No Matter How Loud I Shout by Edward Humes Page B

adventure without end. Except it did end, and all too abruptly.
    The next morning, Carla did not go to the school office before class as she normally did. Instead, two sheriff’s deputies showed up. They had come about Carla. There had been a shooting, they said. A drive-by shooting.
    â€œOh, my God! How did it happen?” the counselor exclaimed, thinking, It’s always the good ones who get hurt. The papers were full of stories like that: Honors student slain. She felt tears welling as office workers crowded around to hear the appalling news. She had sensed something was wrong, berating herself for not doing something more for a child she had come to think of as a daughter. The counselor whispered, “Is Carla all right?”
    One of the cops looked at her strangely for a moment. Then he said, “You don’t understand. We’re looking for Carla James. She’s not the victim of a drive-by. She’s the shooter.”

    C ARLA,” Sharon Stegall is telling a visitor—right in front of the girl, as if she weren’t in the room listening, “is what we’re facing more and more these days. It’s one thing to have kids who screw up because that’s allthey got to do, ’cause they have nothing at home, nothing at school, nothing but the streets and the homies and time to kill, no pun intended. But Carla”—Sharon pauses long enough to aim a measured glower directly at the girl sitting and fidgeting before her—“Carla has everything going for her. Good family. Nice home. Good grades. People who care about her, love her. And she still screws up. Now why is that, Carla?”
    Carla meets her probation officer’s eyes with a steady, even stare—no easy feat when the PO is Sharon Stegall, a large and intimidating woman well practiced at putting kids on the spot, who speaks with a gale-force delivery that paralyzes most delinquents. The judges in Juvenile Court may issue the orders, but it is up to the probation officers to enforce them, and Sharon is among the best. But, in that moment, Carla looks unafraid, wearing the unwavering expression of someone telling the truth—or of an extremely practiced liar.
    â€œAw, Ms. Stegall,” the girl says quietly. “You know I’m straight now. Just ask at my school. I’m doing great.”
    â€œOh, I’m sure you’re running the place, as usual,” Sharon says, shaking her head. “But what else are you running down, that’s the question?” The probation officer earns a sly smile with that one, then turns away again, speaking about Carla in the third person once more, a deliberate tactic of intimidation. “If we can figure out how to deal with the Carlas of the world, we will have juvenile crime licked. It’s that simple. But I’m not sure we can get through to this knucklehead. Not sure at all.”
    Carla rolls her eyes and laughs, running her fingers through her long hair, pushing it away from her eyes. The gesture reveals a place where her tanned skin is marred by a large scar in the center of her forehead. She got it when her head plunged through the windshield of a stolen car. The car had crashed while she and two homies, pursued by police, fled the scene of a drive-by shooting in which Carla had pulled the trigger (in court, Carla denied being the shooter, but later admitted to it in casual conversation). Had the bullet from her gun struck a human target, rather than glancing off a light standard and fragmenting into relatively harmless shrapnel, she would not be sitting and jiving with her PO about going straight. She would be facing a murder rap, her last chance used up.
    But sitting here in Sharon’s cubicle, beneath the Emancipation Proclamation poster and the enormous wall map with its pushpins showing the multitude of gangs that seem to carve the LA landscape into as many turfs as voting precincts, Carla looks and sounds for all the world like