Short essay
"The Good Shepherd"
"Hold still. Hold very, very still. I don't want to screw this up."
I sit in an old, metal chair in the middle of the floor while Francie Rodriguez positions the needle and thread in front of my earlobe. She is so close to me that I feel her warm breath on my cheek. For days, she has pestered me to let her pierce my ears. She's loud and bossy, and I am quiet and shy. Now--my earlobes numbed with ice cubes, an apple behind my ear for a cushion--all that is left is the prick of the needle.
I too don't want Francie to screw this up. "Please, God," I silently petition. "Please don't let this hurt and please help Francie get the holes even."
I am fourteen years old and I've lived in this mammoth, four-story, redstone Home of the Good Shepherd for nearly six months. There are sixty or seventy other girls here. And like Francie and me, we're all considered juvenile delinquents, troubled, wild and wayward. We are "children in need of supervision," according to the courts, and we've been sent from all over the United State to live here. Anglos and black girls from Denver, Mexican girls, Native Americans from reservations in South Dakota. Martha, a 19-year-old Alaskan Inuit, is probably the oldest. She's lived here of years. She has nowhere to go when she gets out and I imagine she may become a nun and stay. Most of us go home after a year or two.
There are three different floors here for the girls. Mother Mary Ambrose is in charge of our floor, which is a sprawling, unpartitioned expanse of twenty beds, cabinets and closets. Mother is always in full dress, black habit and veil when it's cold, white habit when it's hot. When she took her vows nine years ago, I'll bet she never imagined that one day she'd be in this mess, waking up to twenty or twenty-five wild girls who her throughout the day for a sanitary napkin, permission to take a bath or go down to the kitchen. Maybe it helps that she has a fiery Italian disposition.
Francie aspires to be a cosmetologist. She gets in trouble sometimes. Like when Mother Ambrose plays the Motown records and Francie gets carried away and starts dancing the Dirty Dog and gets sent down to the "sitting room" for a few hours. But all the nuns like her and I don't think they're really offended by her dance. They have to do something because suggestive conduct is against the rules.
There's not a lot of friction here--maybe an accusation of thievery by one girl against another. Or one of the nuns might find cigarettes and go looking for the guilty one, most likely a girl who's been out on pass for the day. Some of us might go to the kitchen and bring back a pilfered bag of donated glazed donuts, which is sort of against the rules, but almost always overlooked.
The really hardcore delinquents that I've met before in Juvenile Hall don't live here; they're sentenced to time at the Lookout School for Girls in Morrison--truly a prison. We are runaways, truants, and misfits, but not beyond rehabilitation. That's why the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have taken us in. "The work of the Good Shepherd Sister" it is written "is to once more restore that soul of the wayward girl to its pristine beauty..."
***
I am twelve years old and on my way to junior high school when I pass by what seems to be a haunted house just off Colorado Blvd. It's absolutely gargantuan. Much of it is surrounded by a concrete wall. Someone told me that the girls who live there hide razor blades in their teased-up hair and yell obscenities from the upper level windows. Sometimes I wonder how I can help them...
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