Juvie (17 page)

“Just take me back to the gym,” I said again, in a voice that didn’t give him any room to negotiate, or whine, or try to kiss me, or do any of the things that usually worked for him.

I should have gone home, hung out with Mom, watched some TV, gone to bed early. I had to work at the car wash at eight the next morning. But once I got on my motorcycle, I just wanted to ride, feel that great rush of wind and speed, and leave everything behind — my temper getting the better of me in a way that had never happened before, and hurting that girl, and the stupid technical, and getting benched, and pissing off Coach. And Kevin lecturing me and then whining when he realized we wouldn’t be fooling around any that night. And court. And my confession. And Carla.

I rode up Route 1 to Coal Landing Road, and then down Coal Landing Road, faster than I should, leaning into every hairpin curve, until it dead-ended at Aquia Creek. I stashed my bike there and hiked through the marsh, grateful the moon hung full over the trees, a perfect Government Island night-light, helping me pick out the way and keep to where it was driest.

I had to wade through a ten-yard expanse of creek, just a couple of feet deep, so I pulled off my shoes and rolled up my pants as high as they would go. Once I reached the bank, I scrambled up to an old cart path that ran around the edge of the island and then another that bisected it through the middle, over to the channel side of Aquia Creek. They’d used those paths back in colonial days to haul out freestone from the quarry sites, and they used the freestone to build the foundations for the White House and the Capitol. The first time Dad took me and Carla to Government Island, he carried us up Aquia Creek on his johnboat and told us it was Virginia slaves who did most of the quarry work. He said they did the hauling and the loading onto barges for the trip down the deep, wide part of the creek and onto ships to go up the Potomac River to Washington, DC, forty miles north.

All that history was mostly forgotten now. The island was overgrown and wild again, though you could still find the old quarry sites if you knew where to look.

I ended up staying all night there, even though I hadn’t thought to bring my sleeping bag or anything to eat or drink. At first I just sat on a freestone outcropping over the black water and let my mind wander wherever it wanted: to how I could make up to Julie Juggins and the team for what I’d done; to my complicated relationship with Kevin, who could make me so frustrated one minute and make me love him until I thought I would melt the next; to conversations I’d had with Granny when she was alive; to happy times with Mom and Dad when Carla and I were little, before Dad retreated into himself and Mom had to start caring for all of us on her own.

It was a warm October night, and when the mosquitoes started biting, I slid down to the water’s edge and smeared river mud on my neck and face and the backs of my hands and anything else that was exposed. The mud dried and caked and itched some but did keep the mosquitoes away. I climbed back up to my lookout perch, a wide slab of flat rock thirty feet above the water, and must have fallen asleep at some point.

I woke up just before sunrise. Once my head cleared, I quietly made my way in the dim predawn light to some brush near a certain tree at the water’s edge where I happened to know there was a blue heron nest. I waited there, hidden, camouflaged, trying not to move or make a sound until the precise moment the red sun showed itself just over the tops of the trees on the other side of the widest expanse of the creek, and then I rustled the brush and saw what I was hoping to see: the blue heron rising suddenly from her nest with one great beat of her wings, catching a thermal that spiraled up, so that just for a second she was framed, backlit by the rising sun, and then disappeared off into the sky.

When I left the island and returned to my bike, I turned my cell phone on and saw I had a couple of messages. The first was a voice mail from home.

“Sadie, it’s Mom. Just wanted to remind you you have work in the morning. Hope the game went OK. Say hi to Julie and her mom for me.”

I texted her back:
on way 2 wrk now
.

Kevin had left a text, too —
u ok?
— but that was it. One lousy text. And the minimum number of characters possible. The jerk.

I kick-started the bike and rode back to town and to the car wash, where I spent the next eight hours Windexing and vacuuming and towel-drying an endless parade of cars and trucks and SUVs — and not texting Kevin.

It’s Friday of my second week in juvie, and I wake up scratching my legs. I haven’t shaved my legs since I’ve been here, and for some reason that makes me as depressed as anything that’s happened — or maybe it’s just that it’s
on
top
of
everything that’s happened. My armpits are sprouting hair, too. I guess everybody is going through the same thing except maybe Fefu, who is too little. The rest of us, though — God.

Nobody has said anything about shaving; we’ll probably just get hairier and hairier until we look like apes. Or guys. For once I’m thankful for the juvie-issue jumpsuits and shirts, which keep us from noticing how hairy we’re all getting. But I shudder to think what I’ll look like when they finally let me out of here.

The reading specialist, a little round woman named Mrs. Blanchard, comes later that day so there’s a break in the routine, not that it ends up being much of a break. Mrs. Blanchard decides we’ll have a spelling bee. Middle-School Karen gets called out for court right when we’re getting started. “Good-bye, everybody,” she says as she leaves, sounding as if she thinks she’ll never see us again.

The spelling bee doesn’t go over very well, since almost everybody goes out in the first round, probably deliberately, though I guess the words might be kind of hard:
quantum, duchess, flummox
. I win on
quadrilateral
, but everybody acts so bored the whole time, I’m not even sure Mrs. Blanchard notices. There isn’t a prize.

Next she says we’re going to write character sketches.

“About who?” Wanda asks.

“About yourselves.”

Wanda shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

Nell says, “Me either,” though neither speaks loud enough for the guard, Officer C. Miller, to hear.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mrs. Blanchard says. “But this will be different from the last time we tried this exercise. This time I brought something.”

She pats a machine sitting on the desk. It’s a paper shredder.

“I know last time everyone was worried about who might read their essays and that it might cause them trouble or embarrassment. But this time nobody will see what you write. It really is just an exercise. You can shred it as soon as you’re finished. I won’t even see it. Unless you want me to. I want you all to think of our classroom as a safe haven for expressing your thoughts.”

“Then what’s the point if nobody’s going to read it?” Bad Gina asks. “And, like, how will you grade it or whatever?”

“It’s called freewriting,” Mrs. Blanchard says. “It’s a way to warm up to other essays we’ll be writing later on. Kind of like the stretching you might do before you run in a big race.”

“We gonna have to race again?” Wanda asks. “Like we already did in gym?”

Mrs. Blanchard looks frustrated. “No. Not a real race. I was just using an analogy to explain.”

She passes out paper and markers. Fefu goes right back to coloring in polka dots. Weeze draws more horses. Wanda Jelly plays tic-tac-toe by herself. I can’t tell what Nell is up to. Probably writing death threats to Bad Gina. Bad Gina wraps her free arm protectively around her sheet of paper so I can’t see what she’s doing, either, but it looks as if she’s actually writing her essay.

I eye the shredder, look at Bad Gina scribbling away, and decide to give it a try.

I stop at the bottom of the page, my marker just about dry, and realize how furiously I’ve been writing. My eyes burn, sweat rolls down my cheeks. I wipe my face on my sleeve but rub my nose too hard. A drop of blood lands in the middle of the page. I try blotting it off but that just smears it, like the bright-red tail of a comet, or a shooting star.

Everybody is staring.

I blink. They blink back.

Slowly I raise my hand.

Mrs. Blanchard clears her throat as if she’s going to make a speech.

“Yes, Sadie?”

I push my chair back from the table.

“Permission to use the shredder?”

I have two letters that afternoon at mail call. One is from Julie Juggins. I almost can’t believe it. We’ve been friends for a long time, but she dropped out of sight right before I went to juvie.

I get excited about the prospect of that — for about a minute. And then I get depressed about missing most of the fall AAU season, and the high-school season starting in December, and — who knows? — with community service tacked on to my six months in juvie, probably summer ball next year as well. And I’m still waiting to hear if my conviction and my time in juvie is going to make me ineligible for basketball scholarships. Mom asked Vance to look into it for us as a favor, but so far we haven’t heard anything. Julie might as well be writing about a dream she had, for as likely as that future seems right now.

The other letter is from Mom, with a picture from Lulu. Mom says the reason the tenants at Granny’s house haven’t been taking care of the place is because they moved out without telling her, so now she’s going to have to find some new tenants, only who will want to live that close to Dad and all his junk?