Juvie (10 page)

I’ve almost forgotten the guards are there until we hit what’s probably lap twenty and Officer Killduff yells at us, “Last lap! Winner gets double time in the shower!”

“Game on,” Bad Gina rasps, pulling more speed from out of somewhere. I respond the best I can, though my legs feel like lead and I’m running seriously low on oxygen. Bad Gina stays two steps ahead through most of the final lap, but I keep pressing, hanging on at her shoulder and she knows it. Then we round the last corner, and she nearly loses control. One of her sandals flies off and she skids in her sock, giving me just enough opportunity to pass her — until she grabs the back of my jumpsuit.

She jerks me back hard and whips ahead, just beating me past Officer Killduff.

“And we have a winner,” he says, even though he must have seen Bad Gina cheat.

I grab my knees when I stop, and so does she.

“Double shower time,” Bad Gina rasps. “That’s six sweet minutes of hot water. I’d kill my own grandmother for that.”

I suppose I should count myself lucky, then. The rest of the girls crowd around us, except for the Jelly Sisters, who keep their distance. Weeze gives Bad Gina a high five, and there’s a chorus of “You go, girls” until Officer Killduff breaks up the party.

“Ten more laps for dogging it the first time,” he says. “Except for these two.” He points to Bad Gina and me. “And if I don’t see real running, we’ll have to find out how you ladies like doing wind sprints the whole rest of gym class.”

“Damn it, Sadie,” Chantrelle mutters, out of earshot of Officer Killduff. She looks genuinely dismayed. “I told you to slow it down. Now look what you done.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“Yeah, sorry,” Bad Gina adds. Weeze gives her another high five as she jogs off, but a weak one this time, and with a pained look on her pink face, either from the running she’s already done or the extra laps she now has to do.

The Jelly Sisters bring up the rear, jogging shoulder to shoulder, not stopping for anything or anybody. I have to jump back to avoid getting run over.

Bad Gina and I shoot baskets for the next few minutes as the girls plod around the gym. Officer C. Miller snags a long rebound when I miss a three-pointer that hits the back of the rim and bounces practically to midcourt. She dribbles a couple of times and launches a three-pointer of her own that banks in. I pick up the ball and stare at her for a second. She smiles and shrugs and sits back down next to Officer Killduff.

Bad Gina and I shoot some more. She says she played some before, in middle school. She knows how to dribble, and she can at least hit the backboard from the free-throw line, even if she only makes one in ten.

Finally, when the girls finish their run, Officer Killduff orders us into teams — me, Bad Gina, Weeze, and the young girl, who everybody calls Middle-School Karen, on one; the Jelly Sisters, Chantrelle, Good Gina, and the little Hispanic girl — Officer Killduff calls her Fefu — on the other.

“Hey, no fair,” Bad Gina whines — not to Officer Killduff directly but more to the gym in general. “That’s our four against their five.”

Officer Killduff looks right at her. “Everybody plays,” he says, then he throws the ball at her. I step in front and catch it.

“Ball in,” he says, and we start.

It isn’t much of a game. The Jelly Sisters mostly just stand under the basket and collect rebounds. Weeze does the same for our team. Chantrelle parks in the lane and picks at her cuticles, even though Bad Gina keeps yelling at her that she’s violating the three-second rule. Nobody else seems to know what that is, though — I’m surprised Bad Gina does — and Chantrelle ignores her.

Good Gina also knows how to play, at least a little, so she dribbles around for their team, shoots badly when I let her get off a shot, and occasionally tries to pass the ball inside to the Jellies or Chantrelle. Every now and then she passes to Fefu on the perimeter, but Fefu just looks at the ball as if it’s an exotic fruit maybe and then passes it back.

Weeze on our team stumbles into the Jelly Sisters a couple of times, not exactly fighting for rebounds, but just sort of mildly contesting them. I mostly hold on to the ball when our team has possession, which is most of the game. There’s no driving the lane with the Jellies and Weeze and Chantrelle clogging everything up in there, so Bad Gina and I stay outside and pass the ball to each other. We would include Middle-School Karen, but she’s too busy staying out of the way and chewing on her straw-colored hair.

Good Gina wears herself out running between Bad Gina and me as we keep swinging the ball back and forth waiting for an open shot, which I mostly take. It’s like playing Horse since Good Gina can’t keep up with our passes and nobody else comes out to contest anything.

Ten minutes into the game, our team is up nine to two, counting buckets by ones. I score eight of our nine, but the game is boring and I finally say so.

“This would be more interesting if we played man-to-man,” I say.

“Yeah,” Bad Gina chimes in. “Man-to-man.”

Good Gina sits down on the court. “I’m tired. I’m the only one running out here. This sucks.”

She bounces the ball to Fefu, who doesn’t even bother catching it this time, just stares at it as it bounces past.

Wanda comes out from under the goal a couple of steps. Nell follows her. “Just shut up and play,” she says to me. “You done enough new-girl bullshit for one day.”

“Yeah,” Nell echoes. “Just shut up and play.”

“Fine, then,” I snap. “And screw you.” Seeing my opening with the two of them finally out of position, I grab the ball from the floor near Fefu, dribble around them with my quick first step, and drive the baseline for a reverse layup. It feels good going up, but I haven’t counted on how quickly the Jelly Sisters can move when they want to.

They suddenly materialize
right there
under me as I come down and they sandwich me hard, almost as if they’ve been waiting for the opportunity, maybe even baiting me into the baseline move. One or the other of them, or both, knock the breath out of me, and I drop like a sack of rocks to the floor. My face hits somebody’s knee on the way down — or somebody’s knee hits my face. Either way I feel an explosion of blood out of my nose, showering the court where I fall. I hold my face and know my nose must be broken, as the spray of blood continues with each pounding beat of my heart. I feel dizzy and curl into a ball and fight the urge to vomit.

Everything is frozen for the next few seconds as I guess everybody realizes what has just happened, though my eyes are too tightly clenched shut for me to know. Then I hear Officer Killduff’s booming voice: “Grab some God damn floor!”

Eight bodies sprawl around me, as if they’ve been hit by a bomb.

Next thing I know, Officer C. Miller is kneeling next to me, pulling on blue latex gloves. Then she holds the back of my head up with one hand and a cloth on my nose with the other. “Just don’t move yet, Sadie,” she says.

“Officer Miller!” Officer Killduff barks again. “Radio for backup. Take Windas to the infirmary. The rest of these are going on lockdown.”

“You know Tarzan?”

That’s the first thing the nurse asks when C. Miller delivers me to the infirmary.

She looks about ninety, wears a faded, flower-print smock, and has a chain-smoker’s raspy voice. Her ID says
BATCH.
She scowls down at my face.

“Who?” I ask. It hurts to speak. I’m lying on an exam table, the only one they have in the cramped exam room.

“Tarzan of the jungle,” Nurse Batch says.

She shifts her examination light closer and studies up inside my nose. When she pokes at the septum, I nearly dive off the table.

“Reason I asked,” she wheezes, “is the actor that played Tarzan in the movies, long time ago, he was always falling off his vines in the middle of swinging through the jungle and kept breaking his nose. So after a while he got tired of going to the hospital every time and he would just take ahold and straighten his nose back out himself.”

I look at her to make sure she doesn’t have any ideas of doing that to me.

“It’s just cartilage,” she says. “Not like he was setting bone.”

C. Miller steps up beside Nurse Batch and peers down at me, then shudders and looks away. “It does look like it’s a little sideways, doesn’t it?” she asks.

Nurse Batch nods. “Kind of,” she says, poking. I flinch.

“Well, don’t worry,” she says to me. “I’m going to put this ice pack on to help with the swelling and the bruising, and then we can take a closer look.”

She holds up one of those crush-packs of dry ice and squeezes it several different ways to release the cold. Then just before she applies it, so quickly that I don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late, she pinches the bridge of my nose and yanks it straight.

I howl and clap my hands over my face, blind from the pain, ten times worse than when I got hit in the face by the Jelly Sisters. I let out a string of curse words and Nurse Batch yells back at me to watch my garbage mouth. Then she shoves the ice pack at me, but I push it away, roll onto my side, and finally throw up.

“What’d you do that for?” Nurse Batch yells. “Did you want a crooked nose the rest of your life? You ought to be thanking me, not horking all over my floor.”

I can’t answer. I haven’t ever heard that word before —
horking
— but that doesn’t stop me from hanging off the side of the exam table and doing it again.

I lie on the table for half an hour while Nurse Batch calls for a janitor to come clean up the mess, my head pounding with every little movement.

Twice I hear C. Miller ask Nurse Batch if she’s going to give me anything for pain, and twice Nurse Batch says she’ll get to it when she has time — though she doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything besides talking in a low voice with the janitor once he shows up.

“Hang in there,” C. Miller says to me.

My face hurts too much for me to say anything back. Besides, my voice sounds too strange with these cotton balls sprayed with Afrin shoved up in my nostrils, which Nurse Batch put in after she straightened the cartilage.

The janitor finally starts mopping the floor, while Nurse Batch unlocks a cabinet and shakes a couple of pills out of a large white bottle.

“My shift’s over in an hour, and there won’t be nobody in the infirmary to watch you overnight,” Nurse Batch says when she comes back over to the examination table. “You’ll have to go back to your unit. There’s a shower through that door there. You can shower off all that blood and change your clothes first. And you can take one of these. The officer will give you another later, about midnight.”

She hands me a white pill and a Dixie cup of water. I look at her dully.

“It’s for the pain,” she says. “You
are
in pain, aren’t you? The guard said you were.”

I nod, wanting to ask her why she didn’t give it to me an hour earlier, when I first came in, but probably I’ve already asked more questions than you can usually get away with in juvie. Plus I don’t want to make her mad and have her change her mind about the painkillers.

C. Miller helps me over to the shower. “It’s on a three-minute timer,” she says. A steady river of blood washes off my face and swirls down the half-blocked drain. It mixes with my tears. I don’t know whether they’re from the pain or from the ordeal of the past hour. C. Miller takes pity on me when the water cuts off and turns it back on for another three minutes. I pull the cotton balls out of my nostrils and shudder to see the trail of thick, black-red slime that comes with them.

When I get out and towel off, I catch sight of my reflection for the first time — and burst into more tears. Already my face is puffy, my nose is green and purple, and I have the start of two black eyes. I know the swelling will go away and the bruises will fade over time, but the longer I stare in the mirror, the more I think that even if they suddenly let me out of juvie, even if this was a giant mistake, a big misunderstanding, even if Carla confesses and I could go back to high school tomorrow and see Kevin — even if all that happened, he would probably take one look at me and run the other way.

I crumple against the sink below the mirror, sobbing and feeling sorry for myself, until Nurse Batch grabs my arm and pulls me away and tells me to knock it off. She shoves a pile of clean clothes at me and says, “Give it a rest already. You think you’re the first girl to get her nose broken in here? Don’t worry. It’ll grow back straight. Probably.”

“I know you,” C. Miller says as we walk back to Unit Three. “From before here. I just figured it out.”

“How?” I ask, surprised that she’s speaking to me. Guards aren’t supposed to speak to inmates. Not like this, anyway.

“You went to Mountain View, right? Played basketball? Started when you were like maybe a freshman, three or four years ago?”

I look at C. Miller again. My face still hurts so bad I don’t want to talk, even with the painkiller. I make myself anyway. “Eighth grade,” I say. “They let me play even though I was still in middle school.”

“I played against you one time,” she says. “When I was a senior at Brooke Point. You guys killed us. Y’all had this tall, skinny girl playing center. I remember you had about fifty assists, feeding it to her under the basket. She camped out all night.”

“That was Julie Juggins,” I say. “She was eighth grade, too. We had a good team that year. The rest were juniors and seniors. Two of them are playing college ball now.”

C. Miller pauses to say something in her walkie-talkie. A door buzzes and clicks and swings open, and we keep walking down the corridor that connects the administrative offices with the incarceration units, neither of us in a particular hurry.

“Coach had me playing point guard,” she says, picking up where she left off. “But really I should have been shooting guard. I never got enough shots. We could have been a lot better if we’d had a natural point guard and Coach had let me shoot more. Bet I could have got on somebody’s radar, got a scholarship.”

“That sucks,” I say.

We reach another door and stop. C. Miller lifts her walkie-talkie again but doesn’t press the talk button right away. She looks at me in my red jumpsuit and handcuffs, with my swollen nose and black eyes and rat’s nest hair. Then she sighs and says, “Sometimes I wish I was still in high school.”