My Name Is Venus Black(12)

Longer? She must see the confusion and alarm on my face. I feel like my whole body is going numb with novocaine from the dentist.

“But I didn’t even mean to do it!” I exclaim.

“It’s going to be okay, Venus,” she says in a hushed voice. “Given the evidence, I know enough about what happened to know that, at the very least, your case presents a good amount of mitigating circumstances that can help us.”

“What does mitigating mean?” My brain is still frantically trying to make sense of how any of those numbers—years!—could apply to me. Did she just say I could go to juvenile prison until I’m twenty-one? I’m not even sure where Issaquah is, but it has to be pretty far away and a Podunk town, since I’ve barely heard of it. I can’t bear being grounded for a month, so how would I ever survive being locked up for so long?

“Mitigating means we’ll try to show that there are extenuating circumstances that should be considered,” Betty explains. “The most important one is probably going to be whatever drove you to do this, Venus. For example, if your stepfather sexually abused you, that would be a serious mitigating circumstance.”



“But he didn’t sexually abuse me!” I exclaim.

By now I’m distraught and terrified. Maybe I should just lie? Tell her what she and everyone want to hear. But I can’t bring myself to.

Before I leave Betty’s office, she asks if I want to hurt myself.

I tell her no. “Not yet,” I add. That’s when she mentions that I was on suicide watch my first three days of detention. She explains to me that every fifteen minutes someone was looking in at me through that small glass window in my door.

The news totally freaks me out. “It’s a really good thing I didn’t know that was happening,” I tell her. “It might have had the opposite effect. Did anyone think about that?”

Honestly, suicide hasn’t crossed my mind since I got to Denney. And now I feel kind of bad, like I failed to meet expectations. I didn’t realize I was supposed to feel so guilty about what happened that it should make me want to die.

This must be the reason for the cheap plastic sneakers with Velcro straps they make us wear—duh. They don’t want us to hang ourselves with the shoelaces. Same with taking the erasers off the pencils, so we won’t use the metal part to slit our wrists. I’m pretty sure no one would have thought of doing these things…but it’s like they’re determined to convince you that you want to kill yourself.

I hate to disappoint everybody, but I’m just not there yet. Maybe down the road if things get bad enough…but it’s harder than people think to get in the mood to kill yourself.

I know, because I’ve tried. It was just last week, and here I am, alive.





After my latest session with Betty, I don’t know who I’m more worried about—Leo or myself. I can’t imagine going to a real prison. And I can’t just sit here while my little brother is lost and needs me.

By dinner, my mind is made up. I sit by that girl named Truly again. I overheard her brag once that she’d escaped Denney twice. Something about hospitals trying to kill her.

Since I can tell she’s not one for small talk, I dive right in. “My brother’s gone missing. I might be the only one who can find him. Did you really break out of here before?”

“Yeah,” she says casually. “So did your brother run away?”

“No,” I tell her. “It’s not like that. He’s only seven, but it’s more like he’s three or so, because he has developmental problems. He’s not retarded, but close.” I want Truly to get the point fast. “It sounds like he is lost or he was taken away from the house where he was staying with a friend of my mom’s….”

“Shit, I’m really sorry,” she said. “What’s his name?”

“Leo. Like the constellation.”

“I get it. Your mom’s a space freak.”

“Actually, she’s dumb about space,” I tell her, impatient and annoyed.



“This is just shit,” says Truly, shoving her plate away. It takes me a second to realize she means the food, not what I’m saying.

“Yeah, it is,” I agree. The Salisbury steak sucks, but in an irrational moment I’m tempted to ask Truly if I can have her green peas. Maybe because they remind me of the way Leo always carefully arranges them in a swirl on his plate. He also likes that they are the “right” green.

“I want to break out tonight,” I tell Truly. I can’t believe I just said that.

“Yeah?” she answers, like no big deal. “Tonight? I could do tonight. I’m pretty much ready to go again. There’s lots of ways to get out of here.”

And then she outlines an escape plan that makes me want to burst into tears. Truly will ask a girl named Belinda, who works in the kitchen, to jimmy the kitchen door so we can escape out a back entrance in there. We’ll climb over the chain-link fence, she says. But since there’s barbed wire at the top, we’ll use the big bath mats from the girls’ showers so we can get over it without cutting ourselves.

Bath mats? Her plan sounds stupid, scary, and dangerous. What if we can’t get the mats and ourselves to the top? What if they shoot at us? How bad of a crime is it to try to escape, anyway?