Juvie (27 page)

I stood and watched for a while, Mom saying some things, I guess trying to help, the guy staring off at nothing. It broke my heart to see him like that, so obviously devastated, knowing his little boy was buried not far away, knowing there wasn’t anything anybody could do to bring him back. Even God couldn’t build a backhoe big enough.

I sat under another elm tree and waited. Mom was with the guy for a long time, until the shadows grew so long that they melted away into dusk. I wondered how long she would sit there, but I didn’t mind the waiting. We were supposed to meet Carla and Lulu back at the house for dinner, but I had a feeling that this was where Mom and I were supposed to be.

Granny was three years gone, but I felt her in that moment. It was the same as if she’d been sitting next to me, cradling me in her warm arms, telling me to take what I was seeing along with me into juvie, telling me to keep it in my heart and not feel sorry for myself, not for one minute, and telling me to remember:

You wake up every morning, no matter what happened the day before
. . .

The guards tell us it’s raining, so we can’t go back out on work release right away. If we’d never been allowed outside in the first place, we’d probably have been all right — our usual complacent juvie selves — but now everybody seems to be on edge again.

Bad Gina takes it even harder than the rest of us, though her mood brightens considerably that afternoon when she gets a letter from Weeze. She reads it out loud to New Nikki and Good Gina — loud enough so Fefu, Kerry, and I can hear it as well, though we’re a couple of tables away playing Chutes and Ladders. Somebody had duct-taped the board back together.

“Listen to this part,” Bad Gina says. “‘So since my jaw’s wired shut, I can’t eat anything except through a straw, so they have to puree everything, even meat and stuff. I think I already lost ten pounds.’”

Bad Gina laughs. “Liquid meat. Probably the best thing ever happened to her blubber-butt self, getting her jaw broken.”

Good Gina doesn’t say anything, but I can tell from the stricken look on her face that she wishes she wasn’t sitting with them.

“There’s more,” Bad Gina chirps. “This is good. Check this out. ‘They said I don’t have to go back to juvie. They’re going to send me to a halfway house for the rest of my sentence after I get out of the hospital. But I hope I get to see you again. I hope we can still be friends.’”

“You think she’s in love with you or something?” New Nikki asks.

“Yeah, probably,” Bad Gina says. “God, what a homo.”

I glare at her. Weeze was her friend, got hurt on account of being her friend. And this is how she gets repaid? No wonder the Jelly Sisters attacked Bad Gina. I’d like to hurt her, too, and catch myself thinking of ways I might do it without getting caught.

Kerry touches my arm and tells me it’s my turn. It takes me a second to remember we’re playing Chutes and Ladders. It takes longer to shake the thought out of my head about hurting Bad Gina.

In the real world, you can walk away from somebody who gets on your nerves, ignore them, get lost in a crowd, hang out with other people, do other things. In here, though, the world shrinks so much that there’s no getting away from people, no separating yourself from their crap. Little things become big things because there isn’t anything else.

It keeps raining for the next couple of days, or so Officer Killduff says. He could be making up phony weather reports for all we know. There’s one bit of good news, though — from Carla. She doesn’t get the Victoria’s Secret job, but the Friendly’s manager puts her on the breakfast shift, so at least she won’t be hanging out so much with the afternoon drug crowd. Plus she can get Lulu at a decent time from day care. The news makes me so happy I don’t care about the rain, or the fact that we haven’t been able to go back to Lake Anna.

Fefu and Kerry and I keep hanging out together in the days that follow, sometimes with Good Gina, too — playing cards, board games, kid stuff. They act like I’m their big sister; it’s a role I’ve been in most of my life with Carla, so I’m kind of used to it, and with the good news about Carla’s work, I don’t really mind. Kerry decides we should teach Fefu how to read, so there’s a lot of Dr. Seuss going on for a while.

Some things don’t change. Good Gina keeps pretending to talk to her boyfriend. New Nikki loses phone privileges for humping the wall again. Bad Gina keeps having these agitated conversations with somebody every night, shutting up when the guards come close, keeping her voice low so none of the rest of us can hear what she’s saying. And Carla doesn’t pick up when I call her cell phone. But instead of freaking out, I decide to have a little faith in her. When I do finally get up with her, she tells me she’s been at AA. Twice in a week.

Friday morning they bring in the shackles and everybody gets excited. Officer Killduff orders us into line, and five minutes later we’re climbing into the back of the juvie van, me and Fefu and Kerry on one side, the Ginas and New Nikki on the other. Bad Gina, opposite from me, licks her lips nervously and grins, though not exactly at me.

No one tells us we’re going back to Lake Anna, but once we get to the interstate and head south, everybody knows. New Nikki says she wishes the van was going the other direction, up to DC, where her cousins live, and there are all these clubs they could take us to, where we could get in underage if we dressed slutty and guys would buy us drinks.

New Nikki starts up about this one guy she hooked up with one time, and Good Gina shrinks away on their bench seat. She might have shot her boyfriend and all, but I know hard talk like that still makes her uncomfortable. It’s kind of weird to say, but seeing that gives me hope that maybe we won’t be
so
changed once they let us out.

Fefu has been teaching Kerry how to sing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in Spanish —“
La araña pequeñita”
— and pretty soon they get me singing it, too. The hand motions are the same, though Kerry has difficulty climbing the spider up the water spout, thumb-forefinger, thumb-forefinger.

Bad Gina scowls but doesn’t say anything, which is a nice change.

We hum down the interstate for another half hour until we get to the Lake Anna exit, then wind through two-lane roads in thick forest. For some reason I start thinking about the girls who aren’t on Unit Three anymore. It still feels strange to me that they’re all gone — the Jelly Sisters, Cell Seven, Weeze, Chantrelle, Middle-School Karen, even Summer. And not just gone, but so suddenly, and absolutely. Nobody talks about them, except that day when Bad Gina got a letter from Weeze and made fun of her. I guess that’s just the way it is in juvie. One minute they’re stripping away everything you own, down to your last underwear; the next minute they’re sending you home to your parents, or shipping you off to a long-term facility south of Richmond, or carrying you to the hospital to wire your jaw, or locking you up on another unit with the violent offenders.

They start erasing you when you enter; they keep erasing you after you leave.

The rain has turned the garbage soggy at Lake Anna, even more disgusting than before, if that’s possible. You go for a diaper with your trash grabber, and half of it stays on the ground. Usually the grossest half. But you still have to pick it up. Same with the food. Same with everything.

Fefu and Kerry keep singing the Spanish “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” like a broken record, but I don’t mind. I’m happy that they actually seem to be enjoying themselves. It takes me forever to get all the words right, but then we sing it over and over until Bad Gina throws a wet bag of chips and tells us to knock it off already.

“God!” she snarls. “I’d like to crush that itty-bitty spider under my shoe.”

“Yeah,” echoes New Nikki. “Same here.”

I’m in too good a mood to let them spoil it. “I think you mean ‘itsy-bitsy.’”

Bad Gina glares. “Yeah,” she says evenly. “Whatever. Itsy-God-damn-bitsy.”

I smile, though I’m already on dangerous ground with Bad Gina. “Except it’s Spanish,” I add.
“La araña pequeñita.”

Bad Gina throws a busted flip-flop this time. “Just shut up, Sadie.”

Fefu snares the flip-flop and stuffs it in her trash bag. She and Kerry giggle.

Then they start singing again. Bad Gina and New Nikki huff and work their way up the slope of the beach as far away as they can go without getting barked at by Officer Killduff, who’s standing at the top of the sandy slope in the speckled shade of a gnarly dogwood.

C. Miller stays down with us on the beach. She doesn’t sing along with Fefu and Kerry and me but asks us to repeat the words. She says she wants to teach it to LaNisha when she gets home.

After an hour, C. Miller tells us we can take a break for water. There’s a cooler under the tree next to Officer Killduff, and everybody troops up the hill for some. I stay by the edge of the lake, though, and inhale deeply and look around at the silver water and the lush green tree line and the clear azure sky. Of course there’s also the nuclear power plant with its massive, ghost-white cooling towers, but I try not to focus on that right now. There’s always going to be something — a fly in the ointment or whatever. I mean, look at me. It’s nearly Christmas, and I’m two months into a six-month sentence in juvie, picking up other people’s soggy nastiness and singing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in Spanish with a pyromaniac and a girl who shot her boyfriend and a ten-year-old who clubbed a guy with a metal pipe so she could have his bike. And they’re the nice ones.

But it could have been a whole lot worse. It could have been Carla in prison for four years instead of me in juvie for half of one. And it could be Lulu without a mom instead of just missing her aunt.

I dig unsuccessfully for something with my trash grabber before realizing it’s dog poop and not a brown paper bag. Fefu and Kerry come back from getting water just in time to see what I’m doing and practically fall down laughing.

I kick wet sand over it and move on.

Shortly before noon — the sun directly overhead, though it still isn’t too hot — Bad Gina tells Officer Killduff she has to go to the restroom.

He nods to C. Miller. “Take her.”

“It’s OK,” Bad Gina says, a little too quickly. “I’ll just run up and run back.”

Officer Killduff stares at her. “She goes or you don’t.”

Bad Gina flashes him her girliest smile. “Just trying to be helpful.”

C. Miller rolls her eyes. I want to warn her about Bad Gina. I can’t say why exactly. It’s just a feeling I can’t shake as I watch them trudge together up the beach. Everybody else stops working to watch, too, as if it’s the last time we’ll ever see them.

Officer Killduff yells at us. “Back to work or back to juvie.”

We lower our heads and continue picking up trash in the opposite direction from the pavilion. Officer Killduff barks about stuff we missed and we keep having to go back and get it.

I look up the beach again, but C. Miller and Bad Gina aren’t back yet. I try to focus on my job, but something still doesn’t feel right. Finally I ask Officer Killduff if I can go to the restroom, too.

He looks exasperated. “You couldn’t ask me that before, when they went up?”

“Sorry.” I shrug.

He nods. “Hurry.”

I’m halfway up the beach when a strange wind picks up. It catches a rivulet of sweat on my neck and leaves an icy chill. I walk faster.

There’s nobody at the pavilion or the Dumpster, nobody outside the restroom or at the boat-rental office or anywhere else that I can see. Lake Anna is as deserted as it was when we came before.

I push open the restroom door and step inside. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and when I walk in farther and turn the corner I freeze.

C. Miller lies sprawled on the floor, blood covering one side of her face. Bad Gina’s nowhere in sight, but I look immediately at the back door, remembering what she said last time we were here — about making a break.

C. Miller moans. I rush over and lift her head gently. “Are you OK?” I ask, my stomach twisting at the sight of all that blood. “What happened? Are you all right?” She opens her eyes, stares blankly for a minute, then lifts herself onto her elbows and scrambles away from me into the corner.

“It’s OK,” I say. “You got hurt. It was Bad Gina.”

C. Miller looks scared and confused. She throws her arms up in front of her as if trying to ward me off.

“No,” I say. “It’s not me. It’s just her. I’m going to help you.”

She scrambles farther away, eyes wide with fear.

This is no good. She won’t let me anywhere near her. “I’m going for help,” I say. “Just don’t move.”

I push myself up and out the front door of the restroom and scream down the beach to Officer Killduff. He takes a few running steps in my direction but then stops and looks at the other girls.

“Help!” I scream again. “God damn it! Help!”

I slam back inside the restroom, where C. Miller is wiping blood from her face, shaking her head as if trying to clear her thoughts. I grab a wad of paper towels and kneel next to her even though she tries to crawl farther away. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I say. “Just take this and hold it.” I press the paper towels against the cut and push her hand down over the towels to keep the pressure on.