Allegedly

by Tiffany D. Jackson

Anyways, I’ve been in this home of seven girls for the past three months and not one birthday has ever been mentioned. Guess birthdays don’t mean nothing in a group home. I mean, it kind of makes sense. Hard to celebrate the day you were born when everybody seems to wish you were never born at all. Especially after you come into this world and fuck it all up.

I have to prepare. Be on high alert and focused. Because in a few hours, the most dangerous, most diabolical, most conniving woman in the world is visiting me: My mother.

Ms. Stein limps into the kitchen, her bowlegs fat and swollen. You’d think someone would change their diet after they reach over two hundred pounds.

Damn lol

Most of the crimes the other girls in the house committed are like that. Crimes of passion, “snapped” moments, and good ole-fashioned wrong place–wrong time situations. My crime was more psychotic. I was the nine-year-old who killed a baby. Allegedly. That’s the word they always used.

Ted is studying to be an electrician, out of juvie six months for a crime he won’t tell me about but swears he didn’t do. I don’t pry; don’t want him knowing what I’ve done either.

My favorite show is Law & Order: Special Victims Unit but no one else in the house likes it.

Detective Olivia Benson, the lady cop, seems so, I don’t know, smart and mad nice. She can always tell when someone is lying.

I’ve been working here for close to twenty-five years and I’ve never seen a new mother look so, well, regular, after giving birth.

Thinking of him makes me think of Alyssa and how I couldn’t save either of them from Momma.

I don’t know what’s worse. My momma visiting to make herself feel better or his mom not visiting at all.

“What does it mean when you love and hate someone at the same time?” I ask. He laughs. “It means they family.”

I didn’t mean to throw her. I didn’t mean to throw her. I didn’t mean to throw her . . .

Someone must have heard me talking to Winters. That doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is who else has a knife in here besides me.

They’re pushing for the death penalty and don’t even realize executing this little girl is no different than murdering that baby.”

Car sickness slams me, because I don’t know this momma. I don’t want to go with her, I don’t even want to be alone with her. She’s like the stranger I was told never to talk to.

She has that look on her face, like her body is still here but her mind is a thousand other places at once. I recognize the look before she spots me and tries to hide it with a grin. She is having “a day.” She is not taking her pills.

When people feel insecure, they create a grand self-image in an attempt to compensate for what is lacking internally. They present this façade to the world in order to hide the emptiness they feel, thus falling in love with the idea of themselves.

I know I shouldn’t be getting my hopes up. That buzzing in my head keeps telling me none of this is real. But I can’t help it. Maybe Momma could actually be my Momma for a while. Maybe she’s better and things could change.

I want to be with Momma. She is like my best friend, my only friend. I never knew I could miss someone and hate them at the same time.

And then there’s you . . . yo, you realize if you were white, you wouldn’t even be in this shit? They would’ve said you were one of those crazy white kids, like the ones who shoot up schools and shit, and sent your ass back home!

It was clear that she was under the misguided impression her father was still alive, and that her mother never told her otherwise.

Our eyes meet, both knowing it ain’t that simple to give up on people you love that don’t love you the same.

Because I’ve been there before, I know what she’s feeling. Parents aren’t supposed to disappoint their kids like this. It’s the cruelest type of punishment.

A nurse wheels out the woman from 408. Eyes wide, pupils dilated, hunched over in her chair, drool slipping down her chin. They found out. I tried to protect her as long as I could. And this is what they do to her, make her a vegetable, taking away her dignity.

She returns with two glasses of iced tea. Hers looking much lighter in color than mine.