Juvie Read online

  Dave was kind of heavy, thin on top, walrus mustache. He didn’t look anything like Dad.

  Mom had put Lulu down in a chair and told her to stay, but Lulu hopped up when she saw us and pattered over to the holding cell. “Hey, Aunt Sadie. What’s wrong with Mommy? Can I come in with you guys?”

  “Lulu!” Mom barked. “Over here. Now. Sit back in that chair.”

  Lulu’s bottom lip quivered. She did what Mom told her.

  Mom didn’t seem in any hurry to speak to me or check on Carla. She sat down at Dave’s desk. The cops who arrested us had long gone. A brown-suited deputy sat nearby, talking on his cell phone.

  “So what’s the deal here, Dave?” Mom asked, loud enough now for me to hear.

  Dave tugged on the sides of his mustache. “Drug bust. Undercovers got them at that 7-Eleven off Caroline Street. They sold, like, a kilo or something.”

  “Pot?” Mom asked.

  “Pot,” Dave confirmed.

  Mom turned and glared again. “Is this true?” she called over to me. Carla was awake and struggling to sit up.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yeah, that’s what they arrested us for, but we didn’t do anything. It wasn’t even ours.”

  Mom lifted her hand. “Stop right there. Don’t say anything else. I shouldn’t have asked.” She glared at Carla. I knew what she was thinking: that whatever happened must have been Carla’s fault.

  She turned back to Dave. “So what do we need to do to straighten this out?”

  Dave shrugged. “Can’t do anything tonight, Gretchen. They’re supposed to stay right here until tomorrow and then the older one goes to court for arraignment. She’s got priors. I’m supposed to send the younger one over to Juvie Detention until they schedule her a hearing at JDR, and they’re not in session until Thursday.”

  “JDR?” Mom asked, obviously exasperated — at him for speaking in acronyms, at us, at the world. Lulu was crying now but not making any noise.

  “Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court,” Dave said. “JDR.”

  Mom sat back in her chair. “I’m taking them home with me tonight. I don’t want them staying here.” She pulled Lulu into her lap. “This one needs her mother.”

  Carla crawled over to the toilet and vomited.

  “Can’t do that,” Dave said.

  Mom leaned forward again. She propped one elbow on his desk so she could lean in even closer. “Yes, you can,” she said.

  They talked too low for me to hear anything for the next ten minutes. Finally, though, Dave threw up his hands. When he released us and we were filing out of the building, I heard him say to Mom that he was looking forward to their dinner.

  We didn’t go directly home once we got into the car. Instead Mom drove us to the 7-Eleven on Caroline Street, the place where we’d been arrested. It must have been four in the morning by then.

  “This is it?” Mom asked when we got there.

  I nodded. I was in the front seat. Carla and Lulu had fallen asleep in the back. I pointed to the corner of the parking lot. “We were over there, actually.”

  Mom looked. “Why?”

  “The guys bugged me to park there. They wouldn’t shut up about it, so I did it so they’d hurry up and go buy their beer and we could dump them off back at the party and go home.”

  Mom kept staring. “You were supposed to be at a movie. Out to dinner.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Carla just wanted to party. You know how she is.”

  “And what about you?” Mom demanded, still looking at the place where we’d been arrested.

  “I messed up,” I said. “I didn’t think anything would happen. Just a party.”

  Now she turned to look at me. “You lied to me, Sadie.”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say? I was supposed to be the good daughter, the responsible one, the one who made her proud, the one who wasn’t any trouble, ever.

  “Your sister is on probation,” Mom said, as if I was to blame for that, too. “Did you forget about that?”

  Mom didn’t talk to me for the rest of the drive. Not even when we woke Carla up and dragged ourselves into the house. Mom went out on the back porch, where I was pretty sure she smoked a cigarette, even though she was supposed to have quit ages ago. Carla mumbled some stuff that I couldn’t understand and went off to her old bedroom and passed out again on her old bed. She didn’t bother to take off her clothes, though she was disgusting from the holding-cell floor and the vomit and everything else she’d been up to that night.

  Lulu slept with me, although I couldn’t say I actually slept. I mostly worried about what was going to happen next. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong except be stupid enough to go out with Carla in the first place. But I had to go to JDR on Thursday. What was I going to tell Kevin? My friends? My coach?

  This didn’t fit into my plans at all. I was supposed to keep playing basketball, make all-region, maybe even all-state my senior year, study my ass off and crush the SATs, finish school, land a basketball scholarship — at whatever school Kevin ended up going to for soccer. We’d be one of those couples that just worked: him doing his thing, me doing mine, but ending up together no matter what.

  And out of this town forever.

  I heard Mom come in off the porch. She didn’t go to bed, though. She turned on the TV, and I was pretty sure she stayed awake most of the night. So did I, sick with worry that the life I’d been so carefully building these past few years had just crashed and burned.

  It’s late in the afternoon of my first day in juvie. The girl in the quilt has long since gone back inside her cell, and I’m sitting in a hard plastic chair out in the common room, sort of reading but actually just bored, when the rest of the girls come back from gym. They’re with a thirty-something white guy with an ex-military buzz cut and a melanoma tan, Officer Killduff. His khaki-and-blue looks a couple of sizes too small, probably on purpose to show off how ripped he is.

  There are eight girls total. Six of them, three white and three black, look like they’re around my age. Another white girl appears to be a couple of years younger, middle-school age, and the last of the eight, a tiny Hispanic girl with big watery eyes, could be in elementary school. All wear the same red juvie jumpsuit as me.

  Officer Killduff stands just inside the door with his hands on his hips as the girls shuffle over to the chairs as if they’re in shackles, the way I was earlier. Two of the black girls stop in front of me.

  “That’s my chair,” one of them says.

  I close my book and look around. There are plenty of empty chairs, all of them the same. My first impulse is to tell her to get another one. I don’t let girls push me around on the basketball court. You let that happen and they own you for the rest of the game. Everybody knows it’s the same in prison — at least in the movies. Maybe it’s the same in juvie.

  Or maybe it’s not. Maybe the best thing to do in here is just try to get along, no matter what.

  So I shift to the next chair.

  “Nope,” the girl says. “That one’s hers.” She tilts her head at her friend. They could be sisters — both tall, both heavy, both with their hair in cornrows, both with cheeks so pronounced that their faces look like peaches.

  I keep my mouth shut, hard as it is, and get out of that chair, too, keeping my expression as impassive as I can, as if giving up a chair is no big deal to me and I might even be doing it just because I want to.

  As I sit down in a third chair, Office Killduff comes over.

  “Problem here, Wanda?” he asks the first girl.

  Wanda smiles. “No, sir. Just saying hello to the new girl.”

  “Nell?” he asks the second girl.

  Nell shakes her head.

  “All right, then,” he says. “You said your hello.”

  The girls grin at each other and drag their chairs over in front of the TV, right up front. I think Officer Killduff will say something to me, welcome me, maybe, or tell me not to worry about them, but he doesn’t. He
just walks off. The other girls park their chairs behind Wanda and Nell, and the TV comes on as if it has a mind of its own and has been waiting for everybody to get settled. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the little Hispanic girl turn in her chair to look at me, but when I lift my head from my book, she twists back around.

  Officer Killduff stands in the guard station for fifteen minutes talking to Officer Emroch, then crosses the common area and goes into Cell Seven; he stays there for a few minutes and then comes back out with the girl in the quilt, though now that I can see it better, it looks more like a giant oven mitt. She sits in a chair, sort of facing the TV and sort of just staring off at nothing. One of the other white girls, all blond and sunny, as if she’s just come back from a beach vacation, gets up and sits next to her. Even though the blond girl doesn’t say anything, the oven-mitt girl seems nervous all of a sudden, fidgeting in her chair, tapping her foot, tugging at her limp brown hair so it hides half of her face, glancing around anxiously, anywhere but at the girl beside her. Finally she gets up and goes back to her cell. The blond girl laughs and returns to the seat she was in before.

  Wanda, the one who ordered me out of my chair, watches the whole thing unfold and has a sour look on her face. She whispers to her friend Nell and glares over at the sunny blond girl. Then they all go back to watching Wheel of Fortune.

  Wanda and Nell make a point of sitting on either side of me when the guards wheel in the food cart. All the tables are shoved together, surrounded by our chairs. The oven-mitt girl comes out of her cell but sits alone, an empty chair on either side.

  Dinner comes in Styrofoam boxes: some sort of meat cutlet, waxy green beans, a container of applesauce, a container of green Jell-O, and a roll. Officer Emroch sets a spork and a Dixie cup of water next to each of our boxes.

  Then Officer Killduff materializes from somewhere, standing over us. “Bow your heads,” he says, and everybody bows over their food as he says a rushed grace: “Lord, please bless this food that you have set before us so that it may nourish our bodies so that we may better serve thee. Amen.”

  My spork bends when I try to cut a bite of the meat.

  “You can’t eat it that way,” says Wanda in an overly helpful voice. “You’ll break your spork trying to cut it. You just have to stab it in the middle and lift the whole thing up.” She nods at her friend. “Show her, Nell.”

  Nell shows me.

  I take a sporkful of green beans instead, but Wanda interrupts me before I can bring it to my mouth. “You know where the food comes from, don’t you?”

  “No,” I say, my spork suspended over my Styrofoam box. A bean drops.

  “The Correctional. That’s a mile from here, through the woods. That’s the adult jail. They got inmates over there that work in their kitchen. They make all the food, and the guards and the jail trustees drive it over to us in their food truck.”

  “Interesting,” I say.

  “Yeah, right?” Wanda says. “And you know what they do to it first… .” She trails off.

  Nell nods. “I’ve seen stuff, too,” she says. “You don’t even want to know.” It’s the first time I’ve heard her speak.

  I know they’re just jerking me around. I know it. But still … I look hard at my beans, imagine the worst, and dump them back in the box. I pick up the applesauce container; at least it has a sealed lid.

  “I’d think about that one, too,” Wanda says. “I’ve seen holes poked in some of those. Especially the applesauce. And the Jell-O, too. And I’ve seen some things once I opened them up, too, I wished I’d never seen.”

  “Me too,” says Nell.

  “How about the water?” I ask.

  “Good water here,” Wanda says. “I wouldn’t worry about that. You drink all the water you want around here. I think it must come from a well or something. A real deep well.”

  Nell reaches over with her spork to spear my meat cutlet. She’s already eaten hers. “I guess if you’re not going to …” she says, trailing off again.

  Wanda helps herself to my beans. Both check to make sure the guards aren’t looking before they dive in for the rest of my food — and half the food in the boxes of a couple of the other girls. Nell gets my applesauce; Wanda takes the Jell-O. I do end up eating the roll but make sure to chew each bite twenty times before I swallow.

  One more thing happens — so fast I almost miss it. The sunny blond girl has been sitting on the other side of Wanda during dinner, though they practically have their backs turned on each other the whole time we eat. At one point, while the sunny blond girl is talking to someone, Wanda slips the girl’s spork into her lap, then lets it drop quietly to the floor.

  Nell breaks into a coughing fit that catches everybody’s attention — the oldest, dumbest trick in the world, so of course I fall for it, too. When she stops, I look back down on the floor and the sunny blond girl’s spork is gone.

  Officer Emroch comes out with a big gray trash bag shortly after that, and one by one we shove our Styrofoam boxes in — everything except our sporks.

  The blond girl’s eyes widen as she holds her empty Styrofoam box — she looks as frightened as the little Hispanic girl — and she frantically checks all around, in the box, in her lap, on the floor, under the tables. When Officer Emroch gets to her, she has no choice but to throw away the Styrofoam box, though.

  Officer Emroch brings the trash bag over to the guard station and comes back with a Tupperware container. “Spork count,” she says.

  Wanda drops hers in first and says, “One.”

  Nell is two, I’m three, and the count continues around the table, though Officer Emroch skips the oven-mitt girl, who was never issued a spork and had to eat with her hands. The sunny blond girl freezes when Officer Emroch gets around to her. She’s the last girl. She doesn’t look sunny anymore.

  “Spork count,” Officer Emroch says again.

  The girl’s lips barely move as she mutters, “Can’t find it.”

  “Say what?” Officer Emroch asks.

  “It was just right here,” the girl says. “I don’t know what happened to it. Can I check back in my box? Maybe it got in there and I missed it. Maybe it’s in the trash bag.”

  “Officer Killduff !” Officer Emroch shouts. “Can you bring over the trash bag?”

  Officer Killduff comes out of the guard room and gives her a look that I’m pretty sure means that fetching trash bags is Officer Emroch’s job, not his.

  Officer Emroch corrects herself. “I mean, can you come over here while I get the trash bag?”

  A minute later, Sunny Blond Girl has her arms deep in the trash, pulling out every Styrofoam box, every Dixie cup, every applesauce container, every Jell-O cup. She feels through the soggy leftovers that spilled out and slid to the bottom of the trash bag. She starts crying. “I know it was right by me. I didn’t do anything with it.”

  Officer Emroch takes away the trash again. Officer Killduff looms over the girl. He seems to have gotten taller, larger.

  “I didn’t do anything with it!” the girl says, shouting now. “I didn’t do anything with it!” She keeps repeating herself, as if saying the same thing enough times will convince the guards.

  Officer Killduff grabs the back of her chair and drags it away from the table. “Shut it, Gina,” he snarls. He turns to the rest of us. “Grab some floor.”

  All the girls immediately drop from their chairs and lie facedown on the floor. I follow them.

  “Officer Emroch,” he says, “take this one to her cell for a full-body search. Once you’re done, if she’s clean, come back for the next one.” As soon as they leave, he pulls a chair to the middle of the room and sits in it, boots planted wide apart, elbows on his knees, glaring.

  I keep my cheek on the floor. My stomach rumbles from hunger — I missed lunch, obviously skipped most of dinner, haven’t eaten anything all day except that one lousy roll and a bite of Lulu’s waffle. I’m lying there, wishing I hadn’t fallen for Wanda and Nell’s stupid ploy to get m
y food, and that’s when I see the missing spork, several feet away under the game shelf, where Wanda must have kicked it during Nell’s phony coughing fit.

  “You all know how this works,” Officer Killduff says. “Every one of you gets a full-body. That spork doesn’t show up, it’s lockdown for a week. That’s twenty-three out of twenty-four hours a day in your cell, which is fine by me because it means less work for me. I sit in the guard room eating chocolate. You all remember chocolate?”

  He stands up again and paces around us. “But I want that spork. And I will have that spork. One of you — Gina in there, in her cell getting the full-body right now, or else one of you — will give me that spork.”

  The Hispanic girl whimpers. Soon she’s crying, practically sobbing.

  “Officer Killduff,” I say.

  He stops pacing.

  “Who said that?”

  I signal with my hand from where I’m lying halfway under a table. “Sadie Windas.”

  “Windas,” he repeats, as if he’s surprised there’s someone here by that name.

  Wanda grabs my arm, digging her chubby fingers into my bicep. I shake her off.

  I point. “It’s over there. Under the shelf over there.”

  “And you know this how?” Officer Killduff demands.

  “I can see it,” I say.

  He goes to the game shelf, bends down, and feels around until he finds the dirty spork.

  He studies it for what seems like five minutes, as if he’s looking for fingerprints.

  He shouts at us —“Stand!”— and all the girls jump to their feet, arms behind their backs, eyes down.

  “Grab a door!” he shouts again, and the girls all hurry to their cells — walking quickly, careful not to run. Once I’m in my cell, I sit on my bunk and wait, breathless, wondering what’s next. But what comes next is the obvious thing: Officer Killduff slowly, deliberately, walking the perimeter of the common area, stopping at every cell and locking every door.