One More Tally In The Fires
an excerpt

I guess I can tell you right now that I never meant for things to turn out this way.

I guess that you can figure that, what with me in juvenile hall and everything.

But you’d be surprised. A lot of kids here would rather be in the hall then the places they used to be. One girl, Lluvia, after she punches me so hard and so fast that my eyes are open but all I can see is black, she thinks I’m unconscious when she tells me that it’s better then home. It’s better then her house in the ghetto where her mother is always at work and her father is always at work and her brothers are either on the street or they come home hurt or they don’t come home at all. She once had four brothers. Now she has two. Her house smells stale despite the flowers and the spices and the constant corn being cooked a million different times. Her sisters pencil in their eyebrows and wear earrings as wide and huge as soup bowls and they sneak out at night and return falling and flailing and laughing and crying until they vomit. Lluvia sobs and hawks a loogie into my hair before she leaves me, hands in her pockets and fingering the switch blade smuggled in there and weeping.
Most of the time, I’m all alone or surrounded by girls, but when they take me to the sort-of school here, I get to listen to the boys, too. One boy’s name is Vincent, but the teacher calls him Thompson and the guys in class call him Vince ad the people who know what he’s done call him Chainsaw. “It’s apropos,” He explains to me one day during ELS Transitions math (because we’re delinquents, ergo, obviously stupid), “seeing as I shot and killed my aunt, then attempted to hide the body by making the pieces smaller.” His face goes ashen, almost literally, as a sort of gray casts over his features like clouds. He wrings his hands modestly under the desk. “I just needed out of there. She was incorrigible. She could never understand. She would never understand me and Robby.” And we know what he means but we all want to ask and before any one can, he slips me a small wink that means he’s bored and head’s up so we scoot back a bit before he stands up and flings the table to the side and screams, “You guys are fucking Nazis!” I would smile if it wouldn’t give away his game.
Another boy who’s in my therapy group tries to talk to me during down-time. He says he misses his mother and sister, misses them the most out of everyone outside. His sister is seven. When I as new, I actually asked him why he was here, and he showed no sign of regret when he said, “I fucked her. I fucked my little sister.” He’s probably a bit older than me. He smiles after I shiver. “You look a lot like how I thought she would when she grows up.”
Again, most of the time, I’m alone, but that’s not so bad. A lot of the time I get to be by myself, and I can’t help but think that it’s like time-out when I was little, where I needed to think about what I’ve done and I’ve done something very bad so I’m here a very long time. Everyone here says that things get easier as time goes on, and it’s true. Everyone here misses their victims or their homies or even just their families, and learning to be without them, learning to be specks of spray in a sea of people who are just like you, is the hardest part. Being around people who don’t quite consider you people just becomes something you must immune yourself against.
But it does take time, and it’s true when they say the first night is the worst.
I remember sitting in that cell, my roommate snoring, which was just fine because I couldn’t sleep. I was wearing the shirt they pass out when you get here, papery and itchy wrapped around the front of my knees to keep me in a cocoon. I was rocking and shaking and twitching all at the same time. My mouth felt dry as saliva fell as foam from my lips that were cracked and bleeding. I was cold all over, which I now realize is a bad thing because they keep our rooms pretty warm. My legs looked like baby tree branches after a wind storm. I had no fingernails. All I could think was, fuck, if I just had used my one phone call to ring up Sugar Chat one more time and if I maybe could bribe someone for a quarter and then bribe a guard for the payphone maybe if he watched me very closely because I wasn’t going to be bad and he could listen if her wanted if maybe that was his thing I would say all of these things to him and he could jerk off in front of me if he wanted he could cum on my face if he wanted I could suck on his cock if he wanted and it’s not like I would mind much mister I’ve missed it almost dearly and I’d kill for a cock in my mouth about now I’ve gotten so much better you won’t be able to stand it and it will be so worth it mister you’ll get me a fifty dollar fucking phone card because I’ll be so good God let me let me let me suck you off let me call let me call let me call or I’ll fucking kill myself I’ll take the shiv my roommate has in her panties and I’ll cut my fucking throat and you won’t get your goddamn trial and all of those pedophiles will walk the streets and you’ll never ever find them.
They tell me in therapy the next day that I am an addict.
I’m addicted to phone sex.
If someone were to look at my body back then, which they did, profusely, they could have made an educated guess that I was addicted to something. I was thin, and my skin was loose. I had lost maybe fifty pounds in maybe three months. I had twenty piercings, though some off them were useless and had been ripped out to form little lips of broken flesh. My eyes were muggy and watery and so dark around from lack of sleep that it looked like I had been punched repeatedly until my bones turned black beneath the fist. The only things they found in my vomit the day they found me, after my seizure, was a piece of spearmint gum and semen. Spearmint is my favorite. Semen a close second. My hands and feet and fingertips and lips were cracked and bleeding and sore. At best, I looked like a crack whore. At worst, I was a walking corpse.
But I don’t care. I smiled every time a male officer escorts me somewhere. When they took me to the bathroom, I’d find a way for my still-pretty fingers to graze the front of their pants and I’d show my still-pretty teeth as an female officer took me in and a rush of color almost always came to them and I knew somehow I was still the girl I used to be and I was fucking proud of it. I’d laugh as this stranger lady watched me piss and she’d look away even though she knew she shouldn’t.
They told me eventually that I’d only have female escorts.
Later on that day, I saw one of the officers leaving the building. He was holding some papers and looking very upset and he wasn’t in his uniform. I rolled over on my bunk in a way I knew made the springs squeak and he looked at me. I made my still-pretty smile and said, “See you on the outside.” And he stood so perfect and still it took a second before I could see his hands were shaking and I couldn’t help but giggle a little.
Now, they say I’m better. I’ve been improving. I’ve really grown. I’ve gained ten pounds, which feels nice. I can pass a phone without clawing and snapping my teeth at the hands of guards to get closer to it. I can look at the boys in this building and shift my eyes or even wave kindly before resuming my own business. I can be alone and think normally and rationally and not obsessively about when I’m finally going to get a dick in my hand.
My P.O. won’t believe me, to this day, when I tell her I’m a virgin.
Then again, what is a virgin, really, nowadays?

*****