Wanting to lift her up and carry her from this room.
But I can’t.
Because then Willow will know.
And she may leave.
WILLOW
In here we wear orange jumpsuits, the word juvenile stitched across the back. We sleep in brick rooms, two to a cell, on metal bunk beds, with heavy bars separating us from the concrete corridor where guards—tyrannical women with bodies built like men—stride all night long. We eat at long tables in a cafeteria, from chipped pastel trays loaded with foods from each of the food groups: meat, bread, fruits and vegetables, a glass of milk.
It’s not all that bad, not when compared to picking food from the Dumpster and sleeping on the street.
My cell mate is a girl who tells me her name is Diva. The guards call her Shelby. She has plum-colored hair though her eyebrows are a plain old brown. She sings. All the time. All night long. The guards, other inmates tell her to shut up, to put a sock in it, to shut her pie hole, calling the words out from places we can’t see. I ask her why she’s in here, behind the metal bars like me, sitting on the concrete floor because she swears her bed has been booby-trapped, but all she says is, “You don’t want to know,” and I’m left wondering.
She’s fifteen, maybe sixteen, like me. I see the holes where she was made to remove various piercings: the lip, the septum, the cartilage of her ear. She sticks out her tongue and shows me where it’s been pierced, and tells me how her tongue swelled to twice its size when she had it done, how she couldn’t talk for days. How some girl she knew split her tongue right in two when she did it. She claims her nipple’s been pierced, her belly button. She starts to tell me about something that’s been pierced beneath the pants of that orange jumpsuit, about how the guard watched as she was forced to remove the j-bar from her clit before locking her up in the slammer, and then she mutters under her breath, “Fucking dyke.”
I turn away, embarrassed, and she starts to sing. Someone tells her to shut her trap. She sings louder, high pitched and off-key, like the grating brakes of a freight train coming to a sudden stop.
The guard fetches me from my cell. She binds my hands in cuffs, then leads me by the arm to where Louise Flores waits in the cold room with the steel table. She’s standing in the corner today, peering out the one window, her back to me when I walk in. She’s got on a scratchy-looking cardigan, the color of smoke, a pair of black pants. There’s a cup of tea on the table, a cup of juice for me.
“Good morning, Claire,” she says as we both take our spots at the table. She doesn’t smile. The clock on the wall reads just after ten o’clock.
Ms. Flores motions to the guard to remove my cuffs.
The male guard from the day before is gone. Out of sight. In his place is a middle-aged woman, her gray hair wrapped in a bun. She perches herself where two walls meet, and crosses her arms against herself, the handle of a gun peeking out of a holster.
“I brought you some juice,” says Ms. Flores, “and a doughnut,” she adds as she sets a paper bag on the table.
Bribery.
Like when Joseph, from time to time, came home with a chocolate chip cookie from the community college’s cafeteria, wrapped in cellophane. So that later that night I wouldn’t think twice about pulling that big, old T-shirt I wore to bed up over my hips and letting Joseph draw the undies down my thighs.
She sets her glasses on the bridge of her nose and looks back into the notes from the day before. Leaving the Omaha home with Matthew. Riding the buses all the way out to the zoo.
“What happened when you got home that afternoon? From the zoo?” she asks.
“Nothing, ma’am,” I say as I reach into the bag and remove a doughnut, double chocolate with sprinkles, and stuff it into my mouth. “I was back home well before Joseph,” I mumble. “Well before Isaac. Miriam was in her room, with no sense of time or nothing. I made her lunch and started the laundry, so that later, when I told Joseph I’d done laundry all day, there’d be proof of it—laundry on the line. He’d never know it was a lie.”
She hands me a napkin, motioning to my cheek. I wipe at the chocolate residue, then lick my fingers clean. I guzzle the juice.