Page 1 of Caged In

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Sitting alone in the transitional cells, Jasper Marcelo—or, Izz, as most people call him—is contemplating his life choices.

Does he feel guilty for stealing? No. Does he regret transitioning from houses to pickpocketing? Yes.

Izz never should have tried it, never should have changed his tactics. He’s good at robbing, good at breaking in and getting out without drawing attention to himself. He never takes too much, only a few items, most owners chocking it up to them misplacing things. But then he had to go and screw it all up.

And he screwed up big time. He’s excellent with houses, exceptional with locks. He’s an idiot for changing to pick pocketing. Less than a dozen people, and two weeks after he started, he was caught. He should have just stuck to buildings, to what he is actually good at.

All of this is happening because he listened to Cole. Why did he have to listen? His friend is an impulsive reckless lunatic, he knew it, yet he still followed Cole’s instructions.

Izz had a good thing going. He was working—alas, a crappy, low paying job, but at least it was a job—and he was robbing on the side. He had no choice on the latter, he had to keep his sister in school. To help his mum keep a roof over their heads, to prevent them from starving or freezing to death. They needed their rundown apartment and the crappy heating. Most of all, they needed more money than what he and his mum were able to earn at their jobs. Their mum was working her terrible barber job, with an asshole boss, pulling in double shifts, for shitty pay checks. She was still paying off the countless doctors’ bills. His sister was recovering from cancer. After his father’s death, all theinsurance money was used to pay for chemo and all her other meds and treatments.

Izz’s not going to be there for her birthday, in three months, she will be eleven. And he isn’t going to be there to help her, or their mum.Now that he’s in prison. With no way to provide for his family.

How are they going to stay in their little apartment? They’ll be evicted—be out on the streets, freezing in the snow, and there is nothing he can do about it.

I screwed up.

I failed them.

Why do I have to be such a mess? A terrible brother and a lacking son.

He rubs his hands over his face, trying to scrub away his emotions before they get the better of him. He isn’t sure about much in prison, but he knows crying will be a very bad, very dumb idea. If he falls down the emotional hole, he may as well slap a target on his ass with the words ‘Bitch Boy’ flashing neon pink.

He already has it bad. His petite features. His warm, tan coloured skin. His soft hazelnut hair—long on top, shaved short around the sides. Eyes a rare forest green, brilliant and bright, demanding everyone’s attention. He usually wore contact lenses during his . . . extracurricular activities. To keep his noticeable, and noteworthy, feature from becoming stuck in people’s memories.

He’s a mixed blood. He may as well have no race, with the amount of blood from multiple different races coursingthrough his veins. He’s basically a glorified mutt. A mix-and-match puzzle of genes scrambled together.

He’s not sure if it’s going to help him in prison or make him more of a target. Being all and none of the races at the sametime. For some reason people still see race in today’s society, even with so many people like Izz in the world.

He hopes he can get by without anyone realising he doesn’t belong to an ethnic group—he has a few tattoos, dotted here and there, maybe he can join in with a tattooed prison gang—

If it’s not like the movies where everyone in prison is covered head to toe in ink . . .

He doesn’t have very many tattoos, only a few small ones. He wouldn’t get into the prisoner roles in the movies with his ink work.

A skull on his ankle, which he regrets now, worrying it will label him as a bitch boy or something, not that his petite features won’t do that already. He’s sure ankle tattoos are considered girly? For his sake, he hopes not.

He has another tattoo on the back of his neck, the date of his girl’s death. She was killed in a fatal car wreck with her family when he was thirteen. They knew each other from birth, lived right next door their whole lives. They were always talking about their future, playing families, and make-believe marriages. She will forever be close to him, he’ll never forget her. As soon as he hit fifteen and could find a decent artist to bribe, he had her birth date and death date permanently marked in his skin. His mum had not been happy, to say the least, but she understood why he wanted it so badly.

His third tattoo is vines and branches, interwoven with a snake skeleton that wraps around his biceps—well, his girlish biceps. He is muscled, just not overly so. He’s not a rough tough bad ass dude who people will take one look at and back off from, with zero contemplation on starting any fight. He’s more . . . delicately muscled. Skilled enough to hold his own in a fight, against one, who isn’t overly skilled in hand to hand—

Okay. Okay. He’s more of a run-the-fuck-away kind of fighter. When fight or flight kicks in, he picks flight. In prison,that’s not really an option. You can only run so far in this caged in Hell-hole. He’s been in this prison for the better part of three—or four—hours, and he already wants out of it. He has yet to meet the other inmates and already hates it.

So, in comparison to pretty much every inmate he has seen on television shows, Izz may as well call himself a clean-skinned push over, or whatever the term is that tattooed prison peeps use on non-tattooed peeps. Do they say peeps? Best he doesn’t say that out loud to them, to be on the safe side—

It’s not reallythem, now, is it? He’s a part of thethem. An inmate. Someone society throws into the same bag of bad people, treating them—us—like we’re disgraceful, disgusting degenerates. A plague on society. Not worth caringabout.

If only they cared enough to listen to our stories. To see the world through our eyes, live the world in our shoes. Sometimes, you don’t have a choice in what you do. Sometimes, life throws you under the waves and holds you down, and you find yourself taking drastic measures to pull free from the depths.

His ass is beginning to go numb, his mind blank with boredom—he needs something to focus on, to distract himself—

Izz jerks to his feet and walks over to the bars, squishing his face against the cold metal cage. He can’t see very far down the corridor. All he can see is more of the same—plain whitewash brick walls and a lumpy ass concrete floor. Like whoever they hired to lay the concrete hadn’t been interested in wasting their time smoothing things out. Criminals live here, after all. And who cares how they live—

Man, he has to get out of his head. His thoughts keep spinning into morbidity. Morbidity? Morbidly? Morbid? He’s not sure which is the correct term. Are they all correct? Does it matter?

A clank to his left catches his attention, he angles his head around in the tight space between the bars. The distraction is agood thing, he hates being left alone with his thoughts. Better to be surrounded by people and distractions, than alone.

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