Free Lemon by Cordelia Strube

masturbate in front of your cell so some football player can masturbate in front of his cell?’
    â€˜Don’t use that word.’
    â€˜Think it through, Ross. What do you think Kirsten and Nicole are going to do with recordings of you fingering yourself?’
    â€˜I don’t know how you can not care that nobody likes you.’
    I don’t actually think it’s that nobody likes me. I’m just this bump on the road they step around.
    â€˜You’re a fucking freak, Lemon! Nobody can stand you.’
    This hurts. Not the fucking freak part but the fact that she’s using it against me. I know she’s been humiliated and all that but I still don’t think I deserve to be her hostility sponge. I grab my backpack and slam the door behind me hoping she’ll come running out to apologize.
    Maybe I won’t make her the star of my play.
    I convince Kadylak to go to the playroom to build a Lego house. She’s not talking much and her mouth sores are worse. A boy I don’t recognize keeps slamming things around. His mother’s there but it’s pretty obvious she’s one of those types who let their kids rule once they get cancer. When I ask him to keep it down, he looks at me like I’m some kind of serf. That’s the way it’s going to go, I figure. Back to serfdom. Once people get wiped out by debt and have to surrender their techno-gizmos. The upside is that it might mean revolution. Although it’s hard to think of a revolution that ended up helping anybody in the long term, what with absolute power corrupting absolutely and all that. You just have to think of old Stalin, Mr. Genocide. They always say he was a ladies’ man which is hard to compute. Imagine banging old Joe while famine victims are eating babies.
    â€˜We forgot to put in a door,’ Kadylak says.
    â€˜Do we need one? If we just use windows we wouldn’t have to answer the door.’
    She stops building and looks at me. ‘Why don’t you want to answer the door?’
    â€˜It’s usually somebody selling something.’
    â€˜Like what?’
    â€˜Religion, natural gas.’
    She thinks about this, scratching under her head scarf. Her mother makes her wear Ukrainian headscarves, sending the message that she can’t stand to look at her bald. Kadylak hates the scarves because they itch and are always sliding off her head.
    â€˜I think we should have a door,’ she says. ‘Someone nice might visit.’
    And who might that be? I can’t remember the last time someone nice visited. Drew had this boyfriend for about ten minutes who had a motorboat. He got her water-skiing, which she seemed to think held meaning. She’d come home pink from sun and beer. He used to refer to her as his ‘smart lady.’ When he dumped her, she said she knew all along he was an idiot.
    â€˜If someone nice wanted to visit,’ I say, ‘we could throw down a rope from one of the windows and they could climb it. It would be a kind of test. Only the people who were really determined to see us could come up.’
    Kadylak fondles Lego pieces, trying to work this out. She doesn’t like disagreeing with anybody. She’s one of those people who’ll say it doesn’t hurt while you’re stepping on her fingers. Meanwhile Wacko Boy flings Nerf balls around. His mother sits on a kiddie chair with her arms tightly crossed, holding herself together, while her eyes recede into her head. This happens to parents whose kids have cancer. They stop seeing anything except the cancer. They don’t even see the kid.
    â€˜I think we should have a door,’ Kadylak declares and starts to pull down a wall. I want to hug and kiss her, because she’s so brave, so willing to believe that someone nice might visit. I don’t hug and kiss her because I’m afraid it might freak her out. Her family isn’t very demonstrative. I help her take down the