A Perfect Circle – John Dennis

The moon was a cold, indifferent eye as the three girls crossed the abandoned industrial lot, stepping through drifts of plastic and broken pallets.

They felt older than their assigned numbers. Never as aged as they were that night.

But they were still girls.

Born at the same hospital less than three kilometres away, already rootless. Limbs like saplings. Skin carrying the dry scent of institutional soap, strawberry sweat, cheap perfume.

They walked with purpose.

Stella stayed in the middle, held there by the invisible threads of girlhood loyalty. She believed in friendship as if it were a force, something that could pull you beyond Juvie, beyond the fence, beyond the city lights.

Still, a second thought moved beside it.

Not tonight, she told herself.

When the leader had asked if she wanted to get high, Stella had answered, “Why?”

She almost said no.

But one was the lowest number in the place. One meant silence. One meant eventually giving in to the night guard and his careful kindnesses: fresh linen, small contraband, a door left unlocked.

She had fought for this. Scratched and bitten her way up the narrow hierarchy for the only thing better than respect.

This is initiation, she told herself.

Or punishment.

Behind them the noise of the detention centre faded. They slipped through the gap in the chain-link fence everyone knew about and no one repaired.

Inside the roofless office building, crows lifted from the remains of a rat and settled along the beams to watch.

Stella felt it then. The change in the air. Salt and rust at the back of her tongue.

The two others stopped walking.

The leader raised her phone.

“Why?” Stella asked again.

The accusations came easily. Slights remembered and invented. Pride disguised as judgment.

Stella’s thoughts raced ahead of her.

Run.

Fight.

Laugh.

She stood still.

What followed had the calm of rehearsal.

Later, a journalist would write that certain crimes define the times.

But the place would remain unchanged.

The open fence.

The unlit yard.

The staff looking elsewhere.

And the circle the girls had made that night.