Juvie

by Steve Watkins

“That sounds really pretty,” I say, swallowing hard.

  “Aunt Sadie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When you coming home?”

  Mom takes the phone from her then. I can hear her tell Lulu that that’s enough for one night, and she needs to go on and wash her hands real good in the sink. I want to ask Mom how Carla is doing, if it’s as good as C. Miller made it out to be. But then I decide if it’s not, I don’t want to know about it. Not tonight, anyway. It’s been too nice a day to risk ruining with bad news about Carla. So instead I ask Mom about her cousin, since she’d told me she was planning to drive up to Delaware for a quick visit. Mom says they think they caught the cancer early, so her cousin is pretty optimistic.

  “And what about Dave?” I ask. “Did you go out with Dave?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know why I told you about that.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m not saying one way or the other.”

  I laugh, surprised that I’m relaxed about this. “That means yes, right?”

  She laughs, too. It’s nice to hear. “It means I’m not saying.”

  I hang up, still feeling good about things. Then I hear Good Gina, at the next phone, once again pretending to talk to her boyfriend who she shot, loud enough so I can hear: “Oh, I miss you, baby. I can’t wait to see you. I can’t wait until we’re together again. I’m going to be the best girlfriend ever once I get out of here, and I mean that.”

  New Nikki is on the third phone, and by the looks of things, she’s having phone sex or something close to it, whispering in a low, raspy bedroom voice, practically humping the wall until one of the guards sees what’s going on and makes her hang up. Her face is still flushed when she sits down at one of the tables. Bad Gina asks if she needs a cigarette, and New Nikki blushes an even deeper shade of red.

  I sit with Fefu and Kerry.

  “Wow,” says Kerry, nodding at New Nikki. “Did you see that?”

  I nod. “Yeah. Quite a show.”

  Bad Gina stands up to use one of the free phones, and we all watch her for some reason, as if we think she might pick up where New Nikki left off. She doesn’t. She gets into a heated conversation with somebody instead, though I can’t make out what they’re saying. She never takes her eyes off the guards and stops talking anytime one of them wanders over close enough to hear the conversation.

  Fefu, too, gets into an argument with somebody over the phone, not bothering to keep it quiet, but since it’s in Spanish I don’t know what it’s about. She’s still worked up when we get back to Unit Three. She opens a Candy Land board and stacks the cards facedown and sets up the spinner and the game pieces. She must have played before, and judging from the defiant look she has — teeth bared, eyebrows knitted together — she’s clearly ready to kick my butt or anybody else’s.

  I make sure to let her.

  I stayed in bed all day Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday the weekend before turning myself in to juvie. I probably should have made better use of my last days of freedom — spent the night on Government Island, taken Lulu to the zoo in DC, stuff like that — but I couldn’t seem to make myself get out of bed no matter how hard I tried.

  Carla came over, and I let her in long enough to tell her to just keep her mouth shut. “If you confess now, nobody’s going to believe you,” I said. “Or if they do, you go to jail, and where does that leave Lulu? And I’ll still be in juvie because I already confessed and they won’t let me take it back.”

  “How do you know?” she asked. It sounded like she was begging for something.

  “Any idiot can see it,” I said, my jaw clenched so tight I thought I might break some teeth. Carla started crying, and I told her to leave.

  Sunday afternoon Mom made me open the door. She brought in a grilled-cheese sandwich and some tomato soup on a TV tray. “Sit up. Here. You have to eat.”

  I took a few slow, careful bites. I wasn’t even a little hungry, though I hadn’t eaten since breakfast on Thursday, before the sentencing. I worried that if I ate too much or too fast, I might throw up.

  Mom sat on the floor and leaned against the wall and watched me. “Last time I’m asking,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Did it happen the way you said, or not?”

  I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. She must have known everything was Carla’s fault, but what good would come from changing my story now? All it would do was confirm Mom’s reason for being furious at Carla. And if my going to juvie was going to mean anything, I needed Mom to be there for Carla, not to punish her.

  I didn’t answer her question and she didn’t ask it again. We just sat there together for a while until she told me to get up and come on — we were going to the cemetery.

  Eternal Rest sits on rolling hills west of town. It’s kind of a dumpy cemetery, but I suppose in the end those things don’t really matter.

  Something was happening when we arrived. There were four sheriff’s cruisers and an ambulance parked by what looked like a backhoe lying on its side next to a fresh grave.

  Mom parked as far away as she could. A groundskeeper walked past.

  “Accident?” Mom asked.

  He shook his head. “Fellow come out here little while ago, tried to dig up where his little boy just been buried. Stole that backhoe out of the shed over there. Turned it over in a ditch.”

  “That’s terrible,” Mom said.

  “Terrible to lose your child,” the groundskeeper said.

  Mom and I just looked at each other.

  We hadn’t been to the cemetery since Granny’s funeral, nearly three years ago, but Mom was acting like it was an old habit, something we did on Sunday afternoons. She got down on her knees and pulled out some weeds from around Granny’s headstone. I knelt down to help her, brushing off dried bird poop and tracing Granny’s name with my finger. I still couldn’t figure out why we were there. Mom and Granny had always gotten along well, but Granny was Dad’s mother, not Mom’s.

  When all the weeds were gone, and the bird poop, Mom wandered off and left me alone. I sat on the brown grass and leaned against the headstone.

  The last time I’d seen Granny was at the hospital when she was in respiratory failure. She had already said good-bye to Mom and Carla, and now it was my turn. I was alone with her in the room, and she pulled me so close I was practically lying next to her on the bed. She said there was something important I needed to know. She said I should always remember that life is hard for people like my dad, but that for people like her and me, it’s pretty simple.

  She pulled me even closer so she could whisper, like it was a big secret between just the two of us.

  “You wake up every morning,” she said, “no matter what happened the day before, and you tell yourself you’re going to do good.”

  I waited for more.

  “That’s it, Granny?”

  She nodded. “That’s it.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I told her how much I loved her and she told me how much she loved me, too.

  “Can you send your daddy in here now, sweetheart?” she whispered slowly, her voice fading.

  I hesitated a second, and then said, “I will, Granny. I’ll go get him right now.” Only I couldn’t. She’d forgotten that Dad wasn’t at the hospital. Even with his mom dying, he couldn’t make himself leave her house and come.

  I went out in the hall with Mom and Carla and Lulu, who was just a baby then. I told Mom about Granny’s request, but when she went back in to explain, Granny was gone.

  Mom patted Granny’s thin, frail hand, then left to find the nurse. Carla sat in a chair and cried and gave Lulu a bottle. I lay in bed next to Granny again and closed my eyes and held on to her until Mom and the nurse came back and said it was time to let her go.

  After half an hour or so, I left Granny’s grave to find Mom. She was sitting under an elm near where the guy wrecked the backhoe, and she was talking to somebody who I quickly realized was the guy. The sheriffs w
ere gone, but the backhoe still sat on its side in the ditch. They were going to need a couple of tow trucks to haul it out.

  I stood and watched for a while, Mom saying some things, I guess trying to help, the guy staring off at nothing. It broke my heart to see him like that, so obviously devastated, knowing his little boy was buried not far away, knowing there wasn’t anything anybody could do to bring him back. Even God couldn’t build a backhoe big enough.

  I sat under another elm tree and waited. Mom was with the guy for a long time, until the shadows grew so long that they melted away into dusk. I wondered how long she would sit there, but I didn’t mind the waiting. We were supposed to meet Carla and Lulu back at the house for dinner, but I had a feeling that this was where Mom and I were supposed to be.

  Granny was three years gone, but I felt her in that moment. It was the same as if she’d been sitting next to me, cradling me in her warm arms, telling me to take what I was seeing along with me into juvie, telling me to keep it in my heart and not feel sorry for myself, not for one minute, and telling me to remember:

  You wake up every morning, no matter what happened the day before …

  The guards tell us it’s raining, so we can’t go back out on work release right away. If we’d never been allowed outside in the first place, we’d probably have been all right — our usual complacent juvie selves — but now everybody seems to be on edge again.

  Bad Gina takes it even harder than the rest of us, though her mood brightens considerably that afternoon when she gets a letter from Weeze. She reads it out loud to New Nikki and Good Gina — loud enough so Fefu, Kerry, and I can hear it as well, though we’re a couple of tables away playing Chutes and Ladders. Somebody had duct-taped the board back together.

  “Listen to this part,” Bad Gina says. “‘So since my jaw’s wired shut, I can’t eat anything except through a straw, so they have to puree everything, even meat and stuff. I think I already lost ten pounds.’”

  Bad Gina laughs. “Liquid meat. Probably the best thing ever happened to her blubber-butt self, getting her jaw broken.”

  Good Gina doesn’t say anything, but I can tell from the stricken look on her face that she wishes she wasn’t sitting with them.

  “There’s more,” Bad Gina chirps. “This is good. Check this out. ‘They said I don’t have to go back to juvie. They’re going to send me to a halfway house for the rest of my sentence after I get out of the hospital. But I hope I get to see you again. I hope we can still be friends.’”

  “You think she’s in love with you or something?” New Nikki asks.

  “Yeah, probably,” Bad Gina says. “God, what a homo.”

  I glare at her. Weeze was her friend, got hurt on account of being her friend. And this is how she gets repaid? No wonder the Jelly Sisters attacked Bad Gina. I’d like to hurt her, too, and catch myself thinking of ways I might do it without getting caught.

  Kerry touches my arm and tells me it’s my turn. It takes me a second to remember we’re playing Chutes and Ladders. It takes longer to shake the thought out of my head about hurting Bad Gina.

  In the real world, you can walk away from somebody who gets on your nerves, ignore them, get lost in a crowd, hang out with other people, do other things. In here, though, the world shrinks so much that there’s no getting away from people, no separating yourself from their crap. Little things become big things because there isn’t anything else.

  It keeps raining for the next couple of days, or so Officer Killduff says. He could be making up phony weather reports for all we know. There’s one bit of good news, though — from Carla. She doesn’t get the Victoria’s Secret job, but the Friendly’s manager puts her on the breakfast shift, so at least she won’t be hanging out so much with the afternoon drug crowd. Plus she can get Lulu at a decent time from day care. The news makes me so happy I don’t care about the rain, or the fact that we haven’t been able to go back to Lake Anna.

  Fefu and Kerry and I keep hanging out together in the days that follow, sometimes with Good Gina, too — playing cards, board games, kid stuff. They act like I’m their big sister; it’s a role I’ve been in most of my life with Carla, so I’m kind of used to it, and with the good news about Carla’s work, I don’t really mind. Kerry decides we should teach Fefu how to read, so there’s a lot of Dr. Seuss going on for a while.

  Some things don’t change. Good Gina keeps pretending to talk to her boyfriend. New Nikki loses phone privileges for humping the wall again. Bad Gina keeps having these agitated conversations with somebody every night, shutting up when the guards come close, keeping her voice low so none of the rest of us can hear what she’s saying. And Carla doesn’t pick up when I call her cell phone. But instead of freaking out, I decide to have a little faith in her. When I do finally get up with her, she tells me she’s been at AA. Twice in a week.

  Friday morning they bring in the shackles and everybody gets excited. Officer Killduff orders us into line, and five minutes later we’re climbing into the back of the juvie van, me and Fefu and Kerry on one side, the Ginas and New Nikki on the other. Bad Gina, opposite from me, licks her lips nervously and grins, though not exactly at me.

  No one tells us we’re going back to Lake Anna, but once we get to the interstate and head south, everybody knows. New Nikki says she wishes the van was going the other direction, up to DC, where her cousins live, and there are all these clubs they could take us to, where we could get in underage if we dressed slutty and guys would buy us drinks.

  New Nikki starts up about this one guy she hooked up with one time, and Good Gina shrinks away on their bench seat. She might have shot her boyfriend and all, but I know hard talk like that still makes her uncomfortable. It’s kind of weird to say, but seeing that gives me hope that maybe we won’t be so changed once they let us out.

  Fefu has been teaching Kerry how to sing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in Spanish —“La araña pequeñita”— and pretty soon they get me singing it, too. The hand motions are the same, though Kerry has difficulty climbing the spider up the water spout, thumb-forefinger, thumb-forefinger.

  Bad Gina scowls but doesn’t say anything, which is a nice change.

  We hum down the interstate for another half hour until we get to the Lake Anna exit, then wind through two-lane roads in thick forest. For some reason I start thinking about the girls who aren’t on Unit Three anymore. It still feels strange to me that they’re all gone — the Jelly Sisters, Cell Seven, Weeze, Chantrelle, Middle-School Karen, even Summer. And not just gone, but so suddenly, and absolutely. Nobody talks about them, except that day when Bad Gina got a letter from Weeze and made fun of her. I guess that’s just the way it is in juvie. One minute they’re stripping away everything you own, down to your last underwear; the next minute they’re sending you home to your parents, or shipping you off to a long-term facility south of Richmond, or carrying you to the hospital to wire your jaw, or locking you up on another unit with the violent offenders.

  They start erasing you when you enter; they keep erasing you after you leave.

  The rain has turned the garbage soggy at Lake Anna, even more disgusting than before, if that’s possible. You go for a diaper with your trash grabber, and half of it stays on the ground. Usually the grossest half. But you still have to pick it up. Same with the food. Same with everything.

  Fefu and Kerry keep singing the Spanish “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” like a broken record, but I don’t mind. I’m happy that they actually seem to be enjoying themselves. It takes me forever to get all the words right, but then we sing it over and over until Bad Gina throws a wet bag of chips and tells us to knock it off already.

  “God!” she snarls. “I’d like to crush that itty-bitty spider under my shoe.”

  “Yeah,” echoes New Nikki. “Same here.”

  I’m in too good a mood to let them spoil it. “I think you mean ‘itsy-bitsy.’”

  Bad Gina glares. “Yeah,” she says evenly. “Whatever. Itsy-God-damn-bitsy.”

  I smile, t
hough I’m already on dangerous ground with Bad Gina. “Except it’s Spanish,” I add. “La araña pequeñita.”

  Bad Gina throws a busted flip-flop this time. “Just shut up, Sadie.”

  Fefu snares the flip-flop and stuffs it in her trash bag. She and Kerry giggle.

  Then they start singing again. Bad Gina and New Nikki huff and work their way up the slope of the beach as far away as they can go without getting barked at by Officer Killduff, who’s standing at the top of the sandy slope in the speckled shade of a gnarly dogwood.

  C. Miller stays down with us on the beach. She doesn’t sing along with Fefu and Kerry and me but asks us to repeat the words. She says she wants to teach it to LaNisha when she gets home.

  After an hour, C. Miller tells us we can take a break for water. There’s a cooler under the tree next to Officer Killduff, and everybody troops up the hill for some. I stay by the edge of the lake, though, and inhale deeply and look around at the silver water and the lush green tree line and the clear azure sky. Of course there’s also the nuclear power plant with its massive, ghost-white cooling towers, but I try not to focus on that right now. There’s always going to be something — a fly in the ointment or whatever. I mean, look at me. It’s nearly Christmas, and I’m two months into a six-month sentence in juvie, picking up other people’s soggy nastiness and singing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in Spanish with a pyromaniac and a girl who shot her boyfriend and a ten-year-old who clubbed a guy with a metal pipe so she could have his bike. And they’re the nice ones.

  But it could have been a whole lot worse. It could have been Carla in prison for four years instead of me in juvie for half of one. And it could be Lulu without a mom instead of just missing her aunt.

  I dig unsuccessfully for something with my trash grabber before realizing it’s dog poop and not a brown paper bag. Fefu and Kerry come back from getting water just in time to see what I’m doing and practically fall down laughing.

  I kick wet sand over it and move on.

  Shortly before noon — the sun directly overhead, though it still isn’t too hot — Bad Gina tells Officer Killduff she has to go to the restroom.