Free Bullet Point by Peter Abrahams Page A

found him, gotten his number? Not hard to connect the dots. Dot one, Greer. Dot two, Bert Torrance, doing five years for arson behind the same walls. So obvious, and so infuriating, like he was being manipulated.
    “You were about to say something?”
    “No,” Wyatt said.
    “It, uh, it’s good to hear your voice.”
    Wyatt remained silent.
    “And it’s, uh, good to know you’re in the neighborhood. No mystery there—Bert Torrance is what you might call a casual acquaintance of mine in here, as you probably figured out already, sounding like a smart young man the way you do.”
    “Yeah,” Wyatt said. Did that give the idea he considered himself smart? “About the Bert Torrance part,” he added.
    His—the man laughed. He had a soft little laugh that sounded like it came more from the front of his mouth than from the throat, chest, or belly. “Smarter than the old man, that’s for sure.”
    Wyatt didn’t like that, not at all. “You’re not my old man,” he said.
    “Sorry I—”
    “And all that about getting a girl pregnant—were you talking about my mother?”
    “My apologies. So sorry. So sorry twice. Meant the smart thing as a compliment, nothing more. I see my mistake now. As for your mother, long time out of touch with her, but I had the greatest respect, way back when. And thanks for standing up for her. Lesson learned. I can tell she raised a fine young man, not easy for a single mom. Or even if she’s not single—been no communication since…since the events.”
    Wyatt was silent, sharing no details of his mom’s life. Then it hit him that this man might already know—he’d told Greer about Rusty, Cammy, lots of other details. Had Greer passed on all that, too, to her father? Prisons had high walls to keep bad people separate from good, but now Wyatt realized voices went back and forth, no problem, as though the walls were sieves.
    “But you don’t have to accept apologies in this life. May even be the wrong thing to do sometimes.”
    “Like when?” Wyatt said.
    Then came that soft little laugh again. “I—” The man stopped himself. Wyatt heard voices in the background, maybe speaking Spanish. “Good question. I’ll have to get back to you on that. Unless you don’t want me to call, of course. Up to you.”
    Wyatt said nothing.
    “Got to go. Nice talking to you.”
    More Spanish, louder now.
    Click.
    Wyatt stood behind the tree, wind blowing, the moon now hidden. He was wearing jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, should have felt cold but was sweating instead. He tried to sort thingsout, tried to think, didn’t really know where to start. What he really wanted to do was call his mom, tell her what had happened. He overcame that impulse, a weak, unmanly one, kind of pitiful. His mom had her own problems. He tried Greer’s number again, again got put straight into voice mail. This time he left a message.
    “Give me a call. No matter what time it is.” He thought about the impact that might have and toned it down some. “No emergency or anything. Just call.”
    But she didn’t, not that night. Wyatt tossed and turned for hours, finally fell into a sleep full of unpleasant dreams, all forgotten in the morning.
     
    Greer called at lunch period the next day. Wyatt and Dub had different lunch periods. Wyatt was sitting in the cafeteria with some kids from his last class, English, who were talking about Hamlet , which they’d just started and which he didn’t understand at all.
    “Hamlet’s a wimp,” one kid said. “No guts.”
    “What?” said another. “Just because some ghost appears and says this and that, he’s supposed to start killing people?”
    “You’re missing the point,” said a girl named Anna who sat next to him in class, a blond, apple-cheeked girl whom up to very recently he would have considered beautiful. “It’s not even a real ghost.”
    “Huh?” said the first kid.
    “The ghost just represents thoughts in Hamlet’s head,” Anna said. “He’s