He Didn't Come

The next morning at breakfast, Jack sat alone and ate her oatmeal. It was actually pretty good, but the thick cereal stuck in her throat, despite the liberal sugar and cinnamon seasoning. She told herself that she wasn’t going to stay, so it didn’t matter if people paid any attention to her or not. Nonetheless, the furtive glances in her direction got to her. She was too proud to admit it, but the obvious disdain on the behalf of her fellow ‘inmates’ hurt.

The girl from the gym approached her, and Jack never broke eye contact as she kept on eating. The girl was flanked by two other girls, all with the same haughty attitude. The passed her by, and Jack let out a sigh of relief. She wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation.

Those glances and whispers were really getting on her nerves. She knew what it was, too. It was the hair. The whispered word “dyke” only made it worse. She was feeling lower and lower. Riddick, please come! Jack moaned silently.

Suddenly, tan hands with long fingernails reached around her and grabbed her dish of oatmeal. Jack was unprepared for the speed of the motion, and wasn’t able to get out of the way before the warm, sticky cereal immersed her hair and ran down her face and neck.

What the fuck? Someone just dumped oatmeal on her! What the hell kind of place was this? Jack leapt up, wiped the oatmeal out of her eyes, and smeared the handful on the girl’s face. It was the same girl from the gym. The girl gasped and slapped Jack across the face. The cafeteria was silent until a chorus of “Ooohh’s” rose, gaining volume.

Jack didn’t respond to the girl at first. She just stared at her, purposely not moving. She knew how unsettling it could be. Sure enough, all three girls began backing up nervously. Without warning, Jack sprang for the girl who had dumped the oatmeal. Riddick had taught her well, and within seconds the girl was on the ground with blood pouring from her nose.

One of her cronies bent to help her up, and Jack aimed a kick at her face. She pulled the blow, though. That girl hadn’t done anything to her personally. The girl flinched away from Jack’s flying foot and tripped, landing on oatmeal-girl. The third girl backed off, too, but not before giving Jack a good shove. It almost overbalanced her. Jack caught herself on the cafeteria table and used the reversed momentum to swing an extra-hard punch at the girl’s solar plexus.

The girl was rather nimble and able to avoid Jack’s dangerous fist, but just barely. She turned and ran, but not before calling out over her shoulder, “Psycho dyke whore!”

Jack didn’t hesitate. Nobody spoke to her like that. She jumped over the two fallen girls and raced after that bitch. Unfortunately, she didn’t know Chapel Hall that well at all, and this gave the fleeing girl an advantage over her. Jack ran silently, conserving her energy like Riddick taught her, but the idiot girl she was chasing kept turning her head to fling insults.

Jack chased her for a minute or two until she cornered the bitch in a dead-end hall. Jack never slowed down, instead running into the wall with her hands out to stop the motion. She used her momentum to whirl around and backhand the girl, who was bent over and breathing raggedly.
The girl turned with the force of Jack’s blow, and Jack followed it with a knee to the face. The girl went down immediately. Jack knew that Riddick would have considered it a done deal and left, or ghosted whoever it was he was fighting. It depended on the situation. She wasn’t Riddick, though, and she had no intention of quitting so soon after the fight began.

By the time the counselor and some other adults were able to pull Jack off of her victim, the poor girl had her lip split in three places and her face was a bloody mess. Her nose was broken, and she had two black eyes and some swelling on her forehead.

A woman, equally tanned as the rest of those on Donli, helped her stagger away. Jack had no idea who the adults were. They must have been teachers or something. She knew that in a place as big as Chapel Hall, there had to be many more supervisors than just the director and the cafeteria crew.

Jack was feeling pretty pleased with herself as she was escorted down the hall. A frowning woman with worry-wrinkles led the way, and Jack’s face fell when she saw the sign on the door of the room they dragged her to. SOLITARY, it said, and inside there was a simple bed, a toilet, and a sink.
They shoved her inside and locked the door. “Act like an animal, and you’ll be treated like one,” somebody promised. Before the voices faded for good, she heard a woman say, “I want that girl’s psych files. Now.”

Great. Another counselor ready to pry. Jack sighed and walked over to the sink. She wasn’t able to get the oatmeal out of her clothes, but she was able to get most of it off her skin and out of her hair.

She had a headache.

~*~

“I just told you. I was with Riddick.”

The shrink, who ended up being the woman with the worry-wrinkles, didn’t believe her. She never did. Jack had been in therapy twice a week for three weeks, and the shrink still didn’t believe a word she said. Jack didn’t know why she was surprised. Shrinks were the enemy.

No one noticed her scars her first night. She was soon able to switch to long-sleeved shirts again, which kept them concealed. After her third therapy session, however, there came a point when there were no more long-sleeved shirts in the stack of clothes they had given her. She had been forced to wear a short-sleeved shirt, and tried to keep her arms covered. However, she had a therapy appointment that day, and the shrink spotted them immediately. She asked, naturally, who had sutured them.

Jack had refused to answer at first. She refused to speak, period, until finally she got sick of the woman’s nagging. After being asked a hundred times why she was on the station, who she had been with, who had taken care of her cuts, she finally got tired of it all. “I was on D7 with Richard B. Riddick,” she said sweetly, and waited for the shrink’s reaction. She knew the shrink wouldn’t believe her, but she was hoping for some kind of a rise. What she got was disappointing.

“I see,” was all the shrink had replied, and made a notation on her notepad.

This blatant assumption that Jack was a liar hadn’t wavered in the three weeks since therapy began. Since the moment she had walked into the room, she and shrink had been at odds. The shrink’s office was always a few degrees too warm, and the overstuffed couch was so fluffy that she sank in it whenever she sat down. It was comfortable, yes, but it hindered her movement. She suspected that was why the shrink kept it around. Not for the comfort of her patients, certainly.

Finally the shrink sighed and said, “You want to know what I think, Jack?”

“Not really,” Jack responded dryly.

The shrink ignored her answer and went on as though she hadn’t even spoken. “I think that you were so lonely, you invented this fantasy relationship with Richard Riddick. I don’t know why you were on D7, but I would like to. I want to help you, Jack, if you’ll let me.”

“The only one who’s ever been able to help me was Riddick,” Jack muttered with her arms crossed. She knew the shrink heard her, but ignored her words. Instead, she did what she always did whenever she got sick of Jack being difficult.

“Jack, it’s all the time we have for today.” There had been a time when the appointment lasted only twenty minutes. Next came the part Jack hated most. “You know what needs to happen.”

Jack shook her head. “No.”

“Come on now, Jack. Don’t be difficult.” The shrink reached out for Jack’s arm. Jack resisted and tried to pull her arm back, but the shrink had surprisingly strong hands for a woman. She pulled Jack’s arm toward her and pushed up the sleeve. She repeated the process with her other arm.

“See? Just like usual. No cuts. Can I go now?” Jack jerked her arms back and crossed them protectively against her chest, shivering from the sense of violation that the process gave her.

The shrink sighed and said, “Yes, I suppose so.” If she had anything else to say, Jack didn’t hear it. She was out the door as soon as the shrink said the first word.

~*~

“Hey, Imam,” Jack said weakly. This was the first chance she’d had to use the satcomm.

Imam’s face flickered momentarily on the satcomm screen. The machine was only a year old, but Donli was pretty far from the Ichar system, after all. The connection was bound to be sketchy. “Child, what is the matter?”

Jack shrugged, wanting to glaze over the details. She just wanted to find a solution. “No big deal. There was a problem, though, and I got landed in a youth home in the Donli system.” She looked at him hopefully. “Is there anything you can do to get me out of here?”

“Are they mistreating you, my child?” Imam’s face dark face darkened even further, and Jack shook her head.

“No, they’re treating me fine.” She didn’t tell him about the fact that she’d stayed in solitary three times since her arrival, and she saw the shrink twice a week. She didn’t want him to think poorly of her. It was strange. The only other person whose opinion she’d cared about was Riddick. It was odd that he hadn’t been able to get her yet, but Jack could be patient.

“I will see what I can do,” Imam promised. Jack heard someone approaching, and she whispered a rushed goodbye and switched off the satcomm. She was supposed to be in her dorm. It was after hours, and she was in enough shit already with her normal life. She didn’t want to add any other disciplinary action to her record at the moment. She wondered when the administration planned on giving her time to do her homework when school started again.

It was Joanna. The oatmeal girl. Terrific. “Well, if it isn’t the little dyke,” she said scathingly. What the hell was she doing downstairs after hours?

“Well, if it isn’t the major bitch,” Jack answered in the exact same tone.

“Don’t push it,” Joanna said. Jack smelled cigarettes. So that was why she was downstairs. Joanna wasn’t the little sweetheart she pretended to be to the administration. It was so tempting to tip off the adults that policed her new life, but it wouldn’t work. Jack didn’t have anything on Joanna because she was the new girl, and the new hellion. Nobody would believe her.

Jack rolled her eyes and made to go back upstairs. Joanna stood in front of her, and Jack moved to the side. Joanna blocked her way again. “Get out of my way,” Jack snapped.

Joanna frowned, and didn’t move. “So what’s up with you and the satcomm? Who were you talking to?”

Searching out for an appropriately bitchy response, Jack had an idea. She knew that nobody believed her anyway, and she had no clue as to where he was in the first place. “Richard B. Riddick,” she said proudly.

Joanna didn’t give her the reaction she was looking for. Instead, without skipping a beat, she said, “Oh, were you his little whore? Oh yeah, that’s right! I forgot. You’re Mika’s dyke now. When did you change preferences?”

Jack stared. “What are you talking about?”

Joanna laughed nastily. “Mika’s the resident lipstick les. I think it’s nice that she finally found somebody her own kind.”

Jack was amazed at Joanna’s sheer cruelty. She didn’t know that Mika was a lesbian. Not that it mattered. She was the only person to treat Jack somewhat decently, and now even she had an ulterior motive. Jack opened her mouth to smart off, but Joanna beat her to it.

“I found your files,” she said. “It’s hard to believe that you’re related to whores. I mean, you wouldn’t even be able to attract a rapist. Look at you. Dyke, through and through. Though I wonder, what’s with the Riddick thing?”

She came closer and put her face close to Jack’s. She hissed, “Can’t decide between pussy or dead men, can you?”

Oh, yeah. To the rest of the Consortium, Riddick was still dead. A detached part of Jack’s mind registered this information with mute relief, but the rest of her was focused wholly on Joanna. She reached her hand into her pocket and touched the shiv he gave her for reassurance.

Through some lapse on the part if the administration they hadn’t searched her after the oatmeal incident, and afterward it must have slipped everyone’s mind. Worked for her… she had been able to keep her shiv. She hadn’t pulled it on anybody, because she didn’t want to take the risk that the director would expel her and drop her in juvenile hall. Come to think of it, she didn’t know if there even was a juvenile hall. There had to be, though. This was a home for girls only, so there had to be other places for problem kids.

Fuck it. She pulled the shiv and kicked Joanna’s feet out from under her. Joanna’s gasp of surprise was quickly cut off when, kneeling down, Jack put a knee on her chest and the knife at her throat.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered. “If you so much as look at me, I’ll cut your throat. I swear it. You won’t know I’m coming for you until it’s too late.”

She rested the blade against Joanna’s throat, pressing it slightly into the skin for a brief second. Then she stood and walked toward the stairs, not looking back.

What would Riddick think of her? As Jack reviewed her behavior the past few weeks, she had a sickly feeling that he wouldn’t be proud. Whenever Jack had some spare time, she was in the gym or in the library, doing research on fighting styles. She was training nonstop, and all of the girls she’d beaten up so far probably hadn’t taken a swing except for catfights in their entire lives.

Jack had a definite advantage over these other girls, and while Riddick had the advantage over his marks, that was a different story. In his case, it was kill or be killed, every time. Jack was just beating on those that bullied her. It wasn’t fair, and she knew it.

Riddick wouldn’t like it, but he wasn’t there to say anything to her about it. He hadn’t come for her yet. He would, though. It would just take time. Something went wrong, and maybe he had to split. She was definitely going to have it out with him for leaving her for so long, but she knew that he didn’t mean it. She just had to be patient, and not ghost anybody or get sent anywhere else in the meantime. She should probably try to get back to the station, though. Riddick knew that she had lived on a space station until she was six years old, so maybe he was assuming that she was still on D7, biding her time.

If he didn’t show in another two weeks, she’d make a run for it. He might be mad at her for taking such a risk, but she could put up with that. Two weeks. But of course, Riddick would eventually come for her. He’d come.

He had to.