Someday I’ll forget everything about juvie, but I’ll never forget the permeating grease smell of the place, recalling the thousands of onions and chicken nuggets that have been fried to death here, or the dull fluorescent glow of the classrooms and the teachers who flinch whenever one of the girls moves too quickly, or the movies on Wednesday afternoons in the cafeteria for those of us who earn the extra rec time. I’m quiet during these movies, the black-and-white ones preferred by the warden, probably because they present such unambiguous models for female behavior. A guard will tuck the first celluloid frame into the projector and hit the lights and just like that every girl in the room isn’t in jail anymore. They’re inside a dance hall or a Southern mansion or Oz. It’s a pleasure, always, to observe these pockmarked girls in orange jumpsuits lit up by the wide, expressive face of Orson Welles as he holds ice to the broken tooth of a girl he aims to marry. I can’t get enough of the girls’ faces in those moments, their eyes hollowed out by the film’s shadows.
My entire life has been an experiment in tolerating the unimaginable. I’ve even gotten used to juvie, my body regulated to synthetic food made in factories and pressed together by machines in uniform shapes and sizes, gotten used to the constant reminder of what got me here, that green-eyed boy, that frozen winter night. And, after a time, I’ve even grown used to the missing hands, as much as I can. But I’ll never get used to the uncertainty.
After the hands, after I stopped believing in God, or at least stopped believing that I could ever believe in God again, I also stopped praying. I realized my head had been inflated with prayers, and they always looked like:
Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please.
Who else on Earth would I beg to so shamelessly? Please stop the winter, my toes are numb. Please give Mabel an easy birthing. Please take away the terrible smell of Mabel’s birthing from the kitchen. Please give me a new pair of boots, my old ones pinch. Please make Jude love me forever and ever.
Even so amen.
Why did it never occur to me that anyone would get tired of hearing that after so many years? Now that I’ve stopped asking, I can tell I’d been going about it the wrong way all along. The space in my head where prayer used to live is filled with questions now. Some of them I’ve asked myself my entire life, only now they’re not content to go unanswered, instead beating the inside of my skull like an angry drum.
And that’s why, after breakfast, when Angel leaves for her counseling session, I don’t go back to my cell. I walk down to the classroom corridor and find a yellow door, a piece of paper thumbtacked to the surface. I know I’m in the right place because the only thing on the paper is a large markered cross.
The youth group meets in a blank room with plastic chairs tossed in a misshapen ring around a small multicolored braided rug. Of the twenty chairs, probably half are occupied.
I only know three of the girls, Rashida, who’s sitting near the front next to Tracy, singing a ballad in a high-pitched whiny voice, her arms swinging back and forth at her sides like she’s running; and Wendy, who sits by herself with her ankles linked together. Tracy bounces up when she sees me.
“Hi, Minnow!” she says. “It’s great to see you again. I’m so glad you decided to visit youth group. Why don’t you join us in the circle?”
I sit between an athletic-looking girl with the cuffs of her jumpsuit rolled to the knee and Wendy, who I notice, even though she’s sitting still, wheezes a little at the back of her throat. The girl on the other side takes a look at my Velcro shoes and shifts over slightly.
“Minnow,” Tracy says, folding her hands in her lap. “Tell us about what brought you to youth group.”
“I just wanted to see,” I say, my cheeks flushing uncomfortably. “See what it was like.”