11 years on death row
11
I started hating printers in sixth grade, when Momma made us do this tutoring thing at Penn. Each week Momma said that she wasn’t gonna hear no complaining about it. I just needed to get my butt moving and go. This girl Allison who always wore a Penn sweatshirt and gold T shoes tutored me every week, against my will, and sometimes it felt like against hers too.
The same soundtrack played each time we met. The printers sang with the clicking keyboards at Huntsman Hall, like they were making a song about working and being smart, or about people who focused and had lots of money or were gonna have lots of money. Allison would try to tell me about math stuff, but I couldn’t listen to her, partly ’cause there were too many people typing, partly ’cause I hate math and never get it. She’d start with pre-algebra, ask me ’bout
x and
y, while I didn’t even get why we were talking letters instead of numbers.
I spent most of our meetings staring at the ceiling. At the beginning of each school year, navy banners hung above each wooden bay, one letter on each flag,
W-E-L-C-O-M-E. I didn’t feel welcome. I pretended for Momma, but I knew that place wasn’t mine.
I heard that print-click song again when I got my pretend summer job at Hart Inc., being some kinda printer and copy assistant. Nana found me two Goodwill suits, but that still didn’t make it a real job. My high school guidance counselor said it would help me for college. The pretend part was ’cause they didn’t pay me.
This woman Anne Allen would tell me to do things. She was tall with pretty brown curly hair and seemed kinda cool for a white lady, even though she talked about pop stars too much.
But each day she was less nice; all she did was bark orders and every email she sent me ended with
ASAP. Like
print all these documents, then three-hole punch the papers and put them in a binder ASAP, and I’d stand at the printer and finally, after years of just hearing a printer’s song, I had stuff to print. At first, I tried hard to do everything right. But each email and barked order made me realize Anne didn’t see me. She didn’t notice or care how hard I was trying.
Took me two weeks of standing at the printer to figure out Anne Allen didn’t have a pretend job. She had a real job. She got paid. She clicked keyboards and printed and made money for it. I clicked keyboards, I printed stuff too, but all for no money. So instead of letting her waste my not-pretend time, I planned out a trip to Disney World, pretending my mom was still alive and could take me.
After those two weeks, Anne Allen decided I did everything wrong. I didn’t save files to
the system the right way (what the hell is
the system); I didn’t know how to use the copy machine.
Then one day she yelled at me ’cause I just did her binders
AP, not
ASAP, and another day because I spelled her last name wrong. “Just look at this,” she said with this annoyed kind of huff, waving her misspelled name in my face. “Does this look right?” She went on waving and huffing like she couldn’t believe some pages got out of order, or I printed double-sided when she said single.
When she was yelling at me, I’d avoid her eyes and stare at her stupid long nose, thinking ’bout how much blood would gush out if I smashed my palm into it. I traced her brown ringlets as they bounced, thinking I could pull them out of her scalp, maybe take some skin too.
Anne Allen thought I was stupid, but truth is she was the stupid one. She was supposed to teach me and help me, instead of acting like all of me was worth less than one of her wrong-hole-punched papers. I wasn’t born knowing how to do the stuff she wanted. If she wasn’t gonna show me—when did she think I was going to learn?
She didn’t care if I learned or not. Didn’t care if I ever grew up to be anything.
Maybe didn’t care if I ever grew up at all. Just cared about her binders and deadlines.
After a month she told me stop printing stuff, stop making binders, she’d just get her secretary to do it. So I decided if I was gonna stop printing then I was also gonna stop coming. I quit putting detergent on the underarms of my two suits every other night. Instead, I stayed home and played games on my phone, getting high scores and big tips from the hard-to-please businesswomen who ate at my restaurants.
Anne Allen complained to my school like the Policy Patty she is, but they couldn’t hurt me. I didn’t work for her anymore and didn’t work for my school either.
My guidance counselor called it a learning experience. All that I learned is I can’t print things right.
Anne Allen crept up on me at night all sophomore summer when I was trying to sleep. She’d hang over my bed, inflated to twelve feet tall, flapping her pink glossy lips along to the sound of a printer, telling me
ASAP, then
(scoff) Never mind, I’ll do it myself (huff), then
ASAP again, then
Just look at this, does it look right, over and over. Her hair grew as she did, spilling onto my dresser and out my window. She threatened to swallow my bed, my whole room, maybe Nana’s whole house.
I learned how to stop her. I put Anne Allen in a red room with everyone else that I hated. Like my seventh-grade teacher who didn’t do anything when I had nowhere to sit in the cafeteria, or when the kids in that class started calling me hungry hippo. Like this kid Amari at school that I hated, who’d make pig noises when I walked to my locker. Like the person I can’t even look at in the room, who testified against me at my trial. Couldn’t look at him during the testimony either.
Then I tied them all up and poured gas in the room, watching their faces as they realized they were gonna die. I saved an extra surprise for Anne Allen, though. I got up in her face. Then I tore her skin away, starting with the skin at her eyeballs, digging my fingers into her sockets and peeling it back all the way down her face. I soaked up her scream, the best song ever played, her voice rising above the notes of a printer, clacking and beeping while I printed everything right. When her face was only red tissue, I lit a match at the tip of her nose, so she knew her pain wasn’t over, it had only just begun.
I got out of the burning room before flames hit the ceiling ’cause I could fly, and they could not.
I learned some more at my last job too. A week working at Dairy Queen taught me right quick that seven dollars an hour’s a pretend job too.
Copyright © 2025 by Helena Haywoode Henry. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
