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being a lass. After reading that, I think she nailed it.”
    Joey hadn’t known how to reply. Whatever traits he’d imagined in Gabriel, compulsive reading wasn’t among them. During those early days Joey never spoke to Gabriel unless he had no choice. But protracted silence during the hours of confinement was hard to bear. And Gabriel was surprisingly easy to talk to, quick-witted and intelligent. More than shrewd, as Joey first assumed, Gabriel was self-educated in many areas. He knew the Bible like a seminarian, quoting it chapter and verse, and could recite several poems from memory.
    “Ah, but I’m a man who likes the sound of his own voice,” Gabriel said when Joey was startled by his word-perfect rendition of “The Tyger.” “A poem’s no poem at all ’til you deliver it with an Irish lilt.”
    Joey’s first two weeks under Gabriel’s protection took some getting used to. Few inmates spoke to Joey without first receiving a silent assent from Gabriel. No liberties, not even joking offers or lascivious remarks, were tolerated. One day a G-block Lovely named Petrocelli had offered Joey “something sweet to suck on.” Before Joey could decide if he should feign deafness or hurl back an insult, Gabriel steered Petrocelli to one side, talking quietly to the man while Gabriel’s F-block cohorts hovered just out of earshot. To Joey’s relief, no physical violence ensued. But it was a very near thing. White with fury, Petrocelli had shambled off. Then Gabriel reappeared at Joey’s side with fresh perspiration on the back of his neck and damp patches beneath each armpit.
    “What did you say to him?”
    “Never you mind.” Gabriel sounded unconcerned. “Fetch your supper and think no more on it.”
    The story of Gabriel’s conviction came to Joey in multiple forms, none of them dovetailing sufficiently explain why Gabriel was serving two life sentences, yet hadn’t gone to the gallows. Joey was curious, yet refused to ask. Asking was expected. Inside Wentworth, asking was the universal connection: hearing a man’s story of how his personal liberty had been lost, squandered or in Joey’s case, stolen. But Joey couldn’t make that ritual gesture. The moment he asked Gabriel how he’d come to Wentworth, he might as well have declared it was no hard feelings between them, water under the bridge, a bad moment in the showers and best forgotten. And Joey wouldn’t do that. It was one thing, answering a direct question about a novel, or a meal, or who would shave first. But the idea of behaving as if he and Gabriel were friendly, much less friends, made Joey want to jerk the blade out of a safety razor and open his own wrists.
    And maybe he’d do that before long, anyway. But not just yet.
    Joey, expected to sit beside Gabriel during common time, learned to endure the hand on his knee, the smiles, the quick kiss when the guards’ eyes were elsewhere. Joey had thought it over endlessly, weighed the cost and decided in order to survive Wentworth, he’d have to accept conditions that would have been unbearable in his former life. After the rape – except he couldn’t call it by that word, it made him feel too weak; inside his head he simply called it what happened – Gabriel’s little ways of publicly declaring ownership seemed small indeed. Joey had needed four sutures after what happened. Then the first time he shit he burst two and had to have them redone. The humiliation of lying on his belly and letting Dr. Harper repair his intimate injury had pained Joey almost as much the memory of Gabriel forcing himself inside.
    “You’re too pretty for your own good,” Dr. Harper had said, stripping off his gloves and tossing them in the rubbish bin. “Let me give you a piece of advice, Cooper. Next time it happens, bear down instead of clenching tight. I don’t enjoy putting in these sutures any more than you enjoy receiving them.”
    Dr. Harper hadn’t meant to be cruel. Neither had he meant to be kind.