Free Bad Girls by M. William Phelps Page A

leave behind. On this path, she could numb any pain she felt with drugs, sex, crime, and a crowd of kids just like her to cheer her on. As soon as Jen found someone she could relate to on an intimate, personal level of emotion, she jumped at the chance to prove herself to that person. Despite an earlier promise she made to herself not to be like her mother, life for Jen now was about chaos and not feeling comfortable within a stable environment. Jen felt good when there was a storm brewing or happening. Stability had never been what she was used to. Being bad made her comfortable.
     
     
    After a time of moving around from place to place, getting kicked out of her aunt and uncle’s, moving back in, getting kicked out again, Jennifer Jones found herself living with her father, Jerry. It was March 2004. She was eighteen and now living at the Spanish Trace Apartments on Second Street in Mineral Wells. Meth and the dopers who sought it out surrounded Jen. (“They would make that stuff and ship it by truckload from Mexico into Mineral Wells and other Texas communities,” one law enforcement official told me.)
    Spanish Trace is a two-story, post–WWII tenement showing its age. It’s located on a U-shaped street off Second Street, with apartment buildings on each side. Residents were known to hang out in back and around the building when the weather cooperated. It seemed to Jen that when she looked around, there were scores of kids her age feeling the same way: aimless, directionless, looking for the next big gig, the next party, the next good time.
    On March 25, 2004, sometime in the afternoon (according to one version of this event Jennifer would later tell), she stood in the kitchen of her father’s Spanish Trace apartment, staring out the screen door. It was one of those warm spring days in Texas: nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the sun burning down, drying out the dirt patches of dead yellowed grass. The parking lot was full of vehicles just about ready to cough one last time and be put up on blocks. Jennifer was bored. A job she’d just quit at the Chicken Express turned out to be just one more negative in a life that did not measure up. Each failure seemed to feed the next. Jennifer was vulnerable and weak. A “poor me” syndrome had settled on her. She had quit school and ended up at Chicken Express. And she couldn’t even make that work!
    Dressed in her pajamas, Jen lit a cigarette and sat on the back steps of the apartment. (Again, this is her version—which no one else involved later agreed with.) She stared off into the distance and thought about things. This run of bad luck and disappointment had to come to an end at some point. She was sure of it. Things could not be this bad for this long. Jen knew she had created the latest mess (same as most of the others), but it did not make it any easier to swallow. She’d even written about it in her journal the previous night, noting, I [screwed] up again, like always. She sometimes liked to start out an entry by blaming herself and pouring on the self-pity, which allowed an escape clause to feel good about what came next: getting high. Here we go again. Screw it. Life sucks. It’s too damn hard. Fire up the pipe.
    One of the major regrets Jen had was totally letting her aunt and uncle down just recently. Late the previous year, Jen had been living in their house again with Stephanie. It was near the time they had been busy designing and building that new property. Things were going along well. Jen had hit a hot streak. She felt loved and needed. Alive. A productive member of society. There was someone in her life to answer to. Her aunt or uncle would not let Jen get away with things. Jen welcomed the limitations put on her.
    “And then they found a pipe she was using to smoke dope, which Jen had made out of a lightbulb,” Audrey explained.
    “We found drug paraphernalia in Jennifer’s room in our trailer,” Jen’s uncle corroborated. “I spent five and a half