All that history was mostly forgotten now. The island was overgrown and wild again, though you could still find the old quarry sites if you knew where to look.
I ended up staying all night there, even though I hadn’t thought to bring my sleeping bag or anything to eat or drink. At first I just sat on a freestone outcropping over the black water and let my mind wander wherever it wanted: to how I could make up to Julie Juggins and the team for what I’d done; to my complicated relationship with Kevin, who could make me so frustrated one minute and make me love him until I thought I would melt the next; to conversations I’d had with Granny when she was alive; to happy times with Mom and Dad when Carla and I were little, before Dad retreated into himself and Mom had to start caring for all of us on her own.
It was a warm October night, and when the mosquitoes started biting, I slid down to the water’s edge and smeared river mud on my neck and face and the backs of my hands and anything else that was exposed. The mud dried and caked and itched some but did keep the mosquitoes away. I climbed back up to my lookout perch, a wide slab of flat rock thirty feet above the water, and must have fallen asleep at some point.
I woke up just before sunrise. Once my head cleared, I quietly made my way in the dim predawn light to some brush near a certain tree at the water’s edge where I happened to know there was a blue heron nest. I waited there, hidden, camouflaged, trying not to move or make a sound until the precise moment the red sun showed itself just over the tops of the trees on the other side of the widest expanse of the creek, and then I rustled the brush and saw what I was hoping to see: the blue heron rising suddenly from her nest with one great beat of her wings, catching a thermal that spiraled up, so that just for a second she was framed, backlit by the rising sun, and then disappeared off into the sky.
When I left the island and returned to my bike, I turned my cell phone on and saw I had a couple of messages. The first was a voice mail from home.
“Sadie, it’s Mom. Just wanted to remind you you have work in the morning. Hope the game went OK. Say hi to Julie and her mom for me.”
I texted her back: on way 2 wrk now.
Kevin had left a text, too — u ok? — but that was it. One lousy text. And the minimum number of characters possible. The jerk.
I kick-started the bike and rode back to town and to the car wash, where I spent the next eight hours Windexing and vacuuming and towel-drying an endless parade of cars and trucks and SUVs — and not texting Kevin.
It’s Friday of my second week in juvie, and I wake up scratching my legs. I haven’t shaved my legs since I’ve been here, and for some reason that makes me as depressed as anything that’s happened — or maybe it’s just that it’s on top of everything that’s happened. My armpits are sprouting hair, too. I guess everybody is going through the same thing except maybe Fefu, who is too little. The rest of us, though — God.
Nobody has said anything about shaving; we’ll probably just get hairier and hairier until we look like apes. Or guys. For once I’m thankful for the juvie-issue jumpsuits and shirts, which keep us from noticing how hairy we’re all getting. But I shudder to think what I’ll look like when they finally let me out of here.
The reading specialist, a little round woman named Mrs. Blanchard, comes later that day so there’s a break in the routine, not that it ends up being much of a break. Mrs. Blanchard decides we’ll have a spelling bee. Middle-School Karen gets called out for court right when we’re getting started. “Good-bye, everybody,” she says as she leaves, sounding as if she thinks she’ll never see us again.
The spelling bee doesn’t go over very well, since almost everybody goes out in the first round, probably deliberately, though I guess the words might be kind of hard: quantum, duchess, flummox. I win on quadrilateral, but everybody acts so bored the whole time, I’m not even sure Mrs. Blanchard notices. There isn’t a prize.
Next she says we’re going to write character sketches.
“About who?” Wanda asks.
“About yourselves.”
Wanda shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
Nell says, “Me either,” though neither speaks loud enough for the guard, Officer C. Miller, to hear.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mrs. Blanchard says. “But this will be different from the last time we tried this exercise. This time I brought something.”
She pats a machine sitting on the desk. It’s a paper shredder.
“I know last time everyone was worried about who might read their essays and that it might cause them trouble or embarrassment. But this time nobody will see what you write. It really is just an exercise. You can shred it as soon as you’re finished. I won’t even see it. Unless you want me to. I want you all to think of our classroom as a safe haven for expressing your thoughts.”
“Then what’s the point if nobody’s going to read it?” Bad Gina asks. “And, like, how will you grade it or whatever?”
“It’s called freewriting,” Mrs. Blanchard says. “It’s a way to warm up to other essays we’ll be writing later on. Kind of like the stretching you might do before you run in a big race.”
“We gonna have to race again?” Wanda asks. “Like we already did in gym?”
Mrs. Blanchard looks frustrated. “No. Not a real race. I was just using an analogy to explain.”
She passes out paper and markers. Fefu goes right back to coloring in polka dots. Weeze draws more horses. Wanda Jelly plays tic-tac-toe by herself. I can’t tell what Nell is up to. Probably writing death threats to Bad Gina. Bad Gina wraps her free arm protectively around her sheet of paper so I can’t see what she’s doing, either, but it looks as if she’s actually writing her essay.
I eye the shredder, look at Bad Gina scribbling away, and decide to give it a try.
SADIE WINDAS
Is kind of popular in school, blond, athletic, pretty enough before she got her nose broken and hopefully will be again. She gets good grades and is captain of the basketball team and gets invited to plenty of parties. She’s got a cool soccer boyfriend, or used to. She fits in, but everybody knows there’s kind of an edge to her, too, like an independent streak. She has a motorcycle. She doesn’t wear much makeup. She doesn’t gossip. She’s pretty private about stuff. Like getting arrested. And why her dad and mom no longer live together.
She’s the kind of girl who can sneak off to Government Island to camp out by herself, and a couple of times with her boyfriend, and tell her mom she’s sleeping over at Julie Juggins’s house — because her mom is too tired and worn down to check up on her, and because Sadie is the easy sister, not the strung-out teen mom sister. Not that Sadie’s mom is a bad parent. But she’s a single mom working two jobs. Sadie’s dad lives by himself. He won’t see anybody and refuses to take medication. Sadie hasn’t talked to him in a couple of years. She knows her family loves her in their own way, but it hasn’t felt like enough for a long time.
She has a lot of plans. To go to college on a basketball scholarship, travel, have a career, live in a nice big house with a picket fence and a husband who’s a lawyer/musician and makes decent money. She’ll probably coach her kids’ soccer and basketball teams, host sleepovers, and keep working a good job herself. Though to be totally honest, she wonders if she’d feel like a phony in that kind of life, partly because she’s never actually known anybody who lives that way. But wherever she ends up, she knows she doesn’t want a life like her mom’s. Or her dad’s. Or her sister’s. Lately, and for a long time, to be honest about it, she feels separate from her family, like she’s moved past them or something. But no matter where her life takes her, she can’t imagine ever going far from her little niece. Missing Lulu is the hardest part about being in juvie.
When Carla dragged Sadie to that party, the one where they got arrested, Sadie would rather have been home having a sleepover with Lulu, making a tent with the covers and getting under it with a flashlight, reading Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny over and over until Lulu fell asleep, bec
ause those are the only books she likes to read. But Sadie knows one of her jobs in life is to steer Carla away from trouble, for Lulu’s sake, even though Sadie thinks she’d be a better mom to Lulu than Carla is. But taking the blame for Carla, and going to juvie — that just about killed her: having everybody think she’s guilty, losing all her friends, losing her boyfriend, maybe even losing any chance of a scholarship, and college, and all the rest —
I stop at the bottom of the page, my marker just about dry, and realize how furiously I’ve been writing. My eyes burn, sweat rolls down my cheeks. I wipe my face on my sleeve but rub my nose too hard. A drop of blood lands in the middle of the page. I try blotting it off but that just smears it, like the bright-red tail of a comet, or a shooting star.
Everybody is staring.
I blink. They blink back.
Slowly I raise my hand.
Mrs. Blanchard clears her throat as if she’s going to make a speech.
“Yes, Sadie?”
I push my chair back from the table.
“Permission to use the shredder?”
I have two letters that afternoon at mail call. One is from Julie Juggins. I almost can’t believe it. We’ve been friends for a long time, but she dropped out of sight right before I went to juvie.
Hey, S.,
Hope you’re doing OK and sorry I didn’t get a chance to see you before you left. Anyways, the team has pretty much sucked since Coach sent you into early retirement (that’s what I’m calling it, anyway). I thought about quitting, but figured you’ll be back next year and then we’ll be so awesome when we’re seniors, we will totally rule… .
I get excited about the prospect of that — for about a minute. And then I get depressed about missing most of the fall AAU season, and the high-school season starting in December, and — who knows? — with community service tacked on to my six months in juvie, probably summer ball next year as well. And I’m still waiting to hear if my conviction and my time in juvie is going to make me ineligible for basketball scholarships. Mom asked Vance to look into it for us as a favor, but so far we haven’t heard anything. Julie might as well be writing about a dream she had, for as likely as that future seems right now.
The other letter is from Mom, with a picture from Lulu. Mom says the reason the tenants at Granny’s house haven’t been taking care of the place is because they moved out without telling her, so now she’s going to have to find some new tenants, only who will want to live that close to Dad and all his junk?
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m thinking about moving us out to your grandmother’s — all of us: me, Carla, and Lulu. If Carla goes back to school, she’s not going to be able to keep paying her rent, and since there’s no mortgage out at your grandmother’s we would all get a break. I could try to keep an eye on her if the three of us were living together, and it’d be easier helping take care of Lulu. That’s a big IF, of course. Carla says she’s been looking at the course catalog and plans to call the registrar at the community college. And she says she’ll see about going part-time somewhere if she does start taking classes. But she’s never been too good at following through. And then there’s the question about whether she and I could actually survive under the same roof. We’ll see. It would be strange living right next to your dad, of course, but I don’t expect we’d see him much more than now, the way he keeps so much to himself. Anyway, I’m thinking about it. I guess I could have told you all this over the phone, but I’m never sure when you’re going to call and I thought you might like some actual news in a letter.
I read the letter twice, to make sure I’m not hallucinating. Mom and Carla living together. Yeah, right.
I fold it up and open Lulu’s picture, which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be of me. Anyway, it’s a girl with a giant head, spiky hair, stick arms and legs, enormous fingers and toes, big fat body, big fat butt, tiny little motorcycle, and a frowny bird sitting behind her that might or might not be Lulu.
I trace the outlines of the picture over and over with my finger, imagining her at Mom’s kitchen table with her big crayons and a frozen waffle.
C. Miller hands me a manila folder with my name on it.
I look up at her and hold her gaze, which I know I shouldn’t do but I can’t help it. “Please, just this once? It’s a picture of me, from my niece.” I know I sound pathetic, and I know there’s no point, but I can’t bear to give it up.
“How old is she?” C. Miller asks.
“Three,” I say. “Her name is Lulu.”
C. Miller nods sympathetically, and for just a second I think there’s a chance. But then she says, “Sorry, Sadie. They told you that at Intake. In here, you don’t get to keep anything.”
Dear Lulu,
You draw the best pictures of anybody. I have the one you sent me hanging up over my bed, right next to my pictures of you and Carla and Moo-Moo. I hope you’re taking good care of that rock you gave me the day I left. You can wear my basketball shoes if you want, around the house or whatever, but you probably shouldn’t sleep with them anymore. Too stinky. Ask Moo-Moo if you can have one of my basketball jerseys to sleep in instead. I already told her it’s OK. You can have whichever one you want and you can keep it, too. I wish I was there with you now. We could eat frozen waffles for breakfast.
Dear Julie,
Thanks for your letter, and glad you didn’t quit the team. If Coach lets me back on next year, I’m betting we can win States. Hey, do you ever run into Kevin? I accidentally called him last night and he sounded weird. I mean, it’s hard to know what a normal person would sound like if they got a call from their ex-girlfriend who’s in juvie, but it kind of sounded like maybe he was seeing somebody else and didn’t want me to know it. Weird, right? Why would I care if he had another girlfriend? …
They clean out Middle-School Karen’s cell late that afternoon without telling us what happened to her, but I’m guessing she must have gotten released just like she predicted. An hour later, they bring in a new girl. Everybody else is watching TV; I’m trying to read a book, thinking about going to my cell early and disturbed that I’m actually considering it. She’s an angry-looking white girl with a puffy face and a shock of purple hair and empty holes in her eyebrow and nose and lip and tongue. The hole from her nose ring looks infected.
Officer Killduff introduces her to her cell. She balks at the door, and he practically has to shove her inside. She comes back out a minute later and paces around the common area, seemingly unable to stand still. The other girls watch her for a while, but nobody speaks, and pretty soon they turn their attention back to the TV. There’s just something about the new girl that makes everybody want to stay away. Maybe it’s that nervousness. Maybe it’s something else, some vibe she gives off. Even the guards keep their distance, practically ignoring her, even though she keeps pacing and pacing.
And then, just my luck, she lurches over and throws herself in a chair right next to me. The table I have my book propped on starts shaking, and I realize it’s because her leg is bouncing wildly underneath. Her hands shake, too.
“Hey,” she says. “I’m Summer, like the season. What’s your name? What are you in for? What are you reading?”
She talks too fast for me to respond, as if she’s high on meth or something.
“Never mind,” she says without waiting for an answer. “You’re busy. Sorry to disturb you. I’ll go sit over there.”
She stalks over to an empty chair under the TV next to Weeze, sits for a minute, fires off questions to Weeze, appears to wait for answers this time — but doesn’t appear to get them — then gets up again. She keeps doing that for the next hour. Sitting, snapping off a few questions to whoever happens to be nearby, standing abruptly, crossing the room to another chair, wandering in and out of her cell, approaching the guard table but thinking better of it as soon as she gets there and quickly heading somewhere else, bouncing around like a pinball.
But there are only so many places to go, and Summer en
ds up next to me again, rubbing her hands together, glancing at me, but mostly looking down, studying patterns on the linoleum floor. “What’d you say your name was again?” she asks. “I forgot.”
“It’s Sadie,” I say.
“Sadie, Sadie, Sadie. OK. Thanks. I’m bad with people’s names.” She laughs. “Ha! What I’m bad with is people, you know?” She gets up again but then sits back down.
“Here’s the thing, Sadie,” she says, leaning close. “My mom. Something might have happened to her, you know? They found her. They said they found her in the bedroom. They won’t tell me anything. They keep asking me all these questions, you know? But I don’t know anything.”
She’s wringing her hands now, and tapping her foot so fast and so hard that her knee bangs into the underside of the table. “They said there was a gun. I can’t talk about it. My dad’s so mad at me. He won’t talk to me. But I was at work when it happened. I was at the Tropical Smoothie. You ever go there? To the Tropical Smoothie?”
“The one at the mall?” I ask.
She nods. “They brought me to the police station. They said to tell them what happened, but I told them I was at work. They wanted to know about my boyfriend. His name’s Andy. He didn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t even know where he is.”
She stops talking as abruptly as she started but keeps sitting, keeps tapping her foot.
Juvie Page 13