THE DREAM FIRST MADE AN APPEARANCE MY SECOND WEEK AT THURMOND, AND IT CAME TO VISIT AT LEAST TWICE A MONTH. I guess it made sense that it was born there, behind the camp’s humming electric fence. Everything about that place withered you down to your worst, and it didn’t matter how many years passed—two, three, six. In that green uniform, locked in the same monotonous routine, time stopped and sputtered like a dying car. I knew I was getting older, caught glimpses of my changing face in the metallic surfaces of the Mess Hall tables, but it didn’t feel that way. Who I was and who I had been disconnected, leaving me stranded somewhere in the middle. I used to wonder if I was even Ruby anymore. At camp, I didn’t have a name outside of my cabin. I was a number: 3285. I was a file on a server or locked away in a gunmetal gray filing cabinet. The people who had known me before camp no longer did.
It always started with the same thunder, the same explosion of noise. I’d be old—twisted and hunched and aching—standing in the middle of a busy street. It might have been somewhere in Virginia, where I was from, but it had been so long since I’d been home I couldn’t tell for sure.
Cars passed on either side, heading in opposite directions down a stretch of dark road. Sometimes I heard the thunder of an approaching storm, other times the blare of car horns louder, louder, louder as they approached. Sometimes I heard nothing at all.
