In Time I Dream About You

In Time I Dream About You

By Gene Gant

Gavin Goode, a promising high school athlete with good grades, forfeited his future when he joined a brutal street gang called the Cold Bloods. The gang’s leader, Apache, discovered Gavin is gay and framed him for murder. Now in prison, Gavin faces rape and abuse on a daily basis as gang members there attempt to break him. When his father is critically injured and Gavin reaches his lowest point, a mysterious ally appears. Cato is much more than the guard he seems. He has come from the future, and he possesses the technology to undo everything that’s gone wrong in Gavin’s life.

But meddling in the timeline has dire consequences, and Gavin faces an impossible decision: sacrifice himself and his father, or let thousands of innocents die instead.

Table of Contents

Blurb

Author’s Note

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

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By Gene Gant

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Copyright

Author’s Note

IN FICTION, writers inevitably take liberties with reality, starting with the story itself. For the sake of the tale, we may rearrange whole geographies to insert made-up towns, populate historical events with people who never existed, send human explorers to the far side of the universe, or give our main characters next-door neighbors who are fairies, and lovers who are werewolves.

In this story, I’ve taken many liberties that were necessary to the plot. The most obvious is the notion of time travel, but there are others. The state of Michigan, for instance, has historically displayed a horrendous disregard for the safety of its juvenile offenders by housing them with adult inmates. The state faced lawsuits filed by teenage prisoners who alleged they were raped and prostituted by adult prisoners as well as correctional officers. They further alleged that when they reported these assaults, state officials punished the victims with solitary confinement.

Part of the story focuses on the actions of teenage gang members. The presence of adult inmates would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for the gang members to carry out their plan of retaliation, which is a crucial element of the plot. I therefore set the story in an entirely fictional facility established for the specific purpose of keeping underage offenders separate from their adult counterparts. This makes the Michigan government appear far more humane toward its teenage prisoners than its history would suggest.

Policy regarding the treatment of teenage offenders varies across the world. I urge you, dear reader, to be aware of the policy in your locality. If we, as a society, punish convicts by subjecting them to torturous criminal acts, what does that make us?

Chapter 1

DO OTHER guys dream of romance?

I used to wonder about that sometimes. See, I started dreaming about love and stuff when I was eight, way before I even knew I was gay. Around that time, I obsessed over the story of Cinderella. Seriously. I loved reading it. I loved watching the various movie versions of it, from the 1965 Rogers and Hammerstein’s TV musical adaptation to the latest Disney live-action remake. And I longed for that kind of fairy-tale love in my own life. My daydreams about being romanced and swept away into a musical happily-ever-after all featured a prince, not a princess, which should have tipped me off by third grade as to just what kind of boy I was.

Not that I was effeminate or anything growing up, and there’s nothing wrong with a guy being effeminate in my opinion. It just wasn’t me. I wasn’t into dolls, fancy gowns, Easy-Bake Ovens, unicorns, tiaras, and such. I liked rough-and-tumble play—tackle football, soccer, wrestling—and my favorite toys were helmets, plastic grenades, and realistic-looking machine guns. I wanted to be a soldier when I grew up. Yet I was acutely aware that the group of boys I called my friends wouldn’t respond positively upon learning I wanted a handsome prince to put his arms around my waist and dance me away into the moonlight. So I kept my dreams secret, and in my mind, that kept them a possible future reality.

Yeah.

But the possible doesn’t necessarily become the actual. Maybe dreaming of romance is something only white girls in rich suburbs are meant to do, not a black guy growing up in the stark, decaying streets of Detroit.

I’m not living in Detroit now. Almost a year ago, at fifteen, I got arrested, tried as an adult, convicted, and sent upstate to a prison tucked away deep in the thick Michigan woodland, the Escanaba House of Corrections. It’s more commonly known as the Escanaba House of Hell.

I don’t dream of romance anymore.

DR. BURNS curled her lip at me, an open show of contempt. Gavin Goode, you have secondary syphilis.

Okay. I guess that explained the weird, splotchy rash on my palms and the soles of my feet, the condition that brought me to the infirmary on this occasion. Now what?

A small, slender middle-aged African American woman with a curly Afro and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen, Dr. Burns looked as if she should have been teaching a kindergarten class or leading a Girl Scout troop. But she never smiled, at least not at me. Most inmates only saw her once a year, for routine physicals. My visits with her were much more frequent, something neither of us desired.

I’m ordering antibiotics for you. You’ll get a shot today, and then one more shot down the line. That should fix you up. I need the name of the person or persons you had sex with so I can make sure they’re tested and, if necessary, treated.

Well shit, Doc, I replied, getting more pissed by the second. It’s gotta be one of the usual suspects. I gave you a list the last time I was in here, which had pretty much the same names as the list I gave you the time before that. Pick somebody. Hell, just call in every sucker on the list.

She sneered again as she grabbed up her clipboard and jotted something down on the notepad there. I was sitting on the exam table in nothing but my white boxers. My nearly hairless brown legs looked skinny even to me. The room felt cold as hell and smelled of Pine Sol and rubbing alcohol.

When Dr. Burns finished writing, she stepped past the guard—at least one guard was always present in the examination room when an inmate was there—and handed the clipboard to the nurse waiting in the hall. Then Dr. Burns walked in a wide arc as she moved toward the desk at the back of the room, keeping herself distant as if the air around me was contaminated or something. Her laptop was open on the desk. She sat down and started typing, no doubt updating my prison records.

You’re determined to break the rules, Gavin, she said as she typed. This is the third time in seven months you’ve come in here with an STD.

It’s good to know somebody’s keeping score, Doc, I said.

Don’t get flip with me, she snapped. I hate that smartass attitude of yours. You’re in enough trouble as it is, young man. She was hitting the keys hard now, pop pop pop like kernels of corn in sizzling oil, a sure sign of her irritation. Regulations state there is to be no sexual contact between inmates.

I nodded solemnly. Maybe you should tell that to Ross Hendricks and Deshaun Timmons and Malcolm Whiteside and the guys they run with. They’re the ones who keep sexually contacting me when I don’t want to be sexually contacted.

Dr. Burns didn’t turn to me. She kept her eyes glued to her computer screen as she continued typing. Don’t give me that again. The warden’s office investigated your allegations of rape and found no evidence that any such assaults occurred.

"By ‘investigated’ do you mean when the officer sat me down with the other guys in a cozy little room, and the officer asked the other guys, ‘Did you rape this kid?’ and they all said, ‘Hell no!’ and the case was closed? Is that what you call an investigation?" I was teetering on the edge of the table now, glaring at her, my hands clenched into trembling fists.

You claim multiple assaults but can’t produce even one witness to any of them. I examined you myself after most of the incidents you reported. I never found a single injury consistent with sexual assault.

I had black eyes! Busted lips! A cracked rib! Bruises on my fucking neck from being choked! A torn-up, bloody butthole! Swelling all over my scalp from having my head banged against the floor! What do the bastards have to do for you to get it, woman? Burn a brand on my ass that says ‘Property of the boys in cell block E’?

All the injuries I saw were consistent with fighting, which, according to your records, is partly what landed you at Escanaba in the first place. You’ve had plenty of fights since you got here, many of which you started, including the one on your intake day when you tried to steal another boy’s shoes—

"Those shoes were mine! I was trying to get ’em back after the dude decided they’d look better on his feet and took ’em from me. Jesus, how many times do I have to explain that?"

It’s always your word against someone else’s, isn’t it, Gavin? You’re trouble. Always have been, always will be.

Crazy bitch…!

I jumped off the exam table and stood facing Dr. Burns. I had no intention of attacking her. Swear to God. My knees were scraped, black and red hashtags from where two of my three cellies attacked me in the showers yesterday and dragged me across the floor. I was only going to point out the new injuries to her, but the guard obviously didn’t see it that way. Before I could make another move, the man—big, muscular, about five inches taller than me—twisted my right arm up behind my back and slammed me facedown on the exam table. Despite the padded surface, the blow hurt enough to make me squeal.

I’m notifying the warden that you violated the no-sexual-contact regulation again, and that you also refused to give me the name of your sexual partner. I’m ordering you into isolation for the next seven days. That will allow time to make sure your infection has cleared before you return to gen pop. Dr. Burns didn’t even turn around to see what all the commotion at the exam table was about. Of course, your time in isolation on medical orders doesn’t count toward any time you must serve for violation of regulations. You’ll be taken to isolation directly from here. Guard, hold him down until the nurse comes in to administer his medication. After that, please escort him to solitary.

The guard was doing a pretty good job. He kept my arm bent behind my back, his forearm across my shoulders to press my body to the table, leaning on me with all his considerable weight. I could barely get air into my lungs, let alone break free.

Dr. Burns closed her laptop and stood up. By the way, I ran an HIV test on you and it came back negative. With the laptop in hand, she headed for the door, again giving me a wide berth. Since you insist on remaining sexually active while in custody, I’m going to have you take an HIV test every six weeks going forward. You’ve been lucky so far, Gavin, but sooner or later, everyone’s luck runs out. Think about that the next time you decide to let your filthy urges get the better of you.

Fuck you very much, Doc,