Excerpted: Growing My Way Home

White-Blotter High

It’s the day before Christmas Eve, 1978. I laugh as I realize I’m dipping my french fries into chocolate pudding, which I thought was gravy. The girl next to me must have heard me laugh and calls out something cryptic I can’t understand; her voice echoes against the walls outside our cell block. Then she gets loud and shrieky; it sounds like she’s dropped to the floor, writhing in pain. I call through my bars for somebody to check on her, but it’s late, and the lights are off in the main hallway, and nobody comes. I wonder if there’s even anybody out there, it’s so quiet. She’s coming down off something hard, I’m sure of it.

   I turned fourteen a month ago, and tonight with my elbows resting on cold steel bars, I’m thinking about some of the choices I’ve made, even though I’m still blasted out of my mind, which is muffling my senses and making this cell feel like a womb where the light seems to pulse with each breath I take. But I’m sure it’s just the drugs. I can see a bit of taped-up tinsel garland in the hall, but the holiday itself doesn’t register. Here I’m truly alone, and I wonder, for both of us, what our tomorrow will hold. My cell block neighbour moans by way of punctuation.

   Twenty-four hours earlier, I had been standing outside my apartment block with a smoke, shivering in my jean jacket (because I’d sold my warm winter coat for smoke money), when some guys I knew drove up in a car.

   “Wow, great car, when’d you get it?” I asked the driver, bending down to look inside; not many of my friends were old enough to drive, so a car was news. These weren’t super-great friends, but I’d been dating Frank, the passenger, if you can call it dating, and was happy to see he was out of juvie, probably for the holidays; we kissed quickly through the half-open window. I was the one he called when he was on a weekend pass or if he went AWOL. The guy driving was his identical twin brother Alex. Both had board-straight blond hair, bangs, and crooked smiles as if they had to put their halves together to make a whole, and each spoke with his own version of a lisp. I didn’t know the two other guys in the back, but they were part of the usual gang, and I’d seen them plenty at house parties on the rez.

   “We borrowed it,” the driver said, still looking straight ahead, stony-faced.

   “Cool.” I nodded, misunderstanding, thinking they’d borrowed it from one of the foster moms.

   “Get in, we’re going for a drive!” Frank said, opening his door.

   “Okay!” I thought he meant around the block, but then it dawned on me that the car was hot, and I changed my mind. I shook my head at Frank, pushing myself away from the car, but he smiled his charming half-smile and said it wouldn’t be for long and that I would never get into trouble for it, so I got in, climbing over his seat that he’d pulled forward as far as it would go, and I fell in between the two guys in the back.

Excerpted from Growing My Way Home by Jenn Ashton © 2026. Used with permission of Talonbooks.

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