Allegedly

by Tiffany D. Jackson

  “Okay, ladies, let’s take out our journals. Who wants to be the first to share?”

  Our “feelings” journals; notebooks we’re supposed to write in three times a week about our “feelings.” No one writes in them. No one has feelings in here.

  Ms. Veronica starts talking about sadness and what it means to be sad and how sadness makes us do terrible things. I overheard Ms. Stein talk about her once. She is from Staten Island, married young and rich, so this little therapy job is sort of a joke.

  “So, does anybody want to talk about a time they were sad? I mean, really, really sad?”

  No one says anything for a while, then China raises her hand. She is always the first person to speak.

  “My moms . . . she kicked me out when she caught me with my first girlfriend. Pretty little light skin thing with curly hair . . .”

  She glances at me and I stare at the floor. Kelly rolls her eyes and mouths “Ew.”

  China is the manliest person in the house. She wears nothing but boy clothes, even boxers, which seems like overkill. Momma would be disgusted at the “nasty lesbian” I’m living with. She hates anything that is not in the Bible, which seems like everything.

  “How long you been a rug muncher for?”

  “Joi! Inappropriate,” Ms. Veronica says in a shaky voice.

  Joi rolls her eyes and the others snicker.

  “Anyway though, she kicked me out the house and I was, you know, on the streets for a little while before I linked up wit my crew.”

  “Don’t you mean your ‘gang,’” Kelly corrected.

  “Blood or Crip?” Kisha asks.

  “She’s a Blood.”

  “WAS a Blood. Not no more.”

  The room goes silent. Ms. Veronica, wide-eyed, nods for her to continue.

  “Anyways, I linked up wit my crew, and started getting into things. Then, like a couple of months later, I ran into my boy who lived on my block. Said Moms was in the hospital. So I go to check on her and she was in this room wit all these machines and stuff hooked up to her. She looked real bad. Doctor said she had cancer. When she woke up and saw me, she started screaming, ‘Get that bitch out of here. I don’t want to see her!’

  “It’s like, damn, yo. She didn’t even want to see me on her deathbed. She died like a month later. Didn’t have the right insurance to keep her. It hurt, you know? ’Cause I was always the one taking care of her. She wasn’t that smart so she didn’t keep a job for too long. A week after she died, I got caught.”

  “What did you do?” New Girl asks and the whole room stares. It’s the first time she has opened her mouth. I think she even shocked herself.

  “China likes slashing people’s faces for fun,” Kelly snickers.

  “Yo, why don’t you mind yo’ fucking business!”

  “Make me, you dyke bitch!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, ladies! Language! What did we talk about?”

  The room erupts and I stay still, thinking about how I took care of my momma. She needed watching after. Especially when she was having “a day.”

  I was falling off a building.

  Or that’s what it felt like. Falling to my death off my bunk. But I didn’t fall, I was yanked. My feet hit the floor, balance off, eyes still closed. I can barely stand up straight before I’m dragged out of the room.

  “Get in there now!”

  Ms. Stein grips my arm so hard she leaves half-moon imprints with her nails, blood throbbing to break through the skin. She throws me in the bathroom, eyes still crusted with sleep, a black mop in one hand and a hairy, rusty sponge in the other. The sun hasn’t even got up yet.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” she snaps from the hallway. “Clean up!”

  We stare at each other, because she knows I’m on kitchen duty this week. She knows I shouldn’t have to clean the bathroom. But this is punishment. She had to do something. She couldn’t let me get away with outsmarting her. Not in front of the other girls.

  “Hurry up! I want that toilet shining!”

  My hand tightens around the mop, ready to shove it in her fat mouth. But then I remember the cement blocks of my cell in baby jail and slowly lift up the toilet seat. A ring of shit splatter circles under the rim. I dry heave the moment the stench hits my nose.

  “Ohhh, quit your bitching! It’s your own damn food! Here, put a little bleach on it.”

  She dumps some bleach in the bowl and it splashes on my pajamas. I can taste last night’s dinner in the back of my throat, hot dogs and broccoli. My back stings as I hunch over, wiping the shit with a sponge. Small chunks fall into the water, pieces splattering on my hand. My eyes are so watery from the coughing and heaving that I’m almost blind. It’s too hot . . . I need air.

  “Wash off that sponge. It’s still good to clean the tub. And take out that garbage too. It fucking stinks in here! Hurry up, Mary, I ain’t got all day!”

  The garbage reeks of old rolled-up pads with dry period blood and Kisha’s empty Noxzema jars. The smell hits the bottom of my stomach and I heave so hard my chest aches. SPLAT! Pink and white vomit covers my bare feet, slime seeping between my toes, even as chunks still hang off my lips.

  “Eww! Mary, that’s disgusting! Well, you gotta clean them floors anyway. Here, use some of this bleach. Make them floors shine!”

  Interview with Correction Officer at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility: Anonymous

  A little black girl who kills some little white baby? Man, that kid was famous, face all over the fucking news! And that was the problem. She couldn’t stay in the youth detention center or she’d be eaten alive and she couldn’t be with the adults, ’cause they no better. So what do you do with a kid who murders a baby? Where do you put her? What do you feed her and when? No one knew. And you can’t have some ten-year-old little girl skipping around the yard, now can you? So yeah, she spent a lot of time in the hole, but if they didn’t know what to do with her, how were we supposed to know? It ain’t like she could go crazier than she already was. You ask me, we were doing her a favor.

  Dinnertime. It’s Kraft macaroni and cheese day, made from powdered cheese and water. Reminds me of the first meal I had in baby jail. Served with a side of peas and carrots on a square plastic blue plate, like a TV dinner. I’d never had TV dinners before, or Kraft mac and cheese. I’d seen commercials for the stuff between my cartoons after school, but Momma would “humph” and say things like, “That stuff is so fake. All them preservatives and chemicals . . . you like your momma’s mac and cheese, don’t you, baby girl?”

  Momma made the best mac and cheese. The best fried chicken, the best collard greens. I miss her food more than her. She cooked almost everything and was always ranting about “fake food.” Problem was you had to have money to buy “real food,” and she’d rather us starve than eat a pack of ramen noodles. So we did a lot of starving.

  After dinner and cleanup, everyone runs to the TV room to watch reality shows. I’m no therapist, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea for girls with raging tempers to watch grown women fighting on TV. My favorite show is Law & Order: Special Victims Unit but no one else in the house likes it.

  “Shit is mad fake. Cops don’t care like that!”

  “And those trials are mad fast. I didn’t get offered no deal like that!”

  But I think it’s real, it has to be. Detective Olivia Benson, the lady cop, seems so, I don’t know, smart and mad nice. She can always tell when someone is lying. Always making friends with the victims and doesn’t stop until she gets the real bad guy. Sometimes, I imagine what life would’ve been like if she was the person on my case. She would’ve said, “Mary, it’s okay. I know you loved that precious little girl. My gut tells me you didn’t kill her. And I promise you, I won’t stop until I find out the truth.” Then a week later I would be free, because her gut is never wrong. Maybe even stay at Benson’s house, because she likes me so much and wants to protect me. Would she adopt me? Could she? Damn, my life would’ve been so different if I had Benso
n and not the man who gave me that cheeseburger.

  In the shower, I find another freckle. Or beauty mark, I’m not really sure. That makes twenty-three. So pale and bony, nothing about me screams “black child.” I don’t mind though, just makes me wonder if my daddy is white. Whenever I tried to ask about him, Momma would act like I was crazy and say, “What are you talking about? Ray is your daddy.”

  Ramon, “Ray,” stepfather number two, was a five-foot-three Dominican. Even Momma was taller than him, but he’d beat her down to his eye level all the time. His skin like honey wheat toast, he wore glasses that would fall off his face and break whenever he came home drunk. He was also missing about four of his front teeth. I looked nothing like Ray. And thank God for that.

  But my real daddy, he is out there, looking for me. No one wants to be that kid in the orphanage, waiting to be rescued by her real parents, like in Annie. But some nights, I dream about him. In my dreams he is a big, tall, rich, handsome white man. He’d pull up in his limo, walk through the door, wrap his arms around me and say, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet you.” Then, he would save me from this place, and Momma.

  There are two computers in the corner of the basement we’re allowed to use for thirty minutes at a time. This is where I find New Girl hiding out in her pajamas. Do I say something? Maybe? It’s only us and she is a wet noodle compared to the others.

  “What are you doing?”

  She yelps, jumping from the chair and turning off the monitor in one swift motion, backing away, eyes wide and white as lightbulbs.

  “Listen, I’m not gonna hurt you,” I chuckle. “You’re too old for me to hurt anyways.”

  Her eyes grow wider, hands shaking like I’m a cold wind. I have scared what little color she has right out of her. Bad joke, I guess. I shrug and walk to the opposite side of the room, giving her space. I’m used to being a leper, so my feelings aren’t hurt.

  She waits until I’m seated at the other computer before returning to hers, fingers flying fast across the keyboard. They didn’t let me take computer classes in baby jail. I don’t know why. I bang on the mouse, but the screen stays black. Thought you just moved it and it would turn on? Maybe it’s broken? But New Girl’s is working.

  “Um . . . you know how to . . . turn this on?”

  New Girl’s mouth drops, eyes blinking a few times. “You never used these before?”

  Why she got to ask like that, like I’m stupid or something?

  Still, I can’t meet her eye, it’s mad embarrassing. She hesitates before creeping over, clicking a button on the back of the black box.

  “Thanks,” I mumble as my screen comes to life. She scurries back to her seat, still eyeing me like she doesn’t know what to think while I click on the Google logo. I’ve seen Ms. Carmen on it before. She would type in something and all this information would pop up, so I punch the letters S A T with one finger.

  “I . . . uh . . . Googled you,” New Girl says, a tremble in her voice. “I remember. I was ten when you . . . when you killed that baby.”

  I let out a sigh before turning to her.

  “Allegedly.”

  She swallows hard, eyes returning to her screen. Honestly, I’ve never thought about looking myself up before. What did she see? The stories, the TV shows, pictures . . . maybe pictures of Alyssa! There are probably tons of pictures of her on Google. They wouldn’t give me a picture in baby jail. I was put on cell restriction for even asking. Matter of fact, I was always on cell restriction. The COs were never eager to open my cell. They’d rather keep me locked up all day, staring at the gray cement, thinking of Momma and Alyssa. It’s easier to keep an animal in a cage than to play with it.

  But I’m not in baby jail anymore. All I have to do is type my name, and then I can see her! I delete S A T and type M A R Y A . . .

  “There was a lot about you though. About how you did it.”

  How I did it? Did what? Oh right.

  I didn’t mean to throw her.

  “Are you . . . Googling everybody?” I ask.

  “No. Just you. You’re the celebrity. That’s why they hate you.”

  “Who?”

  “The other girls.”

  “Oh.”

  I thought the whole world hated me. They probably do, like the ones in front of the courthouse. All those people, yelling and screaming, Alyssa on big posters and T-shirts . . . there will be pictures of them too. Backspace. Backspace. Backspace.

  “They all seem crazy. The others. Don’t they?”

  I know crazy. I’ve lived with it for a long time. But none of these girls are crazy. They’re just stupid. They made stupid decisions for stupid reasons. I guess you could say I’m stupid too.

  “I guess.”

  “Do you ever think about . . . that night?”

  My eye twitches and I sigh.

  “Every day.”

  Excerpt from the Final Autopsy Report of Alyssa Richardson:

  Description of Patient: 12-week-old Caucasian female. Brown hair, blue eyes. 13 pounds 5 oz.

  Time of Death: Approximate time of death between 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.

  External Examination: Bruising on forearms, upper right thigh, and center forehead. Ecchymosed bruising under the left eye.

  Cause of Death: Asphyxia due to strangulation.

  Stomach Contents: Colostrum’s lactate (Breast milk), Methylphenidate (Ritalin), and Clonidine.

  Manner of Death: Homicide.

  The moaning through my thin walls wakes me up. Momma and Ray, sexing again. Why does she have to be so loud? When he’s done with her, he’ll come for me, I know it. He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming . . . the tremors start, body shaking from my toes to my ears. I should try to hide again, but I’m too afraid to move. How bad will it be if he finds me this time? Where’s bear? I reach for him, feeling for his stiff clump of fur, but find I’m alone, my sheets rough and scratchy. This is not my bed, this isn’t my room.

  Where am I?

  The smell of Tara’s stank feet brings me back to the group home, but I still hear moaning. Marisol’s bed is empty; she must be next door with China, another night visit to her bunk. Poor New Girl has to witness it.

  “I told you it ain’t my fault!”

  “I don’t want to hear it! You know the rules!”

  I roll over, away from the door and cover my head with a pillow, but I can still hear Joi and Ms. Stein screaming downstairs. It must be really late, because lights-out was at least two hours ago.

  “But there was a fire on the tracks at Union Square. All the trains were stopped! I was waiting for almost an hour. How else was I supposed to get home?”

  “You expect me to buy that? It’s one in the morning! Check-in is at nine! Where the hell were you?”

  “I told you! I was waiting for the train.”

  “Fine, you don’t want to tell me, then tell the marshals.”

  “But I came home!”

  “You’re late! You went AWOL!”

  “Yo, I didn’t!”

  “And you changed your clothes,” Ms. Reba adds. “That’s not the outfit you had on this morning.”

  “I . . . it . . . it got dirty.”

  “Strike two, Joi! You’re on house restriction for the rest of the month. AND bathroom duty.”

  “WHAT! Yo, that ain’t fair! I didn’t do nothing!”

  Damn, house restriction is the worst. It’s like real house arrest, you can’t leave for nothing except school and even then they escort you back and forth like COs. I was on house restriction for a month when I first got to the house. Once they figured out I wasn’t a threat, they gave me a MetroCard, subway map, and pointed me in the direction of the bus. Kisha said we lucky; she’d been in another group home where they were on house restriction all the time.

  Marisol moans louder; China must almost be done with her. Joi is hollering for her freedom. I pin the pillow tighter to my ears, nauseous and feeling anything but lucky.

  “You know, I was thinking,
” Ted says, his arm wrapped around my waist, sitting on some crates in the low light of the janitor’s closet. “We should get out of Brooklyn.”

  Snuggling under his arm, I lean into his chest, breathing easy. I can imagine us like this, in the apartment Ted always talks about getting for us once we’re out.

  “And go where? The Bronx or something?”

  He laughs. “Nah, like leave New York. For good. Get you in a school some place out of here. Maybe down south. Or California. They ain’t got no snow out there.”

  I don’t know what to say. I mean, all we know is Brooklyn. We can’t just leave all we know.

  He peeps my face and shrugs. “Mad tired of this place. Always something. What’s wrong? You scared? You think I’d let anything happen to you?”

  I’m not scared. I know wherever we go, if Ted is there then I’m safe. But . . . what about Momma? How could I be so far away from her? What would she do without me? Or would she even notice I’m gone.

  “We’ll be straight, Ma. Just you and me,” he says and kisses my forehead.

  I swallow, thinking of my missing period, hoping it really will just be him and me. But maybe going away would be good. The farther we are, the less likely he’ll find out that I killed a baby.

  Allegedly.

  “Oh snap, I almost forgot.” Ted pulls a crumpled piece of yellow paper out of his pocket and irons it out. “They having a practice test at Brooklyn Tech on Saturday.”

  FREE SAT PRACTICE!!!

  Saturday, September 26th

  Come practice for the real thing!

  Brooklyn Technical High School

  “You should go,” he says.

  I stuff it in my pocket with a shrug. I am about a third of the way through my book. The vocab isn’t too hard, though I can always learn more words. The math isn’t too bad either, since it turns out I’m pretty good at geometry, but there is still a bunch of stuff I don’t know.

  “What if I fail?”

  “It’s just practice, right? And you ain’t gonna fail. You mad smart.”

  “But what if I fail,” I say again, without looking at him.