Juvie (18 page)

I read the letter twice, to make sure I’m not hallucinating. Mom and Carla living together. Yeah, right.

I fold it up and open Lulu’s picture, which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be of me. Anyway, it’s a girl with a giant head, spiky hair, stick arms and legs, enormous fingers and toes, big fat body, big fat butt, tiny little motorcycle, and a frowny bird sitting behind her that might or might not be Lulu.

I trace the outlines of the picture over and over with my finger, imagining her at Mom’s kitchen table with her big crayons and a frozen waffle.

C. Miller hands me a manila folder with my name on it.

I look up at her and hold her gaze, which I know I shouldn’t do but I can’t help it. “Please, just this once? It’s a picture of me, from my niece.” I know I sound pathetic, and I know there’s no point, but I can’t bear to give it up.

“How old is she?” C. Miller asks.

“Three,” I say. “Her name is Lulu.”

C. Miller nods sympathetically, and for just a second I think there’s a chance. But then she says, “Sorry, Sadie. They told you that at Intake. In here, you don’t get to keep anything.”

They clean out Middle-School Karen’s cell late that afternoon without telling us what happened to her, but I’m guessing she must have gotten released just like she predicted. An hour later, they bring in a new girl. Everybody else is watching TV; I’m trying to read a book, thinking about going to my cell early and disturbed that I’m actually considering it. She’s an angry-looking white girl with a puffy face and a shock of purple hair and empty holes in her eyebrow and nose and lip and tongue. The hole from her nose ring looks infected.

Officer Killduff introduces her to her cell. She balks at the door, and he practically has to shove her inside. She comes back out a minute later and paces around the common area, seemingly unable to stand still. The other girls watch her for a while, but nobody speaks, and pretty soon they turn their attention back to the TV. There’s just something about the new girl that makes everybody want to stay away. Maybe it’s that nervousness. Maybe it’s something else, some vibe she gives off. Even the guards keep their distance, practically ignoring her, even though she keeps pacing and pacing.

And then, just my luck, she lurches over and throws herself in a chair right next to me. The table I have my book propped on starts shaking, and I realize it’s because her leg is bouncing wildly underneath. Her hands shake, too.

“Hey,” she says. “I’m Summer, like the season. What’s your name? What are you in for? What are you reading?”

She talks too fast for me to respond, as if she’s high on meth or something.

“Never mind,” she says without waiting for an answer. “You’re busy. Sorry to disturb you. I’ll go sit over there.”

She stalks over to an empty chair under the TV next to Weeze, sits for a minute, fires off questions to Weeze, appears to wait for answers this time — but doesn’t appear to get them — then gets up again. She keeps doing that for the next hour. Sitting, snapping off a few questions to whoever happens to be nearby, standing abruptly, crossing the room to another chair, wandering in and out of her cell, approaching the guard table but thinking better of it as soon as she gets there and quickly heading somewhere else, bouncing around like a pinball.

But there are only so many places to go, and Summer ends up next to me again, rubbing her hands together, glancing at me, but mostly looking down, studying patterns on the linoleum floor. “What’d you say your name was again?” she asks. “I forgot.”

“It’s Sadie,” I say.

“Sadie, Sadie, Sadie. OK. Thanks. I’m bad with people’s names.” She laughs. “Ha! What I’m bad with is people, you know?” She gets up again but then sits back down.

“Here’s the thing, Sadie,” she says, leaning close. “My mom. Something might have happened to her, you know? They found her. They said they found her in the bedroom. They won’t tell me anything. They keep asking me all these questions, you know? But I don’t know anything.”

She’s wringing her hands now, and tapping her foot so fast and so hard that her knee bangs into the underside of the table. “They said there was a gun. I can’t talk about it. My dad’s so mad at me. He won’t talk to me. But I was at work when it happened. I was at the Tropical Smoothie. You ever go there? To the Tropical Smoothie?”

“The one at the mall?” I ask.

She nods. “They brought me to the police station. They said to tell them what happened, but I told them I was at work. They wanted to know about my boyfriend. His name’s Andy. He didn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t even know where he is.”

She stops talking as abruptly as she started but keeps sitting, keeps tapping her foot.

“So what happened?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to talk about it. They said I would see a lawyer. They would send one to talk to me.” She jerks her head up to glare at me. “You better not say anything, either. I didn’t tell you anything.” She pounds on her knees with her fists. “I swear to God. What was your name again? I forgot. I don’t care. You just better not repeat anything I said.”

I edge my chair back. “Calm down, all right? You didn’t tell me anything, and I’m not going to say anything.”

“Damn right,” she says. “Damn right. OK. I’m gonna go lie down. That’s my cell over there. You think they’ll give me something to help me sleep? They ever do that in here? You think I can ask the guards?”

I say I doubt it but she can try if she wants.

She shakes her head, still acting methed out. “Never mind. I’m going. OK. See you later. Bye. Thanks for talking.”

Summer goes back to her cell, which is just ten feet away, sits on the bunk for a minute, then gets up and bangs her face against the wall. Blood sprouts from her forehead and nose. It’s all so sudden, I don’t react at first. She staggers backward into the opposite wall and then slumps to the floor, at first cradling her face in her hands, then pulling them away and staring at the blood.

I call over to C. Miller and Officer Killduff.

They put Summer on suicide watch — take away her juvie-issue clothes and make her wear the suicide blanket. She protests. She only hit her face on the wall that once, she says, and it was an accident. She
swears
it was an accident.

“Ask that girl I was talking to,” she says from inside her cell. “The one that called you all. She saw it.”

C. Miller, standing at Summer’s door, looks at me sitting at a nearby table in the common room and raises her eyebrows.
Well?

Summer can’t see me. I shake my head and mouth no.

C. Miller has to sit watch after that, staying near Summer for the rest of the shift, walking her to the interview room down the hall to see a lawyer, taking her to Nurse Batch when she bleeds through her bandage.

Bad Gina gives me grief about it the next morning at breakfast. “I saw you rat that girl out,” she says. Weeze nods in agreement, but I don’t think her heart’s really into giving me a hard time. It’s just what Bad Gina expects of her.

“That’s so messed up,” Bad Gina says. “Getting her in trouble like that when she just came on the unit.”

I’m planning to ignore her, but suddenly Fefu grabs Bad Gina’s potato patty and squeezes it into a ball.

Bad Gina curses and grabs Fefu’s hand. “Let go, you little Mexican,” she growls. “I was going to eat that.”

Fefu squeezes out a thin stream of grease, then drops the potato ball into Bad Gina’s Styrofoam box. The Jelly Sisters laugh so hard they both spit out food.

Bad Gina scoots her chair as far away from me and Fefu as she can, muttering, until she’s almost sitting in Weeze’s lap.

I hand Fefu a napkin.

“Gracias,”
I say.

She grins.
“De nada.”

Carla comes on Sunday afternoon for visiting hour.

“Hey, Sadie,” she says, sounding almost shy on the other side of the Plexiglas. “Mom says hi and she’ll come next week. Lulu says to give you a giant hug and a kiss. And an Eskimo kiss and a butterfly kiss.”

She puts her hand up on the glass the same way Mom did when she visited. I put mine up there, too.

“Tell her you did, anyway,” I say.

“Yeah.” She taps the glass. “This sucks. Mom didn’t tell me.”

“She tell you about my nose?” I ask.

She nods. “You OK? It doesn’t look bad at all. Really. Not even swollen or anything. Just kind of bruised a little bit.”

“Thanks,” I say. “It’s been more than a week. Anyway,
you
look good. Did you cut your hair or something?”

Carla smiles at the compliment, which isn’t totally sincere, but not a complete lie, either. She’s way too thin, her cheekbones practically cutting through the skin — not heroin-chic thin but not far enough away from it, either. Her hair does look nice, though, cut shoulder length with a braid down the side. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen her shirt before, one of those French-looking T-shirts with horizontal black and white stripes. All she needs is a beret.

“I’ve been working on things,” she says. “I even went jogging one day.”

I say I think I see a little color in her face.

“Nah,” she says. “It was cloudy. Lulu rode her tricycle so we didn’t get too far. This is just some blush.”

“How’d you get off work today?” I ask. “I thought they had you on the schedule for Sundays.”

“I told the new manager I would quit if he didn’t let me off. He’s such a jerk. He said, did I mean if he didn’t
get
me off? So I threatened to report him for sexual harassment and he just laughed and said, Yeah, right, like anybody would believe me. Anyway, he actually even asked me out on a date after, if you can believe that.”

“So what did you tell him?”

Her face reddens some more, but it isn’t the blush. “We’re sort of going out Tuesday night. But it’ll be after my AA meeting, and yes, I said after my AA meeting. It will be my third one. Mom’s been watching Lulu. She had to cut back on her Target shifts, but she said she thought she could manage OK.”

Carla quickly changes the subject before I can give her grief about dating her boss. She says she told Lulu that if she’ll start wiping herself when she uses the potty, she can have ice cream for breakfast once a week for the rest of her life.

Lulu is holding out for twice a week.

And Carla tells me about Mom’s crazy scheme about moving into Granny’s house.

“As if,” she says. “God. Mom needs to get out or something. She needs to meet a guy, somebody who can pitch in for rent or move her to a bigger place. She’ll go crazy living next door to Dad and all his junk.”

“Maybe,” I say. It’s typical Carla to dismiss Mom’s concerns about money, but I have to admit, she does seem to be making an effort, at least a little: jogging with Lulu, AA meetings, changing her look. Though she still hasn’t said anything about going back to school or finding a new job.

“So tell me more about Lulu,” I say. “Has she been asking about me?”

Carla rolls her eyes. “Oh, no, not much. Only starting when she wakes up in the morning, and ending about when she falls asleep at night. And she won’t wear anything to bed but that basketball jersey of yours, either. ‘Mommy, where’s Aunt Sadie? Mommy, is Aunt Sadie coming over today? Mommy, why can’t Aunt Sadie come over today? Mommy, can we go over to Moo-Moo’s house and see Aunt Sadie?’”

I laugh but can’t help tearing up when she says that.

Carla frowns. “It’s probably not healthy, her asking about you all the time.”

I quit smiling. “I’m sure she’ll get over it soon. She’s probably still adjusting to not having me around.”

“She’s three, Sadie. She just doesn’t understand.”

I tighten my grip on the phone, fighting the urge to snarl at Carla, to ask her who she thinks she is, lecturing me about Lulu. Lulu is practically as much my daughter as Carla’s in a lot of ways — and it kills me to be away from her. And screw Carla, anyway. I wouldn’t even be in this mess if it wasn’t for her. And I wouldn’t be so far away from Lulu.

I keep glaring at Carla in silence. She tries to glare back, but it’s no contest. She blinks and looks down.

“My bad,” she says finally.

“Maybe we should talk about something else,” I suggest.

She agrees.

“Hey,” she says, brightening. “You haven’t seen that girl in here, have you? The one in the newspaper? They said she was in juvie.”

“I don’t know,” I say, though I suspect I know who she’s talking about. “They don’t let us read the newspaper.”

“She killed her mom,” Carla says. “It was terrible. Shot her in the face and then just went to work like it was no big deal. That’s where they arrested her. They said her boyfriend was involved somehow, like talked her into doing it or whatever. He wasn’t there when she shot her mom, but they texted about it. She texted him right after she did it. Her name is Summer. I can’t remember her last name, but they got it from the neighbors. The police wouldn’t give it because she’s a juvenile, but it wasn’t hard to figure out, I guess.”