Free Do Not Pass Go by Kirkpatrick Hill

dashed out and announced with a little flutter of her fingers, “You can go in now.”
    Andy jerked his head at Deet to show him to follow.
    â€œNot too many today,” he said. “Eight people are allowed to have visitors, because there are only eight phones. Actually there are nine phones, but the one phone has never been fixed ever since I’ve been coming here.”
    Deet, the old couple, Andy, and the fat girl with the baby. That meant only four prisoners would have a visit. His mom said the jail was overcrowded, people sleeping in the gym because the prison was designed for a hundred people and there were a hundred and fifty there now. So where were all their visitors?
    Everything was so different from the way he’d imagined it that Deet felt confused.
    Nobody looked the way Deet thought they would, full of meanness or tragedy. It wasn’t like a big drama, it was like normal life, except there was a guard who didn’t look anything but a little bored. The only really out-of-the-ordinary thing was the woman behind the registration desk. He’d been disappointed a lot of times in his life when something wasn’t the way he thought it would be. Like the circus, which had turned out to be a tawdry affair, the costumes dirty, the acrobats and clowns tired and strained. But this was the first time he’d expected something to be terrible and it was just ordinary.
    They entered a long, narrow room made of cement blocks, like the rest of the jail. A long, smeared steel counter divided the room, and a sheet of glass divided one side of the counter from the other. A row of metal stools were bolted to the floor every two feet, and for each stool there was a phone with a long, coiled cord. Deet took the first stool against the wall, but Andy leaned back on his stool and called to him.
    â€œThat’s the phone that’s broken.” Deet nodded thanks and moved to a stool in between the oldcouple and Andy. The glass dividing the counter was smeared and smudged, the floor was littered with bits of tissue and candy wrappers, and under the long glass people had scratched the usual obscenities into the metal frame around the window.
    Deet felt uncomfortable that the old couple could see those words.
    The metal door on the other side of the glass wall opened suddenly, and a guard let a prisoner into the room. He picked up the phone opposite the old couple and began to talk.
    Deet had never seen a prisoner before, and he couldn’t help looking from under his eyebrows. He was startlingly handsome, like someone in a movie, and his black hair was as noticeably neat and silken as the hair of the old couple. He looked as if he might be part Eskimo, but the old couple obviously weren’t. Maybe his mother or father was Eskimo and these were his grandparents.
    You couldn’t hear through the glass, but the old woman began to explain why they’d come today instead of some other day, so he must have said somethingabout being surprised to see them. Deet felt embarrassed, listening to a private conversation in such a tight space.
    They were a nice little couple, the kind who’d live in those houses on the hill. Were they ashamed to be coming here? What did their prisoner
do
? What was his crime? Their talk was as polite and deliberate as if they were talking over coffee at the kitchen table, not as if they were in a place with bars and locks and guards.
    There were two windows on either side of the steel door on the far wall, and Deet could see disorderly lines of prisoners in the same blue suits passing by, looking curiously into the visiting room.
    Deet searched their faces to see what could have brought them to jail, but they were so ordinary. Where were the perverts, the steely-eyed hoodlums, the disgusting underbelly of society? They were prisoners, in jail, but they looked like anyone else you might see in the streets. Some were laughing and calling out to each other, just like kids