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

this is just Carla giving the professionals what they want to hear, an excuse that does not match the facts. Carla’s defiance at home and criminal behavior in the streets did not begin until nearly four years after her father’s death. That was the year Carla turned thirteen and her body stopped looking like a boy’s. That was the year her mother found a second husband who suddenly moved into Carla’s world and expected to be treated like a father.
    And that was the year Carla started coming home late from school, detouring past the corner where the hoods from the Tepa-13 street gang hung out. Carla got her first tattoo that year, a bright red heart on her rear end—a secret she managed to keep from her mother for two years. At age thirteen, Carla began leading two lives, with one—that of the young, dangerous, don’t-care-if-I-die-tomorrow gangbanger—gradually edging the honors student toward extinction.
    It took a while for the adults in Carla’s life to realize her new behavior was more than mere teen angst. Both her stepfather and her mother worked long hours that kept them both out of the home a great deal of the day. By the time they concluded something was seriously wrong with Carla, she had graduated to frequent fights and suspensions at school, plummeting grades, and outright defiance when they tried to discipline her. Every time her mother tried to crack down, Carla ran away. During one three-day refusal to come home, Carla escalated her flirtation with the gang life. She jumped into the Tepa gang.
    â€œJumping in” is a literal term: to pass muster with the gang, she had to stand a minute fighting with several gang members, showing her worth, her courage, her ability to take pain. It is a standard initiation rite of street life, mirrored by an even more brutal “jumping out” ordeal. Normally, girls only have to fight girls, but Carla made it clear she intended to hang with the boys. That meant a double rite. First she had to take on three girl members of Tepa at once, which she did in such a wild and fearless way that she ended up landing more punches than the three of them combined. She sneered at her combatants when it was over and called them weak, sending two of them home in tears. Then Carla withstood a minute-long beating from two male members of Tepa, standing her ground, throwing solid punches of her own and shedding no tears even as blood streamed from her nose and her left eye swelled shut. She could hear some of the guys watching and muttering “Damn!” and she knew she had won their respect that day, the only coin of the realm that matters in a gang.
    In short order, the same natural talent for making herself indispensable that had worked so well for her in school made her a popular leader within the gang. Smart, quick, a good planner, Carla found even older members of Tepa asking what she thought of some plan or plot. The power was intoxicating, something akin to being a general with an army to command. The fierce code of loyalty between gang members, and the sense of security and contempt for outsiders it breeds, became the center of Carla’s life after that. And any guy in Tepa who forgot himself and spoke to her as if she were different or less worthy or, God help him, coddled or touched her in a way that suggested he might be aware of what lay beneath her gangster baggies, then that boy soon found himself flat on his back, Carla’s knees on his chest and her fists drawing blood.
    A new world opened up for her then. With Tepa, like any gang, the rules were clear. You knew what was right and what was wrong: You stood up for your homeboys, you showed them loyalty and respect and they gave the same to you. You never showed cowardice, and you never backed down on a point of honor. Disrespect demanded a quick and violent response. “No one tells you these things,” Carla says now. “You just know them in your gut. You know