Lullabies for Little Criminals

One day, Baby runs into Alphonse; it’s the first time she’s seen him since she’s been back from the detention center. He tells her that she belongs to him, and she likes it because she “wanted desperately to belong to someone” (207). She and Alphonse go to an arcade and then back to his house. He makes her spaghetti, and they lay down together. He puts his hand in her shirt, and “I thought he was going to be freaked at how small my breasts were. They hadn’t even started to grow yet” (209). He says that she’s pretty, and they have sex.

Jules gets a letter that they’re going to be evicted soon if they don’t pay rent. Baby suddenly realizes how bad things are for Jules, and how erratic his behavior has been: he’s been spending most nights in the bathtub and hoarding valueless things he finds on the streets. She hadn’t realized these things because they’d been so distant from one another.

Baby and Alphonse keep sleeping together. One day he gets mad that she doesn’t seem enthused when she has sex with him. The only way she can feel excited is to “think about dirty ugly things […] I thought about being raped in an alley. That made me come” (213), but it also makes her feel guilty afterwards.

Baby is with Jules every day, and Jules doesn’t notice because he’s fallen into his own solitary depression. Leelee tells her that she and Alphonse used to be closer, and that she’s resentful of Baby because Baby is now his favorite. Baby used to be enamored of Leelee, but now Baby thinks Leelee is pathetic.

Alphonse tells Baby that she needs to start making money soon. One day, she’s walking home from school and he grabs her by the hand. He tells her to get into a car because someone wants to give her a ride home. She thinks that maybe the driver will actually take her home, but then he pulls into a parking lot and tells her that he wants to have sex with her for one hundred dollars. She says no, but they end up having sex anyways. She goes home feeling emotionless. Normally she’s scared of the dark, but tonight she feels like the dark isn’t as awful as reality. 

The second man she has sex with for money takes her to a hotel room. She hides under the sheet, not wanting to have sex with him, but he rubs himself on top of her anyway. When she tells him that she’s thirteen, he begins to cry: “He begged me to come home and live with him. He said that he had been in a group home when he was little and knew what I must be going through” (224).

When Baby goes home that night, she finds Jules’s drug paraphernalia on the kitchen table and realizes that he’s using again. Alphonse continues to pimp her out, and she gives him all the money she makes.

Baby resents being in the remedial classes at school. The teachers notice that she’s excelling far beyond anyone else in the program, and they put her in normal classes. She quickly becomes friends with a boy named Xavier, and they develop crushes on each other. They spend a lot of time together after school, and one day she’s late to meet Alphonse for a movie. He’s mad at her, and she wishes that she didn’t have to see him again. When she goes home, Jules and a strange man are high on the park bench, and she realizes there’s no way he can help her.

Baby is thriving in the gifted classes at school, and it gives her a way to keep her mind off things. One day after school she and Xavier hold hands, and she considers him her first boyfriend, despite all that she’d been through with older men. After this, instead of going to Alphonse’s after school like he wants her to, she spends time with Xavier. However, Alphonse still manages to pimp her out whenever he finds her.

Xavier walks her home one day and meets Jules for the first time. Jules is polite, and Baby is happy that she can keep the illusion of being from a normal family. She goes to Xavier’s house for the first time, and he locks them in his room. He lies down beside her on his bed and asks her to be his girlfriend. She says yes, and they lay in bed together kissing. She feels thankful to just lie beside him without having sex.

Baby goes to Xavier’s house again, and they play with his cats. For once, she feels happy, and “didn’t even mind being motherless. I didn’t mind being a child” (254). She’s been avoiding Alphonse, but when she comes home that day she finds a puzzle piece in her mailbox from him. She wishes she never has to see him again.

She’s walking home from school one day when Alphonse grabs her and pulls her into his car. He takes her back to his apartment, where he’s spray painted “I love Baby” on the lobby wall (255). At first she’s repulsed to be at his apartment, but then he gives her a butterfly knife as a gift and she’s grateful. She chalks it up to being “a very shallow person” (256). He asks her if she’s seeing anyone, and she lies. She decides that if her own dad has no rule over her, then Alphonse also has no right over her life.

She keeps seeing Xavier. One day, they’re saying goodbye to each other. Normally, they always kiss goodbye, but today she notices that Alphonse is staring at her from across the street. She can’t say no to Xavier’s pleadings for a kiss, so she kisses him quickly and then runs across the street. Alphonse brings her back to his apartment and yells at her, but she makes up a lie that she’s forced to hang out with Xavier. Then she leaves.

On another day, she and Xavier are riding a tandem bike, and she’s feeling brave; she rides the bike past Alphonse so that he can see she and Xavier together. She flips him off as they pass.

One night, Baby takes a car ride with Zoe and some other people from school. Everyone wants her to date Greg, the guy she’s sitting beside in the backseat. Suddenly, Baby gets out of the car and feels like she’s having an identity crisis: “I used to love riding around with kids, and now it didn’t do anything for me. That was pretty confusing. I just wanted to be a good kid” (270). She tries to go back home, but Jules has locked her out.

Baby has resolved to never see Alphonse again, but she realizes that she has nowhere else to go now that she’s been locked out of her apartment. She goes to his place, and he’s high. She acts erratically, jumping around his house and joking around as if nothing had happened between them, and he locks her in a closet, like a timeout, until she calms down. He finally lets her out, and while he’s cooking food for them she sneaks out.

She goes to Xavier’s house and asks if she can stay with him. He wants her to, but his parents come out and take him back inside. Xavier yells, “Baby, I love you” (282) as he’s being carried inside by his father. Feeling desperately alone, she heads back to Alphonse’s and sees him in a park. At first he’s mad that she left without telling him, but he quickly calms down and takes her back to his apartment. Once inside, he says, “You’ve never done heroin, have you?” (285).