Juvie

by Steve Watkins

  Everything is frozen for the next few seconds as I guess everybody realizes what has just happened, though my eyes are too tightly clenched shut for me to know. Then I hear Officer Killduff’s booming voice: “Grab some God damn floor!”

  Eight bodies sprawl around me, as if they’ve been hit by a bomb.

  Next thing I know, Officer C. Miller is kneeling next to me, pulling on blue latex gloves. Then she holds the back of my head up with one hand and a cloth on my nose with the other. “Just don’t move yet, Sadie,” she says.

  “Officer Miller!” Officer Killduff barks again. “Radio for backup. Take Windas to the infirmary. The rest of these are going on lockdown.”

  “You know Tarzan?”

  That’s the first thing the nurse asks when C. Miller delivers me to the infirmary.

  She looks about ninety, wears a faded, flower-print smock, and has a chain-smoker’s raspy voice. Her ID says BATCH. She scowls down at my face.

  “Who?” I ask. It hurts to speak. I’m lying on an exam table, the only one they have in the cramped exam room.

  “Tarzan of the jungle,” Nurse Batch says.

  She shifts her examination light closer and studies up inside my nose. When she pokes at the septum, I nearly dive off the table.

  “Reason I asked,” she wheezes, “is the actor that played Tarzan in the movies, long time ago, he was always falling off his vines in the middle of swinging through the jungle and kept breaking his nose. So after a while he got tired of going to the hospital every time and he would just take ahold and straighten his nose back out himself.”

  I look at her to make sure she doesn’t have any ideas of doing that to me.

  “It’s just cartilage,” she says. “Not like he was setting bone.”

  C. Miller steps up beside Nurse Batch and peers down at me, then shudders and looks away. “It does look like it’s a little sideways, doesn’t it?” she asks.

  Nurse Batch nods. “Kind of,” she says, poking. I flinch.

  “Well, don’t worry,” she says to me. “I’m going to put this ice pack on to help with the swelling and the bruising, and then we can take a closer look.”

  She holds up one of those crush-packs of dry ice and squeezes it several different ways to release the cold. Then just before she applies it, so quickly that I don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late, she pinches the bridge of my nose and yanks it straight.

  I howl and clap my hands over my face, blind from the pain, ten times worse than when I got hit in the face by the Jelly Sisters. I let out a string of curse words and Nurse Batch yells back at me to watch my garbage mouth. Then she shoves the ice pack at me, but I push it away, roll onto my side, and finally throw up.

  “What’d you do that for?” Nurse Batch yells. “Did you want a crooked nose the rest of your life? You ought to be thanking me, not horking all over my floor.”

  I can’t answer. I haven’t ever heard that word before — horking — but that doesn’t stop me from hanging off the side of the exam table and doing it again.

  I lie on the table for half an hour while Nurse Batch calls for a janitor to come clean up the mess, my head pounding with every little movement.

  Twice I hear C. Miller ask Nurse Batch if she’s going to give me anything for pain, and twice Nurse Batch says she’ll get to it when she has time — though she doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything besides talking in a low voice with the janitor once he shows up.

  “Hang in there,” C. Miller says to me.

  My face hurts too much for me to say anything back. Besides, my voice sounds too strange with these cotton balls sprayed with Afrin shoved up in my nostrils, which Nurse Batch put in after she straightened the cartilage.

  The janitor finally starts mopping the floor, while Nurse Batch unlocks a cabinet and shakes a couple of pills out of a large white bottle.

  “My shift’s over in an hour, and there won’t be nobody in the infirmary to watch you overnight,” Nurse Batch says when she comes back over to the examination table. “You’ll have to go back to your unit. There’s a shower through that door there. You can shower off all that blood and change your clothes first. And you can take one of these. The officer will give you another later, about midnight.”

  She hands me a white pill and a Dixie cup of water. I look at her dully.

  “It’s for the pain,” she says. “You are in pain, aren’t you? The guard said you were.”

  I nod, wanting to ask her why she didn’t give it to me an hour earlier, when I first came in, but probably I’ve already asked more questions than you can usually get away with in juvie. Plus I don’t want to make her mad and have her change her mind about the painkillers.

  C. Miller helps me over to the shower. “It’s on a three-minute timer,” she says. A steady river of blood washes off my face and swirls down the half-blocked drain. It mixes with my tears. I don’t know whether they’re from the pain or from the ordeal of the past hour. C. Miller takes pity on me when the water cuts off and turns it back on for another three minutes. I pull the cotton balls out of my nostrils and shudder to see the trail of thick, black-red slime that comes with them.

  When I get out and towel off, I catch sight of my reflection for the first time — and burst into more tears. Already my face is puffy, my nose is green and purple, and I have the start of two black eyes. I know the swelling will go away and the bruises will fade over time, but the longer I stare in the mirror, the more I think that even if they suddenly let me out of juvie, even if this was a giant mistake, a big misunderstanding, even if Carla confesses and I could go back to high school tomorrow and see Kevin — even if all that happened, he would probably take one look at me and run the other way.

  I crumple against the sink below the mirror, sobbing and feeling sorry for myself, until Nurse Batch grabs my arm and pulls me away and tells me to knock it off. She shoves a pile of clean clothes at me and says, “Give it a rest already. You think you’re the first girl to get her nose broken in here? Don’t worry. It’ll grow back straight. Probably.”

  “I know you,” C. Miller says as we walk back to Unit Three. “From before here. I just figured it out.”

  “How?” I ask, surprised that she’s speaking to me. Guards aren’t supposed to speak to inmates. Not like this, anyway.

  “You went to Mountain View, right? Played basketball? Started when you were like maybe a freshman, three or four years ago?”

  I look at C. Miller again. My face still hurts so bad I don’t want to talk, even with the painkiller. I make myself anyway. “Eighth grade,” I say. “They let me play even though I was still in middle school.”

  “I played against you one time,” she says. “When I was a senior at Brooke Point. You guys killed us. Y’all had this tall, skinny girl playing center. I remember you had about fifty assists, feeding it to her under the basket. She camped out all night.”

  “That was Julie Juggins,” I say. “She was eighth grade, too. We had a good team that year. The rest were juniors and seniors. Two of them are playing college ball now.”

  C. Miller pauses to say something in her walkie-talkie. A door buzzes and clicks and swings open, and we keep walking down the corridor that connects the administrative offices with the incarceration units, neither of us in a particular hurry.

  “Coach had me playing point guard,” she says, picking up where she left off. “But really I should have been shooting guard. I never got enough shots. We could have been a lot better if we’d had a natural point guard and Coach had let me shoot more. Bet I could have got on somebody’s radar, got a scholarship.”

  “That sucks,” I say.

  We reach another door and stop. C. Miller lifts her walkie-talkie again but doesn’t press the talk button right away. She looks at me in my red jumpsuit and handcuffs, with my swollen nose and black eyes and rat’s nest hair. Then she sighs and says, “Sometimes I wish I was still in high school.”

  I try to smile along with her, but my head is somewh
ere else, stuck a minute earlier in the conversation, wondering if I might still be able to play college ball or if any chance of that happening vanished when I got sent to juvie.

  “Yeah,” I say at last. “Me too.”

  By the time we get to Unit Three, the painkiller is kicking in and I can barely walk. Officer Miller leads me to my cell. She tries joking with me on the way. “Thanks for getting me the overtime,” she says. “I need the money.” I don’t say anything in response, and she pats me sympathetically on the back. I collapse on my bunk without eating anything, without brushing my teeth or my hair, without speaking to anybody, not that there’s anybody to speak to, anyway.

  One of the night-shift officers comes around what must be hours later to check on me and give me another painkiller. I sit up long enough to swallow it, then collapse back onto my bunk. The last thing I hear, just before I slip under, is Cell Seven, wailing again, crying and crying, begging someone to please, please, come get her.

  The drugs quit working sometime during the night — it’s impossible to say when. My eyelids flutter open, and the first thing I see, the only thing for a while, is the fluorescent bulb stuttering overhead, bathing my cell in the same eerie green as the night before. My face hurts too much for me to keep lying down, so I force myself into a seated position, cross-legged on my bunk. I pull the scratchy gray blanket around my shoulders and lean the back of my head against the cool concrete wall. I touch my swollen nose and my puffy face but can’t tell if anything has changed. I don’t have a mirror, but I’m not sure I want one, anyway. My vision turns blurry — maybe from the throbbing pain, maybe because I’m tearing up — and the walls seem to expand and contract, as if the cell itself is breathing. I wonder if I might also be suffering from a concussion.

  The fuzziness clears after a while.

  In school, in Mr. Turner’s biology class, we studied this famous terrible experiment from the 1950s where a scientist named Harry Harlow put infant monkeys in cages by themselves except for two fake mothers. They called them surrogates. One surrogate was made out of wire in the shape of an adult monkey. That one had a milk bottle attached. The other surrogate mom was made out of cloth but didn’t have a bottle. The baby monkeys went to the wire moms and drank the milk, but then went to the cloth moms and clung to them, desperate for any sort of warmth and physical contact. It wasn’t enough, though. They all grew up weird and withdrawn. Some of them died of loneliness. Even when the monkeys were put in cages where they could see, smell, and hear — but not touch — other monkeys, they started acting autistic, withdrawing from everything, holding on to themselves, and rocking and rocking and rocking.

  Mr. Turner, who was an expert in making everybody feel like shit, also told us about these babies in Romania, the ones raised in orphanages where nobody was allowed to hold them or play with them from the time they were infants. This went on for years, during the Cold War back in the fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties. Mr. Turner said the babies grew up just like Harlow’s monkeys. They didn’t know how to express affection. They weren’t able to have what Mr. Turner called “permanent attachments.” He said a lot of them were homeless when they grew up.

  So is that how it’s going to be with me? With all of us in juvie? I can’t see that they’re trying to rehabilitate anybody in here with these cold cells, and all the single-file marching we do, with our eyes on the floor, heads down, hands behind our backs. And having to ask permission to so much as go to the bathroom. And no touching unless you’re getting your ass kicked and your nose broken.

  Or maybe this is all specific to me. Maybe it isn’t anything deliberate even. Maybe it’s genetic, and I’m turning into a recluse like my dad. I’ve spent countless nights camping by myself on Government Island, happy to be there alone. Maybe I’ve always had this tendency, just like Dad, but I’ve been able to ignore it until I got to juvie and they put me in this cell.

  I wrap my arms around myself and hang on tighter, frightened about what might happen to me if I let go.

  The unit is deathly quiet. The only sounds I hear are any I make myself, and I’m not moving. Cell Seven must have fallen asleep hours earlier, while I was passed out. Maybe the guards are asleep as well. Maybe I’m the only person awake in the entire juvie, or maybe every girl in every cell is sitting up on her bunk, rocking back and forth, the same as me.

  Carla asked around, but nobody knew where to find Scuzzy and Dreadlocks.

  “Their real names might be Walter and Lee,” she told me on Wednesday. “But somebody else said that wasn’t them. They said their names were, like, Reilly and something. And they haven’t been here that long. They came from Charlotte. Or maybe Charleston. And nobody’s seen them since the party.”

  I didn’t know how much of Carla’s story to believe. Were these guys really so impossible to track down, or did she half-ass her search the way she half-assed most things in her life? It occurred to me that she might not actually want to be able to find them. If the police interrogated them, and they said Carla knew about the drugs, she’d be going to prison for sure.

  She’d gotten off work early for another meeting with her lawyer. It was after school, and I was getting ready for basketball practice. Mom had let up on my restrictions for that and said I could ride my motorcycle to the gym, since she was working at Target that afternoon.

  “Don’t you need to get Lulu from day care?” I asked Carla to keep myself from saying something else — like accusing her of lying.

  “In a minute. Look, Sadie, I know you’re going to hate me for telling you this. But just listen first, OK? I’m trying to get us out of this. I told my lawyer, I asked him for more details — what happens if you tell them you sort of knew about it but I didn’t. That I was just in the car but didn’t know there were drugs or a drug deal or anything. And he said he would talk to the prosecutor’s office about that, but that probably they would just drop the charge against me. And he said the same thing again, that since you’re a juvie and all, and don’t have a prior record or anything, nothing will happen to you. Or nothing very much. But you would have to sign something, a statement or something. He doesn’t think they’ll believe that neither of us knew anything about the drugs, which is stupid, since it’s the truth. But then when you go to juvie court, they would give your statement to the juvie judge. And that’s that.”

  I pulled a white T-shirt over my sports bra, and my practice jersey over that.

  Carla was wringing her hands the whole time. “Well?” she asked, leaning closer on the bed. “What do you think?”

  I fished through my drawer to find some socks without holes in them. I’d barely slept the past couple of nights, trying to figure out the right thing to do. Make Carla tell the truth whatever it might turn out to be? Let her go to jail no matter what? The problem with that was they could still find me guilty, too. I was the one who took the money, after all. If Carla swore that I didn’t know what was happening, though, I would definitely get off. Or mostly get off, anyway. But that meant Lulu wouldn’t have Carla for the next three or four years. It meant either Mom raised Lulu — Mom and me — or Social Services took her. It meant everybody suffered, mostly Lulu, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I’d rather spend the next ten years in jail myself than let that happen.

  I sat on the bed and pulled Carla down next to me, squeezing her hands so hard it made her wince. She tried to pull them away, but I wouldn’t let her.

  I looked hard into her eyes until she dropped her head. I took a deep breath and said, “OK.”

  She looked back up at me. “What?”

  “I said OK. I’ll do it.” It sounded like someone else speaking, a bad actor reading from a script.

  “Oh, my God, Sadie. Thank you —”

  I cut her off.

  “But first we make sure that having this on my record won’t stop me from going to college or getting a scholarship,” I said. “And in return you’ll do whatever I say, right?”

  She nodded.
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  “You’ll go to AA, or NA, or whatever, to stop drinking and smoking pot and everything. You’re done with all that shit.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but then just nodded again.

  “And you’ll spend more time with Lulu. Not just turn on the TV when you’re home with her and let her watch stuff she shouldn’t be watching.”

  Her face reddened, and I could tell it was killing her not to argue with me, even though she knew it was all true.

  “And quit the Friendly’s job,” I continued. “Get a new job where your coworkers don’t all look like heroin addicts.”

  I knew I was pushing it, but after what she’d gotten us into, and what she was asking me to do, I didn’t care.

  “And take some classes at the community college. I don’t even care what. Just start back to school and do something with that GED. You can’t work these lousy jobs forever and raise Lulu right. You want her to be proud of you.”

  I couldn’t believe how much I sounded like Mom. I also couldn’t believe I was agreeing to what Carla had asked. How many chances had we given Carla over the years to get her life together? And did I really think this time would be any different?

  She whispered a final yes and wiped away some tears, and I knew all I could do was hope maybe this time really would be different. It was the closest Carla had ever come to actual jail time, to losing Lulu. If that wasn’t enough to scare her straight, nothing was.

  Julie Juggins, who I’d been friends with for as long as I’d played basketball, cornered me after practice. “What the hell’s going on with you?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said as I unlaced my shoes. We were the last ones in the locker room. I’d spent an extra half hour by myself practicing free throws and three-pointers. She must have taken a long shower to still be there, her hair still wet.

  “Something’s going on,” she said. “You were way too intense out there today — like maybe you thought it was the play-offs and not just running drills.”

  My laces got knotted, and I had to work to get them loose. I reminded myself that Julie was about the only person I knew who I was pretty sure wouldn’t get on her phone as soon as she left and text the whole rest of the world about what had happened. Plus her dad used to drink.