Juvie (19 page)

I nod. “Yeah, she’s in here. She’s on my unit.”

“No way!” she says. “Did you talk to her?”

“A little. She’s pretty messed up and wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. They have her on suicide watch.”

Carla’s eyes widen. “She tried to kill herself?”

“Not exactly.”

Carla says they figure she was high when she shot her mom — with her dad’s shotgun. That her parents didn’t want her seeing the boyfriend, that he was bad news, into a lot of nasty drugs, that she’d been this nice girl when she was in middle school, until she got with the guy.

“She went all Columbine, I guess. That’s what everybody said. You should stay away from her, Sadie,” she says, trying to sound like the big sister she hasn’t been to me in years.

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” I say. “She spends all her time in her cell. And if she does try anything, they’ll put her on lockdown.”

“Good,” Carla says. “Some people need to be locked up.”

She catches herself, realizing what she’s just said.

I’m already grinding my teeth in anticipation of the apology. But of course that doesn’t stop it from coming.

They let Summer have her clothes back and come out of her cell after a couple of days. Nobody will talk to her, though. Whenever she tries to sit next to anybody, they move. Me included. She corners Fefu once — she must know a little Spanish — but the Jelly Sisters walk over and pull Fefu away. I can’t hear what they say to Summer, but she doesn’t approach Fefu or anybody else after that.

I don’t say anything about what Carla told me, so I’m not sure how the other girls know about Summer, but they all seem to. Maybe they heard something when they called home or maybe there’s some kind of secret juvie news channel that I’m not privy to. Nobody talks about her, and after the incident with Fefu, nobody even acknowledges her when she’s around.

She’s different from everyone else in juvie, or that’s how it seems. She reminds me of those dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay I read about, where the red algae grow out of control from all the runoff and fertilizers and pollution and poisons. Dead fish float to the surface. Nothing can live there except the algae. And those dead zones are spreading, merging into one another, threatening to take over the entire bay.

Summer is like that: using up too much of the available oxygen, not leaving enough for the rest of us to breathe. Maybe anybody who kills somebody is like that, especially if it’s their own mother.

A couple of days later, Summer disappears somewhere off the unit. Maybe another conference with her lawyer. Or maybe she’s gone to court. Or been transferred to adult jail and charged as an adult for the murder. Or escaped. I don’t give it much thought. Nobody does. She could be a ghost for all we know or care.

Summer never comes back — not that night or the next day. A janitor comes down on Saturday and mops and scrubs and disinfects her cell, the same as they did when Middle-School Karen left, and soon there’s nothing left to confirm the fact that she was ever even here. Nobody tells us anything, of course, and we don’t talk about it, though I see all the girls at one time or another staring at her cell door — more interested in Summer now that she’s gone than they were during the week she was here. I catch myself doing it, too, though I can’t say why. It’s as if we’re all wondering if she left something behind, some trace, some
aspect
. A blood splatter. A clump of hair. A message carved into the wall. A coded confession. Or maybe it’s that darkness she brought in with her, which has mostly lifted but still won’t all go away.

I knew it Monday morning, the third week after the arrest, the minute I walked into school. Kids were staring at me at the lockers.

“What?” I said to this one boy, a little sophomore with floppy blond hair. I recognized him from the JV basketball team. He blinked at me but couldn’t hide his grin.

“Nothing,” he said nervously. “I was just getting my books.”

Maybe I was being paranoid.

But then I ran into Julie Juggins on my way to homeroom and she confirmed it.

“What are people saying exactly?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Julie . . .”

“They’re saying you were dealing drugs. You and your sister. That those guys in your car were your suppliers or something.”

I punched the wall outside homeroom. “Shit, shit, shit. Did you tell anybody?” I demanded. “How did people hear about it?”

Julie looked offended and drew back. “You know I didn’t. I would never do that.”

“Then how did people hear about it?” My phone was practically buzzing itself free from my backpack. I checked, and there were four texts. Five. A couple were from teammates. Two were from Kevin. The one that had just come in was from Coach.

Mrs. Tomzcak came out of homeroom to shut the door. “In or out, girls?” she said.

“In,” said Julie.

“Out,” I said, turning and running down the hall to the restroom. I was pretty sure I was going to be sick.

I had to work at the car wash after school, so couldn’t meet with Coach until later that afternoon. He didn’t have an office. The AAU team just had use of the gym at my high school. We sat on the bleachers. The other girls were in the locker room getting dressed for practice.

“You want to explain?” he said, clearly pissed. I hadn’t seen him since the game where I got ejected. He yelled at me a lot for that. I couldn’t imagine what he was going to do now.

I didn’t want to look at him — I knew I looked guilty, and there was no way he was going to believe me. Plus, since I’d confessed for Carla, I couldn’t tell him the truth, anyway. Or not the whole truth. “I messed up,” I whispered. “I should have said something, but it’s just been this big mess, with lawyers and my mom, and going to court.”

“So it’s true, then,” he said, keeping his voice low, which was the one good thing.

I nodded. “I’m not sure what you heard, but, Coach, the drugs weren’t mine. There were just these guys, they had them, and I gave them a ride somewhere. The drugs — it was just pot — it was theirs. They got out of the car and left the pot there for somebody to pick up.”

Coach sighed. “So you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Sort of like that,” I said, desperately wishing I could explain.

“That’s it, then,” he said, still with the low voice. “You’re off the team. First there’s what you did to that girl in the game last week, which was inexcusable. Now this. I want you out of here and I mean right now. You can give your uniform to one of the other girls to turn in.”

“But, Coach,” I said, blinking back a flood of tears, stunned. “I haven’t even gone to court yet.” As if that mattered. “It’s not until Thursday.”

Coach just shook his head, letting me know how stupid I sounded, and how pathetic.

Kevin came looking for me a couple of hours later. I was sitting on that limestone outcropping on Government Island, staring out over Aquia Creek at what was left of the sunset. I heard him a good ten minutes before he got there — calling for me and crashing through the underbrush when he lost the trail.

And then, finally, after he’d frightened off all the birds and squirrels and deer and muskrats and beaver and herons and anything else that lived on the island, he found me.

“Hey, Sadie.”

I didn’t turn around. “Hey.”

“Mind if I sit down?”

I scooted over to make room for him on the rock.

“You’re all wet,” I said. “And muddy.”

He pulled off his boots and banged them on the rock. “Yeah. I don’t exactly know the dry way to get here through all that swamp. I brought a blanket, though.” He held it out to me.

“Did you think I’d want to fool around?” I asked, annoyed. “Is that what you had in mind?”

“No,” he said. “God, Sadie. I just thought you might be cold. It’s getting dark, you know. Jesus.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s OK.” He opened the blanket and tucked it around both of our shoulders. “There.”

I’d expected him to be mad at me — for getting arrested, for keeping it a secret, for running off without telling anyone where I was going, for not answering when he kept calling my name just now — but the way he was acting left me feeling helpless suddenly. It felt good to lean against him, and we sat there for half an hour without saying anything else. The last traces of sunset melted out of the sky. There was an early moon, though, and soon everything in the world turned black and silver.

“You want to talk about it?” Kevin asked finally.

I waited until I thought I could speak without choking on the words. “I thought I could just make it all go away,” I said, “if I didn’t tell anybody, if I did everything exactly right. Like it never even happened. Like I would do my community service but just tell everybody it was for National Honor Society or something. I even thought about going down to the food bank so you and I could work there together. Driving forklifts, loading trucks, all that stuff.”

Kevin actually laughed. “They don’t let us drive the forklifts. You just stock shelves and go through the donations and organize them and do inventory and help customers.”

“Yeah,” I said, sagging against him more, leaning my head on his shoulder. “I figured.”

He put his arm around me and pulled the blanket tighter around us. “You could have told me,” he said. “I mean, I love you, Sadie. I would have been there for you no matter what. Look at me. I’m all wet and everything. I probably have leeches and ticks all over me from wading through that swamp and trying to find my way across your island.”

I sat up and stared into his eyes. “Wait. You
love
me?”

He’d never said it before. Not in that way. It had always been just “Love you.” Or
lv u
in his stupid texts. But never with the “I.”

He got this dumb, quizzical look on his face and shrugged, and smiled. “Of course I do.”

I kissed him for a minute, pulled back to study that dumb look some more, to make sure it was for real, then kissed him again, this time deeper, and this time longer.

Mom was mad when I got home late, after curfew, but I didn’t care. I was happy and hopeful for the first time in weeks. So I didn’t tell her about getting kicked off the team, or about hiding out on Government Island, or about Kevin finding me there and telling me he loved me. I didn’t tell her the rest of what he said, either — that he’d skip school on Thursday to come with me to court, even though it meant he’d have to sit out his soccer game that afternoon, and that he’d always, always, always be there for me no matter what. I told myself it wasn’t any of her business, but I think really I just didn’t want to see her get that look that said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Saturday night after Summer disappears from Unit Three, I stay up late reading
Holes
in my cell. I feel pretty bad for the hero, Stanley Yelnats, who is a sweet kid, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m surprised they allow the book in the juvie library, since it makes all the kids out to be decent people, while the warden and the guards are the creeps and the criminals. But maybe no one bothers to vet the kids’ books.

I still can’t sleep after I finish, so I’m awake when they bring in somebody else to Summer’s cell. The unit door buzzes open just beyond my cell door, followed by shuffling footsteps and the sound of shackles dropping to the floor. I hear a girl’s voice, maybe drunk, protesting: “I’m not going in there. Forget it. I want to go home. Let me go home, damn it.
I mean now!
”

A guard barks at her, and her protests stop. I hear whimpering, then a cell door slamming, then the predictable crying, then nothing.

I get an old song stuck in my head after that for no good reason: “Just Like U Said It Would B,” by Sinéad O’Connor, this Irish singer Mom used to listen to. Not that juvie has turned out to be anything like they said it would be — or like I thought it would be.

It keeps on being that kind of night: jangly and disruptive and void of sleep. When they wake us up Sunday morning, I feel pissed off at the world — even more when I remember there won’t be any coffee, just as there hasn’t been any since I got here. I have a headache before I even crawl off my bunk, and the breakfast doesn’t help any, either. It’s the same as the day before and the day before that: runny eggs, cold potato patty, dry white toast, grape jelly, fruit cup circa 1980.