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NEVER

"It's not fair"It wasn't a whine or a complaint, just a stateood was concerned As she stared out theof the Brenda T Trumbull Correctional Facility for Women, it was all she could think to say Outside, the leaves on the trees swayed lazily in the warainst her skin for exactly fifty-fivemidday recess Recess That hat the warden called it Who ever heard of a teenage girl looking forward to recess?

"It's just not fair"

Across the wide oak desk, her "therapist" s his expensive leather chair to let out the loud creak that he knew made Ariana's skin crawl Just outside the fence that encircled the grounds, about a hundred yards from where Ariana now sat, Meloni's precious Doberman, Rambo,

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barked nonstop, as always The in bark all day long, every day It was as if Meloni was trying to re, even when they weren't in session with hi forout there and feeding hi to the animal like it was a newborn baby and the apple of its father's eye Revolting So him

"What's not fair?" he asked

Ariana flicked a glance at Dr Victor Meloni, sitting there in front of his elaborately framed diplomas from Johns Hopkins and Stanford Thick, leather-bound books sat on the shelves to his right, most of which she was sure he hadn't even opened, let alone read Her lip curled at the sight of his fake tan His overly gelled salt-and-pepper hair His heavily starched blue shirt His capped teeth

Two hundred dollars a tooth, but can't spring for a pair of shoes with leather soles Ariana could ascertain everything she needed to know about a person through his or her footwear In the sixteen months she had been in residence at Brenda T Truton, DC, she had only seen Dr Meloni wear two different pairs of shoes The same exact style, one pair in black, one in brown Clearly, the ht that everyone he met would be so dazzled by the veneer of his face, they wouldn't take the time to notice his shoesBut Ariana did And they screamed white-trash-turned-scholarship-student-turned-poseur He'd probably taken this job because it meant

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he'd have the chance to torture the daughters of all the deep-pocketed classmates who had never accepted him into their inner sanctuhed in the face of their desperation

Smirked all the time

"It's not fair,the obvious Stating the point she'd made four thousand times before

"Twenty years to life," he corrected, his blue eyes taunting