“Nora Sheehan, juvenile number one-oh-two.” When she hesitates at the doorway, he pushes her inside. There are two bunk beds, one on each side of the cinderblock room, and two small desks for four girls to share, molded plastic bolted into the wall, each with a circular, backless stool bolted into the floor. “Upper bunk on the left. Clothes and toiletries go in your plastic bin under the bed.”
Nora stands at the precipice of an alternate life, a kind of life she never knew existed, and clutches her belongings: an extra pair of sweatpants, an extra T-shirt and sweatshirt, and underwear and socks, all used, not gently; a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a bar of soap, new. She wears another set of sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers that close with Velcro straps, all issued by a guard after a strip search. Her ankles and wrists are still raw from the handcuffs and leg irons used to restrain her over the past eight days—when she was arrested, occasionally in the infirmary, and back and forth to Lodgepole for court appearances—and she pulls the sleeves of her too-large sweatshirt over the red parts on her wrists.
“We’re bunkmates,” the smallest of the three girls says. She’s reading a book on the top bunk but sets it down on the wool blanket to examine Nora.
“No,” says the biggest girl, “we’re cellmates. This is juvie, Jacqueline. It’s prison, not camp.” This girl, Paradise, lies on the bottom bunk, below the one assigned to Nora. Paradise is too tall for the bunk, almost six feet. In a different life she might have played high school basketball or volleyball, maybe even played in college. Instead, she’s here because she keeps getting caught dealing the meth cooked by the aunt she lives with. Both her feet rest on the metal bar at the end of the bed, and she cracks her knuckles when she says the word prison.
Paradise is right. Paradise knows she’s right because even though she’s only sixteen, she’s been in juvie three times and her aunt has been to prison too many times to count. When Paradise and her aunt are both free and living in their trailer at the same time, they compare notes. She makes good money selling meth, better than she could make working in her town’s Dollar Store, and she’s not about to stop; she just has to figure out how to not get caught.
The third girl, Maria Elena, lies on the bottom bunk under Jacqueline, looks at Nora, and narrows her eyes. She’s not as tall as Paradise, but she doesn’t fit on her bunk, either. Her feet also rest on the metal bar at the end of the bed, and the dirty skin on one heel pokes out of a hole in her sock that’s bigger than her entire heel. All the bunks are undersized, and the only girl in this room whose full body will fit on the thin foam mattress is Nora. Nora is smaller and younger than Jacqueline, Paradise, and Maria Elena. Smaller and younger than any other girl currently in this detention facility.
Maria Elena stands and takes the pile of belongings from Nora’s hands. It could almost be a nice gesture, a welcoming one, but it’s not. The clothes issued to Nora won’t fit Maria Elena, but she takes the new toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap and stuffs them in her own bin, then hands her used ones to Nora. Maria Elena, said in the same breath like it’s one name and not two, is in for armed robbery even though she was baited into driving the getaway car and didn’t do any of the robbing. She’s seventeen and this is her first time here. Paradise follows Maria Elena around like a puppy, even though she’s been here three times and did do what she’s accused of.
Maria Elena and Paradise toss questions at Nora—Why are you here? What did you do? Is this your first time?—but lose interest when she won’t answer. If she wants to hide her crime the way Jacqueline does, they don’t give a shit. Hiding a crime isn’t the same thing as burying shame, and nothing she does will provide safe harbor from the consequences of her actions. They turn back to their own conversation and Jacqueline returns to her book, and they all ignore the new girl as she climbs up to her bunk and lies down, facing the wall, curled into a ball like a dog trying to make itself as small as possible.
*
The girls here sense Nora grew up in a house with her own bedroom, with soccer on the weekends and a minivan-driving mother. Maybe even skiing with a family. When they look at her, they imagine piano lessons and vacations and new clothes for school. She leaves behind a trail of clues about her background every time she moves. Inside her mouth is a set of straight, white teeth, her father visits regularly, and they can almost smell the birthday cupcakes her mother might have baked every year, drifting behind her in a cloud of sweet vanilla. She’s had privileges almost none of them had, privileges they scoff at but never would have tossed away as carelessly as she did. When a lawyer shows up to meet with Nora for the third time, a lawyer who clearly is not a public defender assigned by the state but a lawyer her parents must have the money to pay for, this confirms their suspicions.
In here, though, Nora wears the same used sweatpants everyone else does, sits in the same classroom with the same teachers. The ninth graders do basic math and so do the twelfth graders. Science is human health, not chemistry or physics or biology. Nora learned some Spanish in middle school, but that’s not taught here. The population of western Colorado is only 20 percent Hispanic, but more than 30 percent of the kids in here, and they already speak Spanish at home. Even if they didn’t, the state doesn’t pay for foreign languages for delinquents. Art, once a week. Nora’s lucky she likes to draw and paint because that’s all there is. No ceramics or sculpture or photography because the materials for those classes are too expensive. During free time, the kids watch whatever channel the television is tuned to. There’s no Netflix, no Prime Video, no YouTube. The television is locked inside a metal cage, but sometimes a guard will change the channel if a girl asks. This might require a favor in return, usually in the stairwell away from security cameras.
All the girls know that notwithstanding Nora’s conformity in the detention center, when it comes time for her trial, her privilege will reassert itself. Some girls tease her mercilessly, and although she thinks she’s being targeted, in reality most of the girls are scared. They are all bullies but they are all bullied. Every day, Nora shuffles from her bunk room with its four colorless walls to breakfast with its crowded tables to classrooms with worksheets she did back in sixth grade. She stares at the floor or the wall. When she walks, she walks with her hands behind her back, like everyone else, thumbs and forefingers folded in a diamond shape so the guards can see she isn’t carrying contraband. She doesn’t ask for seconds at meals or extra art supplies or for a different television channel. She still doesn’t speak. But for her scarlet hair, she might blend into the walls. She is almost invisible.
One of the state’s lawyers, a fat man with ruddy cheeks and a high-pitched voice, called Nora uncooperative in front of the judge, but that’s not true. She follows the rules, does everything people want her to, except answer questions. In her plastic bin under the bunk bed, she keeps a piece of paper with a handwritten calendar. She looks at it every morning when she wakes up and every night before bed, wondering when she’ll get to leave, hoping the next X she draws through the boxes marking each day will be the last. Usually, juvenile detention centers are temporary way stations on these girls’ journeys, but Nora doesn’t know she’ll remain here far longer than most other girls. Some will be released after a seven-or ten-day hold, either to the custody of their parents while awaiting trial or, for those who have committed minor infractions, released on probation. Others, like Nora and her cellmates, are either too dangerous or repeat offenders and must stay at the juvenile detention center until their trials. This coed youth services center has two halves, one half with this detention center and the other half with a correctional facility for juveniles who’ve already been adjudicated and incarcerated, but Nora and her cellmates see only one another and the other girls on the detention side. They rarely see the boys in juvie and never cross paths with the kids on the correctional side. What happens outside their small world is a mystery.
*
During free time, the girls who’ve earned full privileges due to good behavior are permitted to hang out in the common area of their pod, to watch the caged television or play board games or draw. One day, Nora draws her brother. He has mini-rockets attached to each hip, with fire and smoke spurting from each one. His hair flows behind him, loose and long in the wind, and muscles bulge beneath his superhero costume. His eyebrows knot together as he focuses on catching a villain in the distance. Nora’s pencil hovers over the paper, trying to figure out whether he needs a sidekick, something like a Batmobile, or whether some sort of super-speed would be sufficient for this version of him.
“I said, is that your brother?” Maria Elena’s voice booms, as if she’s annoyed. “The one you shot?”
Paradise, standing next to Maria Elena, whispers something in her ear, then laughs at Nora, and the two of them walk away. There was a mix-up with the laundry, and Maria Elena is wearing maroon sweatpants instead of the blue everyone else wears. They could be from the next pod over, or from the boys’ side of the detention center. Maybe even from the correctional facility. She sways as she walks, emphasis on each hip like she’s a movie star, maybe because of the novelty of having maroon. Jacqueline, playing solitaire across the table, smiles and says, “I like your drawing,” but the spell is broken and Nora’s pencil hangs limply from her fingers.
Suddenly, there’s a hand on Nora’s shoulder, and a squeeze, and she jumps. It’s one of the guards, the youngest one. Most guards have mustaches and gray hair, or if they’re women, badly dyed hair, but this one has a crew cut because he wishes he could be in the military. His thick arms bulge under a too-small uniform shirt and he probably spends all his free time in the gym.
“Get up,” he says. “Your lawyer is here.”
He grabs her elbow and pulls her away from the drawing of Nico. None of the girls like this guard. His tiny eyes follow them everywhere, his head swiveling on a thick neck like a lizard. Nora looks back to Jacqueline for reassurance, but Jacqueline points to the bruise on her arm and then looks back at the guard. The girls who’ve been here long enough know to avoid him, know he’s one of the guards who expect a favor for changing the channel, that he sometimes expects favors in exchange for nothing at all.
He doesn’t put the belly chain on Nora like when he gets her ready for a court day. On those days, he always makes it too tight, then smiles. Because she’s not speaking, she can’t complain, but she already knows she can’t complain, anyway. She’s alert now, more alert than when she was arrested, but she keeps her face blank and hides what she’s feeling from everyone around her. When he pinches her elbow a little too hard, she doesn’t say anything. She pretends her elbow doesn’t hurt and does what she always does: keeps her mouth shut.
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From Penitence by Kristin Koval. Copyright (c) 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
