I want to die first. He’s sweating so hard he leaves a big wet ass print wherever he sits, and he reeks like a scared dog. At night, he sleeps restlessly and screams out, always something about the Devil and his mother. Guys like that, they always die messy. Guys like Peter, they’re on their knees and begging or pissing themselves before the bullet breaks the skin. Not that I’ve ever seen it before, not right up close. But the Outer Bunks weren’t built to be soundproof… and although some of the others have gotten used to when the night guards unlock the gate before dawn to walk someone to the courtyard, they can never take them far enough away. Nothing gets your attention more than a distant gunshot on a silent night, especially when you’re lying there waiting for it.
    And then every few days they pull a guy who hasn’t gotten used to the idea yet, or is too new to the place to have numbed it out. That’s when you hear the other stuff, the kind that makes your stomach turn. You get snatches of blubbering and praying and god-awful animal noises carried over on the wind and you know exactly what the sorry sonavabitch is doing with his last seconds. Today, listening to Peter mop up his snot with his sleeve for the thousandth time in the far corner, I’d just really rather take my turn. Because letting things rip at you like that, it just can’t be done if you wanna deal with living day to day. Now I don’t wanna die. I didn’t kneel by my bed the night before I got here and put my hands together and say, “Dear Jesus, please, please let me have the back of my skull blown out by some trigger-happy neo-patriot”, but when it comes down to it and I really do have five more minutes to live, I sure as hell am not gonna spend that time shitting myself.
    Before a guy gets pulled, he gets a paper bag with brand new underwear and a clean white t-shirt in it. I know this happens because when they do a day pull, we see them give the kid the bag. And I guess there are showers out there too, because when they lead him to the Northeast side, he’s all peachy and clean and shiny and looking like new, and sometimes we whistle, if we think the guy can handle a joke right before he’s gonna be snuffed. Like Joey, he was a day pull three days ago, and when we saw him walking past all scrubbed up and fresh, we all howled laughing and had a good time of it, and some of us even did phony cat calls, and Joey laughed with us, and we could hear his big dopey guffaw halfway to the courtyard, because that’s just the type of guy Joey was. He wasn’t even a juvie or a jail kid. He was in one of the first herds when they started taking the homeless minors in, cause there just wasn’t any room on the streets anymore. And right before they stuck him in the Inner Bunks he’d been living in some horse’s stall in an old barn outside the city, sleeping in that hay with all the piss and everything, and who knows when the last time he had a bath was, so they pretty much moved him straight to Outer Bunks and left us to deal with his stink. We didn’t mind though. Good guy, Joey. Made you laugh. Wouldn’t have minded having him around for a little longer.
    Unfortunately, he never got the hang of how to not get picked. And every patron of this place is all-American: an upstanding citizen and an utter hypocrite. He’s gonna hand his big check over to the warden, squint at us through the chicken wire, and pick the kid who looks most like a lawbreaker, so he can proudly eat his steak while his wife tells everyone at the dinner table what a hero Daddy was today. No god-fearing man is gonna choose to pop off the clean, straight-backed kid in the back, looking all nervous and like he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You just gotta forget who you are for a minute and transform. When that big Southern guy with the white hair poking out under a two-gallon hat came to the edge of the pen, though, and he clutched his silver belt buckle with the turquoise inlay and gave us all a once-over, Joey didn’t transform. The cowboy saw him lounging in the middle of the crowd, tracing a naked girl on the concrete floor with his spit, and pretty soon Joey was belly-laughing on the way to that place they took them all, and we were laughing too because you have to laugh sometimes, so you don’t go crazy. Then that gunshot came from half a mile away and shut us all up for a while.

    Loitering in Hell’s waiting room, it’s like your soul gets sucked out of you. You see decent guys like Joey get bumped off, and you feel rotten, like you’re scum. But not because your buddy’s bleeding from the head all over his new white shirt, because you can only think one thing:
    “I hope he dies first.”