Free Bad Girls by M. William Phelps Page B

years with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, and have zero tolerance.”
    Jen’s uncle and aunt packed her things and called Jerry. “Come and get her. She’ll be waiting outside the front gate.”
    They weren’t about to allow Jen to explain her way out of this one. No way. Rules were rules. She had broken one of the central tenets of the house. It was as if she had spit in her aunt and uncle’s faces.
    “She took the home we gave her and flushed it down the toilet,” her uncle continued. “Not to mention putting us at risk. A very fine thank-you, indeed.”
    Jen brought hard-core drugs into her aunt and uncle’s house. A big, huge no-no. So Jen moved into a motel room that her dad, Jerry, was renting in Mineral Wells. Jerry had been booted from an apartment weeks back for not keeping up with the rent. Jen and Jerry and Audrey stayed in the motel for a few more months; then Jerry found an opening at Spanish Trace and moved in. Jen went to Santo for a quick spell, but she moved back to Mineral Wells with Audrey and Jerry.
    So here she was now, sitting on that back stoop of the Spanish Trace Apartments, shaking her head, exhaling cigarette smoke, thinking about the mistakes she’d made, pondering the people she’d let down, the family members she loved, and all of the missed opportunities. She considered the way she had tossed the good things in her life aside for a pipe, took the easy road, and had nothing left.
    I had everything going really good for me and I started on that shit again, Jen wrote. This is where I always [screw] up.
    It was as if Jen never gave herself the chance to be good; somehow she’d always manage to sabotage her life.
    There were trees facing the back of the Spanish Trace Apartments. Jen could see them from where she sat on the stoop. According to one version of her story she later told, Jen found herself lost in thought, gazing into those woods, wondering what life had in store next.
    Everything my heart desired, she wrote, talking about her time with her aunt and uncle. Car . . . cell . . . I had a boyfriend. . . . Life was great.
    Stubbing out her cigarette, Jen stood.
    [My boyfriend] broke up with me. . . . I am going to Fort Worth in the morning.
    Audrey was supposed to show up at Spanish Trace that morning. She had taken off for a few days. She’d called Jen the night before and told her she’d be by. After speaking with her, Jen sat down and wrote how she was looking forward to seeing her sister, but hoped Audrey arrived without her “dike [sic] girlfriend.”
    The dyke Jennifer referred to was Bobbi Jo Smith. And wouldn’t you know, just as Jen flicked her cigarette butt, turned to open the door and go back inside, Audrey pulled up, in fact, with Bobbi Jo.
    Great, Jen thought.
    Audrey needed to pick up a few things. She had been basically living with Bobbi Jo, who was staying with an older guy, Bob Dow, at his mother’s house not far away. It was one party after another at Bob Dow’s mother’s place, Audrey told Jen. Bobbi had a mattress on the floor in the living room she sometimes slept on, but she also slept in Bob’s room, which had two beds. Bob’s mother lived in a room by herself, and he supposedly took care of her. “But [Bob] more or less just collected her checks and tossed her a McDonald’s hamburger and some water every few days,” one girl who frequented the house later told me. Bob had a trailer he lived in on the edge of town; he used his mother’s house for sex and drug parties with women and young girls. Bob liked to film and take photographs of the girls who came over to the house. If a female walked into that party house, in other words, she was essentially signing up to be filmed. Most of the girls knew this.
    “Every time I showed up,” said one woman, who had gone over there quite often, “it seemed like Bob had a camera hanging from around his neck.”
    Before stepping into the apartment, Jen saw that Bobbi Jo was sitting next to