Juvie (6 page)

Then Officer Killduff materializes from somewhere, standing over us. “Bow your heads,” he says, and everybody bows over their food as he says a rushed grace: “Lord, please bless this food that you have set before us so that it may nourish our bodies so that we may better serve thee. Amen.”

My spork bends when I try to cut a bite of the meat.

“You can’t eat it that way,” says Wanda in an overly helpful voice. “You’ll break your spork trying to cut it. You just have to stab it in the middle and lift the whole thing up.” She nods at her friend. “Show her, Nell.”

Nell shows me.

I take a sporkful of green beans instead, but Wanda interrupts me before I can bring it to my mouth. “You know where the food comes from, don’t you?”

“No,” I say, my spork suspended over my Styrofoam box. A bean drops.

“The Correctional. That’s a mile from here, through the woods. That’s the adult jail. They got inmates over there that work in their kitchen. They make all the food, and the guards and the jail trustees drive it over to us in their food truck.”

“Interesting,” I say.

“Yeah, right?” Wanda says. “And you know what they do to it first. . . .” She trails off.

Nell nods. “I’ve seen stuff, too,” she says. “You don’t even want to know.” It’s the first time I’ve heard her speak.

I know they’re just jerking me around. I
know
it. But still . . . I look hard at my beans, imagine the worst, and dump them back in the box. I pick up the applesauce container; at least it has a sealed lid.

“I’d think about that one, too,” Wanda says. “I’ve seen holes poked in some of those. Especially the applesauce. And the Jell-O, too. And I’ve seen some things once I opened them up, too, I wished I’d never seen.”

“Me too,” says Nell.

“How about the water?” I ask.

“Good water here,” Wanda says. “I wouldn’t worry about that. You drink all the water you want around here. I think it must come from a well or something. A real deep well.”

Nell reaches over with her spork to spear my meat cutlet. She’s already eaten hers. “I guess if you’re not going to . . .” she says, trailing off again.

Wanda helps herself to my beans. Both check to make sure the guards aren’t looking before they dive in for the rest of my food — and half the food in the boxes of a couple of the other girls. Nell gets my applesauce; Wanda takes the Jell-O. I do end up eating the roll but make sure to chew each bite twenty times before I swallow.

One more thing happens — so fast I almost miss it. The sunny blond girl has been sitting on the other side of Wanda during dinner, though they practically have their backs turned on each other the whole time we eat. At one point, while the sunny blond girl is talking to someone, Wanda slips the girl’s spork into her lap, then lets it drop quietly to the floor.

Nell breaks into a coughing fit that catches everybody’s attention — the oldest, dumbest trick in the world, so of course I fall for it, too. When she stops, I look back down on the floor and the sunny blond girl’s spork is gone.

Officer Emroch comes out with a big gray trash bag shortly after that, and one by one we shove our Styrofoam boxes in — everything except our sporks.

The blond girl’s eyes widen as she holds her empty Styrofoam box — she looks as frightened as the little Hispanic girl — and she frantically checks all around, in the box, in her lap, on the floor, under the tables. When Officer Emroch gets to her, she has no choice but to throw away the Styrofoam box, though.

Officer Emroch brings the trash bag over to the guard station and comes back with a Tupperware container. “Spork count,” she says.

Wanda drops hers in first and says, “One.”

Nell is two, I’m three, and the count continues around the table, though Officer Emroch skips the oven-mitt girl, who was never issued a spork and had to eat with her hands. The sunny blond girl freezes when Officer Emroch gets around to her. She’s the last girl. She doesn’t look sunny anymore.

“Spork count,” Officer Emroch says again.

The girl’s lips barely move as she mutters, “Can’t find it.”

“Say what?” Officer Emroch asks.

“It was just right here,” the girl says. “I don’t know what happened to it. Can I check back in my box? Maybe it got in there and I missed it. Maybe it’s in the trash bag.”

“Officer Killduff !” Officer Emroch shouts. “Can you bring over the trash bag?”

Officer Killduff comes out of the guard room and gives her a look that I’m pretty sure means that fetching trash bags is Officer Emroch’s job, not his.

Officer Emroch corrects herself. “I mean, can you come over here while I get the trash bag?”

A minute later, Sunny Blond Girl has her arms deep in the trash, pulling out every Styrofoam box, every Dixie cup, every applesauce container, every Jell-O cup. She feels through the soggy leftovers that spilled out and slid to the bottom of the trash bag. She starts crying. “I know it was right by me. I didn’t do anything with it.”

Officer Emroch takes away the trash again. Officer Killduff looms over the girl. He seems to have gotten taller, larger.

“I didn’t do anything with it!” the girl says, shouting now. “I didn’t do anything with it!” She keeps repeating herself, as if saying the same thing enough times will convince the guards.

Officer Killduff grabs the back of her chair and drags it away from the table. “Shut it, Gina,” he snarls. He turns to the rest of us. “Grab some floor.”

All the girls immediately drop from their chairs and lie facedown on the floor. I follow them.

“Officer Emroch,” he says, “take this one to her cell for a full-body search. Once you’re done, if she’s clean, come back for the next one.” As soon as they leave, he pulls a chair to the middle of the room and sits in it, boots planted wide apart, elbows on his knees, glaring.

I keep my cheek on the floor. My stomach rumbles from hunger — I missed lunch, obviously skipped most of dinner, haven’t eaten anything all day except that one lousy roll and a bite of Lulu’s waffle. I’m lying there, wishing I hadn’t fallen for Wanda and Nell’s stupid ploy to get my food, and that’s when I see the missing spork, several feet away under the game shelf, where Wanda must have kicked it during Nell’s phony coughing fit.

“You all know how this works,” Officer Killduff says. “Every one of you gets a full-body. That spork doesn’t show up, it’s lockdown for a week. That’s twenty-three out of twenty-four hours a day in your cell, which is fine by me because it means less work for me. I sit in the guard room eating chocolate. You all remember chocolate?”

He stands up again and paces around us. “But I want that spork. And I will have that spork. One of you — Gina in there, in her cell getting the full-body right now, or else one of you —
will
give me that spork.”

The Hispanic girl whimpers. Soon she’s crying, practically sobbing.

“Officer Killduff,” I say.

He stops pacing.

“Who said that?”

I signal with my hand from where I’m lying halfway under a table. “Sadie Windas.”

“Windas,” he repeats, as if he’s surprised there’s someone here by that name.

Wanda grabs my arm, digging her chubby fingers into my bicep. I shake her off.

I point. “It’s over there. Under the shelf over there.”

“And you know this how?” Officer Killduff demands.

“I can see it,” I say.

He goes to the game shelf, bends down, and feels around until he finds the dirty spork.

He studies it for what seems like five minutes, as if he’s looking for fingerprints.

He shouts at us —“Stand!”— and all the girls jump to their feet, arms behind their backs, eyes down.

“Grab a door!” he shouts again, and the girls all hurry to their cells — walking quickly, careful not to run. Once I’m in my cell, I sit on my bunk and wait, breathless, wondering what’s next. But what comes next is the obvious thing: Officer Killduff slowly, deliberately, walking the perimeter of the common area, stopping at every cell and locking every door.

My cell is his last. He doesn’t lock me in right away, though. He steps inside and just stands there staring down at me. I’m still sitting on my bunk, back against the wall.

“You saw how that spork got there?”

“No, sir,” I say, which is technically true. I have no idea why Wanda took it, or kicked it across the room, other than to get Sunny Blond Girl in trouble, but I’m not about to tell Officer Killduff anything.

I think I’ll get a full-on interrogation, but that’s it. Officer Killduff leaves without another word.

My cell door makes a doom sound when he slams it shut as he leaves. I know he must be locking me in, too, but I can’t hear anything else because of the echo, which goes on for a long, long time.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that it always seems to be three a.m. when you’re having a dark night of the soul, and I guess it’s probably true, except that when you’re in your juvie cell, you can’t ever know what time it is. You’ve got no watch or cell phone to check, no windows to see the stars or the moon or the sunrise or the sky grow darker or lighter. You don’t have any clocks on your wall or your computer or TV or microwave or stove to tell you the time
all
the time. To force you to think about what you’re late for or early for, or how little time you have left, or how long you have to wait for something, like 0600, when they finally are supposed to let you out of your cell for breakfast. In juvie you lose all sense of time because you can’t sleep and because of your dirty, dull fluorescent light that just keeps stuttering overhead and never ever goes out, ever.

At one point during the lockdown, I start counting to myself and don’t stop until I get to ten thousand and it still doesn’t seem as if any time has passed. At another point, I hear someone crying in another cell, on and on and on, crying that gets so hard it turns into a wracking cough that also goes on and on and on. Other girls yell at the crying girl to shut up, and keep yelling until a night guard threatens to cut off the air-conditioning. But the girl keeps crying. My heart aches for her. I want to rescue her from her cell and bring her into mine, wrap her in one of my blankets, let her sleep on my floor, or sleep with me, or take my bunk and I’ll sit up and watch over her if it will help, if it will stop her grief or loneliness or whatever it is, stop her crying.

And then, finally — who knows when? — she stops. But now, in the silence, I find myself crying, too — only quietly, tears dampening my blanket until I think I’m going to have to scream, too. I miss my mom so much, and Lulu, and Carla, and Granny, and even Dad, and my boyfriend — my
ex
-boyfriend — my sorry ex-boyfriend, who wouldn’t stand up to his parents when they told him we couldn’t go out anymore after they found out I got arrested.

Apparently Kevin had never heard of Romeo and Juliet and how his parents trying to keep us apart was supposed to make him want to be with me even more, and how he was supposed to sneak out of his house and come over to mine and throw pebbles at my window and say, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Sadie is the sun. . . .”

I get up. I measure my cell in the number of juvie-issue sandal steps it takes to walk from the bed to the door and from one wall to the other. I wash my face and let it drip-dry because the guards didn’t give me a towel and the toilet paper is so thin it shreds as soon as I touch it with my wet hands. I lay my blankets on the floor and do all the yoga poses I can remember from some sessions we had in gym class one time. I do push-ups until I can’t lift myself off the floor or feel my arms. I stand flat against one wall and stare at the other to see if I can unfocus my eyes enough to see any patterns in the green concrete blocks. I stare at my arms, wondering if it’s the light reflecting off the green walls that makes my skin take on a sickly green pallor.

I lie down on my bunk again and pull my blanket over my head but can’t breathe. I try lying on my stomach, but the shape of the mattress with its pillowed end makes that impossible, so I lie the other way. That doesn’t work, either. I shut my eyes and pretend I’m in my bedroom at home; or having a sleepover with Lulu, squeezed into bed with her and a dozen stuffed dogs; or in my sleeping bag camping out on Government Island.

You can sit in a room by yourself for hours, but the minute someone tells you you aren’t allowed to leave, all you can think about is how badly, how desperately, you want out.

Even worse is that after a while — hours into not sleeping, hours into not being able to turn off your brain — you start playing those videos in your head again from a month ago when everything went wrong. You see a million things you’d do differently if you had the chance, but it’s a kind of torture to keep thinking about it, because you’re stuck where you are and there’s nothing you can do to fix anything now.

My first night in juvie, my dark night of the soul, finally ends after thirteen hours of lockdown. I wake up on the cold concrete floor of my cell, no idea where I am at first, or how long I’ve been here, or what’s happening. There’s a lot of noise. Incomprehensible shouting and banging. Then the heavy click of a lock, and the door creaking open, and someone stepping inside, saying, “Well
that
looks comfortable.” A new guard is standing over me. She looks vaguely familiar — not a guard I’ve seen before in juvie, but someone I might know from somewhere else. She can’t be more than four or five years older than me. She’s about my size, with her hair in tight cornrows like Wanda’s and Nell’s. Her name tag says
C. MILLER
. The uniform doesn’t fit her very well.

“O-six-hundred,” she says. “Breakfast.” She drops a small hand towel on the edge of the stainless-steel sink, looks at me hard for a second, as if she maybe recognizes me from somewhere, too, and then leaves.

I drag myself up and can’t figure out why my arms are so sore until I remember the shackles, and the push-ups, and Wanda’s fingers clamping down on me when I told Officer Killduff where he could find the missing spork.

There’s no mirror in the cell, so I just assume I look terrible. Not that it will matter in here. Nobody’s wearing makeup, or doing much with their hair, or shaving their legs, or plucking their eyebrows, or getting their nails done.