Juvie

by Steve Watkins

My cell is his last. He doesn’t lock me in right away, though. He steps inside and just stands there staring down at me. I’m still sitting on my bunk, back against the wall.

  “You saw how that spork got there?”

  “No, sir,” I say, which is technically true. I have no idea why Wanda took it, or kicked it across the room, other than to get Sunny Blond Girl in trouble, but I’m not about to tell Officer Killduff anything.

  I think I’ll get a full-on interrogation, but that’s it. Officer Killduff leaves without another word.

  My cell door makes a doom sound when he slams it shut as he leaves. I know he must be locking me in, too, but I can’t hear anything else because of the echo, which goes on for a long, long time.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that it always seems to be three a.m. when you’re having a dark night of the soul, and I guess it’s probably true, except that when you’re in your juvie cell, you can’t ever know what time it is. You’ve got no watch or cell phone to check, no windows to see the stars or the moon or the sunrise or the sky grow darker or lighter. You don’t have any clocks on your wall or your computer or TV or microwave or stove to tell you the time all the time. To force you to think about what you’re late for or early for, or how little time you have left, or how long you have to wait for something, like 0600, when they finally are supposed to let you out of your cell for breakfast. In juvie you lose all sense of time because you can’t sleep and because of your dirty, dull fluorescent light that just keeps stuttering overhead and never ever goes out, ever.

  At one point during the lockdown, I start counting to myself and don’t stop until I get to ten thousand and it still doesn’t seem as if any time has passed. At another point, I hear someone crying in another cell, on and on and on, crying that gets so hard it turns into a wracking cough that also goes on and on and on. Other girls yell at the crying girl to shut up, and keep yelling until a night guard threatens to cut off the air-conditioning. But the girl keeps crying. My heart aches for her. I want to rescue her from her cell and bring her into mine, wrap her in one of my blankets, let her sleep on my floor, or sleep with me, or take my bunk and I’ll sit up and watch over her if it will help, if it will stop her grief or loneliness or whatever it is, stop her crying.

  And then, finally — who knows when? — she stops. But now, in the silence, I find myself crying, too — only quietly, tears dampening my blanket until I think I’m going to have to scream, too. I miss my mom so much, and Lulu, and Carla, and Granny, and even Dad, and my boyfriend — my ex-boyfriend — my sorry ex-boyfriend, who wouldn’t stand up to his parents when they told him we couldn’t go out anymore after they found out I got arrested.

  Apparently Kevin had never heard of Romeo and Juliet and how his parents trying to keep us apart was supposed to make him want to be with me even more, and how he was supposed to sneak out of his house and come over to mine and throw pebbles at my window and say, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Sadie is the sun… .”

  I get up. I measure my cell in the number of juvie-issue sandal steps it takes to walk from the bed to the door and from one wall to the other. I wash my face and let it drip-dry because the guards didn’t give me a towel and the toilet paper is so thin it shreds as soon as I touch it with my wet hands. I lay my blankets on the floor and do all the yoga poses I can remember from some sessions we had in gym class one time. I do push-ups until I can’t lift myself off the floor or feel my arms. I stand flat against one wall and stare at the other to see if I can unfocus my eyes enough to see any patterns in the green concrete blocks. I stare at my arms, wondering if it’s the light reflecting off the green walls that makes my skin take on a sickly green pallor.

  I lie down on my bunk again and pull my blanket over my head but can’t breathe. I try lying on my stomach, but the shape of the mattress with its pillowed end makes that impossible, so I lie the other way. That doesn’t work, either. I shut my eyes and pretend I’m in my bedroom at home; or having a sleepover with Lulu, squeezed into bed with her and a dozen stuffed dogs; or in my sleeping bag camping out on Government Island.

  You can sit in a room by yourself for hours, but the minute someone tells you you aren’t allowed to leave, all you can think about is how badly, how desperately, you want out.

  Even worse is that after a while — hours into not sleeping, hours into not being able to turn off your brain — you start playing those videos in your head again from a month ago when everything went wrong. You see a million things you’d do differently if you had the chance, but it’s a kind of torture to keep thinking about it, because you’re stuck where you are and there’s nothing you can do to fix anything now.

  My first night in juvie, my dark night of the soul, finally ends after thirteen hours of lockdown. I wake up on the cold concrete floor of my cell, no idea where I am at first, or how long I’ve been here, or what’s happening. There’s a lot of noise. Incomprehensible shouting and banging. Then the heavy click of a lock, and the door creaking open, and someone stepping inside, saying, “Well that looks comfortable.” A new guard is standing over me. She looks vaguely familiar — not a guard I’ve seen before in juvie, but someone I might know from somewhere else. She can’t be more than four or five years older than me. She’s about my size, with her hair in tight cornrows like Wanda’s and Nell’s. Her name tag says C. MILLER. The uniform doesn’t fit her very well.

  “O-six-hundred,” she says. “Breakfast.” She drops a small hand towel on the edge of the stainless-steel sink, looks at me hard for a second, as if she maybe recognizes me from somewhere, too, and then leaves.

  I drag myself up and can’t figure out why my arms are so sore until I remember the shackles, and the push-ups, and Wanda’s fingers clamping down on me when I told Officer Killduff where he could find the missing spork.

  There’s no mirror in the cell, so I just assume I look terrible. Not that it will matter in here. Nobody’s wearing makeup, or doing much with their hair, or shaving their legs, or plucking their eyebrows, or getting their nails done.

  I tuck my hair behind my ears and pull my fingers through to untangle some of the knots that have probably been in there since the day before. My red jumpsuit is wrinkled; I’ll still have to wear it for another day before getting another. I wash and dry my face, stick my hands in my pockets, and shuffle out to meet whatever version of the day they let into juvie at six o’clock in the morning.

  The Styrofoam breakfast boxes are already off the transport cart. A couple of girls, one white, one black, sit together at one end of the mass of tables with their boxes open in front of them; Wanda and Nell sit with theirs at the other end. Some of the other girls are just wandering out of their cells, rubbing their eyes, stretching, coughing, wiping their noses. The little Hispanic girl yawns and looks around dully until Wanda waves her over to sit with them. I don’t see the girl in the oven-mitt dress yet, or Gina, the sunny blond girl whose spork Wanda stole.

  I grab a breakfast box and take a chair next to the girls who aren’t Wanda and Nell.

  “I’m Sadie.”

  The white girl — slight, with red hair, pretty in a washed-out sort of way — nods. “Hey. I’m Good Gina. This is Chantrelle.”

  “Hey,” Chantrelle says, looking annoyed. “You believe this? They’re not giving us our sporks on account of yesterday. We got to eat with our hands. I ain’t even washed my hands yet. Not with soap.”

  “Yeah,” Good Gina says, though she doesn’t seem as bothered. “Sucks, doesn’t it?” She lifts some eggs tentatively to her mouth with the tips of her fingers.

  “Did you say Good Gina?” I ask.

  Chantrelle answers for her. “That’s what I call her. The other Gina — the one that got in trouble last night about the spork — we call her Bad Gina.”

  “Yeah,” says Good Gina. “Bad Gina’s not that bad, though. I don’t think.”

  “Yeah,” Chantrelle says. “And you ain’t all that good, either.”

 
They both laugh.

  I check out the food: a Dixie cup with four desiccated apple slices, burnt scrambled eggs, an undercooked sausage patty, a dry piece of toast, a little plastic container of grape jelly, another Dixie cup with water.

  “Any coffee?” I ask. They break out laughing again.

  “No coffee in juvie,” Chantrelle finally manages to say.

  “Yeah,” says Good Gina. “No hot anything. They’re afraid we’ll throw it on somebody and burn them.”

  I rub my temples, sure I’ll be suffering even more of a headache later as I go through caffeine withdrawal.

  “I know, right?” Good Gina says. “I used to measure time in my day from latte to latte.”

  “I don’t drink coffee,” Chantrelle says. “Don’t like it. I like a Red Bull first thing in the morning, though.” She shakes her head as she chews on a tough apple slice. “I do miss my Red Bulls.”

  I drink the water, pile my sausage and eggs on the toast, then ask if they know who was crying last night.

  Good Gina nods. “Same one as every night since I’ve been here.” She points to Cell Seven, where the new guard, C. Miller, is just walking in, carrying a breakfast box. “Annie or Angela or Angelina Jolie or something. Can’t remember her name. Everybody just calls her Cell Seven. That thing she wears, they call that a suicide pad. They make you wear one if you try to hurt yourself. Can’t tear it apart. Can’t hang yourself with it. She doesn’t even get to have any underwear — no bra, no T-shirt, nothing.”

  “What happened?”

  Chantrelle answers. “Cut her arm. Got a little piece of metal from somewhere. But it wasn’t a real cut, like for a real suicide. She did it the wrong way. She wasn’t here when I come on the unit. I heard they sent her to where they send the mentals, but just for a couple days. She just come back.”

  Annie or Angela or Angelina still hasn’t come out of her cell.

  Good Gina leans close to me. “You know you better kind of watch out — like watch your back and all?” she asks.

  “Because?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” she says. “But there’s something going on between the Jelly Sisters and Bad Gina. You finding that spork — I could tell that made the Jelly Sisters mad.”

  “Jelly Sisters?”

  Chantrelle nods toward the other end of the tables. “Big girls over there with the cornrows. Wanda and Nell. That’s the Jelly Sisters. They’re not really sisters, though. I think they’re maybe cousins. They don’t like that Bad Gina. And that Bad Gina don’t like them, either. And neither does that friend of Bad Gina’s.”

  “Why do you call them that?”

  “Jelly Sisters?” Chantrelle says. “On account of how much they love these little jellies the Correctionals give us at breakfast. Girls that used to be in here, they was calling them that already when I got in.”

  Good Gina giggles. “The Jelly Sisters are jelly jonesing any morning the Correctionals don’t send them their jellies. They don’t even spread it on toast. Just eat it like candy. Or like Jell-O shots.”

  “What are they in for?” I ask.

  “Writing checks,” said Chantrelle. “But I didn’t hear it from them.”

  “I didn’t know it was illegal to write checks.”

  “Is when it’s your teacher’s checkbook,” Chantrelle says.

  “True dat,” Good Gina adds.

  Chantrelle gives her a dismissive look. “Listen to you — all street talk and everything. You been in juvie, what, a whole week?”

  “True dat.” Good Gina grins. Chantrelle rolls her eyes.

  We eat quietly for a minute, low buzzing conversations going on around the tables. Bad Gina comes out and sits with a big white girl, who I assume is the friend Good Gina and Chantrelle were talking about.

  Good Gina finishes eating and closes her Styrofoam box. “What about you, Sadie?”

  “What about me what?”

  “Why’re you in?”

  “Drugs,” I say, hoping that will be enough.

  “Just possession?” she asks.

  “Distribution.”

  “Dang, girl. Weed or pills?”

  “Weed.”

  “So you were dealing weed?” she asks.

  “Not really.” I shrug. “It was a package somebody left in my car.”

  Good Gina and Chantrelle smile at each other. I probably wouldn’t believe me, either.

  Chantrelle has more questions. “What offense?”

  I don’t know what she’s asking. “What do you mean, ‘What offense’?”

  “I mean first offense, second offense, like that.”

  “Oh,” I say. “First.”

  “Dang, girl,” she says, echoing Good Gina. “Nobody gets juvie for first offense anything that’s not violent.”

  “They wanted me to give up some names.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “It was complicated.”

  “I’da named them in a heartbeat,” Chantrelle says. “They out there running around while you do the time? I don’t think so. I don’t care about complicated.”

  “Same here,” Good Gina says. “I’da named names out of the phone book if they’d wanted to hear some names.”

  Chantrelle snorts. “What you know about the life of crime, Good Gina? Or maybe I ought to call you Killer?”

  Good Gina ducks her head and grins again.

  Chantrelle thumps the table. “Good Gina here shot her boyfriend. Didn’t actually kill him, though. Hardly even shot him. Just in his hand.”

  Good Gina turns red. “I’m probably going to have to pay for his surgery and all the medical bills,” she says.

  Chantrelle isn’t through. “At least tell me you shot him in his business hand. The one he use for choking his chicken?”

  “I guess,” Good Gina mutters.

  “Why’d you shoot him?” I ask.

  “The usual,” she says.

  “He was cheating on you?” I guess.

  “Yeah. And it was the other girl’s gun, too. I found it in her purse.”

  “Should’ve shot her,” Chantrelle says.

  Good Gina’s face turns nearly purple, past embarrassment into anger.

  Chantrelle pats her arm. “Well, never mind them,” she says gently to Good Gina. “She’s just a ho and he’s just a pimp. A pimp is a magnet for hos. It’s like a natural law. Nothing you can do about it. Ain’t even about you, really.”

  Good Gina shakes her head. “It’s not like that. He made a mistake. I made a mistake. People make mistakes. You know.”

  She looks at me. “I talk to him all the time,” she says. “When they let us use the phones. I call him. He likes it when I call him.”

  Chantrelle shakes her head. Good Gina doesn’t see her, though.

  I don’t know what to say. The whole conversation seems fictional. I’ve never met anyone who shot anyone. I’m not sure I even know anyone who owns a handgun. “How long are you in for?” I ask.

  “Don’t know yet,” Good Gina says. “Still have to go back to court.”

  “Me too,” says Chantrelle. “Grand-theft auto, just like the video game. Wasn’t me, though. It was a different Chantrelle. I be home with my mom and my sisters in no time, eating real pie off a real plate with a real knife and fork. Maybe y’all will get you your sporks back by then.”

  “God, I hope so,” says Good Gina. “This sucks.”

  I wonder how much of what they told me I can believe — about why they’re in juvie, about the Jelly Sisters, about me needing to watch my back.

  C. Miller approaches the tables and opens a garbage bag. “Here you go, ladies. Trash.”

  All the girls stand up immediately, though the Jelly Sisters are a heartbeat slower than everyone else, like they’re making a point, though I can’t guess about what. Everyone stands in line to dump their Styrofoam boxes, then stays in line, waiting. Officer Killduff, who had been sitting at the guard desk drinking a cup of coffee, rouses himself. He unlocks a cabinet, then brings out
a plastic container full of toothbrushes, each one labeled with a cell number. I take mine and wait for C. Miller to squeeze toothpaste on it — a job that seems to be beneath Officer Killduff — then we all go to our cells to brush our teeth. We drop our toothbrushes back off, and Officer Killduff orders us to line up again at the door to go to morning classes, though we end up just standing there for a good five minutes while he sits at the guard station writing in a logbook. C. Miller walks around the unit, looking into all the cells.

  She stops when she gets to mine. “Windas!” she whispers. I stiffen and hold my breath. I have no idea what’s coming next.

  She’s waves me over.

  “You didn’t make your bunk, girl,” she says. “Hurry and do it.”

  But it’s too late. Officer Killduff sees what’s going on and comes over.

  “That’s not how it’s done in here, Officer Miller.”

  “Sir?” she says.

  He ignores her and turns to me.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I start toward my cell, but he stops me. “I didn’t hear you ask could you go.”

  I fight the urge to look at his face — to make eye contact. I study the tops of my feet instead. I clench my jaw. “Can I go?”

  He grunts.

  When I return to my place in line, which is now last, Officer Killduff gets close to my face. I struggle once again to keep my gaze on my feet.

  “That just cost you three days of phone privileges,” he says.

  Mom hit me with chores all morning on Sunday, the day after the arrest, and only let me leave the house to go to work that afternoon at the car wash. She kept asking me what really happened, but I just kept saying the same thing: that we didn’t know there were drugs in the car, that we’d just given the guys a ride and that was all. Mom said if it turned out Carla had anything to do with the drugs, she would go to jail for sure.

  Kevin came by during my break, but I couldn’t even tell him I’d been arrested. I couldn’t tell anybody. He left thinking I was mad at him for something, and then I really did get mad at him — for taking off so quickly, for not sticking around to try to find out what was wrong. Mom took away my cell phone for a couple of days, so I couldn’t talk to him that night or text him. Every time I tried to apologize, hoping she’d give it back, and maybe ease up on my restrictions, she said she didn’t want to hear it until I was ready to tell her the truth.