Lullabies for Little Criminals

by Heather O'Neill

  On the way back to my room, the girl with the scar asked if I wanted to go see Ralphy get naked.

  “Why’s he doing that?”

  “Everybody has to go through it. His name was pulled out of the hat this morning.”

  I had heard tell of this activity, naturally, but had hoped somehow I’d continue to be excluded from it. She hurried me down to the end of the hall, where we crammed ourselves into a little room. A scrawny boy of about thirteen was standing in the middle of the room with his eyes closed.

  Ralphy never spoke to anyone. If the teacher asked him a question, he would just stare back expressionlessly. He whispered sometimes, but you couldn’t hear him. He was the person who had most mastered the superhero skill of invisibility. Sometimes when I looked at him, I had a hard time believing he was real, or at least as real as the rest of us. All I knew about him was that he liked to draw spirals in his notebooks, hundreds of them. He had a radio that didn’t pick up any signals. A social worker had given it to him as a birthday present because he hadn’t gotten a present from anyone else. He sometimes walked around the yard with the antenna straight up, trying to stumble across a sound.

  “Start already, Ralphy,” someone said.

  Ralphy started to sway his skinny hips back and forth. He put his hands in the air and started to pull his sweater off. It felt as if there was a dove fluttering around under my jacket as I realized he was really going to take off all his clothes. Some of the kids cheered. Others just sat there calmly, as if not even this could make them feel anything.

  Finally, Ralphy was left wearing nothing but a pair of stretched underwear around his hips. When he shook them quickly, the underwear came down little by little until they finally slipped down around his ankles. The only thing that Ralphy had on now was a house key hanging from a shoelace around his neck. I thought he was pretty, but I noticed that the other kids could barely stand the sight of him. He reminded them too much of themselves. You looked at his ribs sticking out and his stretched-out underwear around his ankles and you shuddered and wondered, Is this what I’ve become? This was the type of thing that might happen to you in an anxiety dream. That’s what happens when no one is able to look after you. Terrible, absurd, and humiliating scenarios are no longer the stuff that dreams are made of.

  “You’d never make a dime stripping, Ralphy!” an older kid yelled. “Who would want to look at your sorry ass?”

  Everyone laughed hard, as this joke distanced us from Ralphy’s predicament. He kept his eyes closed and stood still and naked. And he really was as naked as the day he was born. God had created us without clothes, but it was still a horrific thing. I looked at every part of Ralphy. I noticed that he had a cut on his knee. Someone should kiss it better, I thought. He was covered with invisible wounds that would never really heal.

  Suddenly, the bell that signaled that we should return to our rooms sounded. We ran out of the room as Ralphy hurried to get dressed. I walked down the hallway alone. It was better to keep to yourself here, I figured.

  I shared my room with two other girls. The lights went out and they both scrambled under their covers and went to sleep. The day before, one of the girls had informed me that the best way to get out of here was to attempt suicide and get taken to the hospital and escape from there.

  “It’s a risk,” she said, “but it’s totally worth it to get out of this toilet bowl.”

  Other children had offered me other possible ways to escape that didn’t seem too viable, since they were still in here. I changed into the white men’s pajamas with enormous butterfly collars that I’d been issued. They were too big, but I didn’t care. I pulled a paperback book out from under my mattress and examined it lovingly. This was how I escaped from the prison.

  I’d been carrying the book around in my pocket for the past couple weeks. I felt so lucky that I happened to have had it when I was picked up. It was a copy of Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés, The Swallower Swallowed. It wasn’t one of Alphonse’s presents; a girl in the park had given it to me. She said that someone is always given a copy of L’avalée des avalés by someone else and that you can’t buy it. It was the story of a young girl who was at once enraptured and furious with the world.

  I had always liked reading, but lately I had started reading in a different kind of way. When I opened a book now, I was seized with desperation. I felt as if I was madly in love. It was as if I were in a confession booth and the characters in the book were on the other side telling me their most intimate secrets. When I read, I was a philosopher and it was up to me to figure out the meaning of things. Reading made me feel as if I were the center of the universe.

  I lay down on my bed and flicked on the tiny night-light next to my bed. Although it only gave off the smallest puddle of light, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness and the words became clear.

  Tout m’avale…Je suis avalée par le fleuve trop grand, par le ciel trop haut, par les fleurs trop fragiles, par les papillons trop craintifs, par le visage trop beau de ma mère…

  It was impossible to say that I was pitiful after I had read L’avalée des avalés for an hour. I put the book under my pillow and turned off the light.

  It was necessary to have a black chalkboard to be able to see the words written on it in chalk. The stars are always up in the sky. You just can’t see them during the day until the sky becomes dark. Then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come. To see the stars properly, you have to be out in the country where there are no streetlights or lights from apartment windows. When you stood outside the detention center, it was almost shocking how many stars were out there. This is where they were all sent to. So that nobody could see them but one another.

  4

  ONE NIGHT, THE GIRL with the cesarean scar came up to me in the cafeteria and told me that it was my turn to take my clothes off. Everyone stripped when their name came up. Once a boy named Bing had refused to go to the room to strip. Everybody ignored him now and wouldn’t even look at him in the cafeteria. He sat in his black T-shirt looking sadly out the window. It was the only rule the kids had invented. It gave us a sense of power over at least one aspect of our own lives.

  I had been dreading my name coming up, but I was glad to be able to get it over with. I had decided that when it came my turn to strip, I would keep my eyes open. I wouldn’t shut them as Ralphy had. I would act as if it was nothing for me to take my clothes off. I would not crack on the scaffold; I would go to my hanging with dignity.

  About thirty kids crammed into my room at nine thirty and whispered harshly for everyone to shut up. We couldn’t really play music during the strip shows, as it would attract the attention of the staff. One boy named Julian had taken to humming during the performances, and I listened intently as I started to unbutton my flannel shirt. It didn’t make me feel any better about taking my clothes off. It wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t the boy’s fault either. It wasn’t any of our faults.

  I took off my undershirt with the yellow and red flowers on it. I didn’t even own a bra. I thought for a moment that this would cause an uproar, that everyone would start screaming with laughter. Everybody got quiet when they saw that I was shaking. I could hardly get the button of my jeans open because my fingers didn’t seem to be functioning. My whole body was acting as if it was very cold and I’d just stepped out of the swimming pool. If someone blew on me, I would turn into ice and break into a million pieces.

  Then as I took my underwear off, I closed my eyes. And I realized why Ralphy had closed his eyes. It was because he was praying. I was praying that someone would come up and wrap their arms around me and hide my nakedness. I wished and wished in the darkness that I was not alone, but no one came. I remembered that little boy Zachary from the foster home in Val des Loups who always believed that his mother was coming to get him. Right at that moment, I knew exactly what he felt like.

  The bell rang and the humming stopped. I heard everyone running out of the room
. I opened one eye, and even with one eye I knew that things were different for me now.

  IT IS A FACT THAT THINGS ALWAYS GET WORSE for children after a stint in juvenile detention. Being there does something to you morally. When I left a month later, I felt much more vulnerable. I was like one of those baby birds that fall out of their nests in the spring and are virtually impossible to rescue; they need an amount of attention that no one can give them.

  I was supposed to be able to leave right before Christmastime, but the social worker informed me that Jules was sick and was going to be in the hospital for a couple nights. Jules usually got sick at the beginning of every winter, but we’d always managed to spend Christmas together. As long as I could remember, Jules and I had had our Christmas dinners at the soup kitchen at the Mission on Saint Laurent Street. Last Christmas they had served a plate of turkey and french fries with white bread and all the Pepsi Cola you could drink. Jules never got me a Christmas present because they had a bag of donated gifts for the children there. As I unwrapped mine, Jules and I would both hold our breath, equally excited to see what the present would be.

  Big deal, I thought, determined not to care about missing such a paltry affair.

  The children who weren’t allowed to go home were all eating dinner in the cafeteria with their parents or second cousins or whoever had come to visit them. A social worker invited me, but I asked permission to stay in my room. I lay in bed reading a book on formal wear in Edwardian England that I’d found in the broom closet among the donated books that they referred to as a library. Their book selection consisted mostly of Harlequins and outdated science textbooks, so this wasn’t too bad. I turned to the page on decorated buttons and tried to ponder their beauty instead of my own loneliness, trying to will myself into being a sociopath.

  I met with the social worker my last afternoon there. She had a walleye. I had this terrible habit of turning to see what she was looking at. She told me that I was going to be able to go back to Montreal to live with my father. I left the detention center with only a plastic bag that had my paperback book in it. It was strange. I had no idea why I had been there, or what had been the point, exactly. I wished she would have explained it to me and pointed out to me how I was more suitable for society now.

  She did tell me that she thought my dad was too young and immature to offer me much guidance in life and that he was still trying to figure things out for himself. This added to my confusion, making me wonder if it was because of me that Jules was kind of a fuckup. He had to take care of me when he was fifteen instead of going to school or traveling the world or finding a career. Maybe it was me who dragged him down and not the other way around.

  We just sat in silence after she said that. I pointed to the door to indicate that I wanted to leave, and she nodded. I walked to the front door of the detention center, a free person, I suppose.

  I REMEMBERED ONE TIME when my dad and I had gone to a flea market on the other side of the river, right after you took the city bus over the giant Jacques Cartier Bridge. We stopped to watch a man emptying boxes of doves from the back of a truck into a bigger cage. He reached his hand into the smaller cage and transferred the doves into the big cage one by one. They looked so soft. They were the color of a cup of coffee that had been filled with too much cream. They stood on the newspaper muttering prayers under their breaths. All of a sudden one of the doves burst out of the man’s hand like a magic trick. The dove circled around our heads crazily for a moment, as though it were an idea or a thought bubble and couldn’t decide who it belonged to. Then it flew up into the sky and was lost against the clouds.

  “That little guy had so much balls!” Jules cried. “Did you see him just get the hell out of there! He’d been planning it all along. Don’t tell me that bird isn’t a master criminal.”

  The owner of the doves looked at Jules as though he was completely out of his mind.

  playing grown-up

  1

  JULES SHOWED UP WITH HIS FRIEND Lester to pick me up. Jules didn’t say a word to me as we drove to the city. Lester coughed uncomfortably once in a while, but that was all we had in the way of conversation. Lester dropped us off in front of a building I recognized, with glazed white bricks on the facade. It was just another building in the long string of lousy places that we had lived in. Still, I was surprised that we’d moved here. It was so bottom of the basement. Only welfare cases and junkies ever seemed to live in this building.

  The white bricks still managed to give the impression of being really dirty. It was called the punk rock building because a bunch of punk rockers lived in one of the bigger apartments. They would stand in the doorway in their pajamas. There was a sign in the lobby directed at them that read DO NOT BUM FOR CHANGE IN THE LOBBY. On the first of the month, a crowd of eighteen-year-olds waited there for their welfare checks. They hopped up and down and danced a little jig when they saw the postman coming.

  One of the punk kids used to stand outside the building with a guitar and do really ridiculous versions of popular songs. He couldn’t sing at all. He strummed his guitar so hard that it sounded like a pot lid falling on the ground. I always wished I had change, so I could strike up a conversation. Once I returned some beer bottles and gave him the change, but he still didn’t really acknowledge me. It made me feel terribly lonely.

  I couldn’t look Jules in the eye anymore. I couldn’t get it out of my head that he was a rat to have sent me to juvenile detention. We just kept to ourselves, even when we were on opposite sides of the breakfast table. Jules looked at me one morning, shortly after I’d returned, and his face trembled and turned red as tears rolled down it. There was part of me that thought he was faking. He kept on crying and I started to feel deeply crummy. I felt bad for Jules and wanted him to be happy.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, Dad.”

  I HAD LIKED MY VERY FIRST SOCIAL WORKER, Corey, who was assigned to me after I got home. She put makeup on her face to make it white and smelled like baby powder. She had black hair that was teased up in random directions. I thought she must be mad to think that her hairstyle looked good. It made her endearing. She always brought me broken toys, which made me so sad I couldn’t speak. I’d get all choked up when she put her arm around me.

  Then one day I had a new social worker, a slim Indian man with a British accent who took notes all the time. I was in shock. What a fool I was. I realized that I had thought Corey loved me, but she hadn’t even said good-bye.

  After that, I had a string of different social workers. I didn’t understand how it was that I couldn’t have the same social worker for a few weeks even. They often got my file mixed up and thought that I had gone to juvenile detention for being a prostitute. All I had done was date a pimp.

  I didn’t even know where I was supposed to go to school. A well-dressed and intimidating social worker came over and explained the situation to me. After I was in detention, my regular high school didn’t want to take me back. I was considered a system kid, and they didn’t have the facilities to deal with a system kid. That was just their policy and had nothing to do with me.

  The social worker had arranged for me to go to a high school that had a special program for delinquent kids who weren’t good at school. It was a school called Regent Academy, although it was known throughout the neighborhood by a different name.

  “I have to go to Bobo Academy?” I said in disbelief.

  “There are some good students there who go on to graduate. There’s a regular high school program. You’ll probably be happier in the remedial class. They have a lot of life skills classes that teach you things that’ll be more suited for everyday experiences.”

  “Like for English we would write a grocery list?”

  “Exactly. Or I saw one project where the kids wrote personal ads. I thought that was really neat. In math, you learn to organize a budget.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “See! Having a budget might turn that prob
lem around.”

  I didn’t bother explaining that I’d been on the honor roll at my last school. That I had to go to a program for kids who had learning disabilities just made me sad beyond words. When I got sad like that, I was struck dumb. It felt as if I’d never be able to speak. She kept asking me questions, but at this point, I couldn’t say a single word.

  “Is there something wrong?” she asked me, all matter-of-fact, when she noticed that I was crying. I shook my head. “Then why aren’t you talking to me?”

  I shrugged. She said that I had to go to see a psychologist on Fridays to figure out what was wrong with me. If I didn’t show up, she’d call my dad and I might have to go back to the detention center.

  IT WAS LATE JANUARY AND WINTER NOW. The sky was the color of lightbulbs that weren’t lit. There was something frustrating about it. The city always looked like it was just about to get dark, as if the day was always over. Even first thing in the morning you had the feeling that you were running out of time and could never accomplish anything.

  It had snowed the night before, and as I stepped onto the front steps of the building, everything seemed so clean, as if the world had finally tidied up after itself. I noticed some bird footprints all over the light layer of snow on the sidewalk, making it look like a Chinese menu. I set off knowing I wasn’t the first one to ruin the pristine snow. My feet made a sloshing noise as I walked, as though someone was sucking their teeth at me.

  I found out right away that Bobo Academy was run by system kids. They wouldn’t let any of the kids in the regular stream sit on the school steps with them. They wouldn’t let them wear Ozzy Osbourne or Metallica T-shirts or any other heavy-metal band pins. They weren’t even allowed to talk about liking them, for that matter. They weren’t allowed to wear black jean jackets or fedoras. They weren’t allowed to come out and try to bum a cigarette.