Next Life, I’ll Find a Family That’s a Little Less Smart Chapter 08

Next Life, I’ll Find a Family That’s a Little Less Smart Chapter 08

From the moment he arrived, Silas tried to negotiate with his cellmate. His name was Bruno Jenkins.

“Nash equilibrium. The payoff matrix for cooperation beats conflict by a wide margin.”

He adjusted his new standard-issue prison glasses, voice dripping with the same superiority he’d always had.

“I can run the numbers for you. Commissary, books, whatever you need figured out. In exchange, nobody touches me.”

Jenkins was a thick-necked, shaved-headed bruiser in for aggravated assault.

He had no idea what Nash equilibrium meant.

All he knew was that this kid in the glasses had a face he wanted to hit.

Jenkins drove a fist into Silas’s gut.

Every theory Silas had about pain tolerance collapsed the second real violence touched him.

He folded in half on the concrete and vomited bile.

Jenkins’s crew dragged Silas to the communal showers.

“Heard those hands of yours were real talented. Scientist hands, right?”

Jenkins had his boot on Silas’s face.

They jammed Silas’s right index finger into the hinge gap of the door. Then they slammed it shut.

The crack of bone and the scream that followed carried down the entire block.

Beatrice didn’t fare any better.

She tried to psychoanalyze her cellmate, a woman named Roxy Miller.

“Your displaced aggression stems from unresolved attachment trauma in your family of origin. If you let me guide your cognitive restructuring—”

Miller backhanded her so hard it ruptured her eardrum.

Then she grabbed Beatrice by the hair and shoved her face into the toilet bowl. Held her there until she swallowed the filthy water.

“You can choke on your psychobabble bullshit. In here, fists do the talking.”

Terrified and broken, the siblings wrote letters over and over to their parents.

Every one of them begging. Every one of them sorry.

The block guard, Marcus Davis, tossed them in the trash.

“Stop writing.”

Davis didn’t even look at them.

“Your parents’ words, not mine. They said to tell you they don’t have children anymore.”

Months later, the light went out of Silas’s eyes.

That 160-IQ brain couldn’t survive the repeated blunt force trauma. Permanent brain damage set in.

He sat in the corner of his cell all day, drooling, reciting the digits of pi on a loop.

Beatrice lost her mind.

Every night she heard me. My voice, right beside her pillow.

“How does the saline taste?”

She scratched the word diploma into the cell wall with her bare nails, over and over, until all ten fingers were raw and bleeding.

I drifted past the bars and looked at them. Two geniuses who’d once stood above everyone, now crawling.

I shook my head.

They’d made me their test subject. Now they were the experiment, and the results weren’t pretty.

Karma didn’t just come around. It collected with interest.

Years slipped by. A small coastal town near Pelican Bay.

Salt air and the smell of brine off a weathered pier.

Professor Thorne, the man who’d once lectured in tailored suits, was hauling cargo on the docks.

His back was permanently bent. His skin had gone dark and leathery from the sun.

Every day he took the heaviest loads, the worst shifts.

Only when his body was wrecked beyond feeling could he stop seeing my face on the floor.

When he got home, a cramped little bungalow, Mom was sitting by the door.

Her hair had gone completely white. She looked decades older than she was.

She was knitting a red scarf. She’d been knitting it for years. It was never going to be finished.

My photo sat in the center of the room, the first thing anyone saw walking in.

Lined up in front of it, row after row of asthma inhalers. The real ones. The prescription-strength ones.

But no one needed them anymore.