After- to page 286

Devon goes inside the conference room to talk to Dom. She doesn't tell her about what she had remembered. Dom tells her that she went to speak with her soccer coach. He told Dom that Devon had had an injury that incapacitated Devon for several weeks and she could not play. Dom holds no record of this. Devon didn't lie about the injury, but she didn't go to a doctor, too expensive. She looked up her injuries online and some treatments as well. She didn't tell anyone. Dom tells her that she robbed her mother an opportunity to make a good decision for her. Dom thinks it's all crap. She accuses Devon of being afraid that the doctor would find she was pregnant. But Devon didn't know she was pregnant. Though, she looks back on it all and wonder if she really didn't know. Her subconscious might have been telling her that. She should have known, she thought this to herself. She noticed a bump on her stomach, she thought she was getting fat. She started wearing looser clothes because they were comfortable. She avoided looking at herself, or touching herself.

Dom questions her about her friends. Devon has one close friend, Kait. Everyone else is more like an acquaintance. Devon doesn't talk much, she sits quietly and lets the conversation flow around her. But she never told anyone about Conner. The next morning, Devon asks herself these questions, lying in bed. She thinks back over the last few months. She realizes how alone she had been. She had been invited places, to parties or study groups, but she declined. Most days at school she had eaten lunch in the library or not at all. She would sit in the bathroom or someone else away from people. Why had she pushed away and repelled herself from everyone and everything? Eventually, the calls and invites stopped coming. Nobody bothered talking to her in the halls between classes. Only her mom and her coach tried to stay engaged. Kait was hard to shake off. She constantly was asking Devon if she was mad at her, or where she has been. Kait finally wrote Devon a letter, and put it into her locker, but Devon crumpled it and threw it into the trash, Kait standing right behind her, unbeknownst to Devon until after, and then Kait stayed away too.

She gets out of bed, earlier than Wake Up time. She paces around and sees Ms. Coughran outside her window. Ms. Coughran sees her too, and opens Devon's door and tells her she wants to talk to her. She has gotten Devon's report cards and such and sees how smart Devon actually is. She says that she wants Devon to be part of a program in the center -with two others-so she won't fall behind on her grades, because the school at the detention center is based at a seventh grade level. She also tells Devon that the staff wants to bump her up to Honor status.

In class later that day, Karma is back, and there is a woman in a wheelchair there to talk to the class. Karma sits down next to Devon and tries to provoke her again, but Devon talks back this time, she stands up for herself, and tells Karma to back off. The woman- Paula- starts to talk. She talks about how she got into a wheelchair. All the girls get hooked on the story. She was seventeen, and was the first to drink at a party, and then she dove into a swimming pool that was only four feet deep, and she broke her neck. At some point in the story, Karma and Devon glance at each other and Karma smiles shyly. The speaker talks about how the first thing people notice about her is her wheelchair. She says she has a life sentence. When she was young she made some bad decisions that she has to suffer the consequences for now. But the girls before her don't have a life sentence. They have a second chance. They shouldn't let the past define you they are. There is still tension between Karma and Devon, but they are slowly arriving to better terms. Ms. Coughran has them right a paper about a bad decision that they have made and a consequence for themselves and people around them. The girls are actually attentive and thoughtful. Devon thinks for a while. She chooses to write about being alone and how she repelled everything away. If she hadn't isolated herself, and had opened up and trusted, where would she be? Possibly-not here. It's never a good thing to be alone.

The next day, Devon has her hearing. She is up early, groomed and presentable as possible. She learns that she will be sitting next to Dom the whole time. Dom tells her the people who have testified, some will be there and some have written letters: Her coach, Ms. Coughran, Henrietta, her guidance counselor, a mother of some children she babysat, Kait (found this out later than present) and her mom. They enter the court room, Dom has given Devon a pad of paper to write stuff down-anything she wants Dom to say, or wants to ask. The judge enters, her mom says hi to her from behind, but she doesn't reply. The prosecutor begins his opening statement. He goes on for a long time about the negatives about Devon and how she neglected this baby when it was a figure the baby is supposed to rely on. Then the defense (Dom) makes a small opening statement just telling the judge to keep and open mind. The prosecutor calls his first witness, the man you first found the baby, inside a trash bag, shaking violently and blue all over from lack of air. The next witness is Detective Ron Woods, the man who came to Devon's house and found out that she was the one who did it. The prosecutor asks if Jennifer Davenport gave him permission to enter the house, he says yes. Devon goes back in her memory and runs over the situation, never did her mother formally say that he could enter and never did he ask. Devon writes a note to Dom telling her that she didn't give him permission, she was hitting on him. They request a recess.

If they can prove that her mother did not give permission to this man to enter the house, the evidence found inside would not be admissible in the court. Back in the court room now, Dom questions Ron Woods, and finds that he was not formally invited into the Davenport residence. The next witness is the baby's pediatrician, Dr. More. They discuss a bruise that was found on the baby's head, most likely "blows to the head by the hand of the mother".

Devon remembers That Night. She was terribly frightened. She didn't know that she was pregnant until it happened. She was under an incredible amount of stress and physical pain. Still, I cannot understand her state of mind. If it were me, I think...I know I would have handled the situation better. She cut the umbilical cord with a pair of clippers and shoved what was still attached to her back up inside herself. The baby lay on the floor in between her legs, screaming. Devon couldn't take the screaming. It was all too much. She picked up the baby by its head, her hands pressed together ever so slightly, telling it to shut up. The bathroom was covered in blood, urine and other gunky liquids. She was worried that her mom would freak out if she saw this, which, if I do say so myself, wasn't exactly the biggest situation at hand. For what I conclude, Devon did not love this baby. She did not care for it at all. She wanted all of this to go away. She wants to clean everything up, so she picks up the baby to put it in the sink, but intense pain breaks out across her abdomen and the baby slips from Devon's grasp and slides into the sink, the unsupported head snapping back and slams into the faucet. She heads into the kitchen for a trash bag. This part made me sick, for obvious reasons. To me, hurting a child is one of the worse things you could ever do. They are too innocent, too helpless.

I will post up to what I have read tomorrow (309), this blog is getting too long!