Ink

The facility was divided into two wards. The boys were on one side, the girls on the other. The common rooms were in between. This is where the boys and girls were allowed to mix, for school and therapy and social worker visits. But, the truth was, we mixed all over the place. We mixed in the closets and behind the front desk. We mixed in the corners of the small outside yard. We did a lot of mixing.

We weren't exactly locked in, but there wasn't really anywhere else to go. Actually, there were exactly four places you could go: home, juvie, permanent placement, or AWOL. AWOL seemed like the best option at first glance, but once you got out there you found out real fast you didn't have anywhere comfortable to sleep and no one was going to feed you. When you finally got hungry enough to beg for spare change in front of the 7-11, you'd get to experience what it felt like to have most normal Americans passing you right by, walking fast and staring into the middle distance without even looking at you. Pass right by if you were lucky, stop to talk if you weren't.

Americans have very definite ideas of what 12 year old girls should be doing with their time, and they don't mind telling you about it. Sometimes it included getting a job. Other times it was simply that they wanted you to get into their car. It is common knowledge that if you leave an underage girl unattended for any length of time, men will try to fuck her. They can't help themselves. It was better to be in emergency placement than to be out in America. Americans are dangerous.

It was because of this, these filthy things that people do when they don't think anybody else is watching, that you stayed inside unless you had a gang or a boyfriend to run away to. Chances were, if you were in emergency placement, you didn't. I didn't. I'd already been out there for a while and I liked it inside just fine.

There wasn't really anything wrong with me. All they knew was that if they didn't place me somewhere, I'd just keep running away from home. I wasn't going to tell them why. The only thing I would tell them, if I was cornered, was that I was done.

My mother would be sitting in the room with me and my social worker, every week. All three of us would sit there in uncomfortable silence while I practiced being simultaneously gigantic and invisible. I practiced radiating my hatred. I threw it out of my chest and the top of my head in great fiery ropes and destroyed everything around me.

Nobody noticed.

Sometimes, during our visits, the social worker would look up and start in with the questions. Why did I keep running away? Was there anything really wrong with my house? I wasn't being beaten or anything. We had food. We had clothes. Why did I keep coming back here?

My mom would say, "I love her. She can come home any time she wants."

The problem was that I didn't have a script for this. You think that you can just walk away and no one will miss you, like they're going to let you walk off into the sunset of your great potential and they're not going to stop you and ask you a few questions first. I hadn't known about that part the first time I left home. I always kind of thought that maybe if you had the balls to leave your family and leave your life to make yourself into something else, then maybe THAT was the end of the after school special and the credits would roll and you wouldn't have to breathe and think and know what to do next any more. It would be curtains and oblivion and none of it would really matter any more because you were done.

But, as it turns out, that's not what happens. What happens is that you find yourself trying to sleep in a stupid place, some friend's garage on a bunch of couch cushions that stink like old people, when a helpful police officer wakes you up with a light in your face and it's like the best thing that ever happened to you because you get to ride in the back of the cop car and the cop car is warm. They take you back to the office and threaten to send you to juvie or, even worse, home, but they can't because you haven't really done anything wrong and they know you'll just run again.

So anyway, no one tells you about that stuff. You don't know what you're supposed to say next because you've never been there before. The longer you take to talk, the easier it is to keep quiet.

Back in the room with my social worker and my mother, I would stare intensely at the Formica table and say, "I'm just done."

We'd sit in that room together every week until, at last, my mother was done, too. It took a long time to wear her down until she gave up on me, but suddenly I was cut free from everything I knew; the drugs houses we used to live in and the Mormon grandparents, the stupid sisters and the shitty boyfriend. The sadness and shame and the pretending that everything was normal when I just didn't fit. They were sinking and I was done. I was floating. I had made my escape.

Sadly, the escape had really bad food. It also had staff members we'd hardly ever see, movies we'd watch 40 times in a row until you wanted to throw a chair and scream just to make something different happen. It was just like that movie where that day keeps happening over and over, except nothing you do changes the day in any way whatsoever because the day is bigger than you. The day weighs two million pounds and it's slow, but it leaves mountains and valleys in its wake and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

I got kinda used to it. I like a good routine.

We had to go to school there every day except Saturday and Sunday. On the weekends we had television and more television and occupational therapy. I really dug occupational therapy. You got to learn various things to help you prepare for a career in the real world. It was supposed to save me from a life of panhandling in front of 7-11s, but I never quite worked out how. One time I made a pair of moccasins from a kit. They were two different sizes. Another time I made a collage using only eyeballs I had cut out of magazines. On the day I'm thinking about right now, I was teaching myself calligraphy. Actually, what I was doing was, I was stabbing at the empty space between my fingers with the calligraphy pen really fast, trying not to stick myself.

I didn't win.

My hand wasn't my own hand. I felt it like a far-away ghost, like a movie of me stabbing myself. I was looking at the pen sticking out of my hand and I was already giving it bad reviews, figuring out how I could have done it more convincingly, with better emotion. In my idealized version I would display more shock and dismay, I wouldn't be sitting there staring at the thing sticking out of my hand.

Across the table from me was a pretty anorexic girl with long messy hair. She was trying to paint a small ceramic kitten statue, moving her paint brush across the body of it, smearing paint across the face in sloppy streaks. It's so odd that I remember that. Some time before, in group, they had asked us what animal we felt represented us best. We all answered. I think I was a frog or something, I forget. But the thing that stuck with me, for all these years now, was her bony body folded up on itself like a lawn chair, the way her hands cupped her mouth, and how she answered through the cuffs of her sweater. Her face was completely slack when she said, "I feel like a cow because everyone around here keeps sucking on my tits."

Before that, she had been relatively normal. She brushed her hair, she avoided eating, and she watched the television quietly, just like the rest of us. But mostly, and above all, she never talked about her tits in public. One day she was fine. The next she was a skinny cow with messy hair. What happened in the middle there, I don't know. Whatever broke her did it when we weren't watching.

She looked up at my face and then at my hand. We both looked at the pen sticking out of it, throbbing and ticking a little bit. It was so quiet that I could hear the wah-wah sound the pain was making, that sound that happens before the pain actually comes. I could hear her sitting there, looking. I tried to settle on an appropriate response, but nothing was coming to me.

"Cool," she said. She went back to painting her cat.

I sat there a little bit longer, looking at the ink and blood, before I decided to pull it out. At least, I think I pulled it out. I don't think it hurt much, or maybe it hurt a lot, I don't know. I can't remember that part.

A couple of days later the staff started preparing for a female discharge from juvenile hall. I could tell it was a couple of days later because the accidental tattoo I gave myself wasn't so swollen anymore. It had developed a thick blue-black scab that felt kinda hot to the touch. I constantly flirted with the idea of pulling it off, but was afraid that when I did all I'd see was smooth pink scar tissue and not the black dot I was really hoping for.

I always liked it when a girl transferred over from juvie because it meant that everyone would be walking around all day saying "female discharge" to each other and giggling. I had no idea what we were talking about, but it was fun anyway. In fact, when I thought about the words "female discharge" I thought about my aunt Carol shooting her gun. She was a jailer with the sheriff's office and an avid collector of hard bound first edition romance novels and precious moments figurines. She was bitchy, wore frosted lipstick, and carried a gun. She was about the most female woman I had ever met and it was amazing that we were related. When the discharge finally happened we were all sitting in our spots in front of the TV.

Barbara was bad and her parents didn't want her any more. Not in that same way that my mother didn't want me any more, because she couldn't stand me breaking her heart, but in that way where you're sent away and forgotten about forever and no one is allowed to say your name or even think about you, they just go on without you and let the past close up around the places where you used to be, like you never even left an impression. At least with me, my grandmother would continue to make me caramel corn for Christmas every year and store it in cookie tins. When I finally saw her again, she gave them to me, all these tins filled with old caramel corn. I ate some of it. It didn't taste bad.

Barbara was bad in a way like maybe she burned a house down with orphans in it. She didn't have anywhere else to go, so they transferred her over to emergency placement until they could figure out something to bust her for and send her back to juvie. From the looks of her, it wasn't going to take long.

She was the blackest girl I had ever seen, and tiny. She was no more than five feet tall and had her crazy peroxide orange hair pulled back into a short spiky ponytail. She wore street clothes, a baggy Bulls jersey and tight white jeans. Her shoes, though, they were juvenile hall issue. They were navy blue canvas shoes with those cheap rubber soles. It left you wondering what happened to her real shoes. Did they get confiscated? Stolen? Did she kill someone with them? Were they in some evidence box somewhere?

She didn't look at us, sitting in the main common room around the TV. She didn't even acknowledge us. She kept walking right past us and down the girl's hallway with a staff member, towards her room. The staff member came out. Barbara stayed in. The common room was quiet except for the noise coming out of the TV. It sounded like it was being strained through oatmeal before it got to my ears. I thought about how small Barbara's skeleton must be. I wondered if her teeth were smaller than mine because she was shorter, and if her body had the same number of pores as mine, even though mine needed more skin to cover it. I realized that I had a crush on her and that I was fucked.

A little while later Barbara came down and sat in the chair next to me, so close. Our arms weren't quite touching, but they may as well have. My arm hair was tickling her arm hair, and I felt the heat build up between us in that little patch of skin. I stopped breathing. Every time Barbara breathed or moved it caused an emotion to happen inside of me that was like a mixture of complete terror and blinding ecstasy. I slowly moved my tattooed hand into my lap, trying to pull my arm out of her orbit without her noticing. I timed it so that every time she exhaled I would scoot my arm about a millimeter. The plan was to make my movements so subtle that she wouldn't notice that I'd moved my arm. It would be like it had always been there.

That didn't work. I was paying so much attention to the way she was breathing that I didn't notice that she was looking at me, and not making much of a secret about looking at me. I had no idea how long she had been doing it, I only noticed because she took one of her sharp fingers and jabbed it against my tattoo.

"You're in a gang?" she said.

"Yeah," I said. I hadn't really thought about it before, but it was entirely possible that I was in a gang and just didn't remember.

"Who's in your gang?" She asked.

I pointed at the skinny girl with cow tits. I didn't know what else to do.

"I'm in a gang," she said. She held up her hand and I saw a dot, just like my dot, right where my dot was.

"I'm in a gang," she said. "You're not in it. She's not in it."

I curled my hand deep into my lap and wished I had never joined a gang.

She said, "I'm going to kick your ass."

I said, "Okay."

Once that had been decided, Barbara turned back to watching the TV and I sat there next to her until we were told to go to bed a long time later. I knew how to take a beating. When they happened to me I was always so surprised and just stood there, stunned, wondering when it was going to be over.

I hadn't yet actively engaged in physical violence. I would learn that a little bit later when it became obvious to me that there were things you needed in life that would only happen if you hurt someone else. But, at this point my life, I was just a soft ball of dough that didn't really object if you punched it. I knew in some distant way that Barbara meant what she said, and I knew it was probably going to hurt, but it seemed so far off in the future that it was barely worth thinking about.

We brushed our teeth in the bathroom at the same time. I looked at her through the mirror, knowing she was going to look back up at me any time and hating it when she finally did. She spit and rinsed without taking her eyes off of me. She had this look that I now identify with bad-ass tops, that one that says, "I'm going to kick your ass. You know I'm going to kick your ass. I don't even have to say it out loud because you already know."

"Okay," I said out loud.

She rolled her eyes and left the bathroom and I was alone for a minute. She knew she could always beat me up some other time. I wasn't going anywhere. I ran some water over my hand and gently peeled the tattoo scab off. Underneath, some of the ink had set and the tattoo was bluer and shinier than I had expected. I rubbed my hand, I thought about Barbara, and I was happier than I had any right being.