As I stand inside the walls of Wakefield, which have held me prisoner for six months, waiting for someone to let me out, I am flooded with every kind of feeling—anxiety, happiness, fear, pride. All I know for sure is that I want everything to be different. I have spent the last days cataloging memories to hold, focusing on Ron’s words about doing whatever it takes to make life work outside. This morning he walks with me down the long hall, stopping briefly at the booking area to retrieve what I came in with—dirty clothes and nothing else. We say nothing because we’ve already said everything.
Ron unlocks the door and I go out, turning toward Mom. Nana is there too. They are both smiling at me. As I walk toward Mom, I can feel my eyes welling up. She wraps her arms around me and says, “Honey, I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I reply, soaking up the way it feels to be held. To be loved. To be someone who made her mother proud. If she were sitting down, I’d climb into her lap and curl up like a cat.
Putting her hands on my shoulders, Mom looks directly at me. “I’m counting on you staying home.” I step back. Why is she setting me up for failure? Not now, not in this moment.
Then Nana hugs me. She feels smaller than I remember from the last time I saw her. “I hope you do better from now on and make better choices,” she says, giving me a little pinch on the arm.
“Are you hungry?” Mom asks. “Do you want to get something to eat?”
This part I’ve been thinking of for days. “Yes! A burrito supreme, no meat, and extra sour cream.” We say a long good-bye to Ron, jump in the car, and head straight to Taco Bell.
The warmth of the burrito wrapper feels good in my hand, but I hesitate before the first bite when I see that Mom’s about to say something. I hope to hear reassurance, love. We’re all in this together. It’s going to be a new day. Honey, it’s okay to be nervous. It will all be all right. I won’t leave your side until you feel safe again. But that isn’t what comes out. “I tear off the ends of the tortilla,” she explains. “It’s just empty there. All those extra calories aren’t worth it.”
The seventy-mile trip went by too fast; sitting quietly in the car with Nana and Mom, it would’ve been okay with me if the trip had been seven hundred miles long. Mom recounted my last big homecoming, when I was three years old. I’d spent almost two weeks in the hospital after a serious reaction to a spider bite. “I was a nervous wreck,” she said. “I never left you.” I didn’t remember any of the tests, the monitoring or IVs, and I had no picture in my head of her being there, but hearing her say it made me want to believe it. She never left me. Then, closer to home, we stopped for take-out chicken for the family, and suddenly I was brought back to the present—they were all waiting, the others. The stepsiblings who’d never missed me for a second. My stepfather.
My chest tightened a little as we pulled up to the house. It didn’t look much different, except the door had been spray-painted dark brown, with uneven zigzag blotches from the top to the bottom. “What happened to the door?” I asked.
“Oh, Grandpa Mac did it,” Mom said, referring to Steve’s father. “He hasn’t been the same since his surgery. We don’t think they gave him enough oxygen.”
“Mom?” I was scared. I felt like I was about to walk into a trap.
“Yes, dear?”
“Can I stay out here just a few more minutes?” I asked.
“Sure, honey, you can stay, but I’m going in. I don’t want the chicken to get colder than it already is.” She and Nana were already out of the car. I couldn’t put it off. I had to go into the house.
I breathed a little easier when I saw my older sister Sophie in the living room. “I wanted to ride with Mom to pick you up,” she said, “but I had to cover a shift.” Sophie worked at Denny’s and rented a small studio a few blocks away while she finished up at community college, hopeful that she’d be able to transfer to UCLA. She’d written to me while I was locked up, always positive and encouraging in her letters.
The pressure on my chest loosened when I realized Steve wasn’t there. Sara, my stepsister, was waiting to say something to me; I could see it in her eyes. She had given evidence to the cops the last time I was arrested. I didn’t doubt she’d do it again in a heartbeat. With her arms folded, she made her well-rehearsed proclamation: “I’ve cleared out the bottom two drawers for you, plus you can have most of the closet, because I’m locking my things in a metal locker in the hall.”
“Yeah, cuz everybody knows that Carissa’s a thief!” cracked one of my stepbrothers. I clenched my fists, tensing to punch.
Sophie intervened. “Hey, want to go for a ride?” she asked. “There’s a new ampm near I-5 out on Jane. They have great soft-serve ice cream.”
“I’ll go with you.” As soon as we were settled in the car, I confessed, “I didn’t really want ice cream.”
“I know,” she said. “Let’s just drive out there so you can see it. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
During my time away, rumors about my life on the streets had made their way around town. The fact that I’d been threatened and raped and scared for my life didn’t make it into the stories. In most of them, I was a straight-out prostitute. My brothers, my parents, my aunts and uncles, they all seemed to be part of the gossip chain. “She’s a strawberry,” one of my older stepbrothers said, using street slang for a girl who slept around a lot. It took everything I had not to scream at him.
According to my probation officer, not only was I prohibited from seeing Zizi and Shorty, but I also wasn’t supposed to hang out with anyone on probation, which was nearly everyone I’d been friends with just before Wakefield. Most of the girls I’d known in sixth grade had parents who didn’t want me anywhere near their homes or their daughters.
The morning of my appointment with the high school guidance counselor, I reached for my spiral journal, which I’d kept hidden at the top of the bedroom closet. Inside was the small note from Mrs. W about my being ready to take geometry. I’d stashed it away instead of handing it over to my mother, who might’ve lost track of it just as she’d done with the second-grade emergency card. To me, Mrs. W’s note meant more than any other piece of paper—it was the starting point of a treasure map. All I had to do was find out where it led.
Once in the high school counselor’s office, I did all the talking while Mom sat close by to sign any necessary paperwork. I had not completed a single class in junior high. All that I had was this note. Would it be enough? I answered the doubt in the counselor’s eyes by adding, “You can call Ron Jenkins at Wakefield. He’d tell you more about the work I did there.” I put every ounce of confidence I could find into my voice, taking care to sit up straight in my chair when I spoke.
“I think this will be fine, Carissa. We’ll just have to choose your other classes, besides geometry.”
Other classes? I’d been thinking only about math. The counselor disappeared for a few minutes into a back office and returned moments later with my seven-period schedule. It was official: I was a freshman, taking geometry, ninth-grade English, history, science, computer lab, typing, and PE.
My first morning was a failure. Compared to the lineups, rules, and routines of Wakefield, high school was madness. A sea of kids shoving, yelling, slamming metal lockers. Textbooks and pencils (forbidden weapons in juvy) were tossed around as though they held no value. Boys I hadn’t seen since sixth grade were taller and spoke with deep voices. I had street survival skills but was at a loss in this environment—everyone had a two-year head start on me in terms of how to behave, what to wear, how to speak to one another, how to simply get from one room to another. I wanted more than anything to fit in, but I didn’t, and no outfit or cool hairstyle was going to get me to class on time or help me feel at ease once I got there.
Just as I’d done in my first days in Wakefield, I sat at the back of the room and made myself small. The first day, there weren’t enough seats in the computer lab class, and there weren’t enough computers. The room was packed; just in case I needed a quick exit, I chose to get as close as I could to the back window. The day went downhill from there: I didn’t understand the English assignment and didn’t know how to ask for help. I got a glare from my history teacher when I arrived in class late after spending five extra minutes alone staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, wishing it would change. I quickly fell behind; within a few days, my default eighth-period class was detention, the penalty for being chronically tardy. Not wanting detention, I quickly learned how to forge excuses for my tardiness and my absences.
I did only my geometry homework, using the textbook as my guide. I searched every page to find answers, decoding symbols I’d never seen before. Out of fear that I’d be sent back to algebra, I didn’t reach out to the teacher for help. I felt caught halfway between a dream and reality. Had my time and achievements at Wakefield even been real? Was I supposed to be in high school?
I didn’t like how I looked—in broad daylight and bad classroom lighting, my crooked teeth and bad complexion could not be hidden. I went back to keeping my mouth shut, never smiling; if I spoke at all, I put my hand over the lower half of my face. I couldn’t relax, couldn’t share a laugh. Ron’s “You have a nice smile” rang hollow in my ears. Braces, clear skin, new clothes, I needed all of it to fit in—to feel normal—but how was I going to get it?
After I was finally caught with a fake note from home, I started skipping classes. I made some new friends, girls I had nothing in common with—except that they skipped classes too. They also knew where the parties were, even during the day. Anyplace we headed outside school was fine with me.
At home, Steve rarely acknowledged me. He’d agreed with Mom to back off, as long as it was understood that there were two rules I had to obey: The first was to stay out of his way, and the second was to not cause problems in his house. “I won’t try to make rules for you here,” said Mom. I was fourteen, the age she’d been when she first ran away with my father. Whatever “raising” of me still needed doing I was expected to do myself. I could wear what I wanted, date who I wanted, go where I pleased and not meet a curfew, just as long as I didn’t run up phone bills or make any scenes. It was an interesting tactic, and a side benefit was that it made Sara furious. Mom was giving me what I wanted—freedom. No boundaries. No rules. No limits.
Then one morning I overheard Sara’s loud complaints about the unequal rules and treatment. “Why does Carissa get to do what she wants?” she demanded. “I’m a year older than she is, but she has way more freedom than me!” Still groggy from a long night out, I jumped out of bed when I heard my name and eavesdropped from upstairs in the hall.
“Carissa doesn’t have a curfew like you do because she’s gotten around,” Mom said. “Everyone knows it. That’s what your dad doesn’t want for…”
Before she could finish her sentence, I bolted down the stairs and got in her face. “So you let me do what I want because you think I’m a whore!” I was furious. I’d deceived myself that the freedom she’d given me was a privilege I’d earned—in Wakefield or on the streets or in the horrors of the days with Icey. But no, I was just trash, no longer worth making rules for.
My mother looked back at me in shock and tried to take back her words. “No, that’s not what I meant,” she started, but I waved her off.
“You were in counseling sessions with me!” I shouted. “You know what happened. How could you say that to her? How could you say that to anyone! I’m not a whore!”
Mom shook her head. “I didn’t call you that name.”
“No?” I said. “What does ‘gotten around’ mean, exactly? Go ahead, call me a slut and a whore. Next time, just do it to my face!” I turned and ran back upstairs, yanked my hair into a ponytail, changed my clothes, and stuffed some clean underwear into the front pocket of my jean shorts. I was heading out as though I were propelled by rocket fuel, but I knew enough to want clean underwear wherever I landed. When I went downstairs and out the door, my mother said nothing. She didn’t call the cops or my probation officer. We both understood that it was way past that for us.
Just like that, home was the place I checked into and out of like a hotel. I ate there, washed my clothes there, and sometimes slept there, as long as I arrived before closing hours. If I didn’t make it in before the lights were out, I was on my own.
I threw myself into a life of partying. As open as I’d been with Ron and in my counseling sessions, I’d never thought that drugs or alcohol were an issue for me, and I never promised anyone not to party. It was an escape, a way to fit in instantly with a group that accepted me. The “real” addicts, I thought, smoked crack, slammed heroin, did the serious drugs that messed people up. But what I was doing, I reasoned, was “recreation.” Everybody did it.
On the few nights I made it home, I’d lie awake replaying the days over and over in my head. My mind ran off to ugly places. Sometimes I went back to the dream where I faced Icey. In my fantasy, I put the gun right to his head but even awake I could not actually pull the trigger. I wanted the satisfaction of making him as scared as I had been. I wanted to see him frozen, begging for mercy. I thought about Ron, about Mrs. W and about God’s grace, but something big was missing, a void I couldn’t seem to fill no matter what I tried.
At Wakefield there had been boys I liked—and maybe would have liked to be with on the outs—but kids were always coming and going, so it was hard to know who would be around from one day to the next. Now here I was with all this freedom to do whatever I wanted, to party, to stay out late, to ignore home—and it wasn’t fun at all. While I waited for drugs to wear off, I felt more miserable than I’d ever felt on the streets. Tired of spending nights alone and afraid I’d end up being labeled even more, I decided it was time I got a real boyfriend, somebody who wanted something more than sex from me. I prayed about it. God, please let me find a guy that likes me like a normal girl.
Danny, a first-generation Mexican American, had a sweet-faced immigrant mom who always had something good on the stove and a dad who worked long hours in the fields as a supervisor in exchange for a paycheck and housing on the farm. Danny was a big guy—overweight, actually, but I didn’t care. Sixteen, with dreamy brown eyes, the kind a girl could swim in, he had the sweetest disposition of anyone I knew. He was everyone’s friend, and at the perfect moment, for whatever reason, he liked me. Danny wanted to take me on actual dates—basketball games, movies, fast food—and he did. We sat across the table from each other at Denny’s and laughed. Sometimes I would just look at him and be amazed that he was with me.
Danny was kind and gentle. And even though we didn’t wait long, I knew he had fallen in love with me before we had sex. It was easy to love Danny. For the first time I felt like I was making love. When we were together he was patient and sweet, and I felt safe. It made him happy when I responded with pleasure. He held me close afterward for as long as I’d let him. We always did it in the car, but it was fine with his parents that I stayed overnight. Out of respect for them, I slept in his sister’s room; in the morning, everyone sat around the table while his mother served homemade tortillas and eggs. When we were in public, Danny held my hand, proud to be with me. With him by my side, I felt accepted at school. I didn’t just have a boyfriend. I had Danny, and he let everyone know it.
His house soon became my second home. His family did all they could to make me feel welcome there, but I had trouble organizing a routine. My clothes were always in the wrong house, I didn’t have the right makeup, and I didn’t always enjoy the smiles that reminded me I was a guest in the house, especially early in the morning. In the bathroom, in the shower, in moments when I needed privacy or quiet, there wasn’t any. I began to feel restless, crowded in. I recognized the feeling and tried to push it away. No, this is good. Don’t wreck it. And then I wrecked it.
I got sick with some kind of respiratory flu, and though Danny’s mom stayed up all night doctoring me, I didn’t feel right about being there. I felt so disgusting, hacking and snuffing, my head sweaty on their pillow. I didn’t see how Danny or anyone could want to be with me. I couldn’t stop coughing. I didn’t have the ability to do this, to be with a nice guy, to be a nice girl, to be sick and needy and vulnerable. How could he stand me when I couldn’t stand me?
One night, I just flat-out told him to take me home—we were through. Time to run. “Don’t call me,” I insisted. When he left me at the doorstep, I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to watch him drive away, but I didn’t want to go inside my house, either. But where else could I go, now that the gentle, loving boy, the sweet one with a car and a family I loved, was driving away?
Danny would’ve given me anything, and I knew it. We could’ve done the Coalinga thing—gotten pregnant, gotten married, and lived in the love and certainty of his family. Those were choices I knew I wasn’t ready to make. He loved the girl he thought I was, but I was still a mystery to myself. All his certainty in us made me feel like a liar. I put the gifts and memories from Danny into a shoe box and then I put the box away.
I had always been good at letting people go. Some people I might know for a night, a week, a month, or even an hour. New friends replaced old ones, their habits becoming my own, as if I had never existed before I met them. More and more, I lost myself in who my friends were—or in what I wanted them to see when they looked at me. One of my stepbrothers said I was getting “more white,” trading in the ink black eyeliner for a soft beige eye shadow, wearing penny loafers instead of flat black Mary Janes. I was a willing chameleon, desperate to do whatever it took to push back the old Carissa. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t make her disappear.
One morning, after days of skipping school, I woke up in my own bed and decided to give disappearing another try. Dragging myself out of bed, I tried to find something to wear. Nothing looked right. Nothing fit. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt clean, so I took a long shower. Afterward, I still felt dirty inside and out. I brushed my hair but couldn’t make it do what I wanted. I wet it again—still I couldn’t make it right. Everything inside me hurt, and no amount of makeup or hair spray could dull the pain. I had lived with it for too long and wanted nothing but for it to stop.
Quickly, before I could change my mind, I went down to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and grabbed a bunch of medicine bottles—a combination of prescription and over-the-counter drugs—and lined them up on the counter. Popping the little caps, I swallowed fistfuls of pills, including aspirin, which I knew I was allergic to. Clutching a couple of the little bottles, I went back upstairs, crawled into bed, and began to cry. A few minutes later, my stomach began to cramp.
“Carissa?” My mother’s voice. “Are you up there? We’re going to be late.” She had made an appointment with a doctor, trying to call my bluff about being sick and get me to go to school.
“Just cancel the appointment!” I screamed back at her. “I don’t need to go. I’m gonna die anyway.” I heard her feet. She was coming up the stairs, which was rare for her. She opened the bedroom door.
“Get out of bed. If you’re not going to school, you’re going to the doctor.”
She sighed. “And stop being like your real father, always so dramatic. You’re not going to die.”
“I’m not dramatic, Mom! I am really going to die. I want to die.” I threw the empty bottles onto the floor. She looked down at them.
“Well, if that’s true, then we should probably leave for the appointment,” she said. It was hard to argue with her point. Why not die at the doctor’s office?
When we arrived, Mom checked in, said my name through the glass window, and sat down with me to wait. There was no sense of urgency or crisis. The cramps were worse, and I felt a wave of heat rise up from my gut into my face. A nurse opened the door to the waiting room. “Carissa Phelps?” Without a word, Mom and I followed her into the small white examining room. A minute later, another nurse came in and took my blood pressure. “This is very high,” she said. My mother said nothing.
A few minutes later, the doctor strolled in and turned down the lights to peer into my ears and throat for signs of infection. After looking into one ear with his light, he moved around me to look into the other. Mom grew impatient. Her arms folded across her chest, she finally spoke. “Are you going to tell him, or am I?”
“I’ll tell him,” I said.
The doctor looked at me. “Tell me what?” he said, stepping back to look at me in my eyes.
“I took aspirin this morning,” I said. “I’m allergic to it.”
“The entire bottle. And other pills too. Prescription stuff.” He bolted to the door, hit the overhead lights, and hollered down the hall to a nurse. In minutes I was on a gurney and loaded into an ambulance, heading to an emergency room a few blocks away. In the ER, a nurse put a lubed-up tube in my nose and down my throat. I retched up whole pills and a lot of other disgusting stuff. “This hurts,” I gasped. The pumping out was followed by a pumping in of water and a black charcoal substance to absorb everything that did not make it out the first time. “Don’t fight back,” the nurse warned, “and don’t yank on that tube. It will only hurt worse if we have to do it again.”
My hands restlessly patted the hospital sheets as I watched the black tar drain out of me. I wanted to get up. Get out. Time jumped around in the hospital bed. My sister Sky was there, and she called my best friend, Jennifer. “Everyone out, I’ve got to check her vitals. We don’t know how much is still in there.” My blood pressure was returning to normal. The nurse left and Jennifer came in. She looked scared. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a few pills. And they’re all gone now anyway.” She started to cry, and so did I. I was saved. Nothing had changed.
“It hurts,” I said.
“What does?” she asked, maybe thinking I was talking about the tubes or the IV in my arm.
“To live,” I said. “Will you stay with me until I feel better?”
“Of course I will.” She grabbed my hand.
When Mom returned, we learned that I couldn’t be released without a psychologist’s evaluation. Lying on the bed in a thin blue hospital gown, my throat burning like I’d swallowed thumbtacks, I realized that I stood a good chance of being locked up in another institution, worse than juvy—a place where they sent crazy kids.
There was no psychologist on staff in Coalinga, so I was sent to a hospital in Fresno for evaluation, the same place where I was born. Mom drove, Sky came along, and Jennifer was in the backseat with me. My head hurt, I was thirsty, and I was thinking fast. By the time we arrived, I’d come up with a plan: The only way to not get locked up was to not be crazy. Concentrate, Carissa—what do they need to hear, what do you need to say, to convince them you didn’t mean it? “I did it for attention,” I rehearsed to myself. “It wasn’t that many pills. No big deal. I knew I was going to the doctor and that I wouldn’t actually die. I won’t try anything like that again. I know I could’ve been seriously hurt.”
Once inside the hospital, we sat in the psych ward waiting room. Eventually, a disheveled man with wrinkled khaki pants and messy hair emerged from the large double doors that led down a long hallway. “Phelps?” I knew the moment I laid eyes on him that he didn’t have time for me. My rehearsed answers were going to work.
“How are you?” I asked him nicely.
“Just fine. And you?”
“I’m feeling better now, thank you.” My act was on.
We went into a room with a single table and two chairs, and I took my seat facing him. “Do you understand why you are here tonight?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “To make sure that I’m okay to be on my own. It’s required.” When he smiled, I knew it was the right answer.
“Correct,” he said, “so the questions I need to ask you are required too. I’d like you to answer everything honestly. Do you understand?”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded. I did understand, and I was confident that I’d be going home in a half hour or less.
Robotically, he went through the questions and marked up the papers in front of him each time I answered. This was a quiz.
“Have you had a change in sleeping patterns?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” I knew exactly what he meant, but he already believed he was smarter than me. I wanted to keep him in that mind-set so he didn’t catch on to my act.
“Have you been sleeping a lot less or a lot more than normal?” he rephrased the question.
“No, no changes with sleep.” I was lying. He noted my answer and continued to the next question. In total, there would be over twenty questions. It was like a math problem—I could see the answers a mile away.
Change in appetite? Change in weight? Increased irritation or anger? Loss of energy? Decreased concentration? Feeling of hopelessness, worthlessness, self-hate, or inappropriate guilt?
My answers: No, no, no, no, no, no, and “definitely not anymore.”
My least favorite question to answer: “If you leave here, will you try to harm yourself again?”
I answered, “No, I would never do that again.” But honestly, I was afraid. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I left, and if I didn’t think it would have been an automatic lockup I would have answered his question with one of my own: Do you think if I leave here I will try to harm myself again?
At the end of it all, I passed the test. He looked as relieved as I felt—probably less paperwork if I was able to go home.
When we came to the end, he seemed satisfied. “Is there anything else you’d like to say?” he asked. “That you’d like to tell me?”
“No, I’m fine. Can I go home now?”
I wondered if he thought my attempt at suicide was real. I wasn’t even sure myself how much I actually wanted to die. Before taking the pills, I hadn’t threatened to kill myself. I hadn’t talked about dying or suicide, and I really hadn’t thought out my plans. I was just desperate, without hope, and sadder than I ever remembered being. How could I tell him that what I really wanted was to trade in my life for someone else’s? I shrugged my shoulders and took a deep breath in. “No. Nothing more to add.”
He took some final notes and looked up. “I don’t see any problem with sending you home tonight.” Then he led me back into the waiting room. A few minutes later, the nurse appeared with a medical folder and some forms. When Mom signed the last form, the nurse looked over at me. “Carissa, you’re free to go. Take care of yourself.”
The next day, to my horror, my mother called Ron. Even though it was against regulations for Ron to have contact with me once I was back on the outs, he took the call.
I was mortified, but I accepted the phone when my mother handed it to me.
“Carissa.” I had never been so glad to hear someone say my name. “Carissa,” he said again. “How are you?” I started to cry. I couldn’t lie to Ron or put on a fake voice for him. Hearing me so upset, Ron didn’t wait for me to say anything; he just started to talk. “I have to tell you something and you can’t ever forget it, okay? Are you listening to me?”
“Yes.” Of course I was listening. This was Ron. I respected him more than anyone, and he was talking to me about something important, something that mattered enough for him to bend the rules—and he was a rules person. I braced myself for what was next. “I’m here. I’m listening.” I choked out the words and shut my eyes tight, as if blocking out everything around me would help me focus on his words.
“No matter what happens in your life—good, bad, ugly—suicide is not an option,” he said. “You are going to break hearts and you are going to have your heart broken. You are going to make promises and you are going to have promises broken. Drugs, alcohol, all of that—but suicide,” he paused for a deep breath, “is not an option.”
There was a silence. I could picture his face the day he’d pulled the two chairs close together and spoken to me like a father sending his child into the world. “Do I need to repeat it again? Because I will.” Then he did, word by word, as though the quiet force of his words would engrave them on the inside of my brain. “Suicide. Is. Not. An. Option.”
“Okay,” I said, barely able to get the two syllables out of my mouth. “Okay. I understand.” Suicide is not an option.
After hanging up, I knew one door was closed. Now I’d have to find another one to open. I was fourteen and I needed a fresh start.