A Deeper Love Inside (2 page)

I didn’t say anything to her. I had gotten comfortable with my short cut overnight. Then she got mad cause I wasn’t mad. So she fought me again. The authorities, that’s what we call them, they locked me up in isolation for fighting.
Every time
they act like they don’t know what the fight is all about.
Every time
they act like we fifty/fifty involved in the fight when they know damn well that chick hates herself and is gonna fight till somebody kills her and puts her out of misery.

Even with my wrists locked and my ankles chained, headed to isolation, I don’t react. They release me into that little space butt-naked. Then I dance. Repetition makes my legs beautiful, strong, and tight. I don’t eat, so I don’t have no body fat. I taught myself to accept hunger, cause people try to use it against you when they think they got something you really need, even if it’s only a sandwich. I dance until I’m drenched. The music plays in my head, sounding crisp like it did back in Brooklyn. I stop when I collapse. Then, I wake up in another wing with a tube in my arm and a bad-breath nurse faking concern and whispering something like, “You could’ve died last night.” I close my eyes and wish I had enough fluids in my mouth to spit on her, just to clear my throat.

When they would bring me back into the population mix with the rest of the bitches, 522 of them to be exact, I’d see most of the girls from my section gasp like they seen a ghost. I know certain ones of them won’t be happy until they slit my perfect skin open, or at least put a permanent stamp on it. That’s why I plot.

In one of the monthly head sessions they make us have, one of my enemies told the therapist that she fights me because I think I’m better. I told her she fights me because
she thinks I’m better.
These
regular bitches don’t get it. It’s not my hair or eyes or legs or none of that bullshit that makes me who I am, plain and simple. It’s that I’m Porsche L. Santiaga, born rich. My daddy was rich. My momma was rich. My sisters were rich. I’m not gonna act like a regular bitch when I was born royal. They never had nothing, so they don’t know no better. They got nothing to miss. I had a queen-sized bed when I was seven years old. Even before then, back in Brooklyn at my sister’s sixteenth birthday celebration at Moe’s, in the dead of the winter season, my whole family was styling. I rocked a three-quarter mink, and mink earmuffs, and a mink muffler instead of gloves.

I have a mother who taught me the difference between everything cheap and high quality. I had three sisters, all dimes living swolled in a beautiful Long Island palace. The last thing my poppa promised me was a pony so I could trot around our property. It’s the police who are the criminals, kidnappers, and thieves. The authorities know the deal, they all in it together.

That’s why I jammed the sharpened number two pencil in my caseworker’s neck as she was driving me in her state-owned vehicle. She tried to say something slick about my family, about Winter in particular. I don’t play that shit. “Family sticks together.”

If a bitch believed she could say something rude about a Santiaga out loud and in my face, I obviously wasn’t on my J.O.B.

Now I don’t know if I was trying to kill her. I just wanted the bitch to pay attention to what I had been telling her for many months. I am Porsche L. Santiaga, sister to Winter Santiaga, the twins, Lexus and Mercedes Santiaga. Brooklyn-born, we chill now in a Long Island mansion. Stop driving me around and dropping me off to the broke, broken, perverted, ugly-ass, foster-care providers and introducing me to strangers who wanna pretend to be my parents. I don’t pretend at nothing. I don’t like fake shit. Take me home. I have a house and a family. I told her clearly in a respectful tone. I recited to her my exact Long Island address.

“You shouldn’t look up to a girl like Winter, even though she is your real sister,” the bitch said one autumn morning when I was seated and trapped in the back seat of her state vehicle, where I had been seated and trapped many times. She must of felt good and big about herself with her files filled up with dirty talk about my real life,
and her folded newspaper that must have reported some lies that she decided to believe. So, she started saying something foul.

“Winter,” my caseworker said, referring to my well-loved sister . . . .

My caseworker is paralyzed now. So she got a lot of time to sit still and think about all the lies she been telling little kids, about taking them to live in a better place, in better circumstances. She knew what the fuck was up. She’d say and do anything, no matter how evil it was as long as they paid her to do it. She’d drop me off anywhere, including hell, and leave me with anyone including the motherfucking devil, even if she knew for sure I was in serious danger. As long as that was the address printed on her paper, she’d leave me without looking back. So they got me locked up in juvy. It’s better than playing house. Everything is clear in here, the way I prefer things to be. No one is pretending to love me, or the rest of us. We damn sure ain’t pretending to love them or each other either. In here, there’s only friends and enemies, no in-between.

Chapter 2

I overheard my poppa, Ricky Santiaga, say, “A good hustle starts with a tight team.” I got mine. We call ourselves the Gutter Girls, cause one of our teachers said we act like we come from the gutter. I didn’t feel fucked up about the gutter thing. I figured if a rich bitch dropped a diamond in the sewer, even if it got covered with shit and slime, and trampled on by mice and rats, if some one discovered it ten years later, they’d easily clean it off and it would still be worth major paper, probably even more than it was back when it first got dropped. I turned that gutter shit around, made it pop; two upside down lower case interlocking
g
’s. When we got our shit together we would capitalize it, turn it right side up, like Gucci.

When I first formed the little seven-chick clique, I took the leftover, looked over, overlooked chicks from the C-section and gave them a do-over. My first recruit was a fat, stinky girl. Her friends called her Greedy Gail. Her enemies called her Pig. I checked how she got a lot of letters and even a box of goodies from home once a month and seemed to have a big budget at the commissary. While everyone else took the time to tease her, I approached her to strike a deal. I disregarded her funk and went right into it. I called her by her true name, Gail, and kept it polite on purpose. “Do you like music?” I asked her. She looked like she wasn’t used to nobody being nice. After a pause she said, “A little bit.”

“You wanna dance with me on the yard?” I asked her. “We can do a dance workout together. It will make you feel good and look good, too,” I said.

I could tell she was thinking about it. So I pressed her some more. “You have a pretty face. You might as well match it all up,” I said. She seemed to like the way I put it, taking the edge off.

“Not on the yard, cause everybody be staring,” Gail said.

“Okay, then we’ll do it in the dorm at night in our section, starting tonight,” I compromised for her. Then I eased her into purchasing a Department of Corrections radio and cassette player for $39.99. “We gotta control the beat,” I told her. “I help you, you help me?”

“How could I help you?” She said like it wasn’t possible, like she thought I was already perfect.

“Just put in the work for the first two weeks. We’ll do you first, then me,” I said. She agreed.

I put up with her farting every time she lifted her fat legs and even when she bent over to try and touch her toes. In a short time, in addition to the workout, I put her on a diet. Convincing her that I was helping her resist temptation, I took over her care box and her commissary, selling and trading her goods and candies on the low for half the price the authorities charged. It was easy for me, cause I didn’t pay for nothing in the first place. My hustle was so sweet that it tipped off the Sugar Wars in the young section-C dormitory, where we was locked. I made a name for myself. The more sugar schemes I invented, the more rules the authorities invented. The more they punished and stressed us young girls, the more the demand for my discount sugars increased. The more sugar everybody ate, the more tempers flared and fists began flying.

I wanted to be known for making money and moves, not for brawling. Fighting was an interruption to my business. But the better my business, the more the fighting came along with it.

Truthfully speaking, we didn’t have no Grants or Benjamins on lockup. I made paper money in arts ’n crafts, and I made my section believe in it, work for it, trade and pay for things that we all should’ve had anyway, but that the authorities didn’t provide, charging us for it instead. They knew that shit was fucked up for girls like me who didn’t receive no letters or visits, and had no one placing even one piece of copper on my commissary.

As Gail dropped the pounds, she grew more confident. I taught her to stop munching up the product and to work out even harder.
She liked me. I didn’t just talk shit, I worked out beside her and never let her see me laugh at her flaws. When she wanted to skip a night of working out, I refused. I held her feet down for sit ups and cheered her on when she made the smallest improvement.

Music is influence. We picked up four more chicks from our section, all strange but drawn in by the music and dance workout, as well as the results of seeing Gail’s recovery. When she got down to an attractive size, and her face that had been buried under layers of fat got revealed, she became ruthless and loyal. If I got in a fight, she’d handle the business while I was trapped down in isolation.

Now she fought on my side along with five other girls I recruited. Now that Gail looked decent, I liked her for true. Big, sloppy, stinky girls can’t get no respect cause, more than anybody else with a problem, theirs is the first thing you’ll see and smell. So, everybody uses it against them.

Chapter 3

She’s a white girl. I don’t look up to her because of that. But I don’t look down on her either. I already told you, I don’t play the skin-color game. “Riot,” she said, introducing herself to me in the “slop house,” which is what I call the cafeteria at juvy lockdown.

“Riot?” I repeated.

“Yeah, like when shit is so fucked up and you can’t take it no more, so you start brawling, setting shit on fire, blowing shit up.” She gave a Jolly Rancher green-eyed stare into my eyes. Her lips were watermelon red. I didn’t crack a smile.

There was a pause. Looking away and up towards the ceiling, she continued.

“The authorities hate my name, but it’s the name my parents named me. It’s on my birth certificate. It’s official.”

“What do you want?” I asked her as I was checking her out. I could tell from her hairstyle she had at least one ghetto chick for a friend. Her hair was black. It was one thick and pretty cornrow that started at the center of her head and swirled around in circles until it finally dropped down and dangled over her right shoulder. It was frizzy like she had gotten it braided three days back. I could tell that unbraided her hair was crazy long. She was smart to rock it like that, laying tight on her scalp, cause if she were fighting someone younger like me, a furious lightweight who wasn’t naturally a fighter and needed a way to protect myself, I would take long loose hair and choke her with it, the same way the young ones tried to do me when I first got locked.

“You look hungry,” Riot said. She was right. But she looked hungry, too. Her face was lean like a supermodel. Her teeth, the tops and bottom were not crooked or buck or bent. They were all white and lined up in a perfect row.

“What do you eat? You gotta eat something to stay alive, right?” She asked me as though she were my real-life big sister.

“What do
you
eat?” I threw the question right back at her, didn’t like to be questioned.

She smiled. “Apples, oranges, bananas. If I’m lucky, a few nuts and raisins. I got a girl who works in the kitchen and a girl who does a shift at the commissary. So I get mine,” Riot said confidently, not bragging, but more like she was try’na offer me something. That’s how it goes up in here. You gotta watch and listen for the slightest twist of the tongue so none of these slickass girls could front like you agreed to something you didn’t agree to or accept.

I couldn’t and wouldn’t front. I was surviving on sugar and trained myself to be satisfied for hours off of the flavor from a Lifesaver. Dinner would be something big like Twizzlers or Cheez Doodles. Beneath my red “juvy jumper” there was zero body fat.

Before I could ignore or answer her questions, my belly started churning and a noise came out. Our eyes locked, then we both broke out and laughed. I marked that down in my mind. It was my first true smile since getting tooken, a smile that led to real laughter. After that, the feeling between us loosened up some. She started telling me her dope-ass story. That’s how me and her met, got tight, and got ganged up.

Riot’s parents owned a marijuana farm in upstate New York. I don’t know how big an acre is, but she said she had a fifty-acre property. Riot got here on lockdown before me. She said she murdered a man. That made me feel closer to her because I figured she was strong, or at least that she would defend herself, and I liked that. No one believed more than me that there are some who definitely deserve it. She said she tagged me because she noticed I wasn’t eating the shit they served, which meant I was smart and unlike the “robots,” which is what she called most of the other young inmates. Riot said she knows how to grow real food. Her family had apple trees, cornfields, tomato
and lettuce patches, and an herb garden. She claimed she even knew how to make maple syrup from a tree.

My mind envisioned a stack of silver dollar pancakes dripping in syrup.

“I live not too far from here, two hours to the west in ‘quiet country.’ ” That’s how she described her place. “So quiet you could hear mosquitoes, bees, crickets, and snake bellies sliding through the tall grass, or even the wind pushing around, depending on the season.”

I pictured a serpent in my head.