Virgo liked to keep busy. Not because she was somebody who got bored of her own company much (she preferred it) but because when she wasn't doing something she had time to think. Virgo should never be allowed too much time to think. Nothing good came out of it. The correctional admins who decided that solitary was her best option 'to preserve the safety of the minor and the greater detention center population' didn't need long to realize the error of their ways.

She had gotten bored once and written out the entirety of John 3:16 on the wall of her cell in her own blood. She could have written it in the blood of a rat that had burrowed through her wall, but she liked the rat. He was good company. She called him Horatio.

"There are more than things in heaven and in Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Horatio wasn't a bad friend, just an ignorant one. He shouldn't have to die for that ignorance, she'd thought. She still thought. When the juvie custodians had gassed the insides of the prison walls, Horatio had skittered out, bleeding from every pore. He'd twitched at her feet and died. When she left WyJuCo, she'd carried his bones with her in a sock. A little piece of home at the bottom of her bag.

"Alas, poor Horatio, I knew him well."

Horatio her Faithful Friend. He was a good listener when nobody else was.

She unearthed a ragged grey sock from the pit of her backpack (Salvation Army chic, clearance bin; she'd patched it up with rainbow Duck Tape ™) and poured its dear contents onto the mauve top,sheet of her bed. Her room was the guest room and it looked like it; nobody was meant to live here, much less a teenage girl. Mauve sheets, taupe walls, Art Deco prints that went out of style three days after completion hung from hastily painted walls. The only thing they'd done for her sake was start locking the windows. In the word of Daphne and Ebenezer (his real name though he answered to Ben) Sage, they wanted her to feel 'safe as houses'. She'd never felt so trapped in her life and she'd grown up in the iron grasp of Coleridge Coleridge.

At least he had the decency to be what he was. Everybody who was anybody knew the score. Nobody was supposed to get out alive. They got their wish.

Virgo dumped out the books she'd collected from the book depository and tried to get her life in order. She'd wanted to do the high school thing and she as going to crush the high school thing. She admittedly hadn't expected it to be so scary, you know, doing the high school, mean girls, Craft meets Pretty Little Liars baptism of fire. On TV the best you could say about the girls who ruled the school was that they were pretty and they had IT. You know, IT, that thing that made people fall over themselves to impress and humiliate themselves when being the butt of longstanding jokes was the closest they could come to acceptance. It was easy to laugh that off when the closest you had come to a normal educational experience was Sunday school where you learned to plot the natal charts of saints. She'd give Father that much, the Divine Zodiac Disciples had been a meritocracy at its finest.

It was the skills being assessed Virgo hadn't learned till she was just old enough to know what they were worth.

She logged onto the laptop the Sages had gifted her with on her arrival. It was a good machine. An HP Chromebook, a couple of model years old. Not much hard drive storage but it was fast and it worked well for her purposes. It would do for school. Virgo blushed at the memory of how she'd stammered her gratitude when she got it. She was used to care packages from local charity organizations, usually around Christmas, but there'd never been anything like that for her in one of them. Nothing that expensive or that useful. The odd tattered paperback. A fresh pack of socks and underwear that maybe fit if she didn't mind wedgies too much.

The Sages gave her plenty of gifts that were better than she was used to. A computer, a tablet, a mobile phone, even a camera (a Sony SLR—Virgo didn't even take pictures like that!). It didn't quite compute that anybody would want her to have all this. Not knowing what she'd done to end up in the system in the first place. And the Sages had been told. They had to be, in the interest of full disclose. They still wanted her and they still spoiled her.

At least, she'd thought that for a couple of hours, when she was still luxuriating in the spacious shower she got all to herself and the great big queen-sized bed.

Then Useless had reared his ugly head. He'd come in without knocking to assert his dominance as the firstborn biological child or whatever bullshit it took to keep his shaky ego afloat in a prosperous universe.

"Don't get too used to this. All the stuff they gave you is just shit I didn't want. They know how to keep punks happy for a while, but the minute you make them look back they'll send you straight back."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I just got here. I'm not doing anything wrong."

"You're money in the bank. A paycheck with a cute face. But you'll fuck up. They all do."

"All who?"

"All the other system rejects. Money in the bank until you cost a little too much. I wouldn't unpack."'

Virgo had unpacked to spite him. It was stupid and it'd be inconvenient as hell if she had to leave tomorrow, but she needed to wash her bag and the trash bag her other stuff had come in had broken. She had to put her stuff somewhere until she had a minute to find a replacement. She wanted something real this time; none of that shit they gave her when shuffling her between houses filled with do-gooders who liked her right up until she called them fake and told them their bio kids were blooming sociopaths. Because her record made her dangerous and their expectations made them ignorant. Their loss.

'They'll send you right back.'

She was expecting that. Something about a good girl doing bad things made people nervous. But if you ask her, it should have told them how much that bad thing had needed to be done.

She wasn't sorry at all.