Riot began howling quietly with her hands cuffed around each side of her mouth. “When the wolves began howling, and the puppies that Bonnie and Clyde had cleverly hidden and left behind went to barking, and the cans began rattling from the trip wire that my brother laid on the road as a warning to us, we were both at different places on the property. My brother was out in the fields putting down some seeds. I was coming from around the back of our house.” Riot’s face turned angry.
“As the stranger’s car rode cautiously up our pebbled dirt road, I saw his car door first and then his license plate. The plates were marked with two of the words that our parents hated most, state and government.”
The state worker man couldn’t see Riot. Riot saw him. She said she read the words on the side of his car; Bureau of Child Welfare.
“All I could imagine was the guy trying to hurt or separate my brother from me.” Her eyes were squinted now.
“I grabbed my rifle, shot one clean shot, one time, straight through his forehead.” She gestured as though she was holding and aiming her rifle right there in the slop house.
“Six days later cops flooded our property and made another massive and thorough search, uncovering the murdered guy’s buried body and the state vehicle parked behind closed doors, inside our empty barn where some of our stolen animals would’ve been if they hadn’t a slaughtered them.” She put her hands up halfway over her head.
“I got surrounded in the chicken coop where I was squatting,” she said, finally smiling.
“I’m ten,” I told the police. “Don’t shoot me. I’m only ten years old.” She pushed her hands up in the full surrender position.
Riot was so lucky she was only ten back then. We both knew that juvy was fucked up. But we both heard and believed that grown-up prison is much worser. At fourteen years old, any girl up here in juvy can get transferred out to an adult facility without notice. Sixteen is the oldest anybody in here could be. In juvy, no girl turned seventeen.
“I’m asking you to be one of my sons,” Riot said, strangely.
“Sons?” I repeated.
“It’s obvious you’re younger than me. I’m thirteen,” Riot confided.
“I’m ten,” I revealed.
“So, you be my son. I see you’re always fighting. You are young and slim. But no matter how young, big, or small anyone is, one person can never win alone.”
I was thinking about her words and if they had any point or meaning to me.
“Heard you got beef with Cha-Cha,” Riot said.
“What about it? I fight her. It ain’t nothing.” I shrugged my shoulders.
“Cha-Cha’s a robot. She gives the guards what they want. She starts fights and fucks up the flow. She gives them the excuse and the reason to clamp down on you and everybody in your section,” she said. I was listening.
“Say yes, and you got a crew,” Riot added. I was thinking. I already had a crew.
“The thing is, our crew is smarter than the robots. We don’t act like stupid girls fighting over hair and boys and visits or dumb shit. We all girls who came from families with either land, or money, or both.” She rubbed her fingers together making the make money sign.
“We action figures.” She gestured like she was about to leap up from the table. “We camouflage.” She squatted back down and relaxed. “We got plans and connections. We make moves.” She pushed her face closer to mine.
“I’ll turn eleven in July,” I told her. I didn’t want her thinking I was so young that she could rule over me.
“I’ll turn fourteen in July,” she said, letting me know no matter what she had three years over me either way.
“What you call your crew?” I asked her.
“The Diamond Needles,” she said softly with an intense face that caused me to stare at her lips as she pronounced each word.
“We don’t big up our name, wear tattoos, or flash signs. We don’t do the daily group-up on the yard. We keep our mouths shut. If something is important we send a message or a messenger with a kite. We don’t do anything obvious. Like I said, we’re smart. There are ten of us. We each got a number in the order that we came together.”
“What’s your number?” I asked her.
“One,” was all she said.
“If I come in, what do I get?” I asked.
“An army,” she said.
“Do you like music?” I asked her, changing the subject on purpose. I could see it interrupted her thought-flow some.
“Of course,” she responded soft and swiftly.
“Name your favorite rapper, and favorite group.”
“Tupac Shakur, easily,” she answered, like he was a king. “My favorite group, Bones Thugs & Harmony! Hands down!” She was definite, and excited herself just by reciting their group name. “Enough questions,” she said turning suddenly serious. “Are you in or out? If you’re out, this is the last conversation you’ll ever have with me. If you’re in, I’ll let you know the next move.” She wasn’t bluffing. I could feel it.
We both already knew I was in. I liked her story. She wasn’t a broke bitch, a broken-down bully, hater, or a victim, and I wasn’t either. I had nothing to lose. The Gutter Girls weren’t going anywhere and neither were me or Riot. We are all prisoners.
“I got one condition,” I answered Riot after a long pause. “My girl Siri gotta be down with us. It’s a two-for-one deal.”
“Siri?” Riot repeated. “I don’t know her. Point her out.”
“She’s right here,” I pointed Siri out, seated beside me. Riot’s eyes dashed one quick time like she didn’t see Siri. Then she turned straight-faced and said, “No problem. You’ll both be my sons.”
Chapter 4
We met in the dark, Siri and me, almost three years ago, the first night that I got here, the worst night of my life. The last items that I owned that came from Porsche L. Santiaga’s world and wardrobe were taken from me: my denim Guess skirt and matching denim Guess jacket, which Momma brought for me. My deep blue Mecca T-shirt and matching blue bobos, my Taiga leather Louis Vuitton tiny handbag, that matched my leather riding boots.
At first, I didn’t know who Louis Vuitton was, but Winter said he was an important man, and that if I lost the handbag she would punish me by making me wear a cheap bag for a week, and of course for that week I couldn’t go out with her cause she don’t hang with girls who rock cheap bags or cheap footwear, even if they’re blood-related.
I held on to that bag mostly cause I always wanted to hang with Winter. Besides, she bought the bag and boots for me brand new. Her best friend, Natalie, only got to rock Winter’s hand-me-downs.
I sported the boots only on special occasions and kept it a secret when they became too tight. Now all of my shit was gone. Good thing they left me in my panties.
Freezing, the floor was frozen. My freezing little body was flooded with goose pimples. The two lady guards handed me paper shoes and a baby blue jumper, all ugly.
“Don’t get dressed yet. Step over there.”
One of ’em ran her palms over my naked skin. Her palms felt like sandpaper and made my goose pimples crawl. Momma said lady and soft were the same damn thing. Clean, soft hands and skin and feet, she would say, as she rubbed my little body with her special creams and lotions.
“Don’t get dressed yet,” the guard said again as she searched and surveyed my body. Then she ordered her partner to call for the doctor.
“I don’t know why they sent her here so late,” the other guard muttered and picked up the phone.
I shivered and shook for an hour and twenty-two minutes till the doctor finally showed up. I got the feeling they left me there undressed seated on a cold metal stool on purpose.
The male doctor’s hands were pink in his palms and were hairy on the flip side. His bushy eyebrows had dandruff big enough to see, almost as big as snowflakes. His fingertips were cold. His metal thing that he placed on my flat eight-year-old chest was cold. His pointy thing he pushed in my ear holes was c
old. He shoved a stick down my throat and pinned down my tongue. He shined bright thin beams of light into each of my pupils.
Lying flat on a cold table he hit my knees with a hammer. My leg jumped.
“Sit up,” he ordered me. “Hold out your hand,” he said, ignoring my nervous fingertips shaking. He flipped my hand around and pricked me with a needle. Between my thumb and the finger right next to it. He squeezed my finger till my blood burst out the teeny-tiny hole that he made. He did some quick moves then wiped my blood away and Band-Aided it, as though he wasn’t the one who had cut me in the first place.
“Lay down,” he ordered again.
When he said, “Done,” he dragged his hand down my body and touched lightly the front of my panties, like light enough to pretend he didn’t do it. I peed. Even when I squeezed my legs together my warm piss wouldn’t stop gushing out. It was the only warmth I felt in a room so cold my piss should of turned into piss sickles.
“You should have saved that for my cup,” the doctor said now holding a small plastic container in his right hand. Now that he wanted pee from me, none would come out. What had already come was leaking from the metal table to the floor.
In a washroom big as the living room in the projects, on a cold floor that could’ve been made of ice blocks, one guard blast-showered me with cold water. My lips trembled.
“Pick ’em up,” she told me.
She pulled a plastic bag out of her back pocket. I dropped my piss panties, the last item that actually belonged to me, inside of her plastic bag. She put a tie on it and tossed it.
“Get dressed,” she ordered, offering me no towel to dry my drenched skin.
“From now on, walk on the right side of the line,” she ordered. Her voice echoed in the dark hallway. Her shoes clicked out forty-three steps. She stopped walking and clicking. Then she aimed her high-powered flashlight at my feet. My damp paper shoes were no protection against the frozen floor.
“Bed number thirty-four,” she said swiftly swiping her bright beam of light only one time.
I looked but couldn’t catch sight of anything in that one second. She killed the light. I knew she was trying to slowly fill me with panic and fear.
“Move!” she shouted while sounding like she was acting like she was whispering.
Probably if she wasn’t pretending to whisper, her real voice would shake the walls. I took my first step at the first crack of her voice raising up again.
“Keep your hands and feet to yourself,” she said forcefully. “Or else we’ll lock you up in the basement by yourself.”
I could hear her hard shoes banging on the ice floor as she walked away. I squinted looking into the blackness in front of me. I could hear breathing but couldn’t see much of nothing, just piles of bodies beneath blankets, one thin blanket on each bed. Some had their blanket sloppy. Some were wrapped tight like mummies in a horror film.
Up close, I saw one arm dangling from beneath the blanket. It looked creepy.
Swiftly, I looked back when I realized the guard’s shoe sounds stopped clicking and banging. A door slam shut. Not like a door in my Long Island house. It was the sound of a door made of steel so heavy that it couldn’t ever be opened without a bulldozer. The guard left me with lights out. She wanted me to walk to bed number thirty-four in the dark-dark. She wanted me to feel certain that she and anybody dressed in the same uniform as her didn’t give a fuck about me. I felt it. I knew it. I would remember it, always.
Music. I was recasting Michael Jackson’s Thriller video in my mind. I didn’t need no monsters or masks, werewolfs or vampires. The people in here were scary enough. The bodies lying around, beneath blankets was like a graveyard scene. I was Michael Jackson, not the frightened girl in the video. I slid out of those worthless paper shoes and started dancing my walk through the huge black room. My limbs were fluid like Michael’s. My movements were bold like Brooklyn, musical and unafraid. My heart was banging out the fast bass beats of the Thriller song.
As I danced, my body began to heat up. Even the soles of my feet became warm. I was up and down the rows comfortably now, even in the darkness. No one could see me or stop me. My dancing made my anger more powerful than my fears. My body began to sweat. Caught up in my movements I lost track of where I had been standing in the first place and which direction the flashlight had pointed towards to get to my bed.
As my chest heaved in and out and my heart still raced, one blanket raised up in the air. The body hidden beneath was floating like a ghost. The blanket was the only colorful crocheted blanket in the big room. When the hands popped out of each side, I saw glow-in-the-dark little lights. No! I saw glow-in-the-dark nail polish and little fingers waving me to follow her. I was Michael. So she must have been the pretty girl in the video who was afraid but still friendly.
“Follow me,” she said. I did.
She stopped at an open bed so suddenly that I bumped into her back. She giggled.
“I saw you first,” she said. “So let’s you and me be friends before the rest of these monsters wake up. Don’t be afraid. You’ll never like it, being here, but you will get used to it.”
She sounded nice and didn’t stink. She didn’t try to say or do nothing slick. She wasn’t bossy either. She touched my hand. On the bed, she laid down beside me. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Porsche,” I whispered, trying to get my lips close to her ear so no one else would hear.
“Pretty name,” she said. “I’m Siri. We’re gonna be best friends,” she predicted.
“Do you like music?” I asked her.
“I like you!” she responded.
That’s how me and Siri met. That night all I saw was white teeth and pretty fingers. I liked her because she liked me. She only spoke to me. She showed me things about the other girls that maybe I would of missed if she didn’t say nothing at all. When two girls in a nearby bed were acting fly by speaking some language that no one else knew, Siri and me igged ’em. Then, we made up our own language. We worked on it for my first seven nights there at dinnertime, since we both wasn’t eating. We made up our own alphabet using our own symbols. Each symbol stood for a sound just like each letter in English stands for a sound. We would write words and then sentences out of our symbols. If anyone found our notes they would not know what we were discussing because they didn’t know our code or symbols. That meant we could write curses or our secrets and fucked-up things about the authorities.
At first, we didn’t figure out how to speak our secret language out loud. So we only wrote it down after waiting in line to use one of the three pencils available in the dorm. One time when the authorities searched our stuff in our dorm, which didn’t happen often but once is more than enough, they found our paper stacks. When they looked at the pages with all kinds of neatly written symbols lined up in neat rows, they asked us, “What is this about?” We didn’t answer, just shrugged our little shoulders. They stole our pages and never gave ’em back.
One day at my session with the psych, she showed them to me. I was surprised to see them, so I did have a reaction on my face. She started speaking to me in the aggravating sing-song voice that I hated more than I hated her.
“Let’s talk about this,” the psychiatrist said, holding up a page and asking me to explain the meaning.
I told her, “It’s graffiti. Ever heard of that?” She smiled that stiff smile that looked like her lips were stitched and held together by some strong string pulled tightly on the ends to make a fake smile curve.
“No, not exactly,” she answered. She was never able to admit that there was just some shit she didn’t know.
“It’s just a bunch of pretty designs. Don’t you think it looks pretty?” I asked her.
She stared at the page, paused, and then said, “I’m the one asking the questions here.” She was mad that she couldn’t figure me out. She couldn’t get comfortable with being outsmarted by the girls she thought were the lowest, dumbest, and most craziest little things ever.
When we were around the girls on our dorm, especially the ones who were speaking their unknown language out loud, me and Siri would start speaking to each other in a foreign language that even we did not know. It made everyone pay attention to us. It made everyone want to know our language. We wouldn’t tell them shit. They’d get extra red when we suddenly started laughing. We’d be like, “Yeah, we flipped it around on y’all bitches.” That made them start to accuse us of shit that we had nothing to do with. They was just mad that we wasn’t mad. They hated when a girl didn’t need them, their clique, and their bullshit.
I fought, but Siri didn’t. I fought for her, took the punishments and never snitched on anything she did or that we did together. She wasn’t made for fighting.
Siri was the only warmth in a cold, cold place. She was soft and loving. She was into fashion and looked like she belonged on a Benetton’s ad, draped in expensive angora or cashmere sweaters made of thick and colorful yarns. She wasn’t a conceited bitch. She was quiet and exclusively mine. When I heard music in my mind, Siri would hum along with it.
Hearing her hum was real soothing and different. I mean, I was in love with music of all kinds, especially songs that made me catch feelings or remember memories. I was used to hearing the beat box, rhymes, and all types of voices and instruments. I didn’t have no right name for it, but Siri was like a professional “hummer.” Her voice massaged me, even when it was beneath a break-beat. She was the soundtrack to the film that I didn’t want to be starring in, but was. No matter who else I met, fought, or maneuvered around with, me and Siri had been inseparable since we met in the cold, dark dorm.