Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

From my bag, I pulled out a bottle of sunscreen. The other girls had rubbed themselves with baby oil, as if they were steaks on a grill, but the last thing I wanted was to be darker. I noticed Kiera looking at me. “Can you tan ?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, but I was spared going into detail by Misty interrupting.

“This is so awesome,” she said. “The British invasion.” She twisted the magazine so that we could look at the models, each one twiggier than the last, draped in next season’s clothes with Union Jacks and gold-buttoned red coats that made me think of Michael Jackson.

Christina sank down beside me, pointing. “Linda Evangelista is, like, perfect.”

“Ugh, really? She looks like a Nazi. Cindy Crawford is so natural, ” Kiera countered. I peered at the photographs. “My sister’s going to London this summer,” Kiera added. “Backpacking through Europe. I made my dad promise, in writing, that when I was eighteen I could go too.”

“Backpacking?” Misty shuddered. “Why?”

“Because it’s romantic, duh. Just think about it. Eurail passes. Hostels. Meeting hot guys.”

“I think the Savoy is pretty romantic too,” Misty said. “And they have showers. ”

Kiera rolled her eyes. “Back me up, Ruth. No one in a romance novel ever meets in the lobby of the Savoy. They bump into each other on a train platform or accidentally pick up each other’s backpacks, right?”

“Sounds like fate,” I said, but what I was thinking was that there was no way I couldn’t work for a summer, not if I planned to go to college.

Christina flopped onto her belly on the towel. “I’m starving. We need snacks.” She looked up at me. “Ruth, could you go get us something to eat?”

Mama smiled when I came into the kitchen, which smelled like heaven. A rack of cookies was cooling, another sheet was just going into the oven. She held out the mixing spoon and let me lick the dough. “How are things up in Saint-Tropez?”

“Everyone’s hungry,” I told her. “Christina wants food.”

“Oh, she does, does she? Then how come she isn’t the one standing in my kitchen asking?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but couldn’t find the answer. Why had she asked me? Why had I gone ?

My mama’s mouth drew tight. “Why are you here, baby?”

I looked down between my bare feet. “I told you-we’re hungry.”

“Ruth,” she repeated. “Why are you here?”

This time I couldn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Because,” I said, so quietly that I could barely hear it, so quietly I was hoping my mother couldn’t either, “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“That is not true,” she insisted. “When you’re ready for us, we’ll be waiting on you.”

I grabbed a plate and began to stack cookies on it. I didn’t know what my mother meant and I didn’t really want to know. I avoided her the rest of the afternoon, and when she left for the night, we were already locked inside Christina’s bedroom, playing Depeche Mode and dancing on the mattress. I listened to the other girls confess their secret crushes and pretended I had one myself, so I could be part of the conversation. When Kiera brought out a flask filled with vodka (“It has the least calories, you know, if you want to get drunk”), I acted like it was no big deal, even though my heart was racing. I didn’t drink, because Mama would have killed me, and because I knew I had to stay in control. Every night, before bedtime, I lotioned my skin and rubbed cocoa butter into my knees and heels and elbows to keep from being ashy; I brushed my hair around my head to encourage growth and wrapped it in a scarf. Mama did this, and so did Rachel, but I was pretty sure those rituals would be foreign to everyone at this sleepover, even Christina. I didn’t want to answer questions, or stick out any more than I already did, so my plan was to be the last girl in the bathroom and to stay there until everyone had fallen asleep…and then to wake up before dawn and fix my hair before anyone else was stirring.

So I stayed awake as Misty recounted in painstaking detail what it was like to give a blow job and Kiera got sick in the bathroom. I let everyone brush their teeth before me, and waited long enough to hear snoring before I emerged in the pitch dark.

We were sleeping wedged like sardines, four of us in Christina’s queen-size bed. I lifted the covers and slipped in beside Christina, smelling the familiar peach shampoo she had used forever. I thought she was asleep, but she rolled over and looked at me.

My scarf was wrapped around my head, red as a wound, the ends trailing down my back. I saw Christina’s eyes flicker to it, and then back to mine. She did not mention the wrap. “I’m glad you’re here,” Christina whispered, and for a brief, blessed moment, so was I.

–

LATE THAT NIGHT, as Wanda’s snore whistles through the bunk, I lie awake. Every half hour a CO comes by with a flashlight, making sure that everyone is asleep. When he does, I close my eyes, pretending. I wonder if it gets easier to sleep with the sounds of a hundred women around you. I wonder if it gets easier, period.

During one of these circuits, the flashlight bounces with the CO’s footsteps and then stops at our cell. Immediately Wanda sits, scowls. “Get up,” the CO says.

“What the hell?” Wanda challenges. “Now you’re tossing cells at midnight? You ever hear of prisoners’ rights-”

“Not you.” The officer jerks his head toward me. “Her.”

At that, Wanda holds up her hands, backing off. She may have been willing to share a Twix with me, but now I am on my own.

My knees shake as I stand and walk to the open cell door. “Where are you taking me?”

The CO doesn’t respond, just steers me down the catwalk. He stops at a doorway, buzzes the control desk, and there is a grating buzz as a lock is released. We step into an air lock and wait for the door to close behind us before the next door magically opens.

In silence he leads me to a small room that looks like a closet. He hands me a paper grocery bag.

I peek inside to see my nightgown and my slippers. I yank the scrubs off my body, starting to fold them out of habit, and then leave them in a pile on the floor. I pull on my old clothes, my old life.

The CO is waiting when I open the door again. This time he takes me past the cell where I was kept waiting when I first arrived, which has only two women in it now, both curled on the floor asleep, and reeking of alcohol and vomit. Then suddenly we are outside, crossing a fence with a necklace of barbed wire.

I turn to him, panicking. “I don’t have any money,” I say. I know we are an hour or so away from New Haven, and I don’t have bus fare or a phone or even proper clothing.

The CO jerks his head into the distance, and that’s when I notice that the dark is moving, a shadow against a moonless night. The silhouette morphs until I see the outline of a car, and a person inside, who gets out and starts running toward me. “Mama,” Edison says, his face buried in my neck, “let’s go home.”

THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF people who become public defenders: those who believe they can save the world, and those who know damn well they can’t. The former are starry-eyed law school grads convinced they can make a difference. The latter are those of us who have worked in the system and know the problems are so much bigger than we are or the clients we represent. Once a bleeding heart calluses into realism, victories become individual ones: being able to reunite a mom who’s gone through rehab with her kid, who was put in foster care; winning a motion to suppress evidence of a former addiction that might color the odds for a current client; being able to juggle hundreds of cases and triage those that need more than a meet ’em and plead ’em. As it turns out, public defenders are less Superman and more Sisyphus, and there’s no small number of lawyers who wind up crushed under the weight of the infinite caseloads and the crappy hours and the shitty pay. To this end, we learn quickly that if we’re going to keep a tiny bit of our lives sacrosanct, we don’t bring our work home with us.