Pretty Crooked (27 page)

Daniels came back with a damp cone-shaped cup from the cooler. I took it from him, and noticed that my hand was shaking. I drank the water quickly and collapsed the paper in my hand. My wrists were sore and red where the cuffs had been.

“So then what happens?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. We have to wait and see.” I thought of Tre. “Will I be sent to boot camp?”

He looked at me with interest. “Are you confessing?”

“I want to talk to a lawyer. They said I had the right to. Can I talk to a lawyer?”

“Sure.” He handed me the phone. “Be my guest.”

I looked up at him with hesitation, realizing that I had no idea who to call. “I don’t actually have a lawyer.”

“Here’s a list with some names.” He pushed a piece of paper in front of me. “These are court-appointed attorneys.”

I glanced at the list and then back at the phone. What would I even say to a lawyer?
Hello? My name’s Willa and I’m inquiring about your thief-representation services
....

Maybe I didn’t want a court-appointed attorney. Maybe I needed someone expensive and big-time to handle my case. I tried to remember everything I’d seen on lawyer shows.

I was only fifteen years old. How the hell was I supposed to know what to do? I looked up at Daniels, who was watching me expectantly with just a hint of a smile on his face. I had no clue.

I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I tried to think of who else I could call. Tre was no good, because I couldn’t call attention to him. Cherise wouldn’t have any advice, and she probably wouldn’t be all that thrilled to hear I’d been ripping off her friends. But maybe Aidan would. Maybe talking to him, just knowing he was out there, would calm me down. All of a sudden I ached to hear his voice. It was worth a try. I dialed his number and he answered on the second ring.

“Aidan,” I gasped when he answered. “I need your help.”

“Willa? Where are you?”

“I’m at the station. I got taken in. What do I do?”

“What happened?” His voice sharpened with concern. “Did they call your mom?”

“It’s a long story,” I said, looking up at Daniels. “I can’t talk about it right now. My mom wasn’t home.”

“Look, don’t do anything, Willa. Just stay quiet until your mom gets there.”

“Okay,” I said, biting my lip.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, his tone soothing and clear. “I promise you. Just hold tight. If you need anything at all, I’m here for you.”

I wished he were here
with
me so I could wrap my arms around him.

“Thanks,” I said. “That means a lot right now.”

I hung up the phone and sat back in my chair, looking down. The cuff marks on my wrists looked a bit raised now, like
o
-shaped welts. I tried to close my eyes and let Aidan’s words, the sound of his voice, wash over me.

“That was your lawyer, eh?” Daniels asked, raising a doubtful eyebrow.

I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing. Minutes ticked by. Sitting there doing nothing was starting to feel like torture. This was how they got you. I knew Aidan was right. I had to stay quiet. I tried to steel up my face, make it expressionless so Daniels couldn’t read what I was thinking. But his knowing, almost-mocking way of talking to me made me really nervous.

He got up again and moved some files around. When he came back, he said, “You know, this isn’t like the adult criminal system. If you confess on the record it’s actually going to make things easier.”

I knew what he was trying to do. I pursed my lips
together and tried to drown out his voice.
Don’t listen. He’s going to trick you
.

“We have all kinds of evidence that it was you, Willa. Including the backpack of stolen goods you dropped.”

I didn’t say anything, just kept staring down, anxiously willing my brain into blankness. I imagined what he saw in front of him, a scared young girl who was in way over her head.

“It’s up to you, really. But it’ll save us all a lot of time if you just admit it.”

Again, I stayed mute.

“A lot of people have been looking for you. You’ve had a good run, you know? Whatever you were doing, you did it well—I mean you stole a lot of things and you gave away a lot of things. You also got people talking.”

Don’t look at him. Tune him out
.

“But one thing people in this town don’t like is someone who runs away from responsibility. And the more you run, the harder it gets. You can’t live a lie forever. It gets to be a burden.” He stopped talking and stared at me hard.

My eyes traveled upward from the bottom of the desk to where his hands were resting on its surface. And then to his face, which was unshaven and pudgy, but, I could see now, not entirely angry.

I heard the truth in what he was saying. It had been hard for all these weeks to be two people at once. In the beginning it had been thrilling to help those girls,
but maybe, over time, I’d lost sight of that. Maybe I’d focused too much on the stealing part, like Tre had said. The thing was, I’d always known deep down that I couldn’t keep going like I had. Sooner or later I would be caught. And sooner had turned out to be now.

“I mean, if I was you, and I believed in what I was doing, I’d probably want people to know. You had your reasons. You’re not a bad person. Why not stand behind what you’ve done? Be an adult about it.”

“Fine,” I burst out. “I get it. It was me, okay? Are you happy?”

Then, for the first time since I’d been taken in, I started crying. Daniels didn’t say anything further. He let me sit there for what felt like a half hour, crying and letting it all sink in.

On top of everything else, all the worry and disappointment and regret, was the little voice in my head repeating what Aidan had said on the phone. I was supposed to be quiet. I’d screwed up. Majorly. And now I would probably never see him again.

Daniels handed me another cup of water. It was so cold that it hurt my teeth. I gulped it quickly, then put my head down between my arms and felt the tears run off the sides of my face into my sleeves.

I’d confessed. It was all over.

Sometime before midnight—by then, I’d lost track of time, just listening to the police radios drone around the
cubicles—my mom arrived at the center. I could hear her coming before I saw her, her familiar footsteps treading lightly and quickly on the tiled floor.

“She’s here for Willa Fox,” I heard the grumpy woman from the front desk say.

I sat up and turned toward her. My mom headed in my direction, her half-buttoned jacket flapping open, her face drawn up in distress. She didn’t look at me and I almost didn’t care—I was so happy to see her. I wanted to jump onto her back like I’d done as a little girl and have her carry me out of there on piggyback. I was way too big for that now, of course, and it would be a ridiculous thing to do in this situation. Besides, they were detaining me. I was stuck here.

“Hello, officer.” Her tone was cool and formal, but I detected a little huskiness in her voice.

Daniels shook her hand and gestured for her to have a seat in the chair next to me.

“So what do we need to do now?” she asked, all business.

“I just need you to sign a few forms. We’ll review the paperwork and her past record and have a hearing on Monday, most likely.”

My mom cleared her throat. “Will she have to—serve time?”

“We will refer the matter to a probation officer and a judge,” Daniels replied as he shoved his hands in his pants pockets. “It’s really going to depend on how they
view the seriousness of the crimes. In the meantime, you might want to think about getting her a lawyer.”

My mom finished signing the papers.

“I’ll give you two a few minutes to talk,” Daniels said, walking away from his cubicle.

“I cannot
believe
what you’ve done,” my mom said very quietly when he’d walked away. Now she was staring right at me and I could feel a kind of fire in her eyes. “I could kill you right now, Willa. I really could.”

I had never seen her so furious. I’d never heard her say anything so violent. She was a yoga-loving pacifist by nature. “Mom, wait. Let me tell you my side of the story. Please?”

“No! I don’t want to hear your explanations.” She drew her lips back to bare her teeth. “And I don’t want to hear any excuses. You’ve broken the law. You’ve jeopardized your future, everything we’ve worked so hard for.”

I could feel my lower lip quivering. “I wasn’t trying to—I had good intentions.”

She held up a hand to silence me. “What’d I just say? Are you listening to me at all? These are
crimes
you’ve committed. They’ve been all over the news. Do you have any concept how
serious
this is?”

I swallowed hard and opened my mouth to answer her, but nothing came out.

“You’re young—you have no clue, Willa. But everything you do in life has a consequence. We have to keep living with our consequences. And what you’ve done …
you may as well have just thrown everything away. I just can’t believe how reckless and irresponsible you’ve been.”

Her words sliced through me. I’d always felt like she was on my side, like it was the two of us against the world. But this time it wasn’t. It was all accusations. She didn’t even want to hear my perspective. Like she’d already decided I was guilty!

And something in me turned sour then. I needed her again, and again she wasn’t there for me. “I guess I’d thought you’d at least try to understand, but forget it.”

“And what do I need to understand here? How do you expect me to be okay with this?”

“It’s not like you were a model teenager,” I snapped.

“I got
pregnant
. It’s very different from breaking and entering, stealing people’s personal property,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “What I did wasn’t against the law. It wasn’t hurting other people.”

“I wasn’t hurting people, either!”

“But you were. You were deceitful. I mean, what upsets me most are the
lies
—that you’ve been leading a double life all this time. I thought we trusted each other.”

“You’re one to talk,” I said, gathering my arms up into my chest.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on. Double life, Mom? You’re the queen of it!”

My mom let out a frustrated sigh. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

We were fighting in harsh whispers, staring each other down but trying not to make a scene. It was beyond late. There were only a few people wandering around the intake area at this point, and most of the officers had gone home. It felt like she couldn’t leave until the conversation reached some plateau or we reached some kind of understanding. But we were clearly going in a different direction. And there were no barriers now. I had to put an end to this hypocrisy: We were both going to have to tell the truth.

“Mom, I saw you at Target, okay? You were meeting that guy there.”

She clapped a hand over her mouth in surprise. “You followed me?” Her expression collapsed into disbelief. “You actually
followed me
? What the hell?”

“Who is he?” I demanded. “No more lies. We moved here for him, right?”

Silence from her end now as she stared me down, still shaking her head. She wasn’t budging.

I went further. “I just wish you’d shut up about my future—it’s never been about me. Just be honest for once—”

“I’ll be honest when I can trust you.”

“And what about me trusting you? You’d been so mysterious, never telling me where you were going. I had my suspicions.”

She reached over and grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me. “You think this is some kind of game, to spy on me and make up stories? There’s no affair, okay? I told you that.”

I had nothing left to lose. The question flared through me and spun out into the air like a Roman candle. “Is he my father? Tell me the truth.”

“I’m leaving.” She stood up and slung her purse over her shoulder.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Home. We’re finished talking here. You’ve got a crazy way of seeing things, Willa. You’ve just been arrested and you’re blaming
me
for
your
problems, accusing me of lying to you.” She was halfway down the hallway and yelling over her shoulder. “You have no idea what’s going on.
None!
”

There was nothing I could say to stop her as she stormed toward the exit, moving back out into the night. I stood there, limp and helpless. She was a free person. I, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE NEXT MORNING, a “counselor”—in juvenile hall, this is what they called the people in uniform telling us what to do—woke me up and told me I had visitors.

I was still wearing the hall-issued sweatshirt, underwear, and scrub pants they’d given me when they’d booked me—my real clothes had been stored in a paper bag on a shelf at the front desk—but I had to put on my laceless blue shoes, which they’d made me leave outside the door of my tiny gray cell.

I had not slept at all. Instead, I spent the night on the thin mattress rearranging cinder blocks like Tetris in my mind, trying to replay the night’s events, wondering what I could have done differently, wishing I could take it all back and start over. I wondered what people at school knew about my arrest. Surely, by now, Kellie and her family knew. Which meant Cherise and Nikki did, too. Maybe Tre. Maybe even the entire student body.

Mostly, though, I thought about my mom. The cold way she’d looked at me in the station. Somewhere on the cellblock was the distant sound of a tap dripping, and with each drop I felt my heart slowly breaking into little pieces. I ached inside with regret and longing.

Not helping was the glass window in my cell, which was there for the staff to look in on me. It also let in the light from the hallway, keeping me awake and reminding me where I was. In the system. An object of scorn, cast out by society.

The whole point of juvie, of course, was to make you feel remorse about what you’d done, and they’d designed it brilliantly. Before I could meet my visitors, I had to have my designated shower in the girls’ bathroom, which was in an open row of spigots with no walls or privacy. Then I had to have my state of Arizona–funded breakfast: a small bowl of tasteless cereal and a squat little plastic cup of juice with a foil top, the kind they gave you after blood donations. Then I was allowed to go back through the hallway, down to the visitor’s area, which was where I came in the night before. I was led from one destination to the next by different counselors, but none of them even looked at me or introduced themselves.