Juvie Read online

  She nods at Officer Wallace. “Officer Wallace.”

  He nods back at her. “Warden.”

  A door next to where we’re standing buzzes and then makes a heavy clicking sound. Mrs. Simper opens it and disappears inside. A lady guard comes out with handcuffs and ankle cuffs and a whole lot of chain. She sees me eyeing them.

  “Most inmates come in directly from court, from off the transport van,” the lady officer says. Her name is Officer Kohl. “They already have their chains on. It’s procedure we got to put them on you before we take you back to intake.”

  Officer Wallace grabs the ankle cuffs from Officer Kohl. “Legs apart,” he says.

  He squats in front of me with the ankle cuffs while Officer Kohl does my wrists. Everything locks together, my hands shackled in front of me, my legs hobbled. My arms already ache from holding it all up.

  Officer Wallace says something into his walkie-talkie, then there’s another buzz and another click and they lead me through another door off the lobby in the opposite direction of Mrs. Simper. I shuffle through the door and down a short, gray hall to yet another door, this one marked INTAKE. It took more time for them to put me in the shackles than it does to walk there.

  The hall is bare except for a mop and bucket next to a set of gray double doors at the far end of the hall, which is where I figure they bring kids in off the transport bus.

  “What’s that doing there?” Officer Wallace snaps. “That’s not supposed to be there.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Officer Kohl says. “It isn’t my job, though.”

  “If it’s something where it’s not supposed to be, then it’s your job,” Officer Wallace says back.

  Officer Kohl wheels the bucket and mop over to a closet, which she unlocks with a key. Officer Wallace unclips his walkie-talkie from his black belt and mutters something, and the by-now familiar buzz and click happens and then the intake-room door opens. Officer Kohl, back with us now, nudges me from behind, and I shuffle through there, too. It’s still morning, though it could just as easily be the middle of the night since the only light comes from stuttering fluorescent bulbs high overhead. Suddenly I feel very, very tired.

  A row of holding cells lines most of one side of the intake unit. I can see through their small windows: each has a bench bolted to the wall, a stainless-steel toilet with no seat or lid, and a stainless-steel sink, the kind where you push down on a button so water comes out for five seconds — just long enough to wet your hands but never enough to rinse them properly. In the main intake area are a couple of desks, a long shelf with stacks of what look like uniforms, and a row of hooks with enough cuffs and chains hanging from them to stock an entire Inquisition torture chamber. The officers unlock me from my restraints and add them to the Torquemada collection.

  At the far end of the cells are two shower stalls. Officer Kohl leads me to the farthest one while Officer Wallace stays back at the computer.

  “Take your shoes and socks off right out here,” Officer Kohl says. “Then when you go in the shower, you can take off everything else.”

  A minute later, I’m standing in my underwear and bra while Officer Kohl pulls on blue medical gloves like Officer Wallace’s. “I said to strip,” she says. “All the way.”

  I add my underwear and bra to the pile of clothes and cross my arms over my chest while Officer Kohl inspects it all. Then she dumps everything in another garbage bag.

  “Open your mouth,” Officer Kohl says, so I do.

  “Wider.”

  I open wider.

  “Hook your fingers inside your cheeks, and pull open your mouth wider. Then stick your tongue way out, too.”

  She shines a flashlight in my mouth for a while, then grunts.

  “All right. Now I got to have you bend over and spread your butt cheeks.”

  I’ve probably never blushed at anything in my life, but I blush when she says that, and keep blushing as I do it and she aims her flashlight on me.

  “Spread wider,” she says. I move my feet farther apart, but that’s the best I can do. She grunts again.

  I think we’re finished, but we aren’t. “Last thing,” she says. “Now I got to look in your business.”

  “You mean my vagina?”

  She shrugs. “Some call it that.”

  She taps inside my thighs. “Spread wider.”

  “Can I ask you something, Officer Kohl?” I say, trying to sound calm and composed, though I don’t know how successful I am, since I can’t stop clenching my teeth. “Do you ever actually find anything when you do these body cavity searches, or is it just a thing you all like to do?”

  She frowns. “Like Officer Wallace already told you, how it works in here is you don’t ask questions. You get told what to do and you do it.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Can’t hear you,” she said.

  It’s a pissing contest, but I know there’s no way for me to win, so I lower my eyes the way I figure I’m expected to and say what I figure I’m expected to say: “Yes, Officer Kohl.”

  “That’s a lot better. And since you’re brand-new here, I am going to answer your question, just this one time. And the answer is you’d be surprised at what we find in them body cavities.”

  “Like what?”

  Officer Kohl laughs. “Like I’m gonna tell you? Give you some ideas? I don’t think so. And anyway, we’re done.”

  “Does that mean I don’t have to take a shower?”

  “Everybody showers,” she says. “On the regular schedule, you take one three-minute shower every day. Today’s your special day, though, since it’s intake. Today you take you a long shower until I decide you’re through.”

  She hands me a white bottle. “This is lice shampoo. You wash your hair and everything with it, including your hair down there.”

  “You mean my business hair?”

  Officer Kohl frowns again, and I shut up. She steps out of the shower stall and shuts the door, but stays at the window.

  I hope the hot water will steam it up so she can’t see, but that doesn’t happen because there isn’t a handle to turn it on with, so the water stays freezing. The shock takes my breath away and I lather and rinse as quickly as I can.

  Officer Kohl cracks open the door once I’m done. “Back in,” she says. “And do it all over again. Only scrub harder this time, and stay under that shower longer till I say you can come out. You bringing anything in here from outside, it’s going down that drain.”

  Officer Kohl issues me one red jumpsuit, two pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks, one wireless bra, and one pair of plastic sandals.

  “You get clean ones of these every two days. Second-day underwear and socks you keep in your locker. That’ll be right outside your cell door. Dirty ones you put in your locker when you get the clean ones out. Change after shower. Sandals you wear until they wear out.”

  She hands me two blankets and two sheets.

  “Once a week you turn them in for washday. You wet the bed, that isn’t our problem; it’s your problem.”

  “Do many people wet their beds?” I ask.

  “Now, what did I tell you about asking questions?”

  “My bad,” I say.

  “You right it’s your bad. And there’s another thing: you don’t look at the guards unless they tell you you can look at them. You keep your eyes to yourself besides that. And when you’re walking in the hall, you stay in line with your unit and you keep your hands behind your back and you don’t look anywhere but right in front of you and you don’t talk; you don’t say one single word. You just go where you’re told to go and stop when you’re told to stop. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  I put on the underwear and bra that aren’t mine, and the starched red jumpsuit that isn’t mine, and the socks and sandals that aren’t mine, and carry the extra underwear and the blankets and sheets that aren’t mine back to the intake desk with Officer Wallace and his flat face and his computer.

&nbs
p; “Sit down,” he says, indicating a chair across from his, positioned so I can’t see what’s on the screen. “These are questions you’re required to answer. We already know the answers to some of them. They’re included to see if you’re being truthful. You are required to be truthful.”

  The jumpsuit fits surprisingly well, but it itches, and I shift in the chair to scratch the middle of my back, but then I think that maybe it makes me look nervous or uncomfortable answering questions, so I stop.

  “Ready to start?” Officer Wallace says. He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “First question: State your full name.”

  “Sadie Ruth Windas.”

  “Age?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “U.S. citizen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Race?”

  “White. Caucasian, I guess. But part American Indian. One-sixteenth, or thirty-second. I forget. I think my great-great-grandmother was Indian. That’s what my granny told me.”

  “We’ll go with white.”

  “OK.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “OK.”

  “Last time you thought about hurting yourself?”

  “I’ve never thought about hurting myself.”

  “Any suicidal ideation?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s thoughts about hurting yourself.”

  “I’ve never thought about hurting myself.”

  “Mental-health history?”

  “No mental-health history. That is, no mental-health problems.”

  “Ever been sad?”

  “Of course.”

  “Depressed?”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “Ever been diagnosed with clinical depression?”

  “No.”

  “Medications?”

  “No medications.”

  “Violent episodes?”

  “No violent episodes.”

  “Most recent episode.”

  “No episodes.”

  “You are required to answer truthfully.”

  “I haven’t had any —” But then I stop. Because there was this one incident recently, during a game, and what if they know about it somehow and this is a test?

  “Well?”

  I’m suddenly glad for the rule about not looking at officers. I study my hands for a minute. “There was this one thing,” I start. “At an AAU basketball game, like a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, the other team’s center was beating up on our center, Julie Juggins, and the referees weren’t calling it. So I kind of grabbed the girl’s ponytail and jerked back on it — harder then I meant to — and she fell on the court and landed on her elbow. I got a technical foul and got kicked out of the game.” My gut twists just thinking about it. I’d never done anything like that before, I hated the idea of it being entered into an official file on me.

  “Was she injured?”

  “Not really. They iced her elbow and then she was back in the game.”

  “When was this?”

  “I already said. It was a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Charge?”

  “From the basketball game?”

  “No. We’re done with that. From the arrest.”

  “Don’t you already have all that?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Felony distribution.”

  “Adjudication?”

  I answer that one, too, though he already knows the answer. He knows the answers to the next twenty questions as well, but that doesn’t stop him from asking them. I feel more like a criminal with each one, which must be the point.

  Once they’re done, and once I’m back in shackles, Officer Kohl takes me on a long walk down a series of gray corridors, all of them wide, all of them deserted. We pass through a couple of locked doors that require radios and requests, more buzzes, more clicks, until we reach my unit. Inside is a common room with cells branching off to the sides, a TV high on a wall, tables and chairs, a bookcase crammed with books and board games, and a short, stout, white female guard whose name tag reads OFFICER EMROCH.

  “All yours, Sheila,” Officer Kohl says, handing over a file with my name on it.

  Officer Emroch laughs a polite laugh. “Start the party.”

  There’s only one other person on the unit — that I can see, anyway: a white girl sitting in a chair, wearing what appears to be a dark-blue quilt with Velcro straps that fits her like a sack with holes cut out for her head and arms. The girl isn’t doing anything. Just sitting. She might be sixteen. I doubt she’s any older. She doesn’t look up when I enter.

  Officer Kohl unlocks all the cuffs and chains. I’m still standing there holding a stack of blankets and sheets and underwear.

  “That’s it, then,” she says to me. “You belong to Unit Three now.”

  Officer Emroch’s face falls as she watches Officer Kohl leave. I wonder if she’s lonely in here all day, nothing to do but hang out with quiet girls in quilt sacks.

  “Windas,” Officer Emroch says. “What kind of a name is that, anyway?”

  “English, I think.”

  “Huh,” she says. “Not one we’ve had in here before.”

  She takes a long look at me, as if trying to figure out if I might have some other ethnic identity I’m trying to hide from her. We’re the same height, but she’s easily twice my size.

  “All the others in Unit Three are at afternoon gym with Officer Killduff,” Officer Emroch says. She speaks in the same terse way as all the guards I’ve met so far. None of them seem to ever smile. “You’ll meet him when they come back here for showers, then free hour, then dinner. I’ll show you your cell and locker, right over here. You need to go ahead and make up your bed. You know how to do a military tuck? You can come out and sit with me and her after you’re done. No TV allowed until free hour, though.”

  She leads me over to an empty cell — Cell One — and gestures for me to go inside. I stop, though, framed by the door. I can’t seem to go any farther. The cell is the same as the intake cells I saw: eight feet by eight feet with dull-green concrete-block walls and a gray concrete floor. A narrow bunk is mounted to the far wall, with a thin mattress that’s fatter at one end for a kind of pillow. A stainless-steel sink sticks out from the wall next to the door, and on the other side of that is a stainless-steel toilet with no seat or lid. And that’s it. No table, no chair, no desk, no shelf, no posters, no window except the dirty rectangle of reinforced glass on the door. A fluorescent bulb high overhead crackles and hums and gives off a dull white light.

  Officer Emroch looks up at it with me. “That stays on,” she says. “Twenty-four/seven.”

  She nudges me into the cell the way Officer Kohl nudged me into Intake. “Come on, now. That bed isn’t going to make up itself, and you don’t want Officer Killduff to come back here and see you haven’t done it yet. He wouldn’t like that, and you don’t want to do anything he doesn’t like, I promise you.”

  She turns to leave. I hear her cross the common-room floor, hear the scrape of a chair, hear the creak of hard plastic as she sits down, hear her say something to the girl in the quilt. It’s a kinder voice than she used with me, but even so, I don’t hear an answer.

  I set everything down on the sink so I can rub my eyes, then take inventory again, hoping I’ve missed something. I haven’t, except for a roll of scratchy toilet paper sitting on the floor next to the toilet. I take another step, then another, until I stand next to the bed. At least from there I can see the door, and at least the door is still open. I can’t imagine how much more claustrophobic I’ll feel at night when they lock me in. Just contemplating it makes me start to sweat even though it’s cold in my cell, cold everywhere in juvie.

  I make myself think about something else — about Lulu that morning giving me a rock, about how good and scary it felt the first night I rode my motorcycle, about that tournament last month when I had twelve assists and seven steals in the championship game — and slowly I start to feel better. I can handle t
his. I’ve spent plenty of nights alone, camping out on Government Island in a tent a lot smaller than this cell. Granny always said it’s our job in life to learn from everything that happens to us, so that’s what I’ll do here.

  I busy myself with the sheets and blankets and military tucks and then step outside to put my underwear and socks in the locker. The girl isn’t there anymore; I assume she’s gone back to her cell. Officer Emroch sits at the guard’s desk, writing in a logbook.

  I trace the hard plastic number one bolted to the outside of my cell door and take a deep breath. The air tastes stale.

  So this is it. So this is home.

  They brought us to the magistrate’s office after the arrest, after reading us our Miranda rights, after the pointless interrogation about who the guys were who gave us the drugs.

  Carla didn’t know their names, either. Not even Scuzzy’s.

  I wanted to kill her. I wanted to make her tell me what the hell happened back there at the 7-Eleven, and did she know we were going to be part of a drug deal? But I couldn’t very well ask her that right now, and I probably couldn’t kill her right then, either.

  The magistrate’s office was in a small, shit-brown, wood-frame house near the train station. They had a couple of holding cells and stuck us in one after we called Mom. Carla was alternately crying and cussing at the officers, which didn’t help matters any. I kept telling her to shut up, but she was still so drunk that she tried to hit me. Then she lay down on the floor and fell asleep. There were a couple of other drunks in there with us, but they were passed out as well. I was the only one awake when Mom showed up.

  “What the hell’s going on, Dave?” Mom demanded when she stormed in the door. She had Lulu with her, wide-eyed but sleepy, still in her pajamas.

  The magistrate said, “Hey, Gretchen. Long time no see.” I was surprised that they knew each other. He pointed at us on the other side of the room. “They yours?”

  Mom turned and just stood there for a minute, glaring. I nudged Carla with my foot and tried my best to look innocent, which should have been easy but wasn’t.

  Mom turned back to the magistrate, Dave, and said something I couldn’t hear. He seemed vaguely familiar, and I thought maybe he was one of the guys Mom went out with for a while after Dad left. She did that for the first year or so, then quit. She never said why.