Juvie (2 page)

It takes me about fifteen minutes to get there — back down the long driveway from Dad’s, through a couple of neighborhoods, ten miles north of town up a straight, wide, boring stretch of Route 1, past a trailer park and a couple of used-car lots and a bunch of abandoned businesses and old motels. All that ends after a while, and for the last couple of miles it’s all trees and woods except for a lonely 7-Eleven. I try to turn off my brain and just enjoy the ride — the thrill of being on the Kawasaki this one last time, an open highway that’s all mine, the high whine of the gears when I downshift going into a curve, the thrumming of the engine when I hit cruising speed, the chill blast of early-autumn wind that always feels like freedom.

I nearly miss the small juvie sign altogether — I’m going too fast to stop when I see it and have to turn back around. And then, half a mile down a narrow access road, there it is: the Rappahannock Regional Youth Correctional Facility. I sit on my bike in the parking lot and just stare at it for a while. It looks like my high school from in front, all red brick and green corrugated roof and tall, narrow windows no wider than my hand. The whole place sits on about five cleared acres surrounded by a thick tangle of central Virginia oaks and pines and brambles and brush.

I get off my bike and walk around. Along the side and in back there’s a thirty-foot chain-link fence topped with concertina wire, and from there juvie looks even
more
like my high school: picnic tables, exercise area; short basketball court with a couple of bent rims; dusty vegetable garden; nobody in sight except the guard and his reflective sunglasses in the guard tower.

I’m glad to see the basketball court, even if it is just packed dirt and even though they don’t have any nets. Coach kicked me off my Amateur Athletic Union team a week ago. The other players threatened to walk if he didn’t let me back on the team — they said it wasn’t fair, since I hadn’t been convicted, at least not yet — but that never happened. Most of them called to commiserate with me for the first couple of days, then they texted, then my cell phone just sort of went dead.

I walk back to my bike and grab the bag of stuff I’ve brought — shaving cream, razor, deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, and tampons. They told me I’m not allowed to bring in any personal items, but I assume that means no cell phones or teddy bears or whatever. I leave my helmet on the handlebars and hide the key under the seat of my motorcycle so Mr. Lewandowski, the shop teacher at the high school, can send somebody to get the bike later. He said they’d take good care of it in his auto-repair class while I’m away. That’s how he said it, too: “While you’re away.” As if I’m going on vacation.

Mr. Lewandowski and my dad were friends when they were in high school. My dad isn’t friends with anybody now, but Mr. Lewandowski still remembers him, and I think he feels bad that he didn’t do something to keep me out of all this trouble.

I stand outside the juvie entrance for five minutes, one hand on my bike, the other shielding my eyes from the morning sun. A couple of blue jays are caterwauling from a tree nearby. The sky is cerulean, the air still crisp with this first dose of autumn. I can’t breathe in enough of it, though I try and try. I hate the thought of giving it all up — the bike, the sun, the sky, the air. Haven’t I already given up enough? Haven’t I already paid the price for something I didn’t even do?

Screw this. I grab my helmet and jam it back on, slip the key back out from under the seat, throw my leg over, kick-start the engine, and take off, gunning it out of the parking lot and down the access road back to the highway.

I could do it. I could keep on driving and not look back.

If I turn north onto Route 1, I can zip up to Coal Landing Road, then another couple of miles down Coal Landing past a cheap housing development to where the land gets wild again, and in five minutes I’ll be at Aquia Creek, a wide tributary to the Potomac River. There is a certain copse of trees I know about with a lot of undergrowth that I use all the time to hide my bike.

Once I do that, I can jump from fallen log to fallen log through the marsh, and slog through some places where there aren’t any logs, until I make it over to a place called Government Island. The brush is so thick there that no one can see to the interior no matter how close they come in their boats on their way down Aquia Creek to the wide Potomac. I’ve been going to Government Island for years, mostly alone, where there’s nobody but me and the squirrels and the raccoons and the otters and the ospreys and the herons, and I wish I could go back there now.

But I know I can’t do it. I just can’t. Not to Mom. Not to Lulu. Not to Dad. Not even to Carla.

So I make a U-turn in the middle of the highway, the tires squealing in protest, and ride back to juvie.

The first thing I see when I pull up is a woman who kind of looks like my mom standing outside the front door, eating an apple.

She watches me as I pull off my helmet. She watches me as I kick down the bike stand. I watch her, too — eating that apple slowly, like a cow chewing cud. She tilts her head to look into that cerulean sky and takes in a deep breath of the early-autumn air, too. Then she cocks her head in a way that makes me think she’s listening to those blue jays, back at it again in the top of a nearby pine.

Finally she speaks. “You must be Sadie Windas.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

“I’m Mrs. Simper.” She has a strong southern accent. “The warden.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She nods. “I suppose we’d best get you inside.”

I don’t move from my bike, though. I can’t.

Mrs. Simper studies her apple core as if it holds the secret to the universe, or maybe just to make sure she’s eaten all there is to eat. Then she tosses it in a trash can.

“Somebody coming to pick up that bike?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say again. “Key’s under the seat.”

“That a Kawasaki?” she asks.

“Yes, ma’am. Three-fifty cc.”

“All righty, then,” she says, and I realize she doesn’t actually know anything about motorcycles. If I wasn’t suspicious of Mrs. Simper before, I sure am now. Anyone trying as hard as her to be nice — you can’t trust them. At all.

Mrs. Simper holds the door open and says, “After you, Sadie.”

The last thing I hear, right up until the door bangs shut behind us, is those blue jays in that pine tree, going
Caw, caw, caw, caw, ca
—.

It was three weeks into September, a Saturday. I’d already gone to basketball practice for three hours in the morning and worked at the car wash all that afternoon. The tips had been lousy, my boyfriend, Kevin, was out of town, Mom was at one of her jobs, and now I was home playing with Lulu.

We started out sitting at the kitchen table, me tossing Cheerios at Lulu, trying to land them in her wide-open mouth. Most of them ended up on the floor, a few got tangled in her hair, and one hit her upper lip and stuck because she had a runny nose. That got Lulu laughing so hard, she fell out of her chair.

She grabbed her head, pretending to be hurt, which was this thing she did all the time so I would get her an ice pack out of the freezer. “Poor Lulu,” I said, playing my part. “Did you hurt your butt?”

“My
head
!” she yelled.

“Oh,” I said, shutting the freezer door. “So it
is
your butt.”

“No!” she yelled again. “
Not
my butt.”

I pulled her into my lap and handed her the ice pack. “Well, hold this on wherever it is so you don’t get a butt lump.”

“Not my butt!” she yelled, and then she stuck the ice pack down my shirt, which was what she always did as well. Only this time she somehow managed to slip it inside my sports bra.

I jumped up, dumping her out of my lap. Lulu rolled on the floor laughing, so once I extricated the ice pack, I grabbed her and stuck it down her pants.

That somehow led to her peeing herself, which led to us taking a bath together, which led to us playing with a family of tub ducks she’d had since she was a baby. They were supposed to turn blue on the bottom if the water was too hot. Or maybe they were supposed to turn blue on the bottom once the water was the right temperature. Either way, we just used them as battleships and made giant explosions that soaked the bathroom floor.

That’s what we were doing when Carla came in, reeking of Friendly’s.

“Hi, Mommy,” Lulu said.

“Hey, Carla,” I said.

She kissed Lulu on top of her wet head and then started in on me about this party she wanted to go to, and would I go with her?

“Please, Sadie?” she begged me. “We haven’t gone out in forever. Girls just gotta have fun, right?” Before I could say no, she coaxed Lulu into singing that song with her, Carla dancing right there in the soggy bathroom, still in her ice-cream-and-ketchup-stained waitress uniform, and Lulu standing up in the tub and dancing her naked little self along with her mom.

Carla pulled a dripping Lulu out of the tub, and they kept singing and dancing together while I slid down in the water and watched. For a minute it was like the old, sweet Carla was suddenly, magically back. I wondered how long that would last.

Carla brought up the party again after I climbed out and we got Lulu dried off and plopped her down in front of the TV. She pulled me into my bedroom and made me open my closet to look at clothes. “Come on, Sadie,” she said, holding up this stupid leopard-print blouse that Mom must have stuck in there. “I need you to go with me. Mom’ll only babysit Lulu if you agree to be my designated driver. I’ll even pay you. Look, here’s my tip money from this afternoon.”

Carla had been on probation for the past year, first for pot possession and then, a couple of months later, for shoplifting. She’d stolen a pack of baby wipes, which was understandable, maybe even forgivable, except that she also stole an iPod Shuffle.

Maybe it was her dancing in the bathroom with Lulu. Maybe it was the way she seemed so excited for us to hang out. Maybe it was the fact that Kevin was out of town and I was bored. Whatever the reason, I finally caved. We told Mom we were going out with some people to dinner and a movie. She raised her eyebrows, but I kept my expression straight when she looked at me. Finally she settled back into the couch and told us to have a good time. “Don’t be home too late,” she said.

So a couple of hours later, past Lulu’s bedtime and what should have been mine, we walked into an old rundown Victorian house near the river that looked like it ought to be condemned — weedy yard, slanting porch, missing shingles. It smelled of beer and sweat and pot and something totally out of place, like lavender. Everybody I saw was in their twenties or thirties, most already trashed. I was probably the only one there without a visible tattoo or piercing.

I let out a breath and tried to relax. The last time Carla dragged me to one of these parties, she ended up puking in her lap as I drove home, which was not only disgusting but totally freaked me out, since I’d only had my permit then and wasn’t supposed to drive at night or without a sober adult riding shotgun. But that was a couple of years ago, and I had a better sense of how to handle Carla now. Besides, we were driving her car tonight instead of Mom’s; if she puked again, she’d have to clean it out herself.

Somebody handed me a cup of beer. I tried to say I didn’t want it, but it was impossible to hear anything over the pounding bass. I turned to see if Carla wanted it, even though she usually drank harder stuff, but somehow she’d already slipped away into the raging circus of spinning mirror balls and girls dancing with girls and smoke as thick as ocean fog.

“Carla!” I called, though my voice was drowned out by all the people screaming at one another over the retro music. I fought my way through the crowd, my earlier optimism about the evening already gone. Of course Carla didn’t want to hang out with me. All that joking about girls just wanting to have fun was really about
Carla
having fun and Sadie cleaning up the mess afterward.

I finally spotted her on the far side of the living room. Even in the crowd she was hard to miss in her bright-yellow Midas Muffler shirt that she bought at the thrift shop. I pushed my way to her side.

“Hey, Sadie!” she yelled as if we hadn’t seen each other in forever. She grabbed my beer, said “Thanks,” and drained it as she made her way to the kitchen. I followed her and told her to slow down, but she’d found the keg and was already pouring herself another. She handed me one, too.

“I don’t want this,” I said, or tried to. “I’m the designated driver —”

“Hey! Kendall!” she hollered right next to my ear at someone behind me. She elbowed her way across the kitchen to a girl who was leaning against the refrigerator, smoking a cigarette and looking bored. Kendall had a bright-red scar on her cheek and I couldn’t stop staring.

“This is Kendall!” Carla shouted. “She used to play something when we were in school. I can’t remember what. But she was an athlete. I remember that.”

“Cross-country,” Kendall said.

“Yeah,” Carla said. “I knew it was something like that. Anyway, Sadie’s a jock, too. So you guys can talk.”

She practically shoved us into each other and then started talking to a skuzzy guy who was working the keg.