I jumped up, dumping her out of my lap. Lulu rolled on the floor laughing, so once I extricated the ice pack, I grabbed her and stuck it down her pants.
That somehow led to her peeing herself, which led to us taking a bath together, which led to us playing with a family of tub ducks she’d had since she was a baby. They were supposed to turn blue on the bottom if the water was too hot. Or maybe they were supposed to turn blue on the bottom once the water was the right temperature. Either way, we just used them as battleships and made giant explosions that soaked the bathroom floor.
That’s what we were doing when Carla came in, reeking of Friendly’s.
“Hi, Mommy,” Lulu said.
“Hey, Carla,” I said.
She kissed Lulu on top of her wet head and then started in on me about this party she wanted to go to, and would I go with her?
“Please, Sadie?” she begged me. “We haven’t gone out in forever. Girls just gotta have fun, right?” Before I could say no, she coaxed Lulu into singing that song with her, Carla dancing right there in the soggy bathroom, still in her ice-cream-and-ketchup-stained waitress uniform, and Lulu standing up in the tub and dancing her naked little self along with her mom.
Carla pulled a dripping Lulu out of the tub, and they kept singing and dancing together while I slid down in the water and watched. For a minute it was like the old, sweet Carla was suddenly, magically back. I wondered how long that would last.
Carla brought up the party again after I climbed out and we got Lulu dried off and plopped her down in front of the TV. She pulled me into my bedroom and made me open my closet to look at clothes. “Come on, Sadie,” she said, holding up this stupid leopard-print blouse that Mom must have stuck in there. “I need you to go with me. Mom’ll only babysit Lulu if you agree to be my designated driver. I’ll even pay you. Look, here’s my tip money from this afternoon.”
Carla had been on probation for the past year, first for pot possession and then, a couple of months later, for shoplifting. She’d stolen a pack of baby wipes, which was understandable, maybe even forgivable, except that she also stole an iPod Shuffle.
Maybe it was her dancing in the bathroom with Lulu. Maybe it was the way she seemed so excited for us to hang out. Maybe it was the fact that Kevin was out of town and I was bored. Whatever the reason, I finally caved. We told Mom we were going out with some people to dinner and a movie. She raised her eyebrows, but I kept my expression straight when she looked at me. Finally she settled back into the couch and told us to have a good time. “Don’t be home too late,” she said.
So a couple of hours later, past Lulu’s bedtime and what should have been mine, we walked into an old rundown Victorian house near the river that looked like it ought to be condemned — weedy yard, slanting porch, missing shingles. It smelled of beer and sweat and pot and something totally out of place, like lavender. Everybody I saw was in their twenties or thirties, most already trashed. I was probably the only one there without a visible tattoo or piercing.
I let out a breath and tried to relax. The last time Carla dragged me to one of these parties, she ended up puking in her lap as I drove home, which was not only disgusting but totally freaked me out, since I’d only had my permit then and wasn’t supposed to drive at night or without a sober adult riding shotgun. But that was a couple of years ago, and I had a better sense of how to handle Carla now. Besides, we were driving her car tonight instead of Mom’s; if she puked again, she’d have to clean it out herself.
Somebody handed me a cup of beer. I tried to say I didn’t want it, but it was impossible to hear anything over the pounding bass. I turned to see if Carla wanted it, even though she usually drank harder stuff, but somehow she’d already slipped away into the raging circus of spinning mirror balls and girls dancing with girls and smoke as thick as ocean fog.
“Carla!” I called, though my voice was drowned out by all the people screaming at one another over the retro music. I fought my way through the crowd, my earlier optimism about the evening already gone. Of course Carla didn’t want to hang out with me. All that joking about girls just wanting to have fun was really about Carla having fun and Sadie cleaning up the mess afterward.
I finally spotted her on the far side of the living room. Even in the crowd she was hard to miss in her bright-yellow Midas Muffler shirt that she bought at the thrift shop. I pushed my way to her side.
“Hey, Sadie!” she yelled as if we hadn’t seen each other in forever. She grabbed my beer, said “Thanks,” and drained it as she made her way to the kitchen. I followed her and told her to slow down, but she’d found the keg and was already pouring herself another. She handed me one, too.
“I don’t want this,” I said, or tried to. “I’m the designated driver —”
“Hey! Kendall!” she hollered right next to my ear at someone behind me. She elbowed her way across the kitchen to a girl who was leaning against the refrigerator, smoking a cigarette and looking bored. Kendall had a bright-red scar on her cheek and I couldn’t stop staring.
“This is Kendall!” Carla shouted. “She used to play something when we were in school. I can’t remember what. But she was an athlete. I remember that.”
“Cross-country,” Kendall said.
“Yeah,” Carla said. “I knew it was something like that. Anyway, Sadie’s a jock, too. So you guys can talk.”
She practically shoved us into each other and then started talking to a skuzzy guy who was working the keg.
I angled myself so I could keep an eye on her while I got to know all about Kendall the athlete.
“So you ran cross-country?”
Kendall nodded but didn’t say anything. She was already looking past me to see who else was around, smoking her cigarette hard, as if she was mad at it.
“I play basketball,” I said. “I’m on an AAU team. And I play at Mountain View.”
“What’s Mountain View?” Kendall asked dully.
“New high school. Just opened a couple of years ago. You went to Stafford with Carla, right?”
She grunted, which I guessed meant yes. She kept looking past me.
“Hey, check it out,” she said. “Carla already made a new friend.”
Carla and the scuzzy guy were leaning into each other near the keg. At first I thought they were making out, but then they shifted and I realized that the guy had a joint and was shotgunning a stream of smoke into Carla’s mouth. I should have gone over and tried to get her to stop — there was no such thing with Carla as just getting a little high — but I was already tired of playing nanny. At least we were still in the same room.
I turned back to Kendall and tried again to start a conversation.
“So where did you get the scar?” I asked, trying to sound flippant or breezy or something.
She touched the raw scar tissue absently. “I went to this party and started asking somebody I didn’t know a bunch of nosy-ass questions,” she said. “It was the wrong person to be asking.”
She pushed herself away from the refrigerator and dropped her cigarette on the linoleum floor, grinding it out under her shoe.
“I got to go see somebody,” she said, shoving past me.
“Great,” I said. “Whatever.”
Carla and Scuzzy had started working their way toward the living room, so I tried to follow them, but a crowd of more people suddenly pushed into the kitchen and made for the keg, pinning me against the counter. One girl stumbled in her heels and spilled her beer on my sleeve. By the time I found a towel to dry it off, Carla was gone again.
I searched the entire house, including the bathrooms, which probably made me some enemies since I didn’t bother waiting in line. I checked the driveway; at least the car was still there, though that didn’t mean she hadn’t left with Scuzzy. All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t find her anywhere. I took a sip of beer and told myself to calm down. Carla might be self-centered and irresponsible, but she’d never leave a party with some guy she just met — at least not without
telling me first.
I wandered onto the back porch, where a noisy game of beer pong was going on. It was as good a place as any to wait for Carla to show up. At least here the music wasn’t deafening, and there was enough breeze to carry away some of the cigarette and pot smoke choking the rest of the house.
A decent-looking guy with blond dreads came over and asked if I wanted to be his beer-pong partner. I eyed the cup of beer I’d been carrying around for a while now and had hardly touched. I shrugged. Why not? I was a pretty good shot, even when I’d been drinking a little. I’d still be able to drive OK.
Dreadlocks, who might have been high, hugged me every time I nailed a cup — nothing creepy, just hugs — which was a lot since I was a good shot, like I said, and because I was easily the soberest person playing. Dreadlocks and I owned the table for a good hour.
Eventually, though, I started to worry too much about Carla and told Dreadlocks I had to go find her.
“I’ll go with you,” he said. “What’s she look like?”
I told him and we scanned the faces of the crowd as we pushed out way back into the living room, which was still jammed with people — freak dancing on one side of the room, slam dancing on the other. The music was some hard-core rap, bass shaking the walls, and I was already getting a headache.
Dreadlocks hooked an arm around my waist and tried to pull me over with the freak dancers.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
“We should dance!” he shouted back, circling behind and trying to grind against me.
“Knock it off!” I yelled, twisting around. Then, for some reason, I added, “I have a boyfriend!”
“No problem,” Dreadlocks yelled back. “I have a girlfriend.”
I shoved him away, but the crowd pressed him right back. The next thing I knew, he was trying to kiss me.
I jerked my face away. “You have a girlfriend, remember?”
He blinked and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Did I say that?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding, too, in case he couldn’t hear me.
He shrugged. “It’s OK! She’s cool!”
I tried to slide away from him, but he kept his grip on my arm. “Ah, come on, Sally!”
“It’s Sadie!” I said. “Anyway, I have to find my sister.”
Eventually I made it through the scrum of dancers and into the hall. I was just about to go up and check all the rooms again when someone half stumbled down the stairs. Two people, actually: a scuzzy-looking guy holding up a very drunk girl. The girl was Carla.
“Hey,” she said with a wan smile, her yellow shirt half unbuttoned, no shoes, makeup smeared. She draped herself over me and I hugged her back, trying not to think about what she’d just been doing.
I buttoned up her shirt, wiped off her smeared lipstick, and combed my fingers through her hair to get it halfway decent. “Where are your shoes, Carla?” I shouted over the music.
She blinked at me, as if the concept of shoes was foreign to her, or as if she didn’t have shoes, had never had shoes. “Forget it!” I said. “I’m taking you home!”
To my surprise, she nodded. “OK. I’m ready.”
We nearly made it out of there. We got all the way to the front door. I was turning the knob, fishing in my pocket to double-check that I had the car keys, when Dreadlocks and Scuzzy appeared next to us in a cloud of pot smoke — a couple of stoner ghosts.
“You can’t be leaving yet,” Dreadlocks said.
“Hey, baby,” Scuzzy said to Carla. “We’re not done partying, are we?”
I was surprised to see Dreadlocks and Scuzzy together. “You guys know each other?” I asked.
Dreadlocks grinned. “Oh, hell yeah.” He didn’t elaborate.
I hung on to Carla. “We’re leaving,” I said.
Scuzzy laughed a cigarette laugh — as much smoke as words. “Hey, that’s OK. But Carla promised you girls would give us a ride first. Just over to the 7-Eleven to get some more beer for the party. You remember, baby, right?” he said to Carla. He shrugged a small backpack over his shoulder. “For beer.”
Carla nodded hazily. “For beer.”
I protested, but what Carla said, even if she was just stupidly repeating the words, gave the guys some sort of forward momentum. They ignored my protests and followed us out of the house and down the street to Carla’s car.
“Fine,” I said, my shoulder aching from propping Carla upright. “Just make it quick.”
Scuzzy tried to convince me to put Carla in the backseat with him. “Don’t you and him want to sit together?” he asked, nodding at Dreadlocks.
“No,” I said, trying to maneuver a limp Carla into the front seat. She was all deadweight.
“Me and her already hooked up,” Scuzzy said. “That counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“No,” I said, buckling Carla in. “My car, my rules. Boys in the back.”
Scuzzy got in and slammed the back door hard, to let me know he wasn’t happy. Dreadlocks at least was polite. He even opened and closed the driver’s-side door for me.
Carla slumped against the window. Dreadlocks lit a cigarette, but I made him put it out.
“Jesus,” Scuzzy muttered to him. “And you wanted to hook up with this ho?”
I clenched my teeth and sped toward the 7-Eleven. Carla hummed to herself, a song that sounded familiar but that I couldn’t quite make out, which pretty much summed up Carla these days: somebody who seemed familiar but who I couldn’t say I really knew.
There were empty spaces in front of the store, but Dreadlocks told me to park in a dark corner of the lot, out of the light. “It’s closer to the bathrooms,” he said. I didn’t want to argue and figured it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if no one saw us driving around with these two losers — though it occurred to me that it was the sort of place somebody might park if they were planning on robbing a store.
And besides that — I realized too late, as I watched them disappear into the 7-Eleven — Dreadlocks would have to return the key to the bathroom, and so it didn’t save him any time if I parked here.
“Carla, I have a bad feeling about this,” I said, trying to keep my eyes on the guys inside the store, which was nearly impossible. Were they at the register? Were they asking for the bathroom key or for all the money in the register? “Carla?”
But Carla didn’t seem to hear me, or to care about anything that might be going on. Her head was leaned back on the headrest, and her eyes were closed. She was still humming, only now I recognized the tune: an old Led Zeppelin song called “Going to California.” It made me think of Dad, who used to play Zeppelin all the time. And Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead and all those guys.
I liked “Going to California” a lot — the acoustic guitar, the sweet lyrics about riding a white mare and trying to find a woman who’d never, ever been born, whatever that meant. Dad always played vinyl albums on an old record player when we were growing up. He said he never threw away a single album he ever owned, and I believed him. Once when I was little, I bought him a Led Zeppelin CD for Father’s Day, but he never listened to it. I hoped he still played his records now, alone in his wing of Granny’s old house, and I hoped they made him happy, at least a little.
The back door of the car opened suddenly. A bearded guy in a knit cap and a heavy gray overcoat slid into the backseat. He smiled an oily smile.
“What are you doing?” I demanded. Carla just looked back at the guy as if it was no big deal, happened all the time.
“You got something for me, right?” he said. “I got the call to meet a girl here.” He nodded at something in the backseat. It was a backpack that I only dimly recalled Scuzzy carrying. “That it?”
He handed me a thick envelope and I stupidly took it. It wasn’t until I held it up to the dim light from the store that I realized it was stuffed full of money.
“What is this?” I asked the guy in the knit cap, looking around for Scuzzy and Dreadlocks, hoping they would re
appear and clear this whole thing up. “Nobody called you. I don’t want this —” I tried to give him back the envelope, but he ignored me.
He grabbed Scuzzy’s backpack off the floorboard and pulled out a freezer bag filled with pot. He sniffed it, tasted it for some reason, stuffed it back inside the pack, reached in his pockets, and pulled out a badge and a gun.
“Nice doing business with you, ladies,” he said, again with that oily smile. Other men with beards and knit caps and badges and overcoats and guns materialized out of the darkness and surrounded the car, which was suddenly flooded with the light from a dozen flashlights.
“And now you’re under arrest.”
The door to juvie closes with a solid thud, leaving behind the sound of those blue jays, leaving behind my motorcycle, leaving behind everything.
Mrs. Simper takes my bag right away. “You’re not allowed to have this,” she says, lifting it with two fingers and handing it to a guard whose name tag says OFFICER WALLACE. He’s wearing a khaki-and-blue uniform and blue medical gloves.
“You’re not allowed to have anything besides whatever money you’d like to put into your phone account,” Mrs. Simper adds. “Perhaps they didn’t make that clear.” But her tone says that she knows very well that they did make it clear and that I seem to think the rules don’t apply to me. Great. I’ve already gotten on someone’s bad side, and all because of a few tampons and a disposable razor.
Officer Wallace tucks my stuff in a garbage bag. “You can have it back when you get out,” he says. He has a very flat face. I’ve never seen one like it before — with a nose that barely casts a shadow.
“Take good care of it,” I say.
Officer Wallace lets the bag fall to his side. “In here,” he says evenly, “you don’t speak unless you have permission. Maybe they didn’t make that clear, either.”
He starts to say more, but Mrs. Simper puts her hand on my shoulder. “Officer Wallace is our intake supervisor, Sadie,” she says. “He’ll take over now. I’m going to have to get back to my office, but you and I will have an opportunity to talk later.”
Juvie Page 2
