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A LIFE OF TETRIS

ANNA

Ihad been Anna Vale for eleven days, and I still flinched when someone said it out loud.

That was the trouble with a new name. You could practice it in the bathroom mirror, sign it at the bottom of a lease, teach your own mouth to answer the phone with it, and still some animal part of you kept waiting. Waiting for the old name, the real one, the one on a birth certificate I hadn’t seen in three years, to come walking up behind you and tap you on the shoulder.

Eleven days. New city, new name, new job.

Same girl underneath, unfortunately.

The prison sat at the end of a road that went nowhere else, just gray fields, gray sky, and then, all at once,

Ashlock.

It rose out of all that flat gray nothing like something the ground was ashamed of. Two rings of fence, coils of wire stacked on top like barbed weather, and a guard tower. Whoever was up there watched my cheap little car crawl up the road the way you’d watch a bug cross a table, deciding whether it was worth the trouble.

I parked where the agency email told me to park, and I turned off the engine. Then I sat there with my hands at ten and two like the car was still moving, because moving was the only thing my body actually wanted to do.

Run, said the instinctive part of me. But then, it always said that. It had been saying it for the last three years and in every single city I had never dared settle in.

“Nope. Not today, Satan,” I told the fear.

My voice sounded about as convincing as it usually did, and I hated that. I’d once had a voice that filled a room and made people stop to listen. I was fairly sure I had, anyway. But as time went by, honestly… it was getting harder to remember the girl I used to be.

I checked the little monitor on my phone out of habit, the number that lived on my arm under a patch of adhesive and told me, at all hours, exactly how close I was to fainting in a parking lot. Low… Of course it was low. Nerves burned through me like fuel, and my blood sugar always paid the bill.

A sigh left me before I dug into the glovebox, past the prepaid phone and the roll of cash I told myself I’d stop carrying one day. Then I grabbed a fun-size candy bar gone soft at the edges and ate it in two bites while sitting there in the shadow of a maximum-security prison as I told myself it counted as breakfast. Yep. Sure it did.

Sweet on my tongue, and steadier already… yay me. It was almost funny… the one thing that could kill me, low sugar, and the one thing that saved me, sugar, were the same story told two ways. Most of my life felt like that lately.

I flipped the visor mirror down and looked at Anna Vale.

Chestnut hair I’d stopped dyeing because dye was a thing people remembered. Freckles I couldn’t do anything about. Eyes that were trying very hard to belong to someone who had simply relocated for work and had no reason on earth to keep a bag packed by the door. I practiced the face. The pleasant, capable, forgettable face. The one that said I am no one, please look right past me.

I called it my professional veil. It fit better than my own name did these days, that was for sure.

“You’re a nurse,” I said to the mirror.

“You’re just a nurse, and this is just another job.” It was even true, that was the small mercy of it, at least. The lie I was living was stitched onto something real. I was a nurse. A good one, at that, if I said so myself. It was the only thing I’d managed to carry out of the wreckage of my old life intact. The one skill no fake name could ever take from me. Hands were hands. A wound was a wound. And nobody’s blood pressure cared what your driver’s license said.

That’s what I told myself. And most days, the mantra worked.

I slung my bag over my shoulder, the one holding my insulin kit, and glucose chews. And tucked at the very bottom under a paperback, the battered little Game Boy with the cracked corner I’d carried out of the first apartment and never once left behind. Stupid, sentimental thing. It didn’t even hold a charge for long anymore. But it was mine. It had been mine before I’d been anyone else’s, and there weren’t many things left I could say that about.

I was a Tetris master, and that wasn’t just a metaphor for life either. Slot the awkward piece into the gap before the stack could bury you. Clear a line, buy yourself a second, watch the next one drop faster than the last. I’d been playing that game off the screen for three years now. A new city, new name, new job, drop it in, make it fit, don’t let it reach the top. The only difference was that on the little cracked screen, when it all went wrong, I got to hit start and go again.

Real life never did come with a restart button.

I got out of the car and walked toward the fence, because Anna Vale needed the money, and the girl underneath her needed to keep moving, and both of those things had brought me here.

Once inside, they processed me like contraband. Every pocket, every pen, every excuse. And the funny thing? It was the safest I’d felt in weeks.

They took my bag apart on a steel table. A woman with forearms like a longshoreman held each of my insulin pens up to the light and made me explain them twice, then radioed someone to explain them again.

Then she got to the little handset. It did the same job as the app on my phone, reading the sensor stuck to my arm and telling me the number, which was just as well, seeing as my phone was going into a plastic tray and staying there. She turned it over twice and held it up to the light like it might be a phone wearing a disguise. So I explained that one too. It couldn’t call anybody. All it did was tell me a number, and buzz at me when that number went somewhere it shouldn’t.