Kids In Orange: Voices from Juvenile Detention

Chapter Two

Teen Girl

I AM

I am a blue diamond spiral.

I am a Cadillac Escalade Infinity and beyond.

I am Skittles from the rainbow.

I am a blue berry tree with emotional pain.

I am a microphone from California.

I am a bed where thugs cry.

I am a pit bull who buzzes around town.

Call It Courage, August 2006.

The Big Gang Leader Who Doesn't Write

"Guess she got caught."

"Couldn't stay out there forever."

"There is going to be trouble!"

I lean forward at the hundred pound table and soak up the anticipated trouble. There is a rush of exhilaration which surges through me. It is familiar and comfortable and I revel in it. In middle school, I enjoyed challenging Dad at the dinner table. His temper flared easily after a few Manhattans, and there was something inside of my pre-teen self that wouldn't back down.

Dad and my fights ended up in the green-tiled bathroom with a bar of Dial soap. In the summer, my brother and I found cockroaches tucked in the back corners of the bathroom closet large, black cockroaches which have crawled through open holes in the window screen. Somehow, those roaches never emerged during the soap episodes, but they are there every other time we use the bathroom. I hold onto the green sink while Dad pushed my mouth to the yellow bar of soap and I panted, with my tongue out, the way the orthodontist's assistant has taught me not to gag on the gooey impressions gel used for my braces. The panting technique worked just as well on bars of soap and I never threw up. During my parents' first separation, we attended counseling sessions and practiced role playing with a stuffed, oval shaped potato with black glass eyes. The counselor told us we could avoid these dinner-time blow-ups. He told us this feeling of anticipated trouble is called walking on egg shells. It is not a good thing to have this feeling in a family home. None of us ever quite understood this lesson, and years later, I'm really not sure how to live without anticipated trouble.

Each week, as I enter the detention center, I feel the same thrill building. Although the guards, locked doors and constant cameras hang from every ceiling and offer protection, there is still that possibility of knowing that things aren't so safe, and I thrive on that feeling. In all the years of running the poetry workshop, I will never have to break up a fight. When the poetry workshop moves to the school day, I will never have to use the red emergency button in the classroom because I fear for my safety. But fear is always there, taunting me with the possibility of what might happen. Fear lurks along the edges of every poetry workshop and I reveal in that feeling of being right up against the edge of a high cliff, staring down.

I press my stomach against the hundred-pound table as the girls mutter about how when this new girl finds out that one of the big gang leaders is also booked into this same unit there is going to be trouble. They talk as if a party is about to happen, their voices rise and the guard does very little to silence them.

Which one of the girls is the gang leader? I scan the faces at the table. None of the girls seem too scary to me in their orange t-shirts, plastic sandals, droopy orange pants and thick socks. Without makeup, the girls look to be eleven or twelve, not fifteen and sixteen.

Eventually, everyone settles at the table and I explain we write poems from the heart about life experiences. There is no glorification of crimes and addictions. I tell the girls they can write about the sex and violence as a part of their experience, but not to glorify, and to watch the profanity. They girls always laugh when I tell them an occasional shit or damn doesn't send me over the edge, but I don't want to hear the rest, and neither does anyone else who will read the poems.