Cracked Masks: With You and Without You

By Popstheclub.com, Inc.

POPS the Club is a California-based nonprofit creating and supporting high school clubs for those young people whose lives have been touched by the Pain of the Prison System. In weekly club meetings, guided by teachers, writers, artists, activists, performers, and nonprofit leaders, club members tell their stori

• Language: English
• Publisher: Popstheclub.com, Inc.
• Release date: May 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998838298

Book preview

On April 13, 2013, when I was 13 years old, I was charged with battery assault on my school grounds. I was cuffed in front of my mother. I remember Officer J made my handcuffs tighter on purpose—so that I would learn my lesson—because I wasn't talking to him.

I was supposed to go home for dinner and you just ruined that, he said.

I gave him a look that said, F off.

I was driven to the Pacific Station in Culver City, got my fingerprints taken, fingers smudged with black ink, and my pictures taken with a camera with a powerful flash. I was holding a target with a number and behind me was a height chart. Five feet tall, a girl with brown hair and big brown eyes wearing a white polo shirt, navy blue pants and white Vans.

You come to school to fight, young lady? Officer J asked.

No, I said in a deep voice, she hit me first.

Sure, that's what they all say. You know they might sentence you for five months…. You’re too pretty and young to be behind bars, you know.

I didn’t say anything but wriggled my wrist trying to free myself of the cuffs.

I was cuffed for three hours, and when they were removed, I had a big purple-blue bruise. When I got home I iced both wrists.

I am now 17, and I kept the ticket that was given to me on release in an album to remind myself that I am no longer that person—or at least I try not to be. I am on my way to graduating from high school, being the first in my family to graduate from a public school, the first to have the opportunity to walk down the aisle and up to the stage to receive a diploma. I think of all the challenges I have overcome throughout the years and of the friendships that became like family and of the memories that became wisdom.

I don’t know where I'll be heading, but I know I’ll go in the right direction, possibly into the army or college. Mind you, I am writing this story four months ahead of my graduation. I am looking forward to writing my own book full of my short poems, a memoir of my life through high school, but wherever I go, I thank my mother, my father who is an addict, my older sister, Maria, who keeps me strong, my mentor, Dana, who has been with me since I was six years old, my dog for always being happy, my challenges that have made me into a strong, independent young woman, and POPS for teaching me how to release all of my anger into writing.

You saved my life. Thank you.

On July 17, 2016, around 9 a.m. my parents dropped off their fifteen-year-old burden in a brown house in a secluded part of Long Beach, California. They hoped that in 30 days I would find mental stability.

That entire day my body shook violently. I was on my own. In a rehabilitation center for minors who suffered from mental illnesses.

I was being locked up for another reason. I had gone down a dark road of antidepressants. While traveling along this road I experienced flashbacks. There were turnoffs along the road I had been traveling. They were named ADHD, OCD, and Anxiety.

In the rehab center adults watched us young girls while we peed to make sure none of us tried to make ourselves throw up. They scrutinized us to make sure we hadn’t hidden a knife in order to cut ourselves.

We underwent daily room checks, and I was forbidden to keep a green Crayola marker in my room so I could write at night. Nor was I allowed to have two bowls of cereal at lunch according to my designated meal plan.

I was a model what I would call inmate. I never went AWOL. Never had the cops called on me. No counselor had to fill out the crisp white emergency slips explaining that a teenager attempted to make a blunt out of a scrap of paper or use a staple she found on the floor to slit her wrists.

I sat back and watched. Because I felt trapped. Because I wanted out.

I watched the youngest girl in the house, 14, beg her dad between her uncontrollable sobs to allow her to go back and live with his new family rather than being sent back to her mother who she claimed drove her to overdosing.

I watched as a petite Latina admitted to punching her mother’s face and trying to knock out her stepdad.

I watched and I cried when a girl as pale as the winter’s first snow looked me in the eyes and told me how her alcoholic father made her take shots starting at age five.

I remember thinking about my housemates as I looked out the facility’s schoolroom window. It was a small room, practically underground and leading to a garage. I remember there was a slim horizontal window with a view of nothing but a brick wall. I liked that brick wall because sometimes after seeing too many horrible things happening to my housemates, I’d see a cat. Just a plain fat gray tabby prancing across the top of the brick wall.

The cat reminded me of my two kittens back home. And as I watched him, I felt as if my lungs were filling up with water and I was drowning. But when that feeling lessened and I could breathe again I’d yell to the other girls, Come look. There’s a cat.

They would all race to the window and stand on tiptoes to catch a better glimpse. They would laugh and smile as they waved or made funny faces that confused the poor cat. I would walk away from the window and then the sensation of water filling my lungs would come rushing back. Because I felt trapped.

Because I wanted to pick up that plain, fat gray tabby cat and hear his meow, which he would release when he noticed us girls watching him.

Three months later, in my bedroom back home, I think of this past summer and I start to shake. I can still feel my lungs collapsing and stabbing my heart under the weight of my imagined tsunami.

I took two pills in order to write this.

I still deal with my ADD.

I still see flashes.

I’m still on antidepressants.

I still have memories of that ugly brown house in Long Beach and wonder what happened to all those girls.

But I’m also free.

Away from there.

And now what I see is me in the future.

A future where what I want is to prevent a child with mental illness from getting lost the way I did.

To help a child, to heal her, to keep her from having to be dropped off at an ugly brown house in the forgotten part of a lonely city.

To make sure she never has to swallow pills so she can sit long enough to write a paper about how messed up her life once was.

And how watching a cat on a brick wall stopped the world long enough to make her forget where she was and why she was there.

If I can do that one day, then my 30-day incarceration will have been well worth it.

I’m from a big traditional family, with cousins to play with at the parks, with aunts who compliment you and uncles happily giving you money for candy.

I’m from a hospital filled with sick children. A place where the smell of desperation for freedom reeks along with the constant fear of being alone in a dark room, constantly in pain.

I’m from a small family, with a father who chose drugs over me, a stepdad who took advantage of us only to get out of prison, with a mother who can’t do much but watch the babies, and a sister who provides for the whole family.

I’m from a constant struggle to be myself. I’m from always being 50% basically a failure. I’m from being different and a disappointment. I come from a small group of friends who show their love for me.

I’m from a high school that determines my fate, my future, in hopes of finding some success so I can finally be happy and independent.

Everyone has a story, or maybe a lot of stories.

Whatever the story, it has made them the wonderful person they are today.

My name is Leslie.

A few years ago, people knew me as the girl who was always smiling, who was filled with happiness and laughed at everything.

But they never knew the real girl hiding behind that smile. They never knew my darkest secrets.

You know, the things that killed me little by little inside. Every morning I had to pretend I was okay.

As soon as I walked out of my house, I was automatically wearing a mask.

The mask that told everyone, I’m okay, I’m fine. But as soon as I got home, I took off that mask.

It was a routine for me. I got used to it.

I guess it’s true what people say

Sometimes the people who smile the brightest are the ones who hurt the most.

For a big part of my life I was always physically there. But I wasn’t there at the