No Matter How Loud I Shout Page 5

  Most of the people in court crane their heads around to see whom Dorn is addressing. Peggy just smiles, waits until the next case is called, then walks out, if a little stiffly. It was all posturing, she chafes later. Dorn accepted the misdemeanor plea anyway, then imposed exactly the same sentence as he would have had the kid received a felony conviction: probation, a seven o’clock curfew, and the cemetery-penitentiary lecture. For better or worse, first-time auto burglaries are routinely pleaded down to misdemeanors—the system would seize up like an engine with no oil if such deals were not cut daily and every case went to trial. Dorn knows this—he was a prosecutor himself once, Peggy says. The criticism is just his way of announcing who is in charge.

  As Peggy leaves, she stops in the hallway to chat with a juvenile probation officer who wants help with a girl gangbanger named Carla James. In the background, though, Peggy can’t help but listen to the young thief Dorn just sentenced—a sharp-faced little kid in surf dude clothes and a blond mushroom haircut—leave court and say with dripping sarcasm, “Great judge.” Then, safely through the door and into the raucous hallway, he blows a raspberry in Dorn’s direction.

  “You’d better cut it out,” his father says weakly.

  The kid, showing who in the courthouse is truly in charge, stalks off, but not before glancing over his shoulder and telling his dad with practiced scorn, “Just shut up.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Home Girl

  On the day Carla James became a casualty of juvenile crime, she earned an A on her English test, a B in math, and a mild rebuke for missing a history paper deadline, and then she stayed late after school. The staying late was not for the purpose of punishment, but so Carla could perform her regular volunteer work in the school office, taking care of files, answering phones, doing photocopying—generally making herself indispensable to the school staff. Carla was always offering to help out, the kind of kid adults naturally trusted, who did what she said she would do and did it well. Some of her teachers even joked that, some days, Carla seemed to run the place. Her face would split into a huge smile at that—everyone said her smile was dazzling—and she would nod and say something cocky like, “You’re right. I do.”

  This day, though, Carla had been uncharacteristically quiet. She kept pausing in her work to root around inside her bulging backpack, as if she were afraid of losing something inside. Each time, she carefully snapped shut the pack when she was through, then stowed it out of sight. Five minutes later, she’d be rooting again.

  “You look tired today, Carla,” the school counselor commented, poking her head into the office area. Carla appeared startled for a second, almost guilty, then quickly closed and put aside her book bag. The counselor said, “Is everything all right?”

  Carla looked up and smiled then, that broad, infectious grin of hers, a model’s straight, white teeth gleaming. “Sure,” the girl said. “I was just up a little too late. I’m fine.”

  The counselor nodded, studying the tall, thin, charming fifteen-year-old a moment. She had taken a special interest in Carla, ever since her normally excellent grades had begun to slip and her absences began to grow. They visited outside school and talked often on the phone. Carla had opened up to her for a time, revealing how troubled she was beneath her surface élan. She was especially upset about her mother’s recent remarriage, five years after Carla’s father died in a car wreck. Lately, though, the girl had been pulling back again, dodging the counselor. “We should talk,” the counselor said. “Call me later?”

  “Sure,” Carla promised.

  But Carla knew she would not call. She could not tell her counselor the real reason she was so tired, how she had not cracked open the front door of her house that morning until just after dawn, the sun still low and weak over the Los Angeles Basin, its light devoid of warmth, barely piercing air the color of watery brown pudding. She had stuck her head in, the living room silent and empty, no sounds coming from the kitchen, her mother and stepfather already gone for the day to work. Good, she had thought—she wouldn’t have to hear the same old your life’s headed down the toilet, nice girls don’t stay out all hours speech from her mom. Carla knew her mother was beside herself over the suddenly late hours and disobedient behavior, assuming she was sleeping around. Carla did not correct this misimpression. That would mean having to explain what she really was doing.

  Upstairs, Carla had locked herself in the bathroom, showered, then stared into the mirror for a long time. She had been wanting to do this all night, a burning curiosity that had gripped her as soon as the hot edge of fear at what she had done had dulled. Would she—would anyone?—see a difference in her face? Would it be obvious to everyone what had happened? Carla thought about the Shakespeare her English class had read a few months earlier, a lot of stuff she didn’t understand, but that scene with Lady Macbeth, struggling in vain to wash the blood from her hands—that had stuck with her. She had even dreamt about it. Would it be the same now with her? Would it show in her eyes, her expression?

  She had leaned close, bending over the sink, the medicine chest mirror close enough to steam up with each breath. The same old face had stared back at her, the same long blond hair, the same high cheekbones and ski-jump nose, the smooth skin untouched by makeup—the features boys kept telling her were so hot and that she couldn’t stand, because they got in the way of her being one of the guys. She had searched for signs of guilt, of fear, of evil—for imaginary blood that could not be scrubbed clean—but, to her immense relief, she saw no change. She had not felt guilty, not much, anyway. What she really felt, she had decided, was bursting with life, her secret coursing through her like jet fuel. At school, she concluded, they would have no clue. They would see what they wanted to see, a good kid, popular and polite, a girl who loved school, who liked to help: Carla James, honors student. They would see it because it was true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.

  “I’ll call you later,” Carla lied, looking straight into the counselor’s eyes, seeing genuine affection and concern there, and feeling a slight pang at her deceit. But at the same time, she felt relief, because Carla could see the counselor had no idea—she just thought Carla was tired. Her secret was safe. Before she walked through the door, excitement about the night ahead pushed conscience out of the way. She slung her pack over one shoulder, felt the comforting weight of the gun inside, and strode off the school grounds, returning to that new, separate life of hers, another night away from home, another adventure without end. Except it did end, and all too abruptly.

  The next morning, Carla did not go to the school office before class as she normally did. Instead, two sheriff’s deputies showed up. They had come about Carla. There had been a shooting, they said. A drive-by shooting.

  “Oh, my God! How did it happen?” the counselor exclaimed, thinking, It’s always the good ones who get hurt. The papers were full of stories like that: Honors student slain. She felt tears welling as office workers crowded around to hear the appalling news. She had sensed something was wrong, berating herself for not doing something more for a child she had come to think of as a daughter. The counselor whispered, “Is Carla all right?”

  One of the cops looked at her strangely for a moment. Then he said, “You don’t understand. We’re looking for Carla James. She’s not the victim of a drive-by. She’s the shooter.”

  CARLA,” Sharon Stegall is telling a visitor—right in front of the girl, as if she weren’t in the room listening, “is what we’re facing more and more these days. It’s one thing to have kids who screw up because that’s all they got to do, ’cause they have nothing at home, nothing at school, nothing but the streets and the homies and time to kill, no pun intended. But Carla”—Sharon pauses long enough to aim a measured glower directly at the girl sitting and fidgeting before her—“Carla has everything going for her. Good family. Nice home. Good grades. People who care about her, love her. And she still screws up. Now why is that, Carla?”

  Carla meets her probation officer�
��s eyes with a steady, even stare—no easy feat when the PO is Sharon Stegall, a large and intimidating woman well practiced at putting kids on the spot, who speaks with a gale-force delivery that paralyzes most delinquents. The judges in Juvenile Court may issue the orders, but it is up to the probation officers to enforce them, and Sharon is among the best. But, in that moment, Carla looks unafraid, wearing the unwavering expression of someone telling the truth—or of an extremely practiced liar.

  “Aw, Ms. Stegall,” the girl says quietly. “You know I’m straight now. Just ask at my school. I’m doing great.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re running the place, as usual,” Sharon says, shaking her head. “But what else are you running down, that’s the question?” The probation officer earns a sly smile with that one, then turns away again, speaking about Carla in the third person once more, a deliberate tactic of intimidation. “If we can figure out how to deal with the Carlas of the world, we will have juvenile crime licked. It’s that simple. But I’m not sure we can get through to this knucklehead. Not sure at all.”

  Carla rolls her eyes and laughs, running her fingers through her long hair, pushing it away from her eyes. The gesture reveals a place where her tanned skin is marred by a large scar in the center of her forehead. She got it when her head plunged through the windshield of a stolen car. The car had crashed while she and two homies, pursued by police, fled the scene of a drive-by shooting in which Carla had pulled the trigger (in court, Carla denied being the shooter, but later admitted to it in casual conversation). Had the bullet from her gun struck a human target, rather than glancing off a light standard and fragmenting into relatively harmless shrapnel, she would not be sitting and jiving with her PO about going straight. She would be facing a murder rap, her last chance used up.

  But sitting here in Sharon’s cubicle, beneath the Emancipation Proclamation poster and the enormous wall map with its pushpins showing the multitude of gangs that seem to carve the LA landscape into as many turfs as voting precincts, Carla looks and sounds for all the world like someone you would want for a baby-sitter. She instills that good gut feeling you need to have in someone before you entrust your most precious possession in the world, your child. And that trust would not be misplaced: Within a certain context, Carla is caring, loving, dependable, and courageous. That this same girl could point a .357 Magnum at somebody and pull the trigger without remorse is the maddening contradiction of Carla James. She is on the leading edge of two new and disturbing trends in Juvenile Court. She is part of a still-small but rapidly growing group of girls who commit violent crimes, once the exclusive domain of the boys. And she is part of a growing legion of kids whose criminal roots cannot be traced to any sort of abuse or deprivation, children who have potential, privilege, and solid families, yet take a turn toward darkness simply out of personal choice, who have the insight and ability to reflect about the immorality of what they are doing, then do it anyway. These are the kids who have Sharon Stegall and the rest of the juvenile justice system stumped—and scared.

  And, like many of them, Carla is down to her last chance.

  · · ·

  She would say she was going to the library to study. Or to her friend Laura’s house to do homework. Or to soccer practice after school. And then Carla’s mom would find out that the library was closed that day, or that there was no soccer—or no Laura. “I’ll see you for dinner,” Carla would say, then vanish until nine at night.

  Somewhere between elementary school and middle school, somewhere around Carla’s thirteenth birthday, the lying started. The coming home late from school. The hanging on the street corner. The holiday snapshots in the James family photo album show this transformation starkly: one Christmas, there’s Carla with her two older sisters and two younger brothers, the kid in the middle with the glowing smile, the perfect clothes, the limitless future. A year later, there’s this sullen, defiant stranger in bagged-out gangster clothes, forty-inch trousers hanging from her twenty-four-inch waist, all her old friends forsaken in favor of a new, dangerous, loutish crowd.

  It was tough for Carla’s mother to get a handle on her daughter. The girl had always been closer to her father. Unlike her older sisters, Carla had resisted her mother’s attempts to interest her in Barbies and playing house and wearing dresses. Carla insisted on playing stickball and marbles and cards and whatever the boys on her street were playing. She took great pride in the fact that most of her friends were boys, not girls, and that she met them on their own terms: She threw a ball as good as any boy, she ran as fast as any boy, and she’d fight them ferociously if they ever questioned her ability or mettle because of her sex. Her mother fretted over this, but her father always told her she could be anything she wanted—and that she should not take any crap from little boys. Carla worshipped him for this. She was his little sidekick, working on the car, mowing the lawn, walking to the hardware store to mess with the bins of bolts and nuts and tools: If Dad was doing it, Carla wanted to do it.

  His death in a car accident when she was nine devastated Carla, leaving her depressed and withdrawn for many months, then resentful of her brothers, sisters, and mother when they picked up the pieces of their lives and tried to move forward. In later years, once she became an initiate of the system and heard various counselors and POs theorize about her “antisocial tendencies,” she began to blame her delinquency on her father’s death. Parroting the pronouncements of various professionals she met along the way, Carla would say she never got over the grief of losing him, or the anger she felt at being deserted by the person she loved most in the world.

  It seems a convenient explanation, but, in truth, this is just Carla giving the professionals what they want to hear, an excuse that does not match the facts. Carla’s defiance at home and criminal behavior in the streets did not begin until nearly four years after her father’s death. That was the year Carla turned thirteen and her body stopped looking like a boy’s. That was the year her mother found a second husband who suddenly moved into Carla’s world and expected to be treated like a father.

  And that was the year Carla started coming home late from school, detouring past the corner where the hoods from the Tepa-13 street gang hung out. Carla got her first tattoo that year, a bright red heart on her rear end—a secret she managed to keep from her mother for two years. At age thirteen, Carla began leading two lives, with one—that of the young, dangerous, don’t-care-if-I-die-tomorrow gangbanger—gradually edging the honors student toward extinction.

  It took a while for the adults in Carla’s life to realize her new behavior was more than mere teen angst. Both her stepfather and her mother worked long hours that kept them both out of the home a great deal of the day. By the time they concluded something was seriously wrong with Carla, she had graduated to frequent fights and suspensions at school, plummeting grades, and outright defiance when they tried to discipline her. Every time her mother tried to crack down, Carla ran away. During one three-day refusal to come home, Carla escalated her flirtation with the gang life. She jumped into the Tepa gang.

  “Jumping in” is a literal term: to pass muster with the gang, she had to stand a minute fighting with several gang members, showing her worth, her courage, her ability to take pain. It is a standard initiation rite of street life, mirrored by an even more brutal “jumping out” ordeal. Normally, girls only have to fight girls, but Carla made it clear she intended to hang with the boys. That meant a double rite. First she had to take on three girl members of Tepa at once, which she did in such a wild and fearless way that she ended up landing more punches than the three of them combined. She sneered at her combatants when it was over and called them weak, sending two of them home in tears. Then Carla withstood a minute-long beating from two male members of Tepa, standing her ground, throwing solid punches of her own and shedding no tears even as blood streamed from her nose and her left eye swelled shut. She could hear some of the guys watching and muttering “Damn!” and she knew she had won their respect that day, th
e only coin of the realm that matters in a gang.

  In short order, the same natural talent for making herself indispensable that had worked so well for her in school made her a popular leader within the gang. Smart, quick, a good planner, Carla found even older members of Tepa asking what she thought of some plan or plot. The power was intoxicating, something akin to being a general with an army to command. The fierce code of loyalty between gang members, and the sense of security and contempt for outsiders it breeds, became the center of Carla’s life after that. And any guy in Tepa who forgot himself and spoke to her as if she were different or less worthy or, God help him, coddled or touched her in a way that suggested he might be aware of what lay beneath her gangster baggies, then that boy soon found himself flat on his back, Carla’s knees on his chest and her fists drawing blood.

  A new world opened up for her then. With Tepa, like any gang, the rules were clear. You knew what was right and what was wrong: You stood up for your homeboys, you showed them loyalty and respect and they gave the same to you. You never showed cowardice, and you never backed down on a point of honor. Disrespect demanded a quick and violent response. “No one tells you these things,” Carla says now. “You just know them in your gut. You know what is right and wrong. And if you didn’t know them, you didn’t belong there in the first place.”

  No one had to tell Carla what to do when members of another gang drove by and peppered a group of Tepa homeboys with bullets, wounding one kid, Carla’s friend (who recovered, killed a sixteen-year-old boy in revenge, and went to the Youth Authority). “He was my dog. He was my tight. I ran the streets with him. I had to do something.” It was Carla who grabbed a gun—there were always guns, communal property passed from gang member to gang member—and who headed to a car with another girl and a homeboy. The guy tried to take the gun from her, but Carla refused. “If I’m going to do a drive-by, I’m going to do the shooting,” she would later explain, as if discussing the advantages of playing left field over right field in baseball. “If we’re going to get caught, you know, I want to get caught doing something worthwhile. Not some chickenshit murder charge just because I’m sitting in the car when the gun went off. Why go down for that? Might as well do the shooting.”