Chapter 1

Jersey girl Jesse was from Hackensack, New Jersey. She was a “tom boy” almost from the time that she attended kindergarten when she whacked the bully Jim Boy Rasmussen in the head with the teacher’s lunch box weighted down by heavy metal handles. It was entirely instinctive on her part because she knew Jim Boy was being a bad boy and he had to be punished. She was lots smaller, but that fact never stopped her when she knew she was in the right.

Jim Boy recovered without any problem and the whole thing was swept under the carpet because Jim Boy’s parents didn’t want anyone to make a big deal over their vociferous son’s tendency to throw his weight around with any boy or girl that questioned his demands. His dad was totally embarrassed by the whole affair and told his son to stay clear of the Brown girl whenever possible. The perennial bully wanted revenge real bad but he never disobeyed his Father’s direct orders because he feared the consequences more than anything on the outside of their bunker-type home.

Jesse’s dad was overseas in some strange country winning their hearts and minds the hard way with an assault rifle and lots of ammunition. Her mother was down in Atlantic City supposedly earning money to finance their doublewide mobile home on a lot that was just marginally able to pass a test for placing a septic tank under the weed-riddled grass of the area outside the city called the “Unincorporated County Zone”.

Her maternal grandmother was her caregiver and the older woman was saddled with several handicaps that made her outside life a no-show no matter how you looked at it.

Jesse learned at an early age that she had to look out for herself because nobody was coming to her rescue when she got into trouble.

For the next ten years from age five to age fifteen, she managed to keep her head above water and stay out of trouble by a combination of deviousness, lying and downright bad attitude about almost everything imaginable.

The bottom line was that she never got caught and she went on her merry little way like a snowball rolling downhill into a certain collision with reality.

Then came the fateful day when she decided to go with her friends Holly and Tamara to the Dollar Store to “pick up” a few things they just had to have even though none of the teenaged girls had any money to pay for them.

Much to their chagrin they discovered that the new store manager had installed a multi-camera security system that recorded in great detail each and every item that they pilfered from the shelves and hid under their clothing with fast-beating hearts that feared being caught in the act of shoplifting theft of a number of items listed with the retail value shown in the right hand column on the lengthy charge sheet.

Jesse’s grandmother was unable to show up for the hearing before a bored judge that had recently been dumped by her boyfriend and was less than sympathetic to any plea for mercy from the criminals in front of her bench.

“How do you plead, young lady?”

Jesse wasn’t quite sure what the word “plead” meant and she asked the court-appointed attorney what it meant.

“You just need to state if you did it or if you didn’t do it.”

“Oh, I did it, your honor. We got us a nice stash of stuff and I am really sorry we got caught on the way out the door.”

The judge banged her gavel on the top of the Oak desk and said in an authoritative voice heard all the way in the back of the courtroom,

“The prisoner is sentenced to spend the remainder of her minority until age eighteen at the State Detention Facility for Wayward Girls in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. No bail is granted and she is immediately remanded to the custody of the Department of Corrections for processing at this time.

Take her away.”

Jesse didn’t like the handcuffs on her wrists but they told her that it was merely routine and had to be done to follow “protocol”.

The Intake annex of the Detention Center was a dismal place.

The so-called “cells” were just wire cages in the middle of a huge room with some mattresses on the floor and a few communal commodes bolted to the floor so tightly that it would take a power tool to loosen up the bolt.

Jesse was really concerned about pulling down her orange pants and exposing her teenage butt to the other females in the cubicle because some of them were so ugly they looked just like men and not girls.

She had expected the guards to be all female but she discovered that there were just as many male guards as female guards and that most of the detainees used their feminine wiles to persuade the male guards to grant them favors and small gifts like cigarettes and candy bars.

Jesse didn’t see any benefit in such arrangements because she would still be a prisoner and bound to follow all the rules and regulations of the reformatory regardless of who was supervising her on the inside.

Everywhere she went on the inside there was a sickening green line in almost every hallway and room and the rule was to stay inside that line at all times. If you crossed it even by accident, you were taken down to the punishment basement and she had already heard the rumors about why the rooms were all sound-proofed from delicate ears outside.

She was assigned to a four inmate cell without a window that had two empty racks. Jesse was pushed inside along with a mattress cover filled with all of her standard issue for incoming reformatory girls newly arrived and naïve to everything around them.

The girls, including Jesse, were all between the ages of fourteen and seventeen because younger minors were excluded from the reformatory school lifestyle. The lucky ones, under the age of fourteen, were assigned to special homes where they followed orders and worked long hours for their hosts. The supposed “do-gooders” were really looking for cheap labor and submissive attitudes in exchange for housing the castaways from the justice system and feeding them in accordance with specified parameters. Females, especially the pretty ones, were in premium demand and, in a way, Jesse was far better off in the reformatory school rather than one of those stressful environments with little actual supervision from the law enforcement authorities.