Read Online No Matter How Loud I Shout by Edward Humes - Free Book Online

someone you would want for a baby-sitter. She instills that good gut feeling youneed to have in someone before you entrust your most precious possession in the world, your child. And that trust would not be misplaced: Within a certain context, Carla is caring, loving, dependable, and courageous. That this same girl could point a .357 Magnum at somebody and pull the trigger without remorse is the maddening contradiction of Carla James. She is on the leading edge of two new and disturbing trends in Juvenile Court. She is part of a still-small but rapidly growing group of girls who commit violent crimes, once the exclusive domain of the boys. And she is part of a growing legion of kids whose criminal roots cannot be traced to any sort of abuse or deprivation, children who have potential, privilege, and solid families, yet take a turn toward darkness simply out of personal choice, who have the insight and ability to reflect about the immorality of what they are doing, then do it anyway. These are the kids who have Sharon Stegall and the rest of the juvenile justice system stumped—and scared.
    And, like many of them, Carla is down to her last chance.
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    She would say she was going to the library to study. Or to her friend Laura’s house to do homework. Or to soccer practice after school. And then Carla’s mom would find out that the library was closed that day, or that there was no soccer—or no Laura. “I’ll see you for dinner,” Carla would say, then vanish until nine at night.
    Somewhere between elementary school and middle school, somewhere around Carla’s thirteenth birthday, the lying started. The coming home late from school. The hanging on the street corner. The holiday snapshots in the James family photo album show this transformation starkly: one Christmas, there’s Carla with her two older sisters and two younger brothers, the kid in the middle with the glowing smile, the perfect clothes, the limitless future. A year later, there’s this sullen, defiant stranger in bagged-out gangster clothes, forty-inch trousers hanging from her twenty-four-inch waist, all her old friends forsaken in favor of a new, dangerous, loutish crowd.
    It was tough for Carla’s mother to get a handle on her daughter. The girl had always been closer to her father. Unlike her older sisters, Carla had resisted her mother’s attempts to interest her in Barbies and playing house and wearing dresses. Carla insisted on playing stickball and marbles and cards and whatever the boys on her street were playing. She took great pride in the fact that most of her friends were boys, not girls, and that she met them on their own terms: She threw a ball as good as any boy, she ran as fast as any boy, and she’d fight them ferociously if they ever questionedher ability or mettle because of her sex. Her mother fretted over this, but her father always told her she could be anything she wanted—and that she should not take any crap from little boys. Carla worshipped him for this. She was his little sidekick, working on the car, mowing the lawn, walking to the hardware store to mess with the bins of bolts and nuts and tools: If Dad was doing it, Carla wanted to do it.
    His death in a car accident when she was nine devastated Carla, leaving her depressed and withdrawn for many months, then resentful of her brothers, sisters, and mother when they picked up the pieces of their lives and tried to move forward. In later years, once she became an initiate of the system and heard various counselors and POs theorize about her “antisocial tendencies,” she began to blame her delinquency on her father’s death. Parroting the pronouncements of various professionals she met along the way, Carla would say she never got over the grief of losing him, or the anger she felt at being deserted by the person she loved most in the world.
    It seems a convenient explanation, but, in truth,