He nods to C. Miller. “Take her.”
“It’s OK,” Bad Gina says, a little too quickly. “I’ll just run up and run back.”
Officer Killduff stares at her. “She goes or you don’t.”
Bad Gina flashes him her girliest smile. “Just trying to be helpful.”
C. Miller rolls her eyes. I want to warn her about Bad Gina. I can’t say why exactly. It’s just a feeling I can’t shake as I watch them trudge together up the beach. Everybody else stops working to watch, too, as if it’s the last time we’ll ever see them.
Officer Killduff yells at us. “Back to work or back to juvie.”
We lower our heads and continue picking up trash in the opposite direction from the pavilion. Officer Killduff barks about stuff we missed and we keep having to go back and get it.
I look up the beach again, but C. Miller and Bad Gina aren’t back yet. I try to focus on my job, but something still doesn’t feel right. Finally I ask Officer Killduff if I can go to the restroom, too.
He looks exasperated. “You couldn’t ask me that before, when they went up?”
“Sorry.” I shrug.
He nods. “Hurry.”
I’m halfway up the beach when a strange wind picks up. It catches a rivulet of sweat on my neck and leaves an icy chill. I walk faster.
There’s nobody at the pavilion or the Dumpster, nobody outside the restroom or at the boat-rental office or anywhere else that I can see. Lake Anna is as deserted as it was when we came before.
I push open the restroom door and step inside. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and when I walk in farther and turn the corner I freeze.
C. Miller lies sprawled on the floor, blood covering one side of her face. Bad Gina’s nowhere in sight, but I look immediately at the back door, remembering what she said last time we were here — about making a break.
C. Miller moans. I rush over and lift her head gently. “Are you OK?” I ask, my stomach twisting at the sight of all that blood. “What happened? Are you all right?” She opens her eyes, stares blankly for a minute, then lifts herself onto her elbows and scrambles away from me into the corner.
“It’s OK,” I say. “You got hurt. It was Bad Gina.”
C. Miller looks scared and confused. She throws her arms up in front of her as if trying to ward me off.
“No,” I say. “It’s not me. It’s just her. I’m going to help you.”
She scrambles farther away, eyes wide with fear.
This is no good. She won’t let me anywhere near her. “I’m going for help,” I say. “Just don’t move.”
I push myself up and out the front door of the restroom and scream down the beach to Officer Killduff. He takes a few running steps in my direction but then stops and looks at the other girls.
“Help!” I scream again. “God damn it! Help!”
I slam back inside the restroom, where C. Miller is wiping blood from her face, shaking her head as if trying to clear her thoughts. I grab a wad of paper towels and kneel next to her even though she tries to crawl farther away. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I say. “Just take this and hold it.” I press the paper towels against the cut and push her hand down over the towels to keep the pressure on.
She moans in pain, and her eyes are still full of fear. It makes me sick that she thinks this was my fault, that I did this to her.
I think about what Mrs. Simper said, about only doing what I’m told. But I look again at the fear in C. Miller’s eyes, and in that instant I decide: no way am I taking the blame for something else I didn’t do. Not this time. Not ever again.
I open the back door and take off after Bad Gina. She might have outrun me that day in the gym, but there is no way in hell she’s getting away from me today.
Everything that’s happened can’t have taken much more than a couple of minutes. That’s already enough for a pretty good lead, but there’s only one road heading off from the restroom, more of a dirt track really, and Bad Gina has to be on it. I take off sprinting, all out, as hard as I can go, drawing on every ounce of conditioning from years of basketball, throwing myself down that road after Bad Gina the way I’ve always thrown myself after every loose ball and into every fast break my whole life. I don’t slow down for a quarter of a mile, not even when I finally spot her up ahead, maybe two hundred yards away, disappearing around a curve. My sides ache, my lungs burn, but I pick up the pace even more and keep it there, running crazy under a dark tunnel of trees. A minute later, I catch sight of her again.
I keep pushing, gaining on her with every step, until I’m close enough to hear her labored breathing. We’re on a straight section of the trail, and there’s a clearing up ahead. A black car. A guy standing next to it, smoking a cigarette.
Bad Gina starts yelling, “Start the fucking car! Start the fucking car!” But the guy looks uncertain about what to do. We’re a hundred yards away. He just stands there. I pull even with Bad Gina.
She swings an elbow at my face but I duck away easily and keep going. I know I should be afraid. It’s stupid, what I’m doing. The guy could have a gun. But I’m too far in now to quit. She swings at me again.
“Hey, Gina,” I say, as if we’re just out for a friendly jog. “Holding up OK?”
She doesn’t answer. We’re fifty yards from the car. Bad Gina yells at the guy again, but he panics. Jumps in and slams the door shut. The engine roars to life, and the tires spit gravel as the car lurches forward.
Bad Gina wails. “No!”
“Well,” I say, “this sure has been fun.”
Then I grab her ponytail and yank hard, just like during that AAU game. She doesn’t have time to get her hands out to break the fall, just lands straight down on her back. I’m sure it knocks the wind out of her because she just lies there gasping, flailing her arms and legs, eyes so wide I think her capillaries will burst.
The black car vanishes.
“Don’t worry,” I say, standing over her. “You’ll live.”
Once she gets her breath back, I roll her over onto her stomach and sit on her. She struggles to free herself. “Get off me, bitch!”
I push her face into the dirt. Not too hard, just hard enough to make my point. She wails some more but doesn’t fight after that, just lies there cursing and spitting for the next ten minutes until Officer Killduff shows up, gun drawn, and puts us both in restraints.
I was the one who put Lulu to bed the night before I turned myself into juvie. Mom had already retreated to her bedroom; Carla needed something from the store.
First I read the Everyone Poops book, and Lulu and I spent a lot of time discussing it. I quizzed her afterward.
“Does toothpaste poop?”
“No.”
“Does a Chia Pet poop?”
“What’s a Chia Pet?”
“Never mind. Does poop poop?”
“Maybe.”
“Close enough.”
After I turned the lights out, we took turns drawing on each other’s backs. I couldn’t guess what she was drawing on mine because her pictures lacked all sense of proportion: heads that covered both shoulder blades, bodies an inch high. She couldn’t guess what I drew on her because she was just a little kid and thought everything was either a house or a monkey.
We snuggled together under the covers after that. I deliberately slowed my breathing down, the way I used to do when she was a baby, and hers gradually slowed along with mine until I thought for sure she was asleep. She wasn’t, though, and when I tried to ease myself out of bed, she opened her eyes.
“Tell me a story, Aunt Sadie?”
I was happy for the excuse to stay, so I settled back in. “What about?”
“About you and Mommy. And Moo-Moo and Granpa.”
“You don’t even know Granpa.”
“I went to his house,” she said, as if that was the same thing.
So I told her a story about this time we all went camping in the mountains — me and Mom and Dad and Carla. I was
probably eight, so Carla would have been eleven.
“We hadn’t ever done much camping before,” I said. “It was Moo-Moo’s idea. I was the only one excited about it. Your mom didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay home and watch TV. Granpa didn’t like to be in the car with all of us so much. But Moo-Moo wanted us to do something together, a family thing, so we went, anyway.”
Lulu wanted to know if we cooked marshmallows.
“Of course,” I said. “And I ate about fifty. And we wrapped potatoes in aluminum foil and cooked them under the coals in the fire, and we cooked hot dogs on sticks, and when we were finished eating, we tied our food bag to a rope and hung it really high off the ground from a tree limb.”
Lulu wanted to know how come, and I told her that it was to keep it safe from bears, and so a bear wouldn’t come inside our tent looking for the food if we kept it with us in there.
“I don’t want a bear to eat you or Mommy or Moo-Moo,” Lulu said, snuggling closer. “Or Granpa.”
“Me neither. And it didn’t happen, so that was good.”
“Yeah.”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Only something else did get in the tent.”
Lulu looked worried. “Was it a bad monkey?”
“No,” I said. “Worse. It was a skunk. Your mommy got up to pee in the middle of the night, and when she came back, she must not have pulled the zipper all the way down on the tent flap, so a skunk got in.”
“Did the skunk spray you guys? Did it spray Mommy?”
“No. But your mommy saw it, and she got so scared that she ran away into the woods to hide. She told us later that she was afraid if she yelled, it would spray everybody. But the problem was that she ran too far and got lost.”
Lulu sat straight up in bed. “Did she have a flashlight?”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “And she got really lost because instead of stopping and waiting for us to come look for her, she kept walking, thinking she could find her way back to the campsite. Only she couldn’t.”
“So what happened?” Lulu asked, obviously frightened. I wondered if she was too little for this story. I’d chosen it because it had a happy ending and it was one of the few stories about the four of us that did. But now I was worried that I was scarring her for life or something.
“Everything turned out OK,” I reassured her. “Granpa woke up before too long. Somehow he knew something was wrong. And when he saw Carla wasn’t there, but the skunk was, he just quietly opened the tent flap and let the skunk out. Then he woke up me and Moo-Moo and gave us all flashlights and said we had to go find your mommy. So that’s what we did.”
“How?”
“Well, we stayed close together so we could see one another’s flashlights but search kind of a wider space. And we took turns yelling for Carla. It took us about a whole hour. Maybe even longer. Maybe almost all night. I just remember I kept tripping over things and nearly falling down, and I was so mad at Carla for running off like that. But Dad — Granpa — he kept us going until we finally heard Carla’s voice.”
“What was she saying?”
“She was saying ‘Help me! Help me!’ because she had fallen down off some slick rocks and hurt her leg. Granpa had to climb down and get her and carry her back up the side of the mountain, and he even carried her all the way back to our camp.”
“Was Mommy OK?”
“She had to wear this kind of boot thing while her ankle got better, but that wasn’t until we got back home and she went to the doctor. But that night, when we got back to our camp, there was a big problem, because we hadn’t closed the tent flap and the skunk was in there again, curled up on one of the sleeping bags. Only this time your mommy wouldn’t let Granpa kick him out. So we ended up sitting under a big tree the whole rest of the night with a poncho over us. Your mommy and I were shivering because we got kind of wet and cold and so Moo-Moo and Granpa held us in their laps until me and your mommy fell asleep.”
“What happened to the skunk?”
“He woke up after a while and went back to his own family. Granpa and Moo-Moo carried us into the tent while we were sleeping and tucked us in our sleeping bags, and everybody slept until really late the next morning.”
Lulu smiled. “I like that story.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too. We used to be a great family.” As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.
Lulu looked worried again. “Can we still?”
I felt bad. “Still be a great family?” I was stalling for time.
Lulu nodded.
I thought about how I was going away to juvie for the next six months, and how I was afraid Lulu would think I abandoned her. I thought about Dad hiding out at Granny’s and not seeing anybody for years, and Mom tired all the time from working two jobs, and Carla promising over and over that she was finally getting straight.
But then I thought some more about what I was about to do the next day. Really thought about it. I had to believe it was the right thing to do, and I had to believe that it would matter, that it would make a difference in Carla’s life. In all our lives.
“Can we?” Lulu asked again, still wanting to know whether we could be a great family again. As if it was all up to me.
I hugged her tight. “You bet.”
It’s long after midnight when I finally get back to juvie from Lake Anna. They make me go back through Intake, since I’ve been unsupervised on the outside, and it’s still the same old drill: strip search, oral inspection, body-cavity search, shower. I’m just putting on my juvie-issue underwear when Mrs. Simper walks in, looking very, very tired. She waits while I pull on my red jumpsuit and black sandals, then tells the guards they don’t have to put me back in shackles.
“Just this once,” she says to me. “Don’t get any ideas.”
I nod.
“Officer Miller should be all right,” she says before I can ask. “She’s in the hospital overnight for observation.”
The EMTs who checked all of us out at Lake Anna had told me pretty much the same thing, but it’s a relief hearing it again. I want desperately to ask if anyone told C. Miller that it wasn’t me who attacked her but decide to wait to see if Mrs. Simper mentions anything.
“What about Bad Gina?” I ask.
Mrs. Simper gestures at the door, and the guard calls down to the control center to have it unlocked. “She’s somewhere else. There’s an APB out for her boyfriend, the man you reported seeing.”
“Did she confess and everything?”
Mrs. Simper shakes her head. “First she said it was you who attacked Officer Miller. Then she said Officer Miller attacked her and it was self-defense. Then she said she didn’t know who the man with the car was. Then she said the man with the car robbed the liquor store that she was convicted of robbing, and he threatened to hurt her family if she didn’t escape and go away with him.”
“So that’s a no, then?”
“Right.”
We amble down the halls without speaking. It seems like months, not hours, since I last heard the click and buzz of each set of locked doors.
The night guards let us onto Unit Three and unlock my cell. Mrs. Simper follows me in there, too.
I sit on the bunk. She looks around as if it’s the first time she’s ever been in such a place. I scoot over and offer her a seat, but she doesn’t take it. I wait for another lecture like the one she gave me the day Chantrelle freaked out and the Jelly Sisters put Weeze in the hospital: how I should have waited for Officer Killduff; how I shouldn’t have gone after Bad Gina; how in juvie you do what you’re told, no matter what.
Mrs. Simper finishes her inspection of my cell and studies me for a long minute. “What am I going to do with you, Sadie?” she asks.
“A reduced sentence?” I ask, only half joking. After all, I did keep Bad Gina from getting away. That’s got to be worth something.
“A reduced sentence?” Mrs. Simper repeats.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I see,” she says.
I shrug. “I guess they’re all right. I’ve slept on worse.”
“Really?” She seems genuinely interested, so I tell her about Government Island and camping out there and sleeping on the ground a lot of nights.
“It’s not far from here,” I say. “I could take you there when I get out.” I don’t know why I’m being so friendly with Mrs. Simper, except that she’s being so friendly to me, walking me here without shackles, sitting with me on my bunk, hanging out in the middle of the night as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
She stands abruptly.
“Well, good night, Sadie,” she says, turning to leave. Then she pauses and faces me again. For just a second she reminds me of my mom — I’m not sure why. I think she might even try to hug me.
She doesn’t.
“I wouldn’t pin my hopes on an early release,” she says. “That’s not how it works in here.”
I slump against the wall. “But I’m not even guilty in the first place,” I say, though I know it sounds lame.
Mrs. Simper shakes her head. “Just because you’re not guilty,” she says, “doesn’t mean you’re innocent.”
The cell door locks behind her, leaving me just sitting there. Gravity takes over after a while, and I slide down the wall until I lie on my bunk under the stuttering light, exhausted, ready to collapse into one of those dead sleeps I used to fall into after two-a-day practices plus weight training.
It’s not that easy shutting off my brain, though. I mull over what Mrs. Simper just said. I remember C. Miller telling me pretty much the same thing that day the power went out and we were stuck in the gym shooting baskets.
I shouldn’t have gone to that party the night Carla and I got arrested. I shouldn’t have let Dreadlocks and Scuzzy in the car, or waited in the 7-Eleven parking lot. But I let those other voices get too loud in my head — convincing me that I was sick of chasing after Carla and it shouldn’t be my job, anyway, or it was OK to drink just a little that night, or it wasn’t worth the hassle of saying no to the guys, or we’d just have to wait in that parking lot five minutes, that’s all, five lousy minutes, and then we could go home. What could possibly go wrong?
Juvie Page 21
