Free Convict: A Bad Boy Romance by Roxie Noir

he’s showing off a prize. The other officers, all white men, look over at us like I’m an animal on a leash.
    “Can we guess?” one of them asks, his southern accent thick as mud.
    “Go on,” the fat old man says.
    “Dealing oxy at the high school,” someone says. “Looks the type.”
    By ‘the type,’ he means ‘poor.’
    “Fuck you,” I spit.
    They all laugh.
    “Naked with his thirteen-year-old cousin,” someone else guesses.
    I snort.
    “Why fuck my cousin when your wife begs me for it?” I snarl.
    The cop cuffs me hard on the back of the head.
    “He tried to steal Doug Childers’s new Dodge Ram,” the cop leading me says. Then he leans in. “They got alarm systems now, boy,” he tells me, uncomfortably close. “Guess there’s not many new cars in the trailer park, are there?”
    I don’t answer. I know what the cops here do to people they don’t like. I’ve seen it.
    He pushes me onward, through a door, shoves me into a cell. I sit there for three hours before they finally process me.
    “You get one phone call,” someone tells me. They all blend together after a while.
    “I got nobody to call,” I say.
    It’s the first time I spend the night in jail, but not the last.

    * * *
    W hen I leave the Sheriff’s Department in Tortuga, I walk down to the beach, because nothing in town is very far from the water. I spend a long time standing on the jetty and staring out at the ocean, trying to process this.
    When I was ten or eleven, I rode my third-hand bike into town and stole a copy of Point Break from the video store in town. I remember watching it on our shitty VCR, wavy lines tracing over Keanu Reeves’s face, as my mother snored on the couch.
    I thought California was another country, like Canada or Mexico. It still feels like one. I still feel like I’m living someone else’s life.
    Sometimes, late at night, I hear cars roar by on the highway, and more than anything I want to go back. At least I knew what I was doing: one job at a time, don’t get caught. Until I did.
    I think about Luna again. I can’t stop myself. I think of her lips on mine, her body underneath me. I think of her saying it looks like the Cheshire Cat took a piss in a martini glass , and smile.
    I think of her saying I’m anything but , even though she’s dead wrong.
    I don’t think I’ve ever liked a single thing that wasn’t trouble.

8
    Luna
    I slather the ruby-red jam onto a thick slice of homemade bread and push it into my mouth. My mother watches me expectantly.
    “It’s really good,” I say, my mouth still full.
    “Mhm,” says Cedar, my older brother.
    “Which one is that?” I ask, cheeks still bulging.
    “It’s a blind taste test, Luna,” she says patiently. “You have to try them both.”
    I swallow, then slather more jam onto the rest of the bread, passing the knife to Cedar. We both chew in silence for a moment.
    “That one’s really good too,” I say. “Is that ginger in there?”
    “Secret recipe,” my mom says, but she looks pleased.
    “Are you gonna make us guess which is which?” Cedar asks, crossing his arms in front of his chest.
    My mom sits back in the Adirondack chair, her long, flowing skirt settling, and tucks her legs under her. She’s not wearing shoes. She’s never wearing shoes.
    “Which one tastes like it came from the garden?” she asks.
    I look at Cedar. He looks at me. I narrow my eyes, and we take a step away and turn our backs to mom.
    “The first one was a little darker-colored, but a little less sweet,” I say, keeping my voice low.
    Cedar nods very seriously, his arms still crossed in front of himself, his dark hair in a short ponytail at the nape of his neck. He’s only fourteen months older than me, so we’ve always been close.
    “She may have put more sugar in the store-bought strawberries to make up for their lack of sweetness,” he says. “I thought jam number one did have a slightly deeper flavor.”
    I glance back at the jams. Mom’s