"AM I a terrible person?" Patrick looked into the reflective polished steel, shifting his head from side to side until he could easily find his eyes in the rounded surface, reflecting his world in a fish eye. "No, it will be okay, I'm not so bad. Pretty sure."
And he wasn't so bad, just had a bad relationship with circumstance. And that's the kind of relationship that gets you put in prison. Today was Patrick's first day in prison, and I'm sure it's going to be just fine.
He'd always been pretty good at being just fine, but no better. He'd managed the music store in the mall until it closed, he'd been a maitre d', worked in a call center, and he'd been at the bank for about 8 months until everything went left. He hadn't been a successful man, but he was confident. He'd always had a great way with women, was loved by their parents, was popular, and had never really had to work too hard for things to be alright. Had he made some mistakes? Well sure, a first day in prison will attest to that. But was he actually bad? No, he probably wasn't.
When he'd first understood that there was a chance he'd go to prison, he hadn't been afraid. There wasn't a lot going on his life, and he didn't think prison would have too detrimental an impact in the long run. In fact, he was a pretty athletic guy and he thought the time to focus on his health and having the time to work out a lot might be really beneficial. Of course he'd heard about the violence inside and the aggressive social atmosphere, but as he'd been most of his life, he was confident.
When he'd gone through processing and was escorted to his cell he still felt pretty good. The correction officer didn't seem to be a big talker and had shut down Patrick's attempts to make small talk with annoyance. walked him past a cell and pointed inside, and kept walking; Patrick paused.
"In here?"