The answer is remarkable. There is a man. His name is Early. He’s the first person to introduce himself after I arrive at the white cinder-block building that houses every underage female criminal for five hundred miles. He enters the blank-walled processing room with a measuring tape and a mouth full of crooked smiling teeth.
Early’s job, he tells me, is to make all the custom restraints for the Missoula County Correctional Department. You wouldn’t think a man could possibly make a full-time job out of this; after all, how many handless people could possibly be imprisoned at one time? Early says he makes ends meet in all manner of ways—making fox traps for hunters, altering the stretchers where they do lethal injections for obese prisoners. He tells me that he even tinkered together a silver necklace for the warden’s daughter’s sweet sixteen.
He’s a strange-looking man, like I imagine an old gnome might look, a hooked nose and black brooms of hair coming out of his ears and a circular hole in his left front tooth. Early chatters at me the entire time, and I don’t ask how the hole got there, but I wonder.
He unsheathes the orange measuring tape and hooks it around my elbow. I flinch.
“It’s okay,” he says in the quiet way you talk to skittish animals. “No one’s gonna hurt you. No need to be afraid.”
I want to tell him that I have more reasons to be afraid than he could even count. I keep my teeth pressed together in silence.
? ? ?
Juvie is just a shaky, tin-walled place, a repurposed alternative high school the county purchased for juvenile delinquents. All the windows in the big gymnasium were bricked up years ago and scaffolded into three stories of light metal cells.
I can hear the girls—voices, movement, metal clanging on metal—the minute I enter the cell house. It smells of bodies in here, just like the Community.
A guard named Benny leads me to a white-tiled room. She snips the zip-tied restraints around my elbows and I shake out my arms. Benny is big and her skin is a lovely shade of brown, almost exactly like Jude’s, and I trust her, even when she tells me this strange room is for undressing.
“We’ll make two piles,” she says. “A keep pile and a trash pile. Things like jewelry and keepsakes usually go in the keep pile.”
In the corner, there is a black camera that watches Benny yank the belt efficiently through the loops of my skirt, unbutton the pearls of my blouse until I’m standing in only Jude’s shirt. It’s fraying badly, hardly even a shirt anymore.
“Trash?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Keep.”
She raises an eyebrow but puts it in the pile with the rest of my clothes.
With a flap she shakes out a stiff orange jumpsuit. She helps me into it, slips the buttons into the holes, and straightens the shoulders. She finds me a pair of Velcro shoes and watches while I fumblingly fit my feet inside.
Benny picks at the knot on the ribbon that ties the tail of my braid, and my hair slowly unwinds. “You ought to get a haircut,” she says. “Could be a liability here.”
“We hardly ever cut our hair in the Community,” I say.
“Doesn’t look like you’re in the Community anymore.”
We walk out of the room, down a hallway that ends in a heavy door, thick with coats of white paint.
“This is the last free ground you’ll walk on for quite a while,” Benny says. “Are you ready for it in there?”
I shrug.
“Ours is the only mixed-offender facility in the state,” she says. “All the girls are under eighteen, but some were tried as juveniles and some as adults, like you. When you turn eighteen, you’ll be paroled or transferred to an adult facility. Do you understand what that means?”
I shake my head.
“There’re girls here who’ve killed, who would kill again. Just . . .” she glances at my stumps. “Watch yourself. I don’t want to be scraping you offa any floors, you hear?”
? ? ?
Benny leads me down a grated pathway on the third floor. Hazy ovals of faces press against the bars of cells as I walk past, the occasional hoot or shout from an inmate following me down the skyway.
“You’ll be in what we call Angeltown,” Benny says.
“What’s that?”
Benny stops and walkie-talkies to another guard. The cell door before us buzzes loudly and swings open.
Benny looks down at me. “If I were you, I’d try to get on her good side.”
With a flat hand, she pushes me into the cell. The door swings shut behind me and the whole complex of interwoven metal shakes. I look over my shoulder. Benny’s gone.
On the top bunk reclines a girl in the same violent orange as me. She ignores me, reading a book perched on her lap, something with a view of the stars on the cover.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She looks at me with sharp, pale blue eyes. “Angel.”
Angeltown, I think. I know about angels. Sometimes they speak to Kevinians, whisper in our ears and make terrible things happen. They are hairless and androgynous and the height of small buildings.
I wrap my arms around my middle, lean against the concrete wall, and slide to the ground across from her. She picks at the edges of her book with fingernails stained yellow.
“So, let me guess,” she says, casting her eyes over the bunk. “Petty theft?”