“You know why she’s crying, don’t you?” Bad Gina asks.
I shake my head.
“It’s pretty sad,” she says with an odd laugh that isn’t quite a laugh. “She keeps calling her boyfriend, but he won’t accept the charges. I guess she doesn’t have any money in her phone account, so she has to call collect. I’ve heard her before, begging him to take the call, but he never does. He’s got another girlfriend. I can’t really blame him.”
Weeze gets up from the table then and walks over to Good Gina’s phone. Good Gina doesn’t leave, though. She picks up the receiver before Weeze gets there and dials again and speaks to somebody. She hangs up again after about a minute. She keeps trying. Weeze keeps waiting.
Bad Gina keeps talking to me. “This one time, I was at the phone next to hers and I heard her calling and nobody accepting the call, and so she pretended she was talking to her boyfriend anyway, about how she couldn’t wait to see him again, and how everything was going to be better this time, and how she loved him so, so much. But she was holding the hook down the whole time. She wasn’t even trying to pretend she wasn’t. It was pretty pathetic. I felt sorry for her.”
Good Gina finally gives up the phone to Weeze. Chantrelle is still talking on another phone, so Good Gina slumps into Weeze’s seat at the table with Bad Gina and me.
“You OK?” I ask.
She looks at me blankly for a second, nods, then lays her head on the table.
Bad Gina scoots her chair close to mine, far enough from Good Gina to talk privately.
“So how come you’ve been avoiding me all day, anyway?” she asks. “I kind of thought we were friends.”
I shrug. “I haven’t. I’ve just been busy. All these appointments. So much to do.”
“Bullshit,” Bad Gina says, though she doesn’t sound angry. “You got cornered by the Jelly Sisters at breakfast, even though they broke your nose yesterday, but you talked to them anyway.”
I lay my hands on the table in front of me and study them for a minute.
“Look, Gina,” I say, finally. “You seem like a nice girl and all, but I’m not interested in getting in the middle of anything going on between you and Wanda and Nell. It’s none of my business. They see me talking to you, they think I’m on your side or whatever. You see me talking to them, you’re all over me about it.”
Bad Gina narrows her eyes and frowns. “If that’s how you feel, then I guess that’s how you feel,” she says. “But you need friends in here. Those girls are capable of some very bad shit.”
“Yeah. And they say the same thing about you. They said you helped Cell Seven hurt herself. They said you were hooking up with Officer Killduff.”
She draws back. “They said that? They actually said that?”
“I don’t believe them,” I say quickly. “I don’t have any reason to. But I also don’t have any reason to believe you — no offense.”
“None taken,” she says, heavy on the sarcasm.
“I just don’t want to get involved,” I say again. “Hell, they’re staring at us right now because we’re talking.” And they are — Nell from her phone, Wanda from two tables over. For all I know, they’re planning how they’re going to kick our asses, or break Bad Gina’s nose, too.
One of the officers comes over and stands behind us. “You making a call tonight or what?” she asks Bad Gina.
Her face changes in a flash, from angry and defensive to bright and smiling. “Yes, thanks, Officer.” She doesn’t look at me again as she leaves to make her call and passes Weeze, who is on her way back to our table. They fist-bump.
Weeze is smiling, too, but hers seems sincere — her fleshy face all pink, close to radiant even.
“Good phone call?” I ask.
She nods. Weeze isn’t much taller than me, just a few inches, but she probably outweighs me by thirty pounds, making her look larger than she really is. “I got to talk to my dad and my little sister,” she gushes. “They’re both coming to see me tomorrow.”
“That’s great,” I say. “What about your mom?”
Her face darkens. “She’s kind of still having problems with me being arrested and in juvie and everything.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says, then she brightens again. “But Dad said she’s writing me a letter. She just hasn’t finished it yet. But he said she’s going to send me a really long letter. So maybe he’ll bring that with him.”
She seems like a sweet girl, but it’s hard to tell what kind of person anybody really is here. I figure Bad Gina has chosen to hang out with Weeze because of her size — as protection from the Jelly Sisters. I’m not as sure about why Weeze is hanging out with Bad Gina. It could be that Weeze has a crush on her. It could be that she’s just lonely, and when you’re lonely, you grab on to whoever will have you.
That night in my cell feels like the hundredth and not just my fifth. The minute I’m locked in, I start pacing. I count laps for a while — if you can even call them that — but the numbers pile up too fast and it makes me depressed. I try slowing down so each turn lasts longer than the one before, and that works better. After a few hundred, it feels as if I’m moving in slow motion, or walking underwater, and it reminds me of this time Dad took me to a hippie solstice party at a farm way out somewhere on the Northern Neck. They had a roaring campfire and a torchlit Frisbee golf course and a drum circle that went on all night. They’d also set up a labyrinth, with carefully arranged stones marking a twisting, winding path that kept folding back in on itself, with circles inside circles and more circles inside those circles, all somehow connected and yet never crossing over itself, either, and eventually leading to a tiny open space in the middle about the size of a dog curled up and sleeping.
I asked Dad what the maze was for, but he said it wasn’t a maze; it was a labyrinth. A maze was something you got lost in and had to find your way out of. But a labyrinth was different. He said you were never lost in a labyrinth. He said a labyrinth was where you went to find yourself.
I didn’t exactly know what he was talking about — though later, when he got so lost inside his own head and retreated to his wing of Granny’s house and started collecting everything and piling it all up just so, I remembered what he said about the labyrinth and sort of understood.
I try for a while to make my laps around the cell feel like some kind of labyrinth, to let my mind wander, but either I’m so lost that there’s no finding myself or an eight-by-eight cell in juvie is too poor an excuse for a labyrinth. All that happens is that I feel dizzy, and very, very sad.
I climb onto my bunk, wrap a blanket around my shoulders, and lean against the wall, feeling homesick all of a sudden, as if somebody has flicked on a switch — desperately missing everybody: Dad, Mom, Carla, Lulu, Julie Juggins, even Kevin.
I lie under my blanket and try to think about something else, anything that can lift my spirits. I think about Government Island and the times I spent camping out there by myself, how it felt like I was the only person left in the whole world and how peaceful that made me feel. I think about the couple of times I brought Kevin out there and how nice it was to not be the only person in the world then. I think about the other things I always go back to when I need cheering up: my team and winning regionals last year and getting runner-up for MVP. I think about my motorcycle and flying down two-lane county roads where you can go as fast as you want and never see any cops. I think about Lulu handing me that rock and how sweet that was, and how sweet she is.
And I think about Kevin some more. Being in juvie, even just these five days, has taken the jagged edge off how angry I am at him, how let down and betrayed. Though I still don’t think I can ever really forgive him, even if I have the chance. But I don’t want to think about that anymore tonight. Tonight I just want to remember the good stuff, like watching him on the soccer field with his long dirty-blond hair and his face streaked with sweat and that certain grin he gets that means he is so far into the game that nothing
outside it exists, except, sometimes, me when he scores a goal and spreads his arms and tears around the field in celebration and does a knee slide near the sideline and looks up for me cheering in the stands. And how he is a kind and decent person who volunteers at the food bank and wants to join the Peace Corps after college and live in Africa. And how he bought me this really expensive motorcycle helmet because he was so worried about anything happening to me on my bike. And how he came over to Mom’s house a couple of times when I was stuck at home babysitting Lulu, even though he could have gone out with his friends. And what a good kisser he is and how he’d pull me into this little space next to our lockers at school and we’d make out like crazy between classes. And all the sweet and dirty stuff we used to do together that always left me so weak in the knees, literally weak in the knees, which I’d never believed was an actual thing.
I wrap myself tighter inside my blanket, glance at the little window in my cell door to make sure nobody is checking in on me, and then clench my eyes shut and scoot down in my bed and pretend I’m with Kevin, and we’re a couple again, and we’re wrapped around each other on a cold autumn night inside my sleeping bag on Government Island, nothing separating us but skin and barely that.
I shudder — hot and flushed.
And then I stop. Maybe I hear something. Or maybe I’m just worried that one of the guards will look in. There’s nobody at the door, but there’s also no way of knowing when there might be.
Once my mind gets racing, it won’t quit. I start thinking about Harry Harlow’s monkeys again, and this thing I read on the Internet after Mr. Turner’s depressing lecture. It was about how some of the monkeys just sat and masturbated for hours because it was the only stimulation they had, and about how they got addicted to it and kept at it even when it was clear it wasn’t giving them any pleasure, but they just couldn’t seem to control themselves, so they kept going at it until their hands and arms would sometimes even cramp up and they’d be practically paralyzed, those poor, sad, hapless monkeys.
I pull my hands out from under the blanket and swear it’s the last time I’m ever doing anything like that again in juvie.
They wouldn’t let Mom sit in the interrogation room with us, but I figured she was watching through the two-way mirror, and maybe listening in, too. It was just like on TV: a long metal table, hard chairs, two police detectives, and me and my court-appointed lawyer, a kind of washed-out guy named Mr. Ferrell. One of the detectives even asked if I wanted a soda. The older one, Detective Feagles, was white; he had silver hair and a rumpled suit. The younger one, Detective Boldin, was black; he had an earring and a police-department windbreaker.
Mr. Ferrell mostly just sat there and took notes. I wished it was Mom’s friend Vance, not because he seemed especially amazing as a lawyer or anything, but because I figured he probably cared what happened to me, at least a little. But we couldn’t afford him after that one free consultation, and he didn’t offer to take on my case pro bono.
Detective Feagles turned on a tape recorder and fiddled with some dials. Detective Boldin asked most of the questions.
“Full name?”
“Sadie Ruth Windas.”
“Address?”
“Fourteen-oh-eight Clearview Drive, Stafford, Virginia.”
“Age?”
“Seventeen.”
“Birth date?”
“June 19.”
“Social Security number?”
I had a brain freeze. He finally gave up and said we could ask my mom later.
My heart raced wildly the whole time, and I was sweating like crazy. Mom had made me get dressed up like I was going to a funeral, with tights and uncomfortable shoes and everything.
“Now, Sadie,” said Detective Boldin, “I want you to take us through the events of that night. And I want you to include the names of everybody you can think of who you met at the party.”
“I didn’t catch any names,” I said. “It was pretty loud, and it’s not like people were introducing themselves or wearing name tags or anything.” I wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass, but it was like these guys had never been to a party before.
“You sure?”
I racked my brain, then suddenly remembered. “There was this one girl. Kendall. I didn’t get her last name, though. But she had a bright-red scar on her cheek, and she went to Stafford High with my sister, Carla.”
Detective Boldin scribbled on his notepad. Good. Maybe she’d get in some kind of trouble for being at the party. “And did she have anything to do with the drugs?”
“No, sir,” I admitted. “She was just somebody I met at the party. But we didn’t talk for very long.”
“Anybody else?”
“No, sir.”
“What about the two men you say had the drugs?”
I opened my hands on the table. “I didn’t catch their names, like I said. They might have mentioned them, but it was so loud I didn’t hear. I just made up names for them.”
“What were they?”
“Dreadlocks and Scuzzy. Because one had dreadlocks, and the other guy just seemed really scuzzy.”
Detective Boldin wrote that down as well. My lawyer did, too.
“Color?”
“They were white guys.”
“Ages?”
“Twenty-something. I’d say mid to late.”
“Identifying characteristics?”
“Well, the one guy had dreadlocks. He was pretty tall, maybe six two. The other guy was just real scuzzy-looking. Scraggly beard, greasy hair, that sort of thing. He had dark hair, but Dreadlocks was blond,” I added.
“Had you ever seen them before anywhere?”
“No, sir.”
“Seen them since?”
“No, sir.”
“Would you recognize them again?”
“Maybe. I mean, I guess so. It was pretty dark at the party, and in the car, but I think so.”
“And your sister?”
“I don’t think she’d recognize them. She was really drunk that night.” As soon as I said that, I wished I hadn’t, since Carla was twenty, so not legal age. But they let it go.
“Where was she during the party?”
“Not sure. Just hanging out with people, I guess. I was outside playing beer pong.”
Detective Boldin looked at me. “Beer pong?”
“Yes, sir, but I didn’t drink.”
“Right,” he said.
“Maybe a couple of sips,” I quickly added, since it was clear he didn’t believe me.
“Right,” he said again. “And you said that was where you met this Dreadlocks?”
“Yes, sir. I just sort of ended up with him as my doubles partner. And then later on, he asked me to take him and his friend to the store. He said they wanted to buy some beer… .”
“Is that all?” the detective asked.
I looked at my lawyer. He nodded, which I took to mean he wanted me to just go on and get the rest out.
I stared at my hands, unable to look at the detectives as I continued. “No, sir. He also said they had a package they had to deliver to somebody. They said they would pay me if I took them.” I watched the detectives scribble down my lie, making it a permanent part of my story.
“What happened next?” Detective Boldin asked.
“I went and got Carla. She was pretty out of it and practically passed out in the car. The guys got out at the 7-Eleven and left the package in the backseat. And that’s when the police came and arrested us.”
“And you’re saying Carla didn’t know anything about what was going on?” Detective Boldin asked.
“No, sir. And I didn’t know much, either. They just asked me for the ride, like I said.”
“And you didn’t ask what was in the package or who was picking it up.”
I couldn’t look at him. “No, sir. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“Were you drunk? Had you been drinking? Or doing any drugs yourself?”
“No, sir. Just the couple of
sips when we were playing beer pong. We’re in season.”
“In season?”
“For basketball. In AAU, we have summer and fall ball.”
“And what did you know about the arrangement for the drug deal?”
“I didn’t know anything about that. Like about how they set it up or anything. I didn’t even know it was a drug deal until we got arrested.”
“What did you think was in the package, then?”
I wished I’d thought through this line of questioning and had an answer ready, but I hadn’t and I didn’t.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Detective Boldin leaned in closer. “You have to tell us the truth, Sadie,” he said. “Because it’s hard to believe what you’re telling us right now — that you just agreed to drive these guys to a drug deal out of the goodness of your heart and your desire to make a few easy bucks. And that you knew they were delivering a package, but it never occurred to you what was in that package. One of you girls — you or your sister — had to know what was going on. You say she was passed out and nobody told her anything. So that leaves just you.”
I nodded slowly, dying inside as I realized what I was going to have to say to keep Carla out of jail.
“They might have mentioned it was drugs.” My voice was a whisper.
“You’re gonna have to repeat that,” Detective Boldin said. “The tape recorder might not have gotten what you just said.”
“Yes,” I said. “They might have mentioned the drugs. To me. Not to Carla.”
“Right,” Detective Boldin said abruptly. “OK. Well, Detective Feagles has a few questions for you now, but before we get started with him, can I get you another soda?”
“Yes. Thank you, sir. Officer.”
Detective Feagles asked me all the same questions, though he phrased them differently. Once he finished, Detective Boldin went over everything yet again, fishing for more details. I was there for three hours. I drank four Pepsis and had to go to the bathroom four times, though once was just to try to stop shaking so much.
Afterward we waited while they typed up a statement and gave it to me to sign. My hand trembled so badly it looked like I hadn’t yet mastered the art of cursive writing.
Juvie Page 10
