Prison School Ch. 01

The first day I went to school, I wasn't gonna go. A guard came, a fat black woman with no ass (it ain't true all black bitches got back) and yelled at me to get my ass up. I wasn't budging. I lay there like a brick, like a dead man, on my bottom bunk. Every other man in the dorm was gone on work detail somewhere or in GED classes. I wasn't going to GED class. I wanted work detail. I'd told them I'd do anything but go to some damn class where I probably knew more than the bitch teacher. If I'd wanted to finish school, I'd have fucking finished school when I was 18 like everyone else.

The warden was adamant every man who didn't have his GED WOULD TAKE CLASSES. He'd sat me down with a group of 15 other men the day before and told us we were starting, and we would get our GEDs or we wouldn't get out, pretty much. I thought, I'm a grown man. I make my rules. I ain't going to no damn school. Well, he was determined I was, and these two big, line-backer built bitches came and drug me out of that bunk. Okay, fine. I went, but I wasn't going to do anything. I wasn't going to like it.

Somebody like me didn't need school. I quit because it was boring. I knew I was fucking smart. Sure some of these dumb fucks needed school, but I wasn't one of 'em. I quit when I was 17, and I made more money dealing in a year than most people make in ten. I drove a nice, brand new, red Camaro. I had a big, brick house on a long, country road. I wasn't your average drug dealer. At least, I didn't think so. I'd made something of myself. And I had scruples. I didn't deal to kids. I didn't deal anything addictive. I thought of myself as making the world a better place. Mostly pot and hallucinogenic stuff -- LSD, PCP. Anyone tells you that shit is addictive, they're just spouting crap they learned in some drug awareness class. Anybody can pick it up and put it back down if they want to, but people do what makes them feel good, feel right.

So I was getting my ass drug down a gray hallway toward these big rooms with the whole back walls nothing but windows. I felt like I was about to be shoved in a storefront display. I hadn't brushed my hair, hadn't brushed my teeth. Normally I groom myself pretty good, but, I admit, I was pitching a fit like a kid, but I felt like I had every right to. Maybe I messed up and got caught with some illegal shit, but I was a grown ass man, and I wasn't about to let no puffed up warden tell me how to live my life, even in prison.

The guards had to turn sideways to walk me down the aisle between the desks because we wouldn't all fit. Every eye in that classroom was on me. They pulled me to the front of the room, let me go, and the biggest, ugliest one of them (she looked like she had meth-teeth, but it was probably just bad genetics), pointed at a desk right in front of the teacher's and said, "Sit your ass down." I grunted and plopped down in the desk, stared at the board at the front of the room.

The teacher was up there, but I didn't even see her. I was so mad my vision was blurry, like I was seeing red. I just stared. The guards left, and the chick at the front of the room brought me a book, sat it down on my desk and opened it to a page, held her finger in it. "This is where we are, Mr. ...." She looked at my name tag, "Watson." She stood there for a second. She tapped her foot on the floor. She pushed the book further toward me on the desktop. She cleared her throat. Ugh. The chick really wasn't going to leave me the fuck alone until I grabbed that book, and I just wanted her to go the hell away so I could go to sleep, so I reached for it. I grabbed it. She walked away, and I lay my head down on top of that fucker and closed my eyes.

I woke up because I snored. Some younger guy, short and skinny like a rail, snickered beside me. I turned on him and glared hard. He shut up. I like to think I have an intimidating presence. I'm 6'3", 220 lbs, hard muscle, scars and tattoos -- a tiger on my left bicep and a tribal band around my right bicep, and I used to have this girl Tiffany's name on my left forearm, but I got it covered over in some badass flames that went all the way around my arm in red, orange, black and yellow. Scars were from all kinds of things. I got in fights in school, lots of them. I'd been in a car wreck or five, only one my fault because I was drinking, but I don't do that DUI shit no more. A kid in the other car had to go to the ER; I was afraid the little fella was gonna die. Don't want to be responsible for nothing like that, ever. I love kids.

So I look pretty fucking badass, right. I've got jet black hair, keep it cut pretty short, put a little gel in the top and spike it slightly. I got blue eyes, deep blue like you wish the ocean would look, but you get there and it's all brown and disappointing, at least around here. I don't smile much. I got two faces I make, no maybe three. One is just normal, just neutral or bored. One I grimace, which is as close as I come to a smile most of the time. And the other one is when I'm fucking pissed off. That one I lower my brows, wrinkle my forehead, I curl my lip a little on the right side, and I fucking stare daggers through the eyes of whoever's made me that angry.

This snickering kid backed down real quick like. He turned his head around to the front of the room and started watching the teacher. I turned and watched with him. She was writing something on the board, her back to the class. Nothing about her immediately impressed me with her back to me except her ass, which was significantly large in comparison with the rest of her. She wasn't small by any means, but that ass was gargantuan next to her waist, and the pants she had on were stretchy and clingy and held onto the junk in her trunk like they were painted on there, but then they got flowy at the bottom. She had on a black sweater, and when she did turn around, my eyes were about level with her chest. She had kinda small tits, and she was wearing a black shirt with some black sequins around the top. She had on flats with little bows on the toes. The outfit was cute, but she looked like she was on her way to her grandma's funeral.

I felt her looking at me and looked up. She caught me staring, and at that moment, I'd happened to be staring at her boobs. It didn't faze me none, but when my eyes met hers, the woman blushed and turned to look at the guy next to me. "Mr. Hodges, would you like to, um, ... would you like to read these instructions I've written on the board out loud for us." Hodges obliged and stammered over them, blushing as she watched him struggle and urged him on. She wanted us to finish the rest of the dialy reading, from Huckleberry Finn, quietly and then write about our impression of the chapter. I hadn't read Huck Finn since I was 12, but I knew my impression. It was a damn good story. Good ol' Mark Twain. I closed the book and pushed it to the edge of my desk.

She handed a stack of notebook paper to the guy sitting at the front of every row, which meant she dropped some on my desk too. She didn't wait for me to take it from her hand. She had short, slender fingers, kind of long nails, and she didn't wear a wedding ring, but that didn't mean anything really in here. She might just be afraid we'd steal it. That's how most of the people working in the prison treated us. It didn't matter if you were a child molester, a drug dealer, or some petty criminal who stole fifty bucks from a convenience store. It didn't matter what I'd done -- to all of them I was a child molester, a murderer. We were all trash and none of them wanted to touch us; at least it seemed that way to me.

My eyes followed from her hand up her arm as she walked to the next row, and I noticed her hair reached nearly to her ass. It was chestnut colored and wavy. As she turned around, I noticed she had green eyes, as green as mine were blue. She had this upturned, cheerleader kind of nose, but it wasn't too small. I caught a glint of something under her hair and noticed her ears were pierced. She had full, almost pouty lips. I could see how someone would think she was pretty, but I wasn't interested. I was interested in getting the hell out of that classroom and back on some work detail like a normal, adult inmate who didn't deserve to be in class with all these dumb fucks who couldn't hack it in high school. I hadn't failed high school. High school had bored the shit out of me. I loved to read. I was good at math. I liked learning about history, and science was my thing, but... it was fucking boring listening to some dope sit at the front of the room spouting formulas and shit all day long. I'd rather teach myself, and after I quit, I did. I learned all kinds of shit most people probably didn't even think about.

Dealing I could get into. It was a challenge... you had to be a salesman, customer service agent, accountant... you did your own marketing, made new business contacts, kept records and collected on bills. I ran a tight ship. I was my own boss and a damn good businessman by the time I was 25. By thirty I was living a dream life. Then got set-up. I got caught. I got here.

My book was just sitting on my desk with the stack of papers. I knew she wanted me to pass them back, but I didn't want to cooperate. I didn't want to be there. She came over and grabbed the top four of them, leaving one sheet on my desk for me. She handed them to the guy behind me. I could tell by the abruptness of her motions that I was getting under her skin a little. She didn't know how to get me to participate. The guy to my left, Hodges, followed her every move. He acted like he was in love, and I found it funny. He should know she couldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole without losing her job. She didn't seem stupid to me, even though I didn't like her and didn't want to be there. I doubted she'd even fantasized about fucking Hodges when she touched herself in the shower once. But the way he blushed when she caught his eye... he was jacking off to her into his spare socks every night of the week.

She tapped on my desk lightly. "Mr. Watson... I need you to get on the same page with the rest of us please." I hated sitting at the front already. Behind me to my right, in my peripheral vision, it looked like this guy from my dorm, Dukes, had his hand down his pants, and he wasn't just adjusting. Hell, she had guys fucking jerking off to her while she walked around the room, and she was riding my ass about opening my book and participating just because I was at the front and she could fucking see what I was doing.

She pushed the book toward me slightly. "Page 68." She held a pencil out to me, and I grabbed it.

I wrote on that paper, It's a fucking great book. as she walked away, her soft shoes patting the floor as she went. When she came back up the aisle on my other side, I could feel her eyes glancing down at my desk.

"How do you know?" she asked. "Have you read it?" The bitch thought I was stupid like every other dumb fuck in this classroom.

I almost growled back at her, "I've read that book ten fucking times. I don't need to read it again."

I was so angry, not at her really, but I could have bashed her fucking face in just for being the one shoving school in my face right then. I closed my fists and tightened them, digging my fingernails into my palms. I knew I was acting like a stupid kid. I knew it, but I didn't care right then. I was seeing red all over again.

She walked over to a shelf along the wall to my right, a low bookshelf that ran almost the whole length of the classroom. When her back was turned, I watched her, actually curious about what she was doing. She squatted in front of the shelves, which pulled her spandex-like pants tight against her round ass, and I saw Dukes behind me going to town. It was like the man had no shame, but then I figured it had nothing to do with shame. The man seemed like he liked to dominate, and I bet he was thinking about pushing her up against the wall the whole time. He couldn't do it, so he forced her to stand at the front of the room while he thought about it. He was probably in here for rape.

She grabbed a couple of books and walked back over to me, nonchalant. She placed them all on my desk. One was the first book in the Dresden Files series. I'd read that. I pushed it off to the side. The second was Moby Dick. Read it, hated it. Who cares if it was a "classic?" The third one peaked my interest a little. Hunger Games. A kids' book, I thought, but the cover looked interesting. I couldn't let myself act too interested, but I didn't push it away. She walked off. A bell rang. It was time for lunch. I tucked the last book under my arm and took it with me.

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That night I lay in bed reading by my little book light. The book wasn't half-bad. It read fast, and it kept me wanting to read. I stayed awake until I'd finished the whole damn thing. I slept only a couple of hours. When it was time to get up, I tucked the book in my locker at the end of my bunk. I don't know why. I liked it, and she was dumb enough to give it to me... sort of. So why not?

In class that day, I came in, sat down with everyone else. Still didn't want to be there, but I figured, What the hell?

The teacher... what was her name? Ms. Rogers or something like that... She was sitting at her desk rifling through everyone's papers from the day before. She had mine where I'd written It's a fucking great book in dark chicken-scratch, bearing down so hard on the paper I nearly tore through it. She wrote something in green ink on the top of the paper and shoved it back under the stack.

When we all settled down, she looked around the room and asked a guy in the back, "Mr. Francis, what's your favorite thing about Huck so far? What's his best quality?"

Francis spoke up, "Hell, the kid's brilliant."

She nodded in agreement. She asked some more questions, and people answered. The class got into a pretty deep discussion, and I was a little caught up in it myself, remembering what I'd read all those years ago. Then her eyes settled on my desk for a moment, and I realized she was looking for the book she'd given me the day before. I met her eyes and glared at her, the way I glared at everyone. She broke away from our shared look and marched over to the shelf. She picked up a book, the next book in the Hunger Games series, dropped it on my desk, and kept circulating around the room.

It irked me. It was like she thought she had me pegged, like she could just drop books in my lap and get me to read and feel like she'd done the world some big favor by educating another helpless inmate. I lay my head down to sleep. When I woke up, there was a pile of drool on my desk. I wiped it away with my sleeve. I looked around and noticed only a few people were still in the room, most of them reading, none of them reading Huck. I guess I wasn't the only one who got special books.

Ms. Rogers was sitting at her desk, her head bent over some more papers, probably from that day. I hadn't turned one in because I'd been asleep. She heard my desk squeak when I sat up and looked up from her work. "Mr. Watson. I see you decided to rejoin the world of the living..." She sounded so fucking smug.

I stood up and turned around, asked the guy behind me, "Is it lunch or something?" He grunted and nodded, and I left the room. I ate my barbecue sandwich, drank some water, came back into the classroom and deliberately sat at the very back of the room in a desk I didn't remember anyone being in earlier. I sat there the entire rest of the week.

I finished that book that night, and then she had the next one on my desk at the back of the room when I came in the next day. It really pissed me off that she thought she had me pegged. I could tell. She was so smug 'cause she thought she'd figured out how to "motivate me to read," like I was the poster child on some damn literacy billboard on the interstate. I read the books because I liked to read, and they were pretty good books.

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The next Monday we had a test over Huckleberry Finn before lunch. It was always English before lunch and History after lunch. I didn't pay much attention to either. She had the test on our desks when we came in and the desks arranged differently so we couldn't cheat. They were spread apart and all facing different directions.

I sat down at the desk I thought was my usual, and I turned the test over. To take it or not to take it? Damn... tough decision. I wanted to show the smug bitch I was just as smart as she was. At the same time, I didn't want her having the power to just shove a test down my throat and make me take it.

Finally, I decided I'd do half of it... a question or two... just to show her I wasn't stupid. Then I'd take a nap like usual. So I answered the first two questions, wrote whole paragraphs explaining my views, and then I flipped that test back over, lay my head down, and I was snoring softly in two minutes.

I woke up when I felt someone jerking on the paper underneath my right arm. I sat up, unfolding my arms sleepily. Ms. Rogers cleared her throat and said, "Mr. Watson... I see from this that you are very capable of both reading and writing. Now, I've been very lenient with you since it was your first week, but really I'm supposed to write you up every time you sleep in class."

Really?! Who the hell did she think she was? "And what happens it I get wrote up? I don't get to come to school no more? Because, bitch, I don't want to be here anyway."

"Watch your language with me, please."

Wow... smug little twat. I was mad. "I know more about language than you're little college educated ass, and there ain't nothing you can teach me I don't already know, alright?"

She looked like she wanted to smirk, like she was holding it back, and that irked me even more. I stared daggers through those bright green eyes; they looked a different color green depending on the color she wore I'd noticed. The harder I stared, the more her gaze started to falter, and soon she broke away and looked at the floor. "If there ain't nothing I can teach you, Mr. Watson, then by all means... keep sleeping." The bitch was mocking me, like I didn't know "ain't nothing" was common vernacular and a double negative. Self-righteous whore.

I thought she was through, but then she said, "You know what, though? If you're so smart, don't you think you might be able to help someone else by participating? Think of it as a humanitarian effort." She smiled this smile that came off somewhere directly between condescending and admiring, I couldn't be sure which. Then she walked away. So maybe she didn't think I was so dumb after all. So what?

That night I was out of books to read, so I pulled my sketchpad and pencils out of my locker, and I started to draw. A scene popped into my head, and I put it on the paper carefully. Ms. Rogers was wearing a business-style suit, like I'd never seen her wear before, but it looked teacher-like and professional. It had little white cuffs at the sleeves and a white lapel, contrasting the black of the suit. It came about to her knees, and the jacket was fitted nicely. Her long hair was up in a bun, very teacher-like as well.

As the scene formed in my mind, I sketched her left arm bent behind her back. She was leaning forward slightly, toward her desk, and her thighs were pressed hard against the wood. You could see the indentation in her skirt where they met the edge of her desk. She arched her back slightly and had her head turned toward the board, looking over her right shoulder at her aggressor. I drew my left hand, strong and rough, wrapped around her little wrist. I drew my right secured firmly at the back of her neck, pulling her toward me, forcing her back to arch even further.