Journal
- Miss O'Brien visits Steve in jail, and she's not a happy camper. (What does make campers happy? S'Mores? Sorry to say there's none of that here.)
- Bobo looked like a thug in court, and though she's trying to separate him from Steve, it's not going so well.
- Plus she has Briggs to deal with, and he wants to connect Steve and King to make King look better. It's a mess.
- Steve asks if she thinks they'll lose. She says no, but he's not buying it.
- Steve is so scared that he feels like he's suffocating; he sees regular people outside enjoying a nice day, and he wishes he could join them.
- He realizes he's thinking like the other prisoners, telling himself he'll be found innocent. The thing is, he knows he's lying to himself.
- He thinks about his life and how it might be about to change forever.
- He can't figure out what happened to get him into this mess—not a single big thing happened in the past year to change him.
- He writes that the tricky thing about the defense portion is Briggs.
- Briggs will go first, see, which means that O'Brien needs to separate Steve from King without making King look bad, because if King looks bad, then Briggs will attack, and that won't help Steve's case.
- Steve is super depressed, and wishes he could tell Jerry to "think about all the tomorrows of your life" (17.8).