He stares down at me when he passes to take the stand, and I gaze straight into his green eyes. In the fluorescent light of the courtroom, they look unremarkable. Celery-colored and plain. There is nothing there but a boy. A human boy.
Tears pool in my eyes, and after a moment, I start crying loudly, doubled over, my nose almost touching the thickly waxed table. Juanita glances around the courtroom. “That won’t help you, Minnow,” she whispers. “This judge doesn’t have any sympathy for crying.”
I shake my head because everything has become very clear now. How wrong I was, wrong about myself, wrong about everything because there, in front of me, stands the hard evidence of my wrongness, limping in glossy shoes and bruised bones and regular eyes that shouldn’t have made me lose my mind.
Chapter 6
After weeks of court dates and interviews and the incessant droning silences that intersperse moments of terror, the judge says it’s time for the jury to deliberate. Juanita marches me to a small room to await the ruling.
I sit on a leather-upholstered chair. Juanita gives one of her cheerless smiles. I know she doesn’t want to tell me everything will be okay because that would be a lie.
After ten minutes, she takes a phone call, and I’m alone.
My eyes scan the room, and everything becomes suddenly important. A ceiling fan thick with dust. A small, glass-topped vending machine where color-wrapped foods are lined up, trapped. A little pot of brown-edged violets. I can smell the varnish they used on the floor, the powdery cleaner in a can beside the sink, but I can’t smell the violets.
My head jerks when the door opens and a man strolls in. He’s a policeman; I can tell, I’ve been around enough of them now, though he looks different from the others: glasses, herringbone suit, and in his eyes a kind of softness, like he’s winking with both eyes open.
He nods at me and shuffles in his leather shoes to the vending machine. He surveys the contents for several long moments as though this is the most important decision he’s made in years. Slowly, he inserts three coins, turns a knob, and pulls out a yellow-wrapped rectangle. As he tears the wrapper open, I glimpse multicolored candies lined up in a row, toothlike. He unwraps one, chews it, and leans against the machine like he’s totally alone in the room.
I should look away, but I don’t. Every stranger is still a thrill, having gone so many years never knowing anyone but the same hundred wind-burned souls. I read every part of this man, the mechanical motion of his jaw, the gold wedding ring, the fan of lines across his forehead, like I imagine people read books. At least he’s a distraction from the idea of the jury in some room nearby discussing how evil I am.
He turns toward me. “Want a Starburst?” He holds a pink-wrapped square between his thumb and forefinger.
I do want it, but I shrug, holding up my stumps. “Can’t unwrap it, can I?”
And then he does something strange. He smiles. The kind of smile that pushes every feature upward by an inch. “Don’t be so sure,” he says, placing the candy on the coffee table in front of me. “You might be more capable than you think.”
He puts the remaining candies in his pocket and walks toward the door. “See you later,” he says, like a promise.
I glare at the square of pink on the brown table. I know there’s no way I can unwrap it. I’d need fingernails, a thumb.
I swallow the saliva that’s filled my mouth and lean forward. I pick up the candy in my teeth. I run my bottom teeth over the wrapper until it lifts away, and my tongue nudges the other edges. The wrapper falls to the tabletop, and I press the candy to the roof of my mouth. Instantly, my jaw aches and my eyes prickle. I haven’t tasted anything so vibrant since I was five. It is wonderful.
There’s still a sliver of candy on my tongue when Juanita leads me back to the courtroom. I see the man with the candy sitting in the back, chewing. The judge reads the verdict. Guilty. Six years with the possibility of parole on my eighteenth birthday. The judge informs me that, unless I maintain a spotless record in juvenile detention and receive a character recommendation from a staff member, my chances of earning parole are slim.
I take another ride in a cop car. This time to the Missoula County Juvenile Detention Center.
Chapter 7
How do you handcuff a handless girl?