though–you hurt the one person you claimed to care about. It will take a lot to rebuild her reputation, and what was it for, Asher? Huh? Nothing.”

He doesn’t respond at all.

“And I saw the texts you sent her. They were disgusting and desperate. I could see why she’d never go out with you… and if that’s how you approached all women, then–and only then–could I understand why you had a hard time getting girls to go out with you. Because before, I couldn’t understand it. Before I couldn’t understand why you had to forcibly take from these women. From friends of mine or innocent strangers I’d later meet and become friends with. You are Asher Knoxland, and any girl would have done anything to go out with you. That’s what I’ve learned in interviewing people for these stories. You had it made. But when I saw what you had sent to Coley, I would have run the other way, as well, had I been in her shoes. You just had no clue.”

He looks down now, a sure sign of guilt. “Pryana, Asher? How could you do that to her? You respected her. You chose her to succeed you at the paper. She was your equal. I mean, I guess she didn’t like you like that. I don’t need to ask you these questions. They answer themselves, when I really think about it. I don’t need for you to respond. You don’t have to incriminate yourself. I already have the answers.

“There were other ways, though. You didn’t have to ruin other people’s lives just because you had a hard time getting what you wanted.”

“Did you even, for a second, stand up for me, Trey? You talk about loyalty, but did you ever have any for me?”

“I did. I absolutely did. I told Coley there was no way you could do that. And then I remembered that party, and you and Lucy in that dark corner, and I realized that there
absolutely
was some way you could do that. I felt like such an idiot,” I admit to him. “Just…” I’m at a loss for words. “How could you?”

Glancing up at me, he says two words. “I didn’t.”

“You’re
really
going to maintain your innocence?” I can’t keep the anger at bay. He raises his brows. “I
saw
you raping Jenny on video in my own apartment. You did it! I know you did it! We all know you did it. There’s no way you’re getting off for this.”

“You never know what’ll happen in a trial. How many Ivy Leaguers actually do hard time for this crime?”

I stand up and lean on my fists on the table. I can feel the presence of the two officers right behind me. “You will be the example. You will set the precedent. Because what the prosecutors have in this case that the ones in the other cases didn’t have is physical evidence. Not just a rape kit. Not simply witnesses who could testify about what they saw. An actual video of it taking place.”