Juvie (13 page)

“Carla wasn’t going to let her, but Lulu got hysterical and your sister caved in the way she always does,” Mom says. “I told Carla to at least put them in a plastic grocery bag since they’re so dirty and smelly. Lulu doesn’t seem to mind, though. I’m going to wash them next time she’s over here.”

“Why don’t you give her one of my jerseys?” I ask. “I bet she’d like something like that, and it would be more comfortable. And wouldn’t smell as bad.”

We talk like that for a while, about nothing, since I can’t tell her what’s really going on with me and since she probably can’t tell me what’s really going on with her or Carla or Lulu.

Good Gina takes my phone when I hang up. Chantrelle and Nell are still chatting away on the other two phones, and the other girls, including Cell Seven in her suicide pad, are waiting their turns. The only empty seat is at a table with Bad Gina and Weeze, about the last place I want to sit, but I don’t have a choice. I take my time walking over, hoping another seat opens up at another table.

“First call home?” Bad Gina asks.

I nod, surprised she noticed.

“Sucks,” she says. “First time I got to call home, I bawled worse than Cell Seven. Girls were threatening to beat
me
up if I didn’t stop. I got so homesick, I threw up in my cell. Guards made me clean it up myself.”

“Lovely,” I say.

She grins her sunny grin. “I know, right?”

Somebody slams a handset down on its phone hook, and we all turn to look. Good Gina is banging her forehead against the wall next to one of the phones, crying.

“You know why she’s crying, don’t you?” Bad Gina asks.

I shake my head.

“It’s pretty sad,” she says with an odd laugh that isn’t quite a laugh. “She keeps calling her boyfriend, but he won’t accept the charges. I guess she doesn’t have any money in her phone account, so she has to call collect. I’ve heard her before, begging him to take the call, but he never does. He’s got another girlfriend. I can’t really blame him.”

Weeze gets up from the table then and walks over to Good Gina’s phone. Good Gina doesn’t leave, though. She picks up the receiver before Weeze gets there and dials again and speaks to somebody. She hangs up again after about a minute. She keeps trying. Weeze keeps waiting.

Bad Gina keeps talking to me. “This one time, I was at the phone next to hers and I heard her calling and nobody accepting the call, and so she pretended she was talking to her boyfriend anyway, about how she couldn’t wait to see him again, and how everything was going to be better this time, and how she loved him so, so much. But she was holding the hook down the whole time. She wasn’t even trying to pretend she wasn’t. It was pretty pathetic. I felt sorry for her.”

Good Gina finally gives up the phone to Weeze. Chantrelle is still talking on another phone, so Good Gina slumps into Weeze’s seat at the table with Bad Gina and me.

“You OK?” I ask.

She looks at me blankly for a second, nods, then lays her head on the table.

Bad Gina scoots her chair close to mine, far enough from Good Gina to talk privately.

“So how come you’ve been avoiding me all day, anyway?” she asks. “I kind of thought we were friends.”

I shrug. “I haven’t. I’ve just been busy. All these appointments. So much to do.”

“Bullshit,” Bad Gina says, though she doesn’t sound angry. “You got cornered by the Jelly Sisters at breakfast, even though they broke your nose yesterday, but you talked to them anyway.”

I lay my hands on the table in front of me and study them for a minute.

“Look, Gina,” I say, finally. “You seem like a nice girl and all, but I’m not interested in getting in the middle of anything going on between you and Wanda and Nell. It’s none of my business. They see me talking to you, they think I’m on your side or whatever. You see me talking to them, you’re all over me about it.”

Bad Gina narrows her eyes and frowns. “If that’s how you feel, then I guess that’s how you feel,” she says. “But you need friends in here. Those girls are capable of some very bad shit.”

“Yeah. And they say the same thing about you. They said you helped Cell Seven hurt herself. They said you were hooking up with Officer Killduff.”

She draws back. “They
said
that? They actually
said
that?”

“I don’t believe them,” I say quickly. “I don’t have any reason to. But I also don’t have any reason to believe you — no offense.”

“None taken,” she says, heavy on the sarcasm.

“I just don’t want to get involved,” I say again. “Hell, they’re staring at us right now because we’re talking.” And they are — Nell from her phone, Wanda from two tables over. For all I know, they’re planning how they’re going to kick our asses, or break Bad Gina’s nose, too.

One of the officers comes over and stands behind us. “You making a call tonight or what?” she asks Bad Gina.

Her face changes in a flash, from angry and defensive to bright and smiling. “Yes, thanks, Officer.” She doesn’t look at me again as she leaves to make her call and passes Weeze, who is on her way back to our table. They fist-bump.

Weeze is smiling, too, but hers seems sincere — her fleshy face all pink, close to radiant even.

“Good phone call?” I ask.

She nods. Weeze isn’t much taller than me, just a few inches, but she probably outweighs me by thirty pounds, making her look larger than she really is. “I got to talk to my dad and my little sister,” she gushes. “They’re both coming to see me tomorrow.”

“That’s great,” I say. “What about your mom?”

Her face darkens. “She’s kind of still having problems with me being arrested and in juvie and everything.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says, then she brightens again. “But Dad said she’s writing me a letter. She just hasn’t finished it yet. But he said she’s going to send me a really long letter. So maybe he’ll bring that with him.”

She seems like a sweet girl, but it’s hard to tell what kind of person anybody really is here. I figure Bad Gina has chosen to hang out with Weeze because of her size — as protection from the Jelly Sisters. I’m not as sure about why Weeze is hanging out with Bad Gina. It could be that Weeze has a crush on her. It could be that she’s just lonely, and when you’re lonely, you grab on to whoever will have you.

That night in my cell feels like the hundredth and not just my fifth. The minute I’m locked in, I start pacing. I count laps for a while — if you can even call them that — but the numbers pile up too fast and it makes me depressed. I try slowing down so each turn lasts longer than the one before, and that works better. After a few hundred, it feels as if I’m moving in slow motion, or walking underwater, and it reminds me of this time Dad took me to a hippie solstice party at a farm way out somewhere on the Northern Neck. They had a roaring campfire and a torchlit Frisbee golf course and a drum circle that went on all night. They’d also set up a labyrinth, with carefully arranged stones marking a twisting, winding path that kept folding back in on itself, with circles inside circles and more circles inside those circles, all somehow connected and yet never crossing over itself, either, and eventually leading to a tiny open space in the middle about the size of a dog curled up and sleeping.

I asked Dad what the maze was for, but he said it wasn’t a maze; it was a labyrinth. A maze was something you got lost in and had to find your way out of. But a labyrinth was different. He said you were never lost in a labyrinth. He said a labyrinth was where you went to find yourself.

I didn’t exactly know what he was talking about — though later, when he got so lost inside his own head and retreated to his wing of Granny’s house and started collecting everything and piling it all up just so, I remembered what he said about the labyrinth and sort of understood.

I try for a while to make my laps around the cell feel like some kind of labyrinth, to let my mind wander, but either I’m so lost that there’s no finding myself or an eight-by-eight cell in juvie is too poor an excuse for a labyrinth. All that happens is that I feel dizzy, and very, very sad.

I climb onto my bunk, wrap a blanket around my shoulders, and lean against the wall, feeling homesick all of a sudden, as if somebody has flicked on a switch — desperately missing everybody: Dad, Mom, Carla, Lulu, Julie Juggins, even Kevin.

I lie under my blanket and try to think about something else, anything that can lift my spirits. I think about Government Island and the times I spent camping out there by myself, how it felt like I was the only person left in the whole world and how peaceful that made me feel. I think about the couple of times I brought Kevin out there and how nice it was to
not
be the only person in the world then. I think about the other things I always go back to when I need cheering up: my team and winning regionals last year and getting runner-up for MVP. I think about my motorcycle and flying down two-lane county roads where you can go as fast as you want and never see any cops. I think about Lulu handing me that rock and how sweet that was, and how sweet she is.

And I think about Kevin some more. Being in juvie, even just these five days, has taken the jagged edge off how angry I am at him, how let down and betrayed. Though I still don’t think I can ever really forgive him, even if I have the chance. But I don’t want to think about that anymore tonight. Tonight I just want to remember the good stuff, like watching him on the soccer field with his long dirty-blond hair and his face streaked with sweat and that certain grin he gets that means he is so far into the game that nothing outside it exists, except, sometimes, me when he scores a goal and spreads his arms and tears around the field in celebration and does a knee slide near the sideline and looks up for me cheering in the stands. And how he is a kind and decent person who volunteers at the food bank and wants to join the Peace Corps after college and live in Africa. And how he bought me this really expensive motorcycle helmet because he was so worried about anything happening to me on my bike. And how he came over to Mom’s house a couple of times when I was stuck at home babysitting Lulu, even though he could have gone out with his friends. And what a good kisser he is and how he’d pull me into this little space next to our lockers at school and we’d make out like crazy between classes. And all the sweet and dirty stuff we used to do together that always left me so weak in the knees, literally weak in the knees, which I’d never believed was an actual thing.

I wrap myself tighter inside my blanket, glance at the little window in my cell door to make sure nobody is checking in on me, and then clench my eyes shut and scoot down in my bed and pretend I’m with Kevin, and we’re a couple again, and we’re wrapped around each other on a cold autumn night inside my sleeping bag on Government Island, nothing separating us but skin and barely that.

I shudder — hot and flushed.

And then I stop. Maybe I hear something. Or maybe I’m just worried that one of the guards will look in. There’s nobody at the door, but there’s also no way of knowing when there might be.

Once my mind gets racing, it won’t quit. I start thinking about Harry Harlow’s monkeys again, and this thing I read on the Internet after Mr. Turner’s depressing lecture. It was about how some of the monkeys just sat and masturbated for hours because it was the only stimulation they had, and about how they got addicted to it and kept at it even when it was clear it wasn’t giving them any pleasure, but they just couldn’t seem to control themselves, so they kept going at it until their hands and arms would sometimes even cramp up and they’d be practically paralyzed, those poor, sad, hapless monkeys.

I pull my hands out from under the blanket and swear it’s the last time I’m ever doing anything like that again in juvie.

They wouldn’t let Mom sit in the interrogation room with us, but I figured she was watching through the two-way mirror, and maybe listening in, too. It was just like on TV: a long metal table, hard chairs, two police detectives, and me and my court-appointed lawyer, a kind of washed-out guy named Mr. Ferrell. One of the detectives even asked if I wanted a soda. The older one, Detective Feagles, was white; he had silver hair and a rumpled suit. The younger one, Detective Boldin, was black; he had an earring and a police-department windbreaker.

Mr. Ferrell mostly just sat there and took notes. I wished it was Mom’s friend Vance, not because he seemed especially amazing as a lawyer or anything, but because I figured he probably cared what happened to me, at least a little. But we couldn’t afford him after that one free consultation, and he didn’t offer to take on my case pro bono.

Detective Feagles turned on a tape recorder and fiddled with some dials. Detective Boldin asked most of the questions.

“Full name?”

“Sadie Ruth Windas.”

“Address?”

“Fourteen-oh-eight Clearview Drive, Stafford, Virginia.”

“Age?”

“Seventeen.”

“Birth date?”

“June 19.”

“Social Security number?”

I had a brain freeze. He finally gave up and said we could ask my mom later.

My heart raced wildly the whole time, and I was sweating like crazy. Mom had made me get dressed up like I was going to a funeral, with tights and uncomfortable shoes and everything.