Lost Girls

(x) The names of the juveniles and their families have been changed.

Cathi(x) has a way of looking at you with these dark, restless, almond eyes that makes you think of faraway lands. Sometimes, you find out later, that's what she's thinking of. Not often. But when her body can't move, when she's locked up, her brain takes up the chase. She escapes into a novel, or she fills endless journal pages with her small, blocky print, and she floats for a moment in some other place, maybe where she was meant to be, rather than here at San Francisco's juvenile hall.

Cathi is sitting at a round metal table in the main room of G-1, the maximum-security girls' unit. She takes no notice of the large bespectacled girl next to her hollering for paper or of the other 16 girls, all black, Latina or Asian, all in the purple T-shirts and khaki pants that mark them as G-1 residents. Two girls are braiding other girls' hair. Some are resting their heads on their arms, rising only briefly when the math teacher taps his finger on their worksheets in what passes for school in the hall.

Cathi's eyes are locked on her paper. She hasn't attended school regularly since seventh grade. Yet she is hunched over a trigonometry book, jotting calculations on scratch paper. The logic and reliability of the formulas make sense.

Cathi is 16. This is her 12th stay at the Youth Guidance Center, or YGC, as San Francisco's juvenile hall is known. She boasts about having slept in all 19 rooms of the unit. When she was picked up at age 13 for shoplifting clothes at Marshalls, the counselors never figured her for a repeat offender. She came from a caring home with divorced but working parents who had managed to buy a three-bedroom home in Visitacion Valley. She was friendly and bright. And it was just shoplifting.

They didn't know Cathi had been prostituting since she was 11 years old. That she had already squeezed the trigger of a gun in a drive-by. That she craved the crackling excitement of roaming the streets with her best friend, a girl named Dominique who had been through the doors of YGC several times already.

Cathi clicked with Dominique immediately when they met in sixth grade. Dominique had a tough-girl shell. She didn't seem scared of anything. She lived with her mother in a run-down house in Visitacion Valley, but mostly she ran the streets, smoking dope, downing ecstasy, now and then robbing a novice drug dealer of his profits. Having a baby at age 15 barely slowed her down.

Cathi found this confident, fearless girl irresistible. Dominique always had a scheme. She seemed to know someone in every neighborhood, having been kicked from one school to another around San Francisco. For Cathi, a year younger, Dominique was the portal to a new world that fed her thrumming restlessness.

Cathi and Dominique are the kids for whom the juvenile justice system was created. They both arrived while still in middle school, young enough for salvation. Yet despite all the programs and services and well-intentioned professionals, despite stay after stay in G-1, the girls became more entrenched than ever in the life of the street.

They joined the ranks of San Francisco's invisible kids, the ones who drop out of school, disappear from their churches, vanish from the radar screens of every community institution except juvenile hall. The situation here isn't unusual: Girls are streaming into court systems across the country.

The American Bar Association found that between 1990 and 1999, drug charges against girls increased nearly 200 percent, simple assault nearly 100 percent and aggravated assault more than 50 percent - while boys' arrests decreased slightly. The authorities don't know what to do with these girls. So they lock them up in ever-increasing numbers.

But sociologist Mike Males, senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, says no city arrests and incarcerates girls, particularly African American girls, at a higher rate than San Francisco. He says girls in San Francisco are 11 times more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than urban girls in Los Angeles, five times more likely to be arrested on robbery charges and three times more likely to be arrested on felony charges. San Francisco's arrest numbers are, Males says, the "most extreme" he's ever seen.

Jesse Williams, who served as San Francisco's chief juvenile probation officer for 5 1/2 years before leaving in June, said Males' numbers "don't square with my understanding of the reality of San Francisco." But he doesn't dispute that his department's own numbers show disturbing spikes in arrests and incarcerations among girls in San Francisco - during a time when numbers declined sharply for boys.

Arrests of boys dropped by 46 percent in San Francisco during the past decade, but arrests of girls rose by 23 percent. Between 1992 and 1999, felony arrests among boys decreased by 40 percent while female felony arrests increased by 58 percent. Detention referrals for boys declined 7 percent while girls' referrals rose 83 percent, according to an analysis by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco. Girls of color accounted for the entire increase.

Indeed, YGC is filled almost exclusively with teens who are black, Latino and Asian. They come from San Francisco's troubled neighborhoods: Bayview Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley, Ingleside/Excelsior, Inner Mission, Western Addition. Inside YGC, they live behind sealed windows and thick walls that silence the hum of cars on Portola Avenue below.

The G-1 lounge, where Cathi and the other girls are doing math, is a smattering of round tables and molded-plastic chairs bolted to the floor. It is a dreary place, all concrete block and metal and scuffed linoleum.

At the end of class, a counselor collects and counts the girls' pencils so they can't be used to cut either themselves or others later. Cathi is quiet, waiting for a counselor to signal that it's OK for her to cross the room for lunch.

When a visitor arrives through the steel doors of the unit, Cathi smiles brightly, like a child. She is calculating, considering the angles as if part of a trigonometry problem, sizing up whether the person can be of use to her, even as momentary entertainment. The visitor walks past without making eye contact. Cathi's smile vanishes.

Cathi knows she'll be placed once again in a group home. She is waiting only to find out where. She'll tell the counselors and her parents that this time she'll stay. But she knows she'll run back to the streets, where Dominique will be waiting.

In a year, Dominique will be 18. If she doesn't turn her life around, she will graduate to adult courts and prison and their harsh realities. Cathi has two years left in the juvenile system to save herself.

The clock is ticking. But Cathi and Dominique don't hear it.

Cathi was born in a filthy toilet of a crackhouse. Her birth mother was a 21-year-old prostitute who wanted no part of motherhood. Cathi says little about her, but likes to tell people her almond-shaped eyes are inherited from a mysterious Arab father. More than likely they are evidence of fetal alcohol syndrome.

Cara and Jim Jefferson fell in love with Cathi as soon as they saw her in the arms of her foster mother. Cara and Jim couldn't have children; Cathi would be their third adopted child. She was a chubby 6-month-old with curly black hair. Jim and Cara took turns holding her for three hours during that first visit. She was like a little doll, all smiley and soft, showing no signs of the severe drug withdrawal she suffered at birth.

Cathi's father affectionately called her "Fats," and she was a daddy's girl from the start, wheedling out of trouble with a hug and a smile. When she began reading in preschool, everyone marveled at the charming, intelligent girl whose self-confidence bordered on haughty. But she could also explode with rage. She developed quickly into someone who loved attention and could command an audience whenever she liked.

Unlike her girlish older sister, Julie, Cathi liked to roughhouse with boys and play tackle football, though she adored Minnie Mouse. For her fifth birthday, her parents threw her a surprise party, inviting all her cousins from Fairfield and Vacaville.

Cara Jefferson baked a cake shaped like Minnie Mouse and spent weeks making games that transformed the family garage into an arcade. Cathi remembers she wore a polka-dotted Minnie Mouse dress. It still hangs in the back of her bedroom closet, a remnant of a childhood that ended too soon.

She was 8 years old the first night it happened. Her mother left as usual for her graveyard shift in the American Airlines baggage room at San Francisco International. Cathi found herself happily cuddling with her adored big brother, 17-year-old John, in his bed. He told her he loved her. Then he slowly forced himself on her. A few nights later, he raped his little sister again. He swore Cathi to secrecy, and she told no one.

Cathi hated the painful, confusing acts of intercourse at first, but she liked her brother's attention. Soon, Cathi's mind turned the rapes into a secret romance. Sex made her feel loved. It also made her feel grown-up and powerful. She could see how much her brother wanted her in his bed. By the time she turned 10, she understood she could have the same effect on other boys, even grown men.

Unable to sit still in her fourth-grade classroom, bored by the work, Cathi began skipping school and hanging out in her Visitacion Valley neighborhood with a teenage crowd, which adopted her like a mascot. Her restlessness found its match in the dynamic rhythm of the streets.

To prove her mettle, Cathi fought girls six or seven years older. She begged one day to hold a gun during a drive-by shooting. She shot into the darkness, her heart pounding with excitement. She couldn't tell if she hit anybody; she only knew she loved the adrenaline rush of squeezing the trigger.

She also began having sex with grown men, partly as a way to show she wasn't a child. Mostly, it was about power and attention. All the guys wanted her, and she could get money, clothes, booze, drugs - anything she wanted from them.

Cara says she didn't know about the double life her little girl was leading.

The school would call to say Cathi was late or absent, or that she had talked back again to a teacher or gotten into another fight. One afternoon when Cathi walked in the house, Cara noticed she had an odd, musty smell. She figured it was prepubescent hormones and poor hygiene. She didn't know that when she left for her night-shift job, Cathi was slipping out of the house.

Even when Cathi developed a vaginal infection normally found only in adults,

Cara accepted the doctor's explanation that it was probably caused by Cathi wiping herself carelessly after bowel movements.

"I never suspected anything," Cara would say years later. "The doctors kept telling me she was too young, that she couldn't be having sex. But nobody's too young for nothin.' " As Cathi headed toward middle school, she was spiraling out of control. School administrators were calling more often about her belligerent behavior, explosive temper and absences. She was staying out late, lying about where she had been, returning home tired but defiant. She always seemed to have a cigarette lighter in her pocket.

"It's like she was my kid, but she was a completely different person," Cara said.

One thing Cara knew for certain: Cathi's troubled friend, Dominique, was wrapped up in this somehow.

Dominique learned early that safety, if it exists at all, is something you had to create on your own. You couldn't count on anyone - not your friends or your neighbors, not your parents. Especially not your parents.

It's not that Dominique didn't want to believe that someone was looking out for her. But whatever remnant of trust she might have clutched in her little- girl hands disappeared forever on a late spring day when she was 8 years old.

It began on a Sunday morning when Tina Moore, Dominique's mother, received a call from her ex-con boyfriend. He was in the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General. No one was taking care of him, he complained, and begged Tina to come get him.

Carl was a violent, explosive drunk. Dominique feared him so intensely that she slept most nights at her grandparents' house in Visitacion Valley. Tina had filed a restraining order against him the previous week, but now she felt sorry for him. She always did. Carl's own mother and sister warned Tina against getting involved. But Tina fell for him anyway and had two baby daughters, Dominique's little sisters.

On that Sunday morning, Tina rationalized that a father should be with his children and fetched him from the hospital.

When Carl arrived at their dilapidated, rat-infested house in Lakeview, he began cleaning obsessively. For three days, he mopped the same floors over and over. He wiped down the windowsills, shooing away the rodents that gnawed on the rotted wood. He boarded up the back door with planks of wood. To keep out intruders, he said.

On Wednesday, three days after his return, Carl told Tina to go get Drano at the corner grocery store, two blocks away. When she asked why, he snapped at her to shut up and go.

As she left, Carl asked whether she was taking Brittany, their 6-month-old. Tina took Brittany everywhere. Eighteen-month-old Shelly had grown too big to carry easily, so she was often left in Carl's care.

But this time, Tina told him she would be out only a few minutes, so she was leaving both girls at home. Dominique was gone for the day in school.

Tina bought the Drano and headed home on foot. She didn't see the smoke right away. She noticed only her friend at the curb, pointing and shouting. Tina looked toward her house. Ribbons of smoke seeped from the front windows and doors. The can of Drano dropped from Tina's hand and rolled into the street. She bolted toward the house as the ribbons turned to billows.

Tina rushed for the front door. Locked. She heard screaming and turned to the front window. Through the security bars, she saw Shelly screaming, her hands pounding at the glass.

Tina yanked at the iron bars. Her friend punched her fist through the window and reached for the little girl.

Suddenly Carl appeared, looming behind Shelly like a ghost. Without a word, he lifted the crying, thrashing toddler and retreated into the fire.

Tina screamed and pulled wildly at the bars.

Sirens.

Fire trucks.

Hands pulling her away.

The three charred bodies were found in the bedroom the two little girls shared. Brittany was in her baby swing. The fire, investigators later concluded, had been started in a pile of baby clothes on the floor beneath her.

Across town, Dominique returned to her grandparents' house from school to find her mother crying hysterically in a back bedroom. Her two sisters were dead. All her own toys and furniture and clothes had been destroyed. Her grandparents didn't know what to say, so they said almost nothing. Her mother slept and cried for weeks, barely emerging from the bedroom, until one day she abruptly decided to take Dominique and move into an apartment.

The two would never have a substantive conversation about the tragedy. In the list of family members in the newspaper death notice, Tina forgot to include her one surviving daughter.

"It made me not care about nothin,' " Dominique would say later of the tragedy.

For years, she would flash on an image of her sister in the fire and imagine she knew exactly how she felt, a little girl banging on a locked window, screaming for someone to rescue her.

Cathi didn't know Dominique when the house burned down. But in some ways her fate was forged in the fire, too. Dominique's damaged psyche amplified and twisted Cathi's recklessness. Dominique manipulated and exploited, seeming to take perverse pleasure in it, as if dominating others brought some order to a dangerous world.

Dominique's aunt lived two doors down from Cathi in Visitacion Valley. The girls, a year apart in age, were drawn to each other right away. Two restless souls who craved the adrenaline of the streets.

Even so, they were unlikely friends. Dominique had no respect for females. She thought they were stupid and worthless. She hung out instead with the boys at the Sunnydale housing project, drinking and smoking weed and reveling in her position in the male inner circle.

Dominique saw in Cathi a girl who would do things for her. At the same time,

Cathi was feeling abandoned. She had reached puberty and her brother wouldn't sleep with her anymore out of fear she might get pregnant.

Cathi was 11 years old, a sixth-grader at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, when Dominique took her to a 20-year-old pimp named Zach. Still devastated by her brother's rejection, Cathi fell in love with Zach. He talked her into turning a trick one night. They'd be in business together, he said, a team. She could make good money. Turning tricks, he told Cathi, proved she really loved him.

Dominique helped Zach by encouraging Cathi, though Dominique herself thought prostitution was "just another form of hurtin' a female."

Cathi began prostituting in Oakland and in the Tenderloin, handing her earnings to Zach and returning home reeking of sex and sweat. To Cathi, the prostituting didn't feel like exploitation. It was exciting. All the guys wanted her. They knew she was still a baby.

Cara still couldn't imagine that her 11-year-old daughter was having sex, much less selling it, a denial reinforced by school counselors who chalked up the truancies and late nights to premature teenage rebellion. Sometimes Cara exploded when her daughter walked in dirty and glassy-eyed, and she'd whip her with a belt. Cathi would stiffen her muscles so the blows wouldn't hurt as much.

Cathi was 13 the first time she ran away. She left on her father's birthday,

holing up at first in the Oakland apartment of Dominique's 34-year-old brother. Zach was in jail awaiting trial on drug charges.

Cathi's father and uncle finally found her two months later on Mission Street, filthy and ragged, her hair uncombed and her clothes stained. They brought her home, but a few days later she took off again. She was gone for five more months. Her mother told counselors her daughter was like a wild animal that couldn't be caged.

Jim and Cara checked her into St. Mary's psychiatric hospital, where doctors prescribed medication to calm her. But nothing seemed to stop Cathi from bolting. "You can't imagine," Cara says, "why a child would be out on the streets and not come home."

One day, the San Francisco police picked Cathi up for shoplifting clothes at Marshalls and took her to the Youth Guidance Center. For Cara, it was actually a relief. Maybe, Cara thought, getting arrested was the best thing that could have happened. Maybe Cathi will get the help she needs. Cathi was only 13. Surely, Cara believed, her daughter was still young enough to be saved.

After the shoplifting arrest, Cathi spent a month at San Francisco's Youth Guidance Center. But what Cara had hoped would be a more promising track for her daughter turned into a revolving door of arrests and incarcerations. The worst was when Cathi disappeared the entire winter when she was just 14. She had left San Francisco with a pimp who put her to work in New York, Florida and Los Angeles. "I wanted to go nationwide with it," Cathi explained later, laughing at how ridiculous that sounds.

At age 16, Cathi has been in and out of YGC 11 times. She recites the charges as if they are stops on a long trip: "Second time, bench warrant. Third, gun charge. Fourth, assaulting a police officer. I kicked him. Five, hitting a police officer with his own gun. Six, bench warrant 'cause I went AWOL. Can't remember seven, eight and nine. Tenth, prostitution.

"Eleven, bench warrant. My ex-boyfriend kidnapped me on my way to work and raped me. I went to the police and they said, you have a missing-person warrant."

After more than two months in YGC this last time, Cathi was sent to a group home in Oakland called Potter House. It was a curious choice. Potter House has been criticized for its record in keeping girls from running away. Before the end of her second week, Cathi was gone. Soon afterward, Potter House was closed to girls.

Cathi headed to Los Angeles. She told her mother she was safer there. Not as many temptations. Not as many dangerous friends. She went to a public library in Los Angeles and researched obituaries until she found one of a 3- year-old who died in 1983. She then obtained a birth certificate, Social Security number and driver's license that said she was 21. She got a job as a file clerk in a law office through a friend.

But two months later, the phone rang in Cara's home. When she heard the voice, she sank into a kitchen chair. It was Cathi, calling collect from Los Angeles County Jail.

Cara heaved a sigh, a mix of frustration and exhaustion. Four years of this.

The arrests, the prostitution, the drugs, the running away, the danger and filth of the streets.

Cathi was crying into the phone, delivering a scattered account of what happened. She had been arrested four days earlier in a stolen car she said belonged to a boyfriend. For reasons that are still unclear, she gave police her 20-year-old sister's name, so instead of being taken to juvenile hall, she was stuck in adult jail, and for all her street swagger, she was crying and scared. She wanted her mother to get her out.

When Cara called Cathi's juvenile probation officer in San Francisco, she was surprised to learn he already knew her daughter had been arrested. He had not gotten around to arranging for Cathi's transfer back to YGC.

"Unfortunately, she's about 23rd of 28 priorities I have right now," he said matter-of-factly.

Cara couldn't find out the name of the public defender handling Cathi's case in Los Angeles. She couldn't hurry up the probation officer in San Francisco. She didn't know what else to do for Cathi. She hasn't known for a long time.

Cara felt like a "looney tune." Yet for all of the setbacks, something almost miraculous has been happening during her daughter's frequent stays in YGC. Cathi has begun to read.

At home, she is always moving, always out. Locked in her solitary room at juvenile hall, with no television or radio, she first consumed romance novels, adventure stories, murder mysteries, whatever dog-eared paperbacks lined the shelf above the boarded-up fireplace in the G-1 lounge. Now her mother brings her Toni Morrison novels and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and anthologies of poetry.

Cathi consumes whole books, sometimes two, in a single weekend.

During the day at YGC, when Cathi is allowed a pencil, she writes about her experiences and her feelings. She writes poetry. Girls ask her to write poems for their boyfriends' birthdays or their babies' christenings.

Often Cathi writes about life inside G-1. She composed a free verse poem about the ritual of lining up at the light switch in the lounge to keep order:

"Here I am at the light switch, just the same as I was yesterday, with the same clothes I had on yesterday, here with the same old rules as yesterday. Now I'm counting the tiles on the floor, just the same as I was yesterday. Now I'm counting them one by one, two by two, when suddenly somebody says, F- you, just the same as yesterday. It's the light switch drama, that's what I say."

In Cathi's journals, Cara has read about her daughter being gang-raped at the Sunnydale housing project. And another rape at the hands of a pimp who accosted her at a fast-food joint on Mission Street.

Then there was the entry about an unimaginable betrayal.

Cathi wrote about a friend who invited her to her house, then said she had to run to the store for a few minutes. But it was all a setup. When the friend left, the girl's half-brother showed up and raped Cathi, who was 15 at the time.

Afterward, Cathi wrote, she got a gun from a male friend, found the half- brother outside a liquor store in Hunters Point and shot him in the chest. He survived, Cathi says, though he spent two months in a coma. He didn't press charges.

It's hard to tell what is real and what Cathi wishes were real. Did she really shoot her rapist? Did she really shoot a man in Berkeley who was beating up her sister, as she also claims?

One thing was certain: Cathi struggled for a long time to understand why her friend had set her up to be raped.

Her friend Dominique.

While Cathi was in Los Angeles, Dominique was growing more frustrated in San Francisco's juvenile hall. She has been locked up for more than four months as her probation officer tries to figure out where she should go.

She rarely sees her 1-year-old daughter, Maya, who is being raised by Dominique's mother in a crumbling house in Visitacion Valley. Unlike in adult jails, juvenile halls have no set rules about baby visits. A girl can visit with her baby only if her probation officer takes the time to set it up and then sticks around to supervise it.

But Dominique's P.O. has come through for her, arranging for a visit in her office.

As Dominique returns to G-1 from her visit, Julie Posadas - the no-nonsense 31-year-old director of girls programming at YGC - is about to begin a group discussion about sex. Good sex. Abusive sex. Exploitive sex.

Already, in just a year, Posadas had come to understand how damaged the girls are by the time they arrive at juvenile hall. She once thought she would transform lives, save the world. Now she knows the most she can do sometimes is listen intently; hardly anybody else does. She celebrates the smallest victories: a girl who shows up for prenatal services or group counseling on the outside, a girl who admits out loud that she deserves to be safe in a relationship.

"People assume when girls commit crimes, they're acting like boys," Posadas says, arranging the classroom desks in a circle. "Girls are responding to the violence in their lives.

"They take drugs and they run because the pain is too much to sit with. It's too hard to be sober. I'm telling you, we need to flood the areas where these kids live with mental-health workers like they do after wars."

Most girls who end up in America's juvenile halls have been sexually abused.

Yet the system does little to address the connection between the abuse and the girls' criminal behavior. So Posadas, frustrated by the scarcity of mental- health services, is making a stab this afternoon at running a support group, though she is uncertain and nervous about how it will go. She has no therapeutic training.

As the girls settle into their chairs, Posadas is struck again by how simultaneously young and old they are. At one desk, Dominique sucks her thumb with her index finger hooked over her nose, a jarring sight given her reputation as a hardened, fearless street kid.

Posadas nods to the girl sitting closest to her. "Want to start the check- in?"

"I'm happy - I got a new boyfriend, y'all," the girl says, smiling.

Check-in is a ritual that begins all of Posadas' classes. Each girl shares how she is feeling.

The next girl shoots Posadas a dark look. "I frickin' pass," she says, then reconsiders. "I feel terrible and vicious."

When Posadas first began the check-in, the girls offered little more than "cool" and "bad." Unaccustomed to talking about their feelings, they didn't have the language to be specific. So Posadas printed up a list of adjectives that now passes from hand to hand as each girl takes her turn. "Cool" and "bad" are not allowed.

It's Dominique's turn. She keeps her thumb in her mouth. Her eyes are rimmed in red. She says nothing at first. Then: "I'm lonely in here."

Posadas poses a question: What is sexual pleasure? Between giggles and hoots, the girls talk about oral sex, snuggling, various positions. "I like rough stuff," one offers. "Scratches on the back. I got stuck in handcuffs once!"

The other girls howl with laughter, slapping their desks.

Michelle, a girl next to Dominique, doesn't laugh. She isn't saying anything. She has pulled the neck of her purple sweatshirt over her nose and mouth, wanting no part of the discussion. But the topic snaps Dominique alive. She pulls her thumb from her mouth.

"I love it when I feel his vibe when we hug. It goes right to my head," she coos.

Posadas asks about sexual exploitation, and Dominique pipes up again.

"My brother has stacks of videotapes of girls having sex with him," she says, still smiling. "I feel so bad for setting up these girls. I brought so many girls to him." When she finishes talking, she laughs, not registering the seriousness of her admission.

But it turns out she isn't alone. Stories spill out around the room, ugly stories about gang rapes and betrayals, told in incongruously bold, almost braggadocio, tones.

"When my sister was 13," one girl says, "a dude was videotaping her, getting a train run on her and showing it to everybody."

A train is a succession of boys or men who have sex, whether forcibly or consensually, with one girl.

Michelle suddenly pulls the sweatshirt off her mouth. "My brother ran a train on a girl and has it on video," she says. Instead of eliciting sympathy for the victimized girl, Michelle's remark triggers a flurry of loud, delighted speculation on the girl's identity and her reputation as a whore.

"So we laugh when girls get sexually exploited?" Posadas asks.

"I smile when I'm nervous," Dominique explains, "but for real I really do feel bad I'm hooking them up with my family."

Michelle tells about delivering an unsuspecting friend to her brother. "My brother said, I got a room, I got a room, hook me up with her. I'm tellin' you he's a rapist. The girl was only 12 years old."

Posadas looks at Michelle without shock or judgment. She asks Michelle whether she understood how she was contributing to the sexual exploitation of girls just like herself. "Yeah," Michelle replies evenly. "But I'd probably still do it if he asked."

Suddenly, across the room, a girl named Denyce leaps to her feet. Denyce has been quiet the entire class. Now her face is twisted with anger. Her eyes brim with tears.

"How could you do that? Why would you do that?" she barks at Michelle.

"I have that much love for him," Michelle says. "I'd do anything for him. I'm keepin' it real here with you. He'd do anything for me."

Denyce begins to shout. "You disrespect yourself as a woman. That's wrong. That's not your friend if you do that. I been raped. What you said is wrong. Dead mother-f- wrong. Don't even talk to me about it no more."

Denyce slaps the desk. Her mouth quivers as she forms the words, trying to control her voice.

"At some point you got to be a woman and feel where the next person is comin' from," she says. She begins to cry.

Then Michelle starts to cry as she shouts at Denyce. "We don't need your s-,

nigga. I'm sayin' I'm feelin' bad about what we done."

Now several other girls jump into the argument. Two more girls burst into tears. In the tangle of voices, Michelle's words are barely audible: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's my fault," she says, though it is unclear who she's addressing.

One of the girls wraps her arms around Michelle, but Michelle stands stiffly, her face contorted from crying, her hands balled into fists at her side.

Class is over. The girls have to return to their rooms for the night. Michelle looks as if she might be ill. Denyce's face is streaked with tears. A counselor who has listened to the heated discussion watches the girls slowly file from the classroom. "They're going to wake up with tension for breakfast, " she says.

Dominique, however, hums to herself as she ambles down the hall and into her room.

A few days later, Cathi arrives back at the hall, transported up from Los Angeles. She shuffles into the lounge one morning, her hair rumpled from sleep,

her mood dark. Because of planned construction, all the girls - the new arrivals and the veterans - are in a single unit. No pencils are allowed now, so Cathi hasn't been able to write. And the younger girls, mouthy and arrogant,

are getting on her nerves.

"I'm ready to flash on these punk-ass ho's," she snaps as she sits down. "Down here, you got girls tryin' to prove themselves to us."

She isn't speaking to Dominique. The two won't even look at each other. Cathi is asked what caused the falling out with Dominique.

"I don't know," she mumbles.

You had said you had been set up by a friend to be raped by her brother.

"Yeah."

You were 15.

"Yeah."

And it was Dominique who set you up?

"Yeah. I don't want to talk about that. It's just something I blocked out of my memory, and I don't want it back."

That's why you and Dominique had your falling-out.

"No, that just made me lose trust in her. But that's not the reason we fell out."

What could be worse than what she did to you?

"It was something else. After that."

So you forgave her for the rape?

"Not really. I didn't want to forgive her, but I mean, like they say, it's a healing process where I have to forgive to forget."

When was the real falling-out?

"This year."

Cathi explains that Dominique was living out of a car on Kirkwood Avenue with her boyfriend, a drug dealer and pimp. She was popping ecstasy and fighting with other girls and selling dope.

"To me that's just nonsense," Cathi says. "Dominique didn't even look like herself. It kind of hurt to see her like that. So I told Tina [Dominique's mother].

"At the same time, Dominique and her boyfriend are like, 'We want you to go on the ho stroll for us.' So I told Tina that, too. I told Tina that I heard Dominique was also on the ho stroll for her boyfriend, but I never believed it.

But I still told Tina just to inform her."

Tina exploded and called the cops. Tina told them Dominique had pulled a knife on her. Dominique was hauled back to juvenile hall. That was more than four months ago. Dominique was still there, waiting for her probation officer to figure out a placement, when Cathi returned to the unit from Los Angeles. Dominique wouldn't speak to her. They haven't spoken since.

"It hurt that she felt that way," Cathi says, "because whenever I was down, she was always there for me. She ain't never told my mom or nobody about what I was doing."

By the code of the street, Cathi, not Dominique, committed the greater betrayal.

Dominique is escorted with her hands cuffed behind her back into Court 30 on the first floor of YGC. She is led into a holding cell to wait until her case is called. Inside the cell is a bench and a toilet. A flap of cardboard, attached by duct tape, covers the door's small window.

While Dominique waits, her mother is throwing a fit in the hallway outside the courtroom. Tina has just been thrown out of Cathi's placement officer Dorothy Ellis' office for making a scene. Tina claims Ellis promised a visit for Dominique with her baby, and now she is reneging.

Tina is having a bad day. She has just gotten word that she has been suspended from Volume Services, the food vendor for 49ers games at Candlestick Park. She called in sick one too many times.

A court officer calls Dominique's case. Dominique stands at the "defendant's" table near Ellis. The girl's face lights up when she sees her mother and baby walk in. Just as she wraps her arms around little Maya, a court officer rushes over.

"Court is not an appropriate place for a family visit," he says. "You have to give the baby back."

Tina sits down with Maya on a long bench behind her daughter. She looks at the chair next to Dominique then looks up at the judge's desk. Dominique's lawyer hasn't shown up, so Ellis asks a public defender to sit in. Just boiler plate stuff, she tells him. And the judge isn't the usual one, Katherine Feinstein. It is a fill-in.

"Why is this young woman in juvenile hall?" the judge asks, flipping through papers.

"She was placed in a group home and went AWOL," Ellis answers.

Tina leaps to her feet. "She's never been in a group home!" she shouts.

Ellis has mixed up Dominique's case with another girl's, and since the public defender knows nothing about Dominique, he doesn't question Ellis' information. Ellis turns to Tina and apologizes.

"Jesus," Tina grumbles under her breath, settling back in her seat, "what are you talking about?"

The judge sets the disposition date for Oct. 19, two weeks away.

Tina raises her hand. "Can I say something please? Dominique has done more than five months here in juvenile and only seen her baby three or four times."

Ellis sighs. "She hasn't been waiting placement for five months. That's inaccurate. We'll work it out on the 19th."

But Tina won't let it go. "Mrs. Dorothy Ellis, are you going to give Dominique a baby visit? Dominique, ask her if you get a baby visit!"

"Ma'am," Ellis replies, "if you want to come to my office, you can."

With that, a guard handcuffs Dominique and escorts her through the back door of the courtroom and up to the unit. Tina bursts into tears. She reaches under Maya's stroller and pulls out a salami sandwich on a hard roll wrapped in foil. "I made it for Dominique for the baby visit," she says.

A week later, Dominique gets word that a close family friend has died suddenly. Dorothy Ellis is out sick with a sinus infection, so the officer of the day makes the decision to grant Dominique a pass to attend the funeral the following day.

She has been locked up for months. No drugs, no sex, no excitement. She thinks about Kirkwood Avenue, where she had been when the police hauled her off to juvenile hall. Her mother had told officers her daughter was selling dope and getting high on ecstasy.

"Coke is my drug of choice," Dominique says, sitting at a table in the G-1 lounge, itching for morning, when her mother would pick her up for the funeral.

"But don't nobody know that. When I did coke, my mind went black. I didn't care about nothin.' "

Kirkwood was the setting for her bloodiest fights. "If I was scared of a girl, me and that girl gonna have to fight. Just 'cause I'm scared of her and I got to see, Can I win? I got to see."

Now, she says, nothing scares her. Not even death. Not anymore.

"About two years ago, everybody started dying. Everybody's been coming up dead. Friends. Family. Mostly shootings. I felt like I can't be scared to die 'cause it's gonna come. It's just gotta come. It's normal."

The next morning, Tina picks up her daughter at YGC at 8 a.m. When the family and friends of the deceased arrive at the Neighborhood Baptist Church on Hayes Street at 3 p.m., Dominique isn't among them.

Tina says she lost track of Dominique at the cemetery.

Dominique is already on Kirkwood Avenue, bouncing down the sidewalk in a tight, beige leather suit and black heels. She is transformed from the girl she had been at juvenile hall the day before. She is energetic, happy, flirtatious. She stops at the front steps of a dilapidated house and pulls out a cell phone. As she chats, a thin bedraggled man on the steps next to her smokes a joint. On the street, other men sit on the hoods of cars, watching her.

"I'm dyin' to see you!" she shouts into the phone to her boyfriend.

She heads back up Kirkwood toward Third Street, talking and laughing on her cell phone. The men's eyes follow the bouncing leather suit until it disappears around the corner.

Back at YGC, Dan Hicks, the placement supervisor, says he knows there is a risk in giving a girl like Dominique a day pass, especially one that allows her to stay out until 9 p.m. But, he says, YGC wants "to be sensitive to how different families put on funerals."

Dorothy Ellis had said just a week earlier that Dominique had shown no sign she was prepared to keep herself safe and out of trouble on the street. Yet YGC let her out for 11 hours without a chaperone.

Dominique, of course, knows there is no significant penalty for not returning. Hicks admits as much. "She'd get a good chewing out, and so would her mother," he says.

Dominique stays out all night and stops by her mother's house the next morning to see Maya and change her clothes. Neither the police nor the probation officers go looking for her. They say she will be picked up again when she screws up. They'll deal with her then.

"She made a choice and she'll take the consequences," Tina says. "I couldn't get her back there myself. I was grieving. I had made all the funeral arrangements. I was tired as hell, too tired to keep up with Dominique.

"I've been a good mother," she says, dropping crackers onto the table of Maya's high chair. "I don't deserve this. I spoiled the hell out of that girl all her life."

A month later, Dominique's lawyer, George Lazurus, hasn't heard from her. He isn't surprised she bolted.

"She was placed [at YGC] to be helped, and instead she was put on ice for five months because they couldn't find the right placement," he says. "If you're locked up at YGC for that long, you lose any faith you might have had in the system."

Back at YGC, Cathi celebrates her 17th birthday at a picnic table by the chapel. Her parents bring pizza, chips, soda, a carrot cake and ice cream, which they share with Cathi's probation officer, Kwanza Morton.

Morton had gotten Cathi into the chapel's choir and now, in front of her parents, is telling Cathi - again - she is much too intelligent to live the kind of life she is living. She could be a writer. She could go to college. She is smart enough to be anything she wishes.

Cathi beams. She has grown accustomed to people marveling about her potential, and she never tires of it. She needs the boost today. She is depressed about being back at YGC. She hates most of the other girls. She hates the mind-dulling routine. In a few days she is scheduled to enter a drug rehab facility in San Mateo. If she finishes the program, her father has promised to set her up in an apartment of her own.

He lives in a rooming house, surviving on his salary as a janitor at a San Francisco recreation center. He keeps his money not in a bank but behind the crisper in his refrigerator - he trusts neither the banks nor his beloved daughter, who has broken into his room several times and made off with his cash.

Cathi assures him those days are over. This time will be different.

A few days later, Cathi is waiting in the G-1 lounge for her parents to arrive. If they don't come by 5:30 p.m., she won't see or talk to them for 30 days. She is going to rehab center tomorrow, and residents are barred from all outside contact for the first month.

Cathi says she knows how deeply she has hurt her parents, especially her mother. In her early teens, after her parents divorced, Cathi thought her mother didn't like her, and the feeling was mutual.

"I was busy trying to get all this materialistic s- that my dad was giving me, and my mom was givin' me nothin,' " she says, glancing at the clock on the back wall. In 30 minutes, her parents will be too late.

"But now I understand that the reason I had a roof over my head was because of her. The reason I had clothes on my back was because of her. She never bought the excess clothes, the excess jewelry, the $100 tennis shoes. She got me what I needed, not what I wanted.

"My mother had been there for me 100 percent. Through everything. From the time I ran away she was there. No matter where I was, she always visited me faithfully. She was there for me.

"It took me a while to realize what I was doing. I know my problem is that I'm afraid. Basically, I'm afraid. I ain't gonna say I'm afraid of commitment. I don't know. It's like I'm always running from my problems. Every time something comes my way, I always find myself running from it to avoid it 'cause I don't know what the outcome will be. And I don't want to know the outcome because I'm afraid of it."

She falls silent, watching the clock, tapping her fingers on the metal table.

"I'm not going to run this time because of my family. I know I've been selfish, thinking about my own needs all the time. My mother and father are getting way too old. I want them to say, 'My daughter, she came home.' "

The door to G-1 opens and Cathi's parents appear.

"My mommy! My daddy!" Cathi shrieks, rushing to them.

Cathi runs from the rehab facility before the week is up.By early December, two months later, she's back home. YGC has run out of ideas. So they set her up at school and give her a curfew. For nearly a month, she sticks more or less to the schedule, attending classes at a small school in the Walgreens Plaza on Third Street.

On Christmas Day, Cara gives her daughter a leather jacket, boots, a purse and money. Cathi's father gives her more money. Even so, when Cathi returns from shopping with her Christmas money, she seems to have more new clothes than the money would buy.

As New Year's Eve approaches, Cathi's probation officer reminds her she can't stay out past 9 p.m., the curfew on holidays.

At 1:34 in the morning, the phone awakens Cara, who had fallen into a fitful sleep, wondering where her daughter was. It is Cathi, calling from Richmond. Someone in another car fired four shots into the car in which she was riding with her boyfriend and two friends. One bullet grazed her friend's cheek. Another hit her boyfriend in the side of his buttocks. Her boyfriend is in the hospital, and she is keeping him company. She says someone will drive her home later.

But she doesn't return for two days. When she does, she steals her mother's DVD player, DVDs, a cross pendant, a watch, a heart-shaped necklace with diamonds, diamond earrings and gold earrings.

Cara discovered the items missing when she returned home from work.

"She hurt me so bad," Cara says. "She stole from me. I do for her and do for her. I think she took the DVD player so the guy in the hospital can watch. If I'da seen her yesterday, I'd have halfway tried to kill her."

Cara is in her cheery kitchen, sitting at her small round table. Her eyes fall, as they often do when speaking of her youngest child, on the three large picture frames on the wall by the phone. The frames, one for each of her children, have 13 slots for every school photo from kindergarten through high school. In Cathi's frame, the photos stop in seventh grade.

Epilogue

Dominique, now 19, had her second baby in the spring. She has already landed in county jail on drug charges, which were later dropped. Her mother's phone number has been disconnected. Her former caseworker at YGC doesn't know where she is.

Last April, Cathi solicited an undercover officer for sex in the Mission District. Though she had already turned 18, the juvenile court decided to keep jurisdiction (which they can until age 21) and incarcerated her for a month in YGC. She was released to her mother with a monitor bracelet on her ankle.

She pried it off a few days later to attend the prom at Downtown High. She wore a black strapless dress with rhinestones down the sides. The next morning,

she snapped the ankle monitor back on. But when her friend Anthony told her he was driving to Las Vegas, Cathi decided to go along, taking the bracelet off somewhere on Interstate 5.

A month later, she took a bus back to San Francisco.

"Everything just changed around," she says now. "I think by then I really wanted to settle down. I was tired."

She enrolled at John Adams continuation school to work toward her GED. There she met Donnell. He wasn't a pimp or a john. He was a guy who lived in the Potrero Hill projects and thought she was pretty and smart.

For her birthday in October, he rented her a Ford Explorer, though she never had a driver's license. The police stopped her for running a stop sign on Fillmore Street. She ended up in county jail, then was sent back to juvenile court. The district attorney's office dismissed all the charges, based on her months of attending John Adams regularly. She expects to earn her GED this summer, then enroll at City College to become a radiology assistant.

On Valentine's Day, Donnell took her to Baker Beach and made a campfire. He brought her a rose and a teddy bear. "No one has ever done that for me before, " she says.

Cathi had a baby in late June. She doesn't plan on marrying Donnell any time soon. They're not ready, she says. She'll raise the child for now in her mother's house. She isn't worried that, growing up in the same environment, her child will end up like she did.

"It never was the environment that led to the way I was," she says. "It was me and certain people around me."