Your Last Arrest
by Jaquira Díaz

 
Your last arrest is the worst.

At seventeen, you refuse to accept that the life you’re living may lead you to become just like your mother—a junkie, a paranoid schizophrenic living off disability and the occasional twenty bucks from an asshole boyfriend, or a trick. But that’s not enough to keep you off the streets, to keep you in school.

You spend your days smoking purple haze with your homeboy, Jonathan. His mom sells the stuff, and sometimes the two of you raid her stash. You smoke until his mom comes home, finds you sitting side by side on the floor, passing the Dutch back and forth and staring blankly at the TV. But that day, she doesn’t come home and instead of watching The Lost Boys rapping about ghetto love on BET, you end up fucking on his mother’s couch, the two of you blissfully naked, except for your matching Air Jordans. Then Jon says, you wanna try some scutter? And although you always said you’d never fuck with that shit, you do it anyway, sniff a couple rows before you decide to walk home, paranoid as hell.

When you walk into your dad’s Miami Beach apartment, you don’t know that this will be the day of your last arrest. Your worst. And later you will tell yourself, You can’t keep living like this. You’ll be eighteen soon. No more juvie. No more games.

*   *   *

It’s almost midnight when I arrive at the Juvenile Detention Center.  All the cells in the female wing are closed, but through the vertical glass windows that run up and down each door, I can see most of the girls asleep on floor mats.

They walk me past the hall to the showers, where I have to undress in front of the guards and another girl who was processed just before me. They perform a juvie strip-search, inspecting every part of my body, including my hair and the inside of my mouth. Instead of soap, a guard pours lice shampoo into our cupped hands, which we are to use for hair, arm pits, and pubic area.
After the showers, we’re given orange jumpsuits. I’m reminded of all those stupid prison movies—unknown actors shanked for walking onto the wrong turf, or looking at some white supremacist the wrong way—and I’m glad I’m in juvie, not prison.

We have to braid our hair, one of the guards tells us, or they will cut it off. So I braid my hair while the other girl comments about the ridiculous rules. I don’t even look at her, just stand there, telling myself that I won’t allow this to affect me. I won’t make friends or enemies. I won’t feel sad, or lonely, or scared. But the other girl, she wants to talk, so she asks, What did you do?

*   *   *

What did you do? 

People always ask that question. But you never own up to it, even after you get out of juvie. Even after you turn eighteen and your record is expunged—you just think you’ll never have to remember that day again.

You enlist in the military. You think that’s the only way you can get yourself off the streets. You hope that the uniform will change you. Save you. That it will magically erase your sins and you’ll be able to look your father in the face again, know what it feels like to have someone be proud of you. 

But your father is exhausted by you. And when you finish boot camp, he doesn’t make it to Great Lakes for your graduation. You don’t recall if he even gives you one of his excuses—he couldn’t get a flight, or he had to work, or he was broke again—but after the ceremony is over, when all the other sailors walk toward the stands to embrace their families, you don’t look for him in the crowd.

 
*   *   *

After I braid my hair, they take me into one of the small cells. I’m given a blanket and a mat for the floor, and then the guard locks the door behind me. The room is empty and cold, and I realize that I’ve finally been put in my place.

I wake up the next morning to find that I have a new roommate. She’s lying on her mat, eyes swollen from crying. She wipes her face on her sleeve, and starts talking to me like she knows me.

“Don’t eat the grits,” she says. “They put something in them to make you shit.” Turns out girls in juvie have a hard time going in front of everyone else.

We’re both silent for a while, then I say, “I don’t even like grits.”

“Don’t give ’em up, though,” she says. “or they’ll think you’re soft.” 

She tells me about her boyfriend, some old man they robbed, how they hit him with a bat. She talks on and on, and I let her, just stare at the ceiling without saying a word. Until she asks, like I knew she would, What did you do?

*   *   *

When you arrive at your father’s apartment that day, your brother and your little sister are already home. Your brother is two and a half years older than you, but he thinks he’s your watchdog. So when you stumble into the apartment, tripping over his gym bag left on the living room floor, eyes puffy and red, he begins to lecture. He follows you to your bedroom, and won’t get out of the doorway so you can close the fucking door in his face like you intended.

You are not my father, you love to say.

Count your fucking blessings, he says. I would’ve sent your ass away a long time ago.

But it’s not when he points out the obvious that his words sting. You’re caught off balance when he asks, What kind of girl are you?

You don’t have an answer to his question, but you’re certain that you are not what your father would call una niña de familia, a proper, respectable Puerto Rican girl.

You’re not of your family. You belong to no one.

You push past him through the hallway again, but he follows you, still talking. Talking at you.

You try to walk out of the apartment, but he blocks the door. You’re not going anywhere, he says. You run back through the living room, grab his gym bag from the floor, run out the back door, open his bag and throw all his shit over the eighth-floor breezeway. When he catches up to you, sees T-shirt, sneakers, gym bag flying, landing on cars in the parking lot below, he slaps you in the face.

You are not my father, you say again, and even though you know you’ll regret it later, you slap him back and make a run for it. But you’re prepared this time. Prepared for anything. You’re in the kitchen—you open a drawer, pull out a steak knife. And when your brother is standing in front of you, and all you can do is breathe and brace yourself, you hold out the knife and say, If you touch me I will fucking kill you.

But your brother’s also prepared, and he’s pissed. Both hands balled into fists, he lands a right hook on the side of your head. You fall to your hands and knees, drop the knife, feeling like he just broke your ass in half and handed the pieces right back to you.

He leaves you there, breathing. Chest rising, falling. You can hear your little sister somewhere in the apartment, crying. But you belong to no one, so you pick up the knife, get back on your feet, and go after him.

He turns around. You raise the knife. He holds his arms out protecting his chest. You stab him in the forearm.

Then the knife is on the living room floor, and someone is on the phone, and your little sister is crying and crying, and you will always remember how when they arrested you, the cops kept asking her, Was it a stabbing motion, or a slicing motion? How was she holding the knife?

And how your father kept asking you, Que hiciste? What did you do?

Jaquira Díaz was born in Humacao, Puerto Rico. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Miami Herald, Underground Voices, and Passages North, and has been featured in the South Florida spoken word reading series, Lip Service Stories. She is Nonfiction Editor of Gulf Stream, and a MFA candidate in Florida International University's Creative Writing Program. Her favorite writer is Junot Díaz.

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