“You wanna dance with me on the yard?” I asked her. “We can do a dance workout together. It will make you feel good and look good, too,” I said.
I could tell she was thinking about it. So I pressed her some more. “You have a pretty face. You might as well match it all up,” I said. She seemed to like the way I put it, taking the edge off.
“Not on the yard, cause everybody be staring,” Gail said.
“Okay, then we’ll do it in the dorm at night in our section, starting tonight,” I compromised for her. Then I eased her into purchasing a Department of Corrections radio and cassette player for $39.99. “We gotta control the beat,” I told her. “I help you, you help me?”
“How could I help you?” She said like it wasn’t possible, like she thought I was already perfect.
“Just put in the work for the first two weeks. We’ll do you first, then me,” I said. She agreed.
I put up with her farting every time she lifted her fat legs and even when she bent over to try and touch her toes. In a short time, in addition to the workout, I put her on a diet. Convincing her that I was helping her resist temptation, I took over her care box and her commissary, selling and trading her goods and candies on the low for half the price the authorities charged. It was easy for me, cause I didn’t pay for nothing in the first place. My hustle was so sweet that it tipped off the Sugar Wars in the young section-C dormitory, where we was locked. I made a name for myself. The more sugar schemes I invented, the more rules the authorities invented. The more they punished and stressed us young girls, the more the demand for my discount sugars increased. The more sugar everybody ate, the more tempers flared and fists began flying.
I wanted to be known for making money and moves, not for brawling. Fighting was an interruption to my business. But the better my business, the more the fighting came along with it.
Truthfully speaking, we didn’t have no Grants or Benjamins on lockup. I made paper money in arts ’n crafts, and I made my section believe in it, work for it, trade and pay for things that we all should’ve had anyway, but that the authorities didn’t provide, charging us for it instead. They knew that shit was fucked up for girls like me who didn’t receive no letters or visits, and had no one placing even one piece of copper on my commissary.
As Gail dropped the pounds, she grew more confident. I taught her to stop munching up the product and to work out even harder. She liked me. I didn’t just talk shit, I worked out beside her and never let her see me laugh at her flaws. When she wanted to skip a night of working out, I refused. I held her feet down for sit ups and cheered her on when she made the smallest improvement.
Music is influence. We picked up four more chicks from our section, all strange but drawn in by the music and dance workout, as well as the results of seeing Gail’s recovery. When she got down to an attractive size, and her face that had been buried under layers of fat got revealed, she became ruthless and loyal. If I got in a fight, she’d handle the business while I was trapped down in isolation.
Now she fought on my side along with five other girls I recruited. Now that Gail looked decent, I liked her for true. Big, sloppy, stinky girls can’t get no respect cause, more than anybody else with a problem, theirs is the first thing you’ll see and smell. So, everybody uses it against them.
Chapter 3
She’s a white girl. I don’t look up to her because of that. But I don’t look down on her either. I already told you, I don’t play the skin-color game. “Riot,” she said, introducing herself to me in the “slop house,” which is what I call the cafeteria at juvy lockdown.
“Riot?” I repeated.
“Yeah, like when shit is so fucked up and you can’t take it no more, so you start brawling, setting shit on fire, blowing shit up.” She gave a Jolly Rancher green-eyed stare into my eyes. Her lips were watermelon red. I didn’t crack a smile.
There was a pause. Looking away and up towards the ceiling, she continued.
“The authorities hate my name, but it’s the name my parents named me. It’s on my birth certificate. It’s official.”
“What do you want?” I asked her as I was checking her out. I could tell from her hairstyle she had at least one ghetto chick for a friend. Her hair was black. It was one thick and pretty cornrow that started at the center of her head and swirled around in circles until it finally dropped down and dangled over her right shoulder. It was frizzy like she had gotten it braided three days back. I could tell that unbraided her hair was crazy long. She was smart to rock it like that, laying tight on her scalp, cause if she were fighting someone younger like me, a furious lightweight who wasn’t naturally a fighter and needed a way to protect myself, I would take long loose hair and choke her with it, the same way the young ones tried to do me when I first got locked.
“You look hungry,” Riot said. She was right. But she looked hungry, too. Her face was lean like a supermodel. Her teeth, the tops and bottom were not crooked or buck or bent. They were all white and lined up in a perfect row.
“What do you eat? You gotta eat something to stay alive, right?” She asked me as though she were my real-life big sister.
“What do you eat?” I threw the question right back at her, didn’t like to be questioned.
She smiled. “Apples, oranges, bananas. If I’m lucky, a few nuts and raisins. I got a girl who works in the kitchen and a girl who does a shift at the commissary. So I get mine,” Riot said confidently, not bragging, but more like she was try’na offer me something. That’s how it goes up in here. You gotta watch and listen for the slightest twist of the tongue so none of these slickass girls could front like you agreed to something you didn’t agree to or accept.
I couldn’t and wouldn’t front. I was surviving on sugar and trained myself to be satisfied for hours off of the flavor from a Lifesaver. Dinner would be something big like Twizzlers or Cheez Doodles. Beneath my red “juvy jumper” there was zero body fat.
Before I could ignore or answer her questions, my belly started churning and a noise came out. Our eyes locked, then we both broke out and laughed. I marked that down in my mind. It was my first true smile since getting tooken, a smile that led to real laughter. After that, the feeling between us loosened up some. She started telling me her dope-ass story. That’s how me and her met, got tight, and got ganged up.
Riot’s parents owned a marijuana farm in upstate New York. I don’t know how big an acre is, but she said she had a fifty-acre property. Riot got here on lockdown before me. She said she murdered a man. That made me feel closer to her because I figured she was strong, or at least that she would defend herself, and I liked that. No one believed more than me that there are some who definitely deserve it. She said she tagged me because she noticed I wasn’t eating the shit they served, which meant I was smart and unlike the “robots,” which is what she called most of the other young inmates. Riot said she knows how to grow real food. Her family had apple trees, cornfields, tomato and lettuce patches, and an herb garden. She claimed she even knew how to make maple syrup from a tree.
My mind envisioned a stack of silver dollar pancakes dripping in syrup.
“I live not too far from here, two hours to the west in ‘quiet country.’ ” That’s how she described her place. “So quiet you could hear mosquitoes, bees, crickets, and snake bellies sliding through the tall grass, or even the wind pushing around, depending on the season.”
I pictured a serpent in my head.
“I’m not afraid of snakes,” Riot said. “I used to lie in the grass right beside them and swim in the lake with the water moccasins.” She used her hand and motioned a snake movement. It looked like she was remembering something that felt good to her.
“I was lying in the long grass on my back late summer when I saw those ‘hell-copters.’ ” That’s what she called them. Then she pointed to the sky. “I didn’t panic. I just counted and watched them flutter in.”
“Our farm field workers dropped down and laid low like locusts,” she said,
gesturing dramatically.
“That was their first time also, seeing hell-copters over my parents’ place. They were still flat on their bellies after the copters had flown for half an hour before fluttering out.” Riot paused like she was remembering it too clearly and waiting with her workers.
“Some workers didn’t show back up the next day. The workers who did show, my dad paid ’em double. He believed in ‘profit sharing,’ worked the land the same as if he wasn’t the owner, when he was. He hated the word boss, didn’t answer anyone who used it. He said workers united are more powerful than any boss, any state or any authority. My mom wasn’t the agreeing type, but she agreed with my Dad. My mom hated the words boss, authority, state, and government.”
The murder Riot committed, and the weed farm she came from, caught my attention. When she would talk some sentences I didn’t understand or give a fuck about, I’d just listen to the feeling of her storytelling, and watch the intense and swift way she switched her face gestures. Oddly, it felt like her words were filling my belly with a real meal, temporarily at least. And they were flooding my mind with movie pictures. I thought about how I had not seen even one film since I was seven.
Riot said her parents drove a lavender station wagon with huge yellow daisies painted on. I thought to myself, “Who would buy that shit if they were getting gwop?”
Riot said her parents were caked up but didn’t care about fashion and money. “Mom and Dad were in love with freedom, the land, the soil, the animals, and people.”
She said her whole family was all vegetarians. Yet, they had four pet pigs who wasn’t locked up or fenced in, and roamed around a big area freely.
“I could tell each one of ’em from the other, and they each had names—Weed, Seed, Smoke, and Puff,” she said, pulling a finger as she counted em out. “We treated them like people.” She smiled, remembering. “Seriously, they each had different personalities, and I hope you know for sure that I’m not making none of this up.”
“You like animals?” she asked me. I smiled, remembering myself.
“Something like that,” I said, snatching my smile back. I didn’t want anyone in here to know my likes and dislikes. I knew they would use that shit against me. But I had obviously already given that one fact away by mistake.
“Then you would love Ganjah, my colt. He’s incredible,” Riot said.
“How fast is he?” I asked curiously.
“He could outrun the bullets fired from the tower,” Riot answered, referring to the rumored guards who, everyone said, stood watch from way up high over the lock-up facility for violent juvenile girls, where we are both prisoners. The sky guards were the threat, make one wrong move and they would riddle our little bodies with bullets. None of us saw them, though. At least I didn’t. But I didn’t doubt that they were up there lurking.
“Ganjah’s faster than my brother’s horse, Sensimillia,” Riot added.
I pictured pretty ponies galloping in my mind. I liked the way Riot put her words, like she wasn’t afraid of shit. I liked that she was rich—even if her people didn’t know how to spend or wear it right. At least they had a family, and the pictures in my mind said they was happy.
“Have you ever seen a diamond needle?” she asked out of nowhere.
I had seen plenty of diamonds. Winter had fifty princess-cut diamonds in her tennis bracelet and 125 in the matching necklace. I counted them secretly, since I wasn’t allowed to touch her jewelry or Momma’s and wasn’t scheduled to get my own diamond set until I turned sixteen. I shined Winter’s diamonds after I tried them on and before I placed them back on the black velvet and placed them exactly where they were hidden in her room before I found them.
“Diamond needles are insects with beautiful wings,” Riot said. “They look like a mix between a dragonfly and a honeybee. That’s what the hell-copters looked like the second time they showed way up in the sky, a swarm of diamond needles dancing behind swollen clouds on a rainless, gray day. Our fieldworkers scattered like ants in all directions. I crawled into my hiding place like my parents told me and my brother to do if the copters ever returned,” she said, and I felt in my gut that something real bad was about to happen in Riot’s story.
“Unlike the previous time, the copters cut their way through the clouds and actually landed on our land.” Her fingers were fluttering in the jumpy motion of the helicopters landing.
I glanced at the guards. In here if any of us keep using our fingers, they swear we gang signaling. As Riot described the raid on her property, pictures and sounds of the Nassau County Police, geared up and guns drawn, flashed through my mind from the night they swooped down and barged in on my family. They smirked smiles as they cut open our leather sofas and love chairs, broke vases and dishes, jerked down pictures from walls and pulled furs and fashions out of our closets. Capturing and cuffing my handsome and fashionable father, who was dressed in a thick black suede v-neck leisure suit and sporting black Gucci loafers wasn’t enough for them. They seemed to want to destroy his success and lessen him some in our eyes.
“Jealous motherfuckers,” I whispered under my breath before I tuned back in to the story Riot was still telling.
“Ragweed and gunpowder, that’s all I could smell. I didn’t move. I was frozen by the sounds of war,” Riot said and struck a frozen frightened pose.
“I knew my dad and mom were firing back. After all, the Feds were the intruders. The fifty acres and all of our animals were our private property, brought and paid for in full by my parents.”
A slop house guard patrolled by our table. He knew it was unusual for an older girl to be sitting with a young one. Besides I was in my red jumper, so he would’ve been watching closely anyway. Red jumper meant violence. Riot glanced at him.
“You know a shootout is nothing like what you see on television. The speakers in your TV set can’t capture the deafening noise or the thickening of the air or the scent of flesh ripped open and guts and blood bursting and pouring out, till there’s nothing left except for dark stains.”
Riot described the murder of her parents, who were killed defending their freedom, their property, family, and hard work. “They went out the right way. That’s what they would say. ‘Fuck a government that wants to tell you what you can grow on your property and still charge you property taxes for property you already paid for,’ ” she said, imitating what I guessed was either her mother’s or father’s words.
“Live free or die fighting. That’s our thing.” She put up two fingers like a peace sign, but then put her fingers to her lips pretending like she was smoking a cigarette but she wasn’t. There’s no smoking allowed in juvy lockdown. None of us are over sixteen.
Riot and her brother stayed still for days in an underground bunker their father had built long ago. “We had books, blankets, a toolbox and candles, two flashlights, a limited supply of water, a fruit basket, a first-aid kit, flares, emergency items and canned beans, dry snacks and, of course, our guns.”
“When the intruders, cars, trucks, sirens, and voices had ceased for more than forty-eight hours, we climbed out,” she said.
It wasn’t long before their head count confirmed what “our hearts couldn’t handle,” but that they had already suspected. Not only their parents’ bloodied bodies had been removed, but their animals had been seized also. They had heard their cries, their feet and their voices from the underground. “It sounded so sick I forced myself to forget it. Otherwise it would’ve kept replaying in my head. We felt helpless, like cowards. My brother and I both fought and held one another back from coming out of the bunker like our parents told us not to do.” Riot’s face revealed her regrets.
“My collie named Clyde had been taken and his wife, Bonnie. We loved our dogs. We were all family.” Riot spoke as though dogs could actually be married. I wanted to laugh at that, but from her look, she was dead serious and still hurting. So I didn’t.
Her and her brother scrubbed up spilled blood and continued to live on their land.
“The harvest had brought us plenty of fruits and vegetables. We could’ve lived off of just the apples and corn alone.”
Riot said that they knew that the two of them being left alone was only temporary. The authorities, school principal, and maybe even friends or neighbors would come looking for them. “How could two children just disappear without a trace?”
“Me and my brother was always the best at hide-and-seek. We used to play it with the workers’ children on some weekends when they’d show up. One autumn, we were playing the most wicked game of hide-and-seek ever. It dragged on from sunup to sundown, when their parents were done for the day. No one knew the property better than us.” Riot had her hands on her hips now, looking fully confident.
“After our parents were murdered, it was three months before Con Ed cut off our electricity. Three and a half months before Ma Bell shut down our phones.
“The telephones didn’t matter. We didn’t make or take no calls, and treated the phones like a trap. We’d listen to it ring one, two, seven, eight times. We also rarely used the power and tried to accomplish everything in the daylight. Lights could be seen by any curious neighbor. Lucky for us, out in ‘quiet country,’ neighbors were more than a mile away on both sides. We only had to be on the watch for the extra-curious ones, who now treated our place like an exciting stop on a crime/horror tour, or the land-thieving realtors who had posted a ‘for sale’ sign at the beginning of our land and then at the end,” she said.
“The hell-copter raid had taken place in August. When the power finally shut off in November, we sparked up the backup generator that my parents had used many times in the furious country storm weather. We had gasoline stored, but not enough for more than two weeks’ worth, so we used it sparingly. We put all our blankets in one pile and slept there together underneath them all. We came close to freezing to death but luckily not both at the same time. When I got sick, my brother healed me. When he was sick, I healed him. We survived the coldest winter ever, my brother and me.”