MidReal Story
Hidden Shadows: Uncovering the Facility's Dark Secret
Scenario: 2 lesbian couple who just go out jail and went into this program to help troubled kid get back on track. But the facility is hiding a dark secret.
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I was a criminal.
I was a felon.
I was an ex-con.
But I was also a mentor.
And I was going to make a difference in the life of a troubled teen.
I had been out of prison for six months, and I had been dating Sarah for four of those months.
We met at the halfway house where I lived after my release, and we hit it off right away.
She was beautiful, with long blonde hair and big blue eyes, and she was sweet and kind and compassionate.
She also had a great sense of humor, and she made me laugh all the time.
We had so much in common, it was like we were meant to be together, and we fell in love quickly.
Sarah was also an ex-con, but she had been out of prison for three years, and she had turned her life around completely.
She had gone to college while she was incarcerated, earning her degree in social work, and she worked as a counselor at the halfway house where we met.
I was a mentor at the halfway house, working with a troubled teen named Mark Thompson.
He was sixteen years old, and he was on probation after getting caught breaking into cars and stealing things.
Mark’s parents were both in prison, and he lived with his older brother and his girlfriend.
He wasn’t happy about being on probation, but he was doing what he was supposed to do, and he showed up for our weekly meetings on time and did his homework assignments.
I liked him, and I thought he was a good kid, but he didn’t trust me yet.
I didn’t blame him, either.
I had been in prison for eleven out of the past seventeen years, and I had made a lot of mistakes in my life.
But this time, I wasn’t going to screw up again.
I didn’t want to go back to prison ever again, and I was going to do whatever it took to stay out of trouble.
It was a lot harder than it sounded, though.
I had been in prison for so long that I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it on the outside.
The only thing that kept me going was the thought of seeing Sarah every day.
She made me want to be a better person, and I knew that I could do it if she was by my side.
I looked at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth one morning and smiled.
It was hard to believe that I had been out of prison for six months already.
Three years before that, when I was released from my last stint in prison, I swore that I would never go back there again.
I had been in and out of prison for most of my life—at first as a juvenile, then as an adult—but this time was different.
This time, I had someone who believed in me and who supported me, and I wasn’t going to let her down.
I had always been a screw-up, but this time was going to be different.
This time, I was going to make something of myself, and I was going to be somebody.
I looked down at my reflection in the sink and splashed my face with cold water before toweling myself off.
I was thirty-four years old, with short black hair and an athletic build, and I knew that a lot of people wouldn’t give me a second chance after everything that I had done in my past.
But I also knew that Sarah believed in me, and that’s all that really mattered.
She loved me despite my faults, and she made me feel like a real person instead of a loser or a criminal.
I loved her more than anything else in the world, and I would do anything to make her happy.
The sound of the front door opening interrupted my thoughts, so I rinsed off my toothbrush and put it away before heading into the living room to greet Sarah.
“I have to go to work earlier this morning,” she said as I poured myself a cup of coffee in the kitchen area next to the living room.
“Somebody called in sick, so I have to cover their shift.” She sighed and ran a hand through her long blonde hair.
“I might even have to work late tonight too, so I don’t know when I’ll be home.”
“That’s fine,” I said with a smile as I sat down at the small table and took a sip of my coffee.
“I’ll just hang out here with Mark after he gets out of school.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?”
she asked as she grabbed her purse off the counter and headed for the front door.
“You don’t have to stay here with him all afternoon if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said as I stood up and walked over to her so that I could give her a kiss goodbye.
“I like hanging out with him.”
“Okay,” she said as she smiled and kissed me back.
“I’ll see you later then.”
“Bye.” I watched her leave before I sat down at the table again and finished my coffee.
I thought about what she had said as I got up from the table and put my cup away in the sink.
Even though I was an ex-con, I had been hired by a local construction company after I got out of prison because I had experience working on a crew while I was on work release one time (even though I was fired from that job for using drugs on the job site).
Since then, I worked hard to prove myself to my new boss—and to prove myself to Sarah—and I had been promoted to supervisor after two months on the job.
It was only a small construction company, but it was a start, and I was happy to have a good job even though I knew it wouldn’t last forever.
I heard the sound of a car horn honking outside, so I turned on my phone and checked for messages before I walked to the door and grabbed my keys off the small table by the entrance.
Mark was already sitting in the passenger seat of his brother’s car when I walked outside and climbed into the driver’s seat, and we drove to his school in silence after that, with him listening to his headphones while he looked out the window at all the houses we passed along the way.
After we got to his school and he got out of the car, he turned back around and looked at me as he closed the door behind him.
It was also during this time that Sarah had also met a mentor who had given her a new dream to look forward to that she talked about all the time now—but she never told me what it was since she said that it was a secret that she only shared with her mentor, even though she talked about it like she would have never accomplished anything without their help.
She had always been a good counselor (despite not having any formal training other than going to some meetings with other ex-convicts who had been through halfway houses as part of her probation after she got out of prison), but it was like she was a different person now that she had met her mentor—and it was like she was a different person around me, too; like she had grown up a lot while she was away and knew what she wanted now and was determined to get it no matter what it cost her or what she had to do to get it.
I thought about my relationship with Sarah on my way to work that morning.
Sarah and I had been together for almost a year now, even though we had both only been out of prison for a few months.
It was like we had known each other our whole lives, though, because we could both relate to each other in ways that we couldn’t relate to anyone else.
Sarah knew what it was like to be on drugs and go through withdrawal after she got clean in prison, just like I did—and she knew what it was like to be in a gang, too.
The only difference between us was that she had never been arrested for anything until her last time in prison, even though she told me about all the other things that she had done.
She also knew what it was like to not have anywhere to go or anyone who cared about you when you were released from prison because all your friends or family members either abandoned you or were still in prison themselves.
We also both wanted to make something better of ourselves even though we had fucked up every other time that we had tried—so far.
Sarah told me all the time that I could do anything that I wanted as long as I put my mind to it and worked hard enough—that I could even become president if I wanted to (even though I didn’t think anyone would ever vote for an ex-con like me no matter how much I changed my life around).
Even though I knew that I wasn’t very smart, I also knew that I was capable of doing anything that I wanted when I put my mind to it because people always told me how smart I was when I was growing up—even when I was failing all my classes in school just because I didn’t want to do the work—and Sarah was the only person who ever believed in me enough to give me a chance to prove myself.
That’s why I loved her so much, even though I never told her because I didn’t know how.
“Are you okay?”
