Juvie (11 page)

I try to smile along with her, but my head is somewhere else, stuck a minute earlier in the conversation, wondering if I might still be able to play college ball or if any chance of that happening vanished when I got sent to juvie.

“Yeah,” I say at last. “Me too.”

By the time we get to Unit Three, the painkiller is kicking in and I can barely walk. Officer Miller leads me to my cell. She tries joking with me on the way. “Thanks for getting me the overtime,” she says. “I need the money.” I don’t say anything in response, and she pats me sympathetically on the back. I collapse on my bunk without eating anything, without brushing my teeth or my hair, without speaking to anybody, not that there’s anybody to speak to, anyway.

One of the night-shift officers comes around what must be hours later to check on me and give me another painkiller. I sit up long enough to swallow it, then collapse back onto my bunk. The last thing I hear, just before I slip under, is Cell Seven, wailing again, crying and crying, begging someone to please, please, come get her.

The drugs quit working sometime during the night — it’s impossible to say when. My eyelids flutter open, and the first thing I see, the only thing for a while, is the fluorescent bulb stuttering overhead, bathing my cell in the same eerie green as the night before. My face hurts too much for me to keep lying down, so I force myself into a seated position, cross-legged on my bunk. I pull the scratchy gray blanket around my shoulders and lean the back of my head against the cool concrete wall. I touch my swollen nose and my puffy face but can’t tell if anything has changed. I don’t have a mirror, but I’m not sure I want one, anyway. My vision turns blurry — maybe from the throbbing pain, maybe because I’m tearing up — and the walls seem to expand and contract, as if the cell itself is breathing. I wonder if I might also be suffering from a concussion.

The fuzziness clears after a while.

In school, in Mr. Turner’s biology class, we studied this famous terrible experiment from the 1950s where a scientist named Harry Harlow put infant monkeys in cages by themselves except for two fake mothers. They called them surrogates. One surrogate was made out of wire in the shape of an adult monkey. That one had a milk bottle attached. The other surrogate mom was made out of cloth but didn’t have a bottle. The baby monkeys went to the wire moms and drank the milk, but then went to the cloth moms and clung to them, desperate for any sort of warmth and physical contact. It wasn’t enough, though. They all grew up weird and withdrawn. Some of them died of loneliness. Even when the monkeys were put in cages where they could see, smell, and hear — but not touch — other monkeys, they started acting autistic, withdrawing from everything, holding on to themselves, and rocking and rocking and rocking.

Mr. Turner, who was an expert in making everybody feel like shit, also told us about these babies in Romania, the ones raised in orphanages where nobody was allowed to hold them or play with them from the time they were infants. This went on for years, during the Cold War back in the fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties. Mr. Turner said the babies grew up just like Harlow’s monkeys. They didn’t know how to express affection. They weren’t able to have what Mr. Turner called “permanent attachments.” He said a lot of them were homeless when they grew up.

So is that how it’s going to be with me? With all of us in juvie? I can’t see that they’re trying to rehabilitate anybody in here with these cold cells, and all the single-file marching we do, with our eyes on the floor, heads down, hands behind our backs. And having to ask permission to so much as go to the bathroom. And no touching unless you’re getting your ass kicked and your nose broken.

Or maybe this is all specific to me. Maybe it isn’t anything deliberate even. Maybe it’s genetic, and I’m turning into a recluse like my dad. I’ve spent countless nights camping by myself on Government Island, happy to be there alone. Maybe I’ve always had this tendency, just like Dad, but I’ve been able to ignore it until I got to juvie and they put me in this cell.

I wrap my arms around myself and hang on tighter, frightened about what might happen to me if I let go.

The unit is deathly quiet. The only sounds I hear are any I make myself, and I’m not moving. Cell Seven must have fallen asleep hours earlier, while I was passed out. Maybe the guards are asleep as well. Maybe I’m the only person awake in the entire juvie, or maybe every girl in every cell is sitting up on her bunk, rocking back and forth, the same as me.

Carla asked around, but nobody knew where to find Scuzzy and Dreadlocks.

“Their real names might be Walter and Lee,” she told me on Wednesday. “But somebody else said that wasn’t them. They said their names were, like, Reilly and something. And they haven’t been here that long. They came from Charlotte. Or maybe Charleston. And nobody’s seen them since the party.”

I didn’t know how much of Carla’s story to believe. Were these guys really so impossible to track down, or did she half-ass her search the way she half-assed most things in her life? It occurred to me that she might not actually want to be able to find them. If the police interrogated them, and they said Carla knew about the drugs, she’d be going to prison for sure.

She’d gotten off work early for another meeting with her lawyer. It was after school, and I was getting ready for basketball practice. Mom had let up on my restrictions for that and said I could ride my motorcycle to the gym, since she was working at Target that afternoon.

“Don’t you need to get Lulu from day care?” I asked Carla to keep myself from saying something else — like accusing her of lying.

“In a minute. Look, Sadie, I know you’re going to hate me for telling you this. But just listen first, OK? I’m trying to get us out of this. I told my lawyer, I asked him for more details — what happens if you tell them you sort of knew about it but I didn’t. That I was just in the car but didn’t know there were drugs or a drug deal or anything. And he said he would talk to the prosecutor’s office about that, but that probably they would just drop the charge against me. And he said the same thing again, that since you’re a juvie and all, and don’t have a prior record or anything, nothing will happen to you. Or nothing very much. But you would have to sign something, a statement or something. He doesn’t think they’ll believe that neither of us knew anything about the drugs, which is stupid, since it’s the truth. But then when you go to juvie court, they would give your statement to the juvie judge. And that’s that.”

I pulled a white T-shirt over my sports bra, and my practice jersey over that.

Carla was wringing her hands the whole time. “Well?” she asked, leaning closer on the bed. “What do you think?”

I fished through my drawer to find some socks without holes in them. I’d barely slept the past couple of nights, trying to figure out the right thing to do. Make Carla tell the truth whatever it might turn out to be? Let her go to jail no matter what? The problem with that was they could still find me guilty, too. I was the one who took the money, after all. If Carla swore that I didn’t know what was happening, though, I would definitely get off. Or mostly get off, anyway. But that meant Lulu wouldn’t have Carla for the next three or four years. It meant either Mom raised Lulu — Mom and me — or Social Services took her. It meant everybody suffered, mostly Lulu, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I’d rather spend the next ten years in jail myself than let that happen.

I sat on the bed and pulled Carla down next to me, squeezing her hands so hard it made her wince. She tried to pull them away, but I wouldn’t let her.

I looked hard into her eyes until she dropped her head. I took a deep breath and said, “OK.”

She looked back up at me. “What?”

“I said OK. I’ll do it.” It sounded like someone else speaking, a bad actor reading from a script.

“Oh, my God, Sadie. Thank you —”

I cut her off.

“But first we make sure that having this on my record won’t stop me from going to college or getting a scholarship,” I said. “And in return you’ll do whatever I say, right?”

She nodded.

“You’ll go to AA, or NA, or whatever, to stop drinking and smoking pot and everything. You’re done with all that shit.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but then just nodded again.

“And you’ll spend more time with Lulu. Not just turn on the TV when you’re home with her and let her watch stuff she shouldn’t be watching.”

Her face reddened, and I could tell it was killing her not to argue with me, even though she knew it was all true.

“And quit the Friendly’s job,” I continued. “Get a new job where your coworkers don’t all look like heroin addicts.”

I knew I was pushing it, but after what she’d gotten us into, and what she was asking me to do, I didn’t care.

“And take some classes at the community college. I don’t even care what. Just start back to school and do something with that GED. You can’t work these lousy jobs forever and raise Lulu right. You want her to be proud of you.”

I couldn’t believe how much I sounded like Mom. I also couldn’t believe I was agreeing to what Carla had asked. How many chances had we given Carla over the years to get her life together? And did I really think this time would be any different?

She whispered a final yes and wiped away some tears, and I knew all I could do was hope maybe this time really would be different. It was the closest Carla had ever come to actual jail time, to losing Lulu. If that wasn’t enough to scare her straight, nothing was.

Julie Juggins, who I’d been friends with for as long as I’d played basketball, cornered me after practice. “What the hell’s going on with you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said as I unlaced my shoes. We were the last ones in the locker room. I’d spent an extra half hour by myself practicing free throws and three-pointers. She must have taken a long shower to still be there, her hair still wet.

“Something’s going on,” she said. “You were way too intense out there today — like maybe you thought it was the play-offs and not just running drills.”

My laces got knotted, and I had to work to get them loose. I reminded myself that Julie was about the only person I knew who I was pretty sure wouldn’t get on her phone as soon as she left and text the whole rest of the world about what had happened. Plus her dad used to drink.

So I told her — about the party, the arrest, even the plan for me to take the blame.

She didn’t hesitate before telling me straight up that it was a bad idea. “You can’t save her,” Julie said. “Nobody can. You can’t make that deal with Carla. It’s just going to mess up your life, too.”

“But she’s my sister,” I said. My voice seemed to echo in the empty locker room. “She’ll go to jail.”

Julie shook her head. “
You
might go to jail,” she said. “Where you should go is to Al-Anon. That’s where my mom took me and my brother, to help us when dad got so bad. You remember when we had to live in that trailer? At Al-Anon, they tell you you have to look after yourself, and your dad or whoever has to hit bottom and then put his life back together himself, but you can’t do it for him. You can’t do it for Carla. Only Carla can.”

Julie sounded like she was making an Al-Anon commercial, which got on my nerves. I understood what she was saying, but it wasn’t like Carla was a drug addict or an alcoholic. She wasn’t a falling-down drunk like Julie’s dad had been. She just partied too much and got into trouble — and now she’d gotten me into trouble, too. It wasn’t at all the same as Julie’s dad.

“I got her to promise to go to AA and stuff,” I said. “She’s serious about making herself better.”

Julie shook her head again, only harder this time. “She’s just saying what she thinks you want to hear.”

Then she looked at me funny. “Have you told anybody else? Have you told Kevin?”

I said no. “He would flip if he knew.”

“But he’s your boyfriend,” Julie said. “Don’t you sort of have to tell him? Isn’t that in the boyfriend-girlfriend contract?”

“I don’t remember signing anything,” I said.

Julie shrugged her gym bag over her shoulder. “Well, good luck with that.”

Kevin was waiting outside in his car, next to my motorcycle. I climbed in the front seat next to him. He handed me a box. It wasn’t wrapped. “For our anniversary,” he said.

“It’s our anniversary?”

“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “What? You forgot? We started going out five months and five days ago. So it’s like our five-month–five-day anniversary.”

I tapped him on the forehead with the box before I kissed him. “God, Kevin,” I said, smiling. “You’re such a girl sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “So open it already.”

It was a scarf. The whole time we’d known each other, I’d never worn a scarf. I hated anything like that around my neck, plus I was pretty sure I’d seen his mom wearing one just like it.

I thanked him, though, and let him drape it over my neck and pull me to him again. We made out for a while until I was ready to crawl over into the backseat with him right then and there. I was actually panting. And then he stopped. It was the reverse of the other night by my house.