The Blackbirds Read Free Page B

We’re his girls. We should go eat him out of house and home.”
    â€œYou are a lucky daughter. Mr. Jones is a great dad.”
    â€œWe get hit by one thing after another in my family. Now it’s fucking cancer.”
    â€œHe will kick cancer in the ass. I know he will. He’s a remarkable man.”
    â€œI know Dad used to take you to your chemo treatments when one of us couldn’t.”
    â€œMr. Jones would take me to Kaiser, wait on me, sit with me in the room while I got my treatment, tell me jokes, then take me to breakfast at CJ’s after Kaiser pumped me with poison.”
    â€œI always used to wish your mother would take you to get your chemo treatment when one of us couldn’t drive you.”
    â€œYou know damn well that me and Mrs. Stockwell ain’t friends like that.”
    â€œShe’s your mother. I had hoped that you two could work it out when you were sick.”
    â€œOur relationship was
worse
when I was sick. She kicked me when I was down. I was puking and she would say horrible things. Told me what I did when I was a teenager gave me cancer, said that cancer was God’s punishment for being a problem child. I stayed alive because I refused to die before that bitch did. I refused to give her the satisfaction of outliving me.”
    â€œWhen you used to babysit me, Dad used to always say he wishedyou were his daughter too. I used to wish that too. I needed your guidance back then. If I had had a sister like you around me, I don’t think I would have gone out into the world trying to make friends.”
    â€œDaughter? Wow. I’m sorry. Your dad saw me as his other daughter.”
    â€œMy mother saw you as a daughter too.”
    â€œI never felt like Mrs. Jones cared too much for me.”
    â€œShe liked you a lot. She hated it when you went away to Oklahoma.”
    â€œI was forced to go. Oklahoma was my Hoosegow. It was my prison.”
    â€œI doubt if they made you strip naked, bend over, squat, and cough when you got there.”
    â€œBut it was still my Hoosegow. I was not received kindly or treated with dignity.”
    â€œYou have no idea about the conditions in the girls’ juvenile hall, have no clue what kids between the ages of eleven and seventeen have to go through at the hands of adults.”
    â€œCan’t imagine an eleven-year-old locked up. Not even menstruating, and imprisoned?”
    â€œThey’re not the normal eleven-year-olds. They have had interesting lives. Some are already hardened criminals. For some, gangs are their families. When you see them, you see how America has failed. America is more concerned with the black oil in the Middle East than its own citizens, and will invest more in incarceration than education. Where I was, a lot of people had been born in hell, had lived in hell, and for some, jail was better than their hell.”
    â€œNo, I don’t know the kind of evil you met, don’t know the hell you lived in.”
    â€œThey will put a fifteen-year-old in solitary confinement for a hundred days, give her a break twice a day, and offer no educational services for those one hundred days of solitude. When she’s let out, she’s in a cell the size of a mattress, with a window smaller than her hand.”
    â€œI know it was bad.”
    â€œThey use isolation to break people, to try and kill their spirits. Keeping a teen in her own cell for twenty-three hours a day drives her a little mad. The only contact you have is when guards check on you four times an hour to make sure you haven’t somehow found a way to hang yourselfwith a string of dental floss, and outside of that, you’re lucky if they let you talk to a nurse, your attorney, maybe a priest, or one of the overseers. They call that bullshit
room confinement
. I think that was better than Oklahoma.”
    â€œI wished I could have been alone for a hundred days.”
    â€œYou had your freedom. If not for