We Went Wild
WE WENT WILD that hot night. We howled, we raged, we screamed. We were girls—some of us fourteen and fifteen; some sixteen, seventeen—but when the locks came undone, the doors of our cells gaping open and no one to shove us back in, we made the noise of savage animals, of men.
We flooded the corridors, crowding together in the clammy, cooped-up dark. We abandoned our assigned colors—green for most of us, yellow for those of us in segregation, traffic-cone orange for anyone unlucky enough to be new. We left behind our jumpsuit skins. We showed off our angry, wobbly tattoos.
When outside the thunder crashed, we overtook A-wing and B-wing. When lightning flashed, we mobbed C-wing. We even took our chances in D-wing, which held Suicide Watch and Solitary.
We were gasoline rushing for a lit match. We were bared teeth. Balled fists. A stampede of slick feet. We went wild, like anyone would. We lost our fool heads.
Just try to understand. After the crimes that had put us inside, after all the hideous things we were accused of and convicted of, the things some of us had done without apology and the things some of us had sworn we were innocent of doing (sworn on our mothers if we had mothers, sworn on our pets if we ever had a puppy dog or a scrawny cat, sworn on our own measly lives if we had nobody), after all that time behind bars, on this night we were free we were free we were free.
Some of us found that terrifying.
On this night, the first Saturday of that now-infamous August, there were forty-one girls locked up in the Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center in the far northern reaches of the state, which meant we were one shy of full capacity. We weren’t yet forty-two.
To our surprise, to our wide-eyed delight, the cells of B-wing and C-wing, of A-wing and even D-wing, had come open, and there we stood, a thunder of thudding hearts in the darkness. We stood outside our cages. We stood outside.
We looked to the guards’ stations: They were unmanned.
We looked to the sliding gates at the end of our corridors: They were wide-open.
We looked to the floodlights ringing the high ceiling: The bulbs had gone dim.
We looked (or we tried to look; it was the way our bodies pulled) through the window slits and into the storm pounding outside, all across the compound. If only we could see past the triple-fenced perimeter, over and beyond the coils of barbed wire. Past the guards’ tower. Past the steep road that plunged downhill to the tall iron gate at the bottom. We remembered, from when the blue-painted short bus from the county jail had carried us up here. We remembered we weren’t so far from the public road.
That was when it hit us—how little time we were sure to have before the corrections officers returned to their posts. Maybe we should have been sensible about our sudden freedom, cautious. We weren’t. We didn’t stop to question the open locks. Not then. We didn’t pause to wonder why the emergency lights hadn’t blinked on, why the alarms didn’t blare. We didn’t think, either, about the COs who were supposed to be on night duty—where they could have gone, why their booths were empty, their chairs bare.
We scattered. We spread out. We pushed through barriers that were always locked to us before. We ran.
The night burst open the way a good riot tends to, when it takes over the yard and no one knows who started what, or cares. The shouts and screams, the whoops and wails. Forty-one of the worst female juvenile offenders in the state set loose without warning or reason or armed guards to take us down. It was beautiful and it was powerful, like lightning in our hands.
Some of us weren’t thinking and only wanted to kick in the glass fronts of the vending machines in the canteen for snacks or pillage pills from the clinic to get a fix. Some of us wanted to pound a face in and jump someone, jump anyone; it didn’t matter who. A couple of us simply wanted to slip out back under the murky cloud covering and shoot some hoops in the rain.
Then there were those of us, the ones with brains, who took a breath. And considered. Because, with no COs coming at us with clubs out, no alarms bleating or intercoms crackling commands to herd us back to our cells, the night really was ours, for the first time in days. Weeks. Months. Years.
And what’s a girl to do with her first free night in years?
The most violent among us—the daddy killers, the slitters of strangers’ throats, the point-blank shooters of pleading gas-station attendants—would later admit to finding a sense of peace in the plush darkness, a kind of justice not offered by the juvenile courts.
Sure, some of us knew we didn’t deserve this reprieve. Not one of us was truly innocent, not when we were made to stand in the light, our bits and cavities and cavity fillings exposed. When we faced this truth inside ourselves, it somehow felt more ugly than the day we witnessed the judge say “guilty” and heard the courtroom cheer.
That was why a few of us hung back. Didn’t leave our cells, where we kept our drawings and our love letters. Where we stowed our one good comb and stashed all our Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which were like gold doubloons up in Aurora Hills, since we didn’t have access to cash. Some of us stayed put in the place we knew.
Because what was out there? Who would keep us safe, on the outside?
Where, really, would a girl from Aurora Hills, who’d disappointed her family and scared off English teachers and social workers and public defenders and anyone who tried to help her, a girl who’d terrorized her neighborhood, who was as good as garbage (she’d been told), who was probably best left forgotten (she’d read this in letters from home), where would a girl like that go?
A lot of us did try to run—even if it was only habit. Some of us had been running all our lives. We ran because we could and because we couldn’t not. We ran for our lives. We still thought they were worth running for.
Most of us didn’t get far. We got distracted. Overexcited. Overcome. A couple of us came to a stop somewhere in one of the hallways outside our designated wing and sank to the cracked and pitted floor in gratitude, as if we’d been acquitted of all our crimes, our records expunged.
This felt like everything we’d dared let ourselves dream up, when the taunting fantasies slipped in between the bars. Wishes for fast getaway cars or Rapunzel ropes to climb out the narrow window openings. Pleas for forgiveness, for vengeance, for glittery new lives on some far-off riviera where we’d never again have to face hate or law or pain. It was happening. To us. We never did believe it could happen to kids like us.
Some of us cried.
There we were, set loose on the defenseless night, instantly wanting everything we could imagine: To thumb a ride at the nearest freeway. To call an old boyfriend and get laid. To have a never-ending breadstick feast at the Olive Garden. To sleep under fluffy covers in a large, soft bed.
That August marked my third summer at Aurora Hills. I’d been locked up here since I was fourteen (manslaughter; I pled innocent; I stuffed myself into a skirt and sheer hose for trial; my mother turned her face away when I was found guilty and hasn’t looked my way since). But it’s not my arrival I find myself thinking about, now that we have so much time to sit here thinking. It’s not the judge’s ruling and the deafening years of my sentence and how I landed here because not one person believed me when I said I didn’t do it. I let go of all that a long time ago.
It’s this one night that I keep coming back to. That first Saturday in August, when the locks couldn’t hold us. That brief gift of freedom we’d take to our graves.
I get hung up on it sometimes, on what if things had gone another way. If I’d made it past the gates and gotten out. If I’d run.
Maybe I would have made it over the three sets of fencing and down the hill to the free patch of road and my part in this story would be over. Maybe all that was about to come tumbling at us after this, someone else would have to bear witness to. Someone else would have to do the remembering.
Because that was the night we went wild. I remember how we fought and we cried and we hid and we flung ourselves through windows and we pumped our legs with everything we had and we went running as far as we could make it, which wasn’t far.
On that night, we felt emotions we hadn’t had a taste of for six months, twelve months, eleven and a half weeks, nine hundred and nine days.
We were alive. I remember it that way. We were still alive, and we couldn’t make heads or tails of the darkness, so we couldn’t see how close we were to the end.