Member-only story
The Visiting Room
She just couldn’t bring herself to put out her thumb and actually hitch hike so week after week she walked most of that 30 miles. 30 miles out and 30 miles back. Dogs’d come running out to the ends of driveways but if she kept walking they’d just bark and leave her go her way. The few cars that did slow way down to look at her, those were the ones she sure would not be getting into.
Once she was out there at the prison farm she’d stand in line to be searched before being allowed into the visiting room. At first, he’d always be there, all eager to see her. He’d cut a hole in one pants’ pocket that she could play with him while they necked. It was the first penis she’d ever touched and she wondered what it looked like. She’d bring little bags of pot out for him. Later, when she finally got her nerve up and started hitchhiking, he’d keep her waiting sometimes. She’d wait, too. Of course she’d wait.
When the other girls were going out on dates and sneaking off to skip school with guys, Theresa Lee (or to her friends Teeter), knew no one was going to ask her out. It must be because she was too ugly although sometimes she’d stand there in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror trying to see the ugly. Her solution was to get herself a pen pal out at the state minimum security prison farm and, on weekends, tell her Mom she was going out to draw. Teeter’s mother didn’t question that (at…
