This is M's fifth Christmas locked up in kid jail. She was telling me about speaking Creole and how I can find a husband in south Florida and how her Mom fills up trailers with stuff from Good Will and goes to Haiti every year but this year her Dad is locked up in Jamaica and there was supposed to be a money order for $800 somewhere in the house but no one can find it. She also mentioned that despite my constant encouragement she will not become a social worker. "I was looking at you earlier, when you were talking to that girl? And I was thinking 'Why the hell does she work here?"

Right around the time M. was watching me and thinking that, I was sitting with Negative Attention Seeking Shanae and coloring; or rather, I'm coloring, she's making a huge deal out of ignoring me, loudly announcing that I'm on drugs, and demanding that security separate us. I'm just waiting it out--she'll come around eventually and color out of boredom and the shiny allure of markers. Couple seconds later she was clutching a plastic bottle of lotion and telling me to "duck, because I'm about to do something" and I was sort of laughing, saying I'm not going to duck because she doesn't need to throw any lotion at anyone when WHAP she smashes the bottle down on the table and it shatters and there are globs of lotion and shards of thin plastic all over her, the table, and the floor. And so I calmly picked out the shards of plastic and made a joke about wasting all this good lotion while I'm ashy. "Why you picking up all the plastic, you think I'm going to cut myself?" says the girl with jagged scars all over her arms, who tried to kill herself just weeks ago, who has a life story so devoid of warmth that when she acts crazy I just want to congratulate her for not eating humans. "Well, you know me, always worried about cutting" I said affably. Because it's true. These girls will cut themselves with anything.

The key moments for me are that I actually felt affable--that exploded lotion and unheralded aggression can just pass right through me carrying whatever messed up message they were supposed to send and move right on by. That just as I was thinking "Man, I love this job" M is asking what exactly is wrong with me; and also, that I can have tiny moments when if you stay calm and soothing then suddenly everyone is calm and soothing and we're wiping up lotion and making jokes about my scaly elbows.