Juvie (5 page)

I make myself think about something else — about Lulu that morning giving me a rock, about how good and scary it felt the first night I rode my motorcycle, about that tournament last month when I had twelve assists and seven steals in the championship game — and slowly I start to feel better. I can handle this. I’ve spent plenty of nights alone, camping out on Government Island in a tent a lot smaller than this cell. Granny always said it’s our job in life to learn from everything that happens to us, so that’s what I’ll do here.

I busy myself with the sheets and blankets and military tucks and then step outside to put my underwear and socks in the locker. The girl isn’t there anymore; I assume she’s gone back to her cell. Officer Emroch sits at the guard’s desk, writing in a logbook.

I trace the hard plastic number one bolted to the outside of my cell door and take a deep breath. The air tastes stale.

So this is it. So this is home.

They brought us to the magistrate’s office after the arrest, after reading us our Miranda rights, after the pointless interrogation about who the guys were who gave us the drugs.

Carla didn’t know their names, either. Not even Scuzzy’s.

I wanted to kill her. I wanted to make her tell me what the hell happened back there at the 7-Eleven, and did she know we were going to be part of a drug deal? But I couldn’t very well ask her that right now, and I probably couldn’t kill her right then, either.

The magistrate’s office was in a small, shit-brown, wood-frame house near the train station. They had a couple of holding cells and stuck us in one after we called Mom. Carla was alternately crying and cussing at the officers, which didn’t help matters any. I kept telling her to shut up, but she was still so drunk that she tried to hit me. Then she lay down on the floor and fell asleep. There were a couple of other drunks in there with us, but they were passed out as well. I was the only one awake when Mom showed up.

“What the hell’s going on, Dave?” Mom demanded when she stormed in the door. She had Lulu with her, wide-eyed but sleepy, still in her pajamas.

The magistrate said, “Hey, Gretchen. Long time no see.” I was surprised that they knew each other. He pointed at us on the other side of the room. “They yours?”

Mom turned and just stood there for a minute, glaring. I nudged Carla with my foot and tried my best to look innocent, which should have been easy but wasn’t.

Mom turned back to the magistrate, Dave, and said something I couldn’t hear. He seemed vaguely familiar, and I thought maybe he was one of the guys Mom went out with for a while after Dad left. She did that for the first year or so, then quit. She never said why.

Dave was kind of heavy, thin on top, walrus mustache. He didn’t look anything like Dad.

Mom had put Lulu down in a chair and told her to stay, but Lulu hopped up when she saw us and pattered over to the holding cell. “Hey, Aunt Sadie. What’s wrong with Mommy? Can I come in with you guys?”

“Lulu!” Mom barked. “Over here. Now. Sit back in that chair.”

Lulu’s bottom lip quivered. She did what Mom told her.

Mom didn’t seem in any hurry to speak to me or check on Carla. She sat down at Dave’s desk. The cops who arrested us had long gone. A brown-suited deputy sat nearby, talking on his cell phone.

“So what’s the deal here, Dave?” Mom asked, loud enough now for me to hear.

Dave tugged on the sides of his mustache. “Drug bust. Undercovers got them at that 7-Eleven off Caroline Street. They sold, like, a kilo or something.”

“Pot?” Mom asked.

“Pot,” Dave confirmed.

Mom turned and glared again. “Is this true?” she called over to me. Carla was awake and struggling to sit up.

“No,” I said. “I mean, yeah, that’s what they arrested us for, but we didn’t do anything. It wasn’t even ours.”

Mom lifted her hand. “Stop right there. Don’t say anything else. I shouldn’t have asked.” She glared at Carla. I knew what she was thinking: that whatever happened must have been Carla’s fault.

She turned back to Dave. “So what do we need to do to straighten this out?”

Dave shrugged. “Can’t do anything tonight, Gretchen. They’re supposed to stay right here until tomorrow and then the older one goes to court for arraignment. She’s got priors. I’m supposed to send the younger one over to Juvie Detention until they schedule her a hearing at JDR, and they’re not in session until Thursday.”

“JDR?” Mom asked, obviously exasperated — at him for speaking in acronyms, at us, at the world. Lulu was crying now but not making any noise.

“Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court,” Dave said. “JDR.”

Mom sat back in her chair. “I’m taking them home with me tonight. I don’t want them staying here.” She pulled Lulu into her lap. “This one needs her mother.”

Carla crawled over to the toilet and vomited.

“Can’t do that,” Dave said.

Mom leaned forward again. She propped one elbow on his desk so she could lean in even closer. “Yes, you can,” she said.

They talked too low for me to hear anything for the next ten minutes. Finally, though, Dave threw up his hands. When he released us and we were filing out of the building, I heard him say to Mom that he was looking forward to their dinner.

We didn’t go directly home once we got into the car. Instead Mom drove us to the 7-Eleven on Caroline Street, the place where we’d been arrested. It must have been four in the morning by then.

“This is it?” Mom asked when we got there.

I nodded. I was in the front seat. Carla and Lulu had fallen asleep in the back. I pointed to the corner of the parking lot. “We were over there, actually.”

Mom looked. “Why?”

“The guys bugged me to park there. They wouldn’t shut up about it, so I did it so they’d hurry up and go buy their beer and we could dump them off back at the party and go home.”

Mom kept staring. “You were supposed to be at a movie. Out to dinner.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Carla just wanted to party. You know how she is.”

“And what about you?” Mom demanded, still looking at the place where we’d been arrested.

“I messed up,” I said. “I didn’t think anything would happen. Just a party.”

Now she turned to look at me. “You lied to me, Sadie.”

I didn’t say anything. What could I say? I was supposed to be the good daughter, the responsible one, the one who made her proud, the one who wasn’t any trouble, ever.

“Your sister is on probation,” Mom said, as if I was to blame for that, too. “Did you forget about that?”

Mom didn’t talk to me for the rest of the drive. Not even when we woke Carla up and dragged ourselves into the house. Mom went out on the back porch, where I was pretty sure she smoked a cigarette, even though she was supposed to have quit ages ago. Carla mumbled some stuff that I couldn’t understand and went off to her old bedroom and passed out again on her old bed. She didn’t bother to take off her clothes, though she was disgusting from the holding-cell floor and the vomit and everything else she’d been up to that night.

Lulu slept with me, although I couldn’t say I actually slept. I mostly worried about what was going to happen next. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong except be stupid enough to go out with Carla in the first place. But I had to go to JDR on Thursday. What was I going to tell Kevin? My friends? My coach?

This didn’t fit into my plans at all. I was supposed to keep playing basketball, make all-region, maybe even all-state my senior year, study my ass off and crush the SATs, finish school, land a basketball scholarship — at whatever school Kevin ended up going to for soccer. We’d be one of those couples that just worked: him doing his thing, me doing mine, but ending up together no matter what.

And out of this town forever.

I heard Mom come in off the porch. She didn’t go to bed, though. She turned on the TV, and I was pretty sure she stayed awake most of the night. So did I, sick with worry that the life I’d been so carefully building these past few years had just crashed and burned.

It’s late in the afternoon of my first day in juvie. The girl in the quilt has long since gone back inside her cell, and I’m sitting in a hard plastic chair out in the common room, sort of reading but actually just bored, when the rest of the girls come back from gym. They’re with a thirty-something white guy with an ex-military buzz cut and a melanoma tan, Officer Killduff. His khaki-and-blue looks a couple of sizes too small, probably on purpose to show off how ripped he is.

There are eight girls total. Six of them, three white and three black, look like they’re around my age. Another white girl appears to be a couple of years younger, middle-school age, and the last of the eight, a tiny Hispanic girl with big watery eyes, could be in elementary school. All wear the same red juvie jumpsuit as me.

Officer Killduff stands just inside the door with his hands on his hips as the girls shuffle over to the chairs as if they’re in shackles, the way I was earlier. Two of the black girls stop in front of me.

“That’s my chair,” one of them says.

I close my book and look around. There are plenty of empty chairs, all of them the same. My first impulse is to tell her to get another one. I don’t let girls push me around on the basketball court. You let that happen and they own you for the rest of the game. Everybody knows it’s the same in prison — at least in the movies. Maybe it’s the same in juvie.

Or maybe it’s not. Maybe the best thing to do in here is just try to get along, no matter what.

So I shift to the next chair.

“Nope,” the girl says. “That one’s hers.” She tilts her head at her friend. They could be sisters — both tall, both heavy, both with their hair in cornrows, both with cheeks so pronounced that their faces look like peaches.

I keep my mouth shut, hard as it is, and get out of that chair, too, keeping my expression as impassive as I can, as if giving up a chair is no big deal to me and I might even be doing it just because I want to.

As I sit down in a third chair, Office Killduff comes over.

“Problem here, Wanda?” he asks the first girl.

Wanda smiles. “No, sir. Just saying hello to the new girl.”

“Nell?” he asks the second girl.

Nell shakes her head.

“All right, then,” he says. “You said your hello.”

The girls grin at each other and drag their chairs over in front of the TV, right up front. I think Officer Killduff will say something to me, welcome me, maybe, or tell me not to worry about them, but he doesn’t. He just walks off. The other girls park their chairs behind Wanda and Nell, and the TV comes on as if it has a mind of its own and has been waiting for everybody to get settled. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the little Hispanic girl turn in her chair to look at me, but when I lift my head from my book, she twists back around.

Officer Killduff stands in the guard station for fifteen minutes talking to Officer Emroch, then crosses the common area and goes into Cell Seven; he stays there for a few minutes and then comes back out with the girl in the quilt, though now that I can see it better, it looks more like a giant oven mitt. She sits in a chair, sort of facing the TV and sort of just staring off at nothing. One of the other white girls, all blond and sunny, as if she’s just come back from a beach vacation, gets up and sits next to her. Even though the blond girl doesn’t say anything, the oven-mitt girl seems nervous all of a sudden, fidgeting in her chair, tapping her foot, tugging at her limp brown hair so it hides half of her face, glancing around anxiously, anywhere but at the girl beside her. Finally she gets up and goes back to her cell. The blond girl laughs and returns to the seat she was in before.

Wanda, the one who ordered me out of my chair, watches the whole thing unfold and has a sour look on her face. She whispers to her friend Nell and glares over at the sunny blond girl. Then they all go back to watching
Wheel of Fortune
.

Wanda and Nell make a point of sitting on either side of me when the guards wheel in the food cart. All the tables are shoved together, surrounded by our chairs. The oven-mitt girl comes out of her cell but sits alone, an empty chair on either side.

Dinner comes in Styrofoam boxes: some sort of meat cutlet, waxy green beans, a container of applesauce, a container of green Jell-O, and a roll. Officer Emroch sets a spork and a Dixie cup of water next to each of our boxes.