Ariel and the Silver Car
March 11, 2007

By BROOKE HAUSER

THE keys were in the car door. That much Ariel Guadalupe remembers telling the police on the September day in 2004 when she was nabbed for stealing a 1999 silver Ford Crown Victoria in Queens. She was 14.

More than two years later, the rest of the episode is mostly a blur. During a Christmastime visit to the cozy Queens Village home of her grandmother Ada Guadalupe, Ariel, now 16, had trouble recalling the model or even the color of the vehicle. Between spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup at her grandmother's dining table, she described the car simply as ''suitable.''

It had been suitable enough for the livery-car driver who owned it. For Ariel, a foster child turned runaway, it soon proved suitable enough for sleeping. A few days after the theft, she was nodding off in the back seat around midnight when the police spotted her 18-year-old boyfriend parking the car near Commonwealth Boulevard in Bellerose. The couple had just seen the shoot-'em-up ''Bad Boys II,'' starring Will Smith as a Miami detective.

''I had a huge headache, so I was in the back relaxing,'' Ariel said as she sat at her grandmother's table, looking sweet and tough as taffy in an oversize Sean Jean shirt, fatigue-style pajama pants and fluffy pink slippers. ''They didn't even know I was in the car until they flashed the light. Then they were like, 'Oh, there's a girl in the back.' They read me my rights and handcuffed me.''

If Ariel had committed the same act 15 years ago, the chances are better that the police would have directed the brunt of their questions at her boyfriend. That approach has changed. According to a study last year by the Citizens' Committee for Children, girls no longer appear to be getting the free ride in the city's juvenile justice system that they once did.

In 2005, girls like Ariel accounted for 20 percent of all youths entering the city's detention centers, compared with just 11.3 percent in 1990. With this rise -- to a total of 1,037 girls in 2005 -- has come a jump in the number of girls dispatched from detention centers to longer-term juvenile facilities, like the Lansing Residential Center, an institution near Ithaca where Ariel spent 18 months.

Experts attribute the increase to a variety of factors, including quality-of-life crackdowns, zero-tolerance policies in schools and bad-girl images in the media. While some people suggest that female delinquency is on the rise, most experts say it is simply that such behavior is finally getting noticed.

''The assumption in the old days was, especially if girls committed masculine-type offenses, that they really couldn't have done these things -- so we kind of let them go,'' said Meda Chesney-Lind, a co-author of ''Girls, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice'' (Wadsworth Publishing, 2003) and a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. ''We didn't ever build the juvenile justice system for girls.''

As more and more Ariels are swept into the system, concerns are growing about its ability to address their needs. Ariel is herself struggling back; having been released from Lansing in July, she now lives and attends classes at an after-care program in Pleasantville, N.Y., about an hour north of the city, and spends weekends at her grandmother's house.

She says she hopes to resume a normal life soon. But she is shadowed by the fact that troubled teenagers are typically walking contradictions, vulnerable but tough, young but old.

During her Christmastime visit to her grandmother, on the way to buy a quart of milk, Ariel walked with a swagger that, after a lifetime of fights, has become as much a part of who she is as her full lips and her almond-shaped eyes. But roll back the sleeves of her black North Face jacket and you'll see a constellation of cuts and burns, left there by staples, erasers and anything else she could get her hands on while locked up.

''T-A-Z,'' she said, reading the letters spelled out in scar tissue on her left wrist. ''That's what they called me because of the cartoon character'' -- the Tasmanian Devil. ''You know when it starts wildin' out of control? That's what I used to do.''

Disney and Cinnamon Buns

It's not just the Tasmanian Devil. Ariel's life is populated by Looney Tunes and Disney characters, some of which take on a sinister shape in the shadows between girl world and real world. There's Scamp, the scruffy pup from ''Lady and the Tramp,'' whose outline Ariel got tattooed on her hip when she was 13, the year she became a stripper in the Bronx. There's the Mickey Mouse doll (''my little Boo'') that sits on her bedpost. And, of course, her name.

''My mother was in the hospital, and she saw 'The Little Mermaid' while she was giving birth to me,'' Ariel said one wintry afternoon as she sat at her grandmother's table and leafed through the pages of her powder-blue photo album. ''My father told me the story.''

In the photos, most of which have been labeled and dated in a neat hand, Ariel looks like the most indulged child in the world. On page after page, she is smiling, pudgy and pigtailed. In her early years, when she was living in various neighborhoods around the city, pictures were taken for every occasion: first Christmas, first graduation, first Little League photo op.

But many landmark events in her life were never captured by the camera. By the time she celebrated her second birthday, complete with a banner and a Little Mermaid pi–ata, Ariel no longer lived with her parents. She had been placed in foster care with Ada, who is her father's mother.

The reason for the transfer was Ariel's mother, Dorylice Guadalupe. By all accounts, Dorylice loved Ariel and her brother, Junior, who is four years younger, but she had serious mental health problems that no one in the family quite understood at the time. According to documents submitted to Queens Family Court, the mother repeatedly took Ariel to the hospital to be treated for diarrhea, vomiting and sleep apnea.

It turned out that the mother suffered from the disorder Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a caregiver tries to gain sympathy by inducing illness, often in a child. Ariel's symptoms disappeared as soon as she began living with her grandmother.

''It was hard for her the first couple years -- she would ask a lot, why is she staying there?'' recalled her father, Heriberto, who worked as an interstate truck driver for much of her childhood. ''Eventually, Grandma did a good job of making her forget: buying her things and taking her places and making life pleasurable.'' Indulgences included a pair of pink-and-white Jordans that Ariel had when she was younger, and a plentiful supply of the sticky sweet cinnamon buns that she loves.

On weekends and after school, Ariel would visit her mother, a beautiful redhead who had a soft spot for animals, high fashion and Disney movies -- interests that sometimes collided, as in the case of Ariel's first pet, a cocker spaniel named Pucci. But the two never had the chance to forge a normal mother-daughter relationship. Sometime after Ariel's removal from her parents' home, the mother contracted H.I.V. and developed cancer.

Dying Mother, Raging Child

As her mother weakened, Ariel toughened. She went from being a fifth grader who ironed all her clothes until they were ''crispy'' to a bully who, on the days when she wasn't cutting class at Public School 33 in Queens Village, picked fights with both boys and girls. Though she started falling behind in school, on the street Ariel quickly graduated to being the girlfriend of the young man who would be her partner in car theft.

Around that time, she started figuring out that she could abandon her mother before the mother abandoned her.

''I had to be forced to go see my mother because I thought of it as wasting my time,'' Ariel said as she sat at her grandmother's, picking at her long, red- and black-tipped fingernails. ''I remember this one time I went, I wanted to leave. This was when she was sick, so she was skinny. She tried to block the door, and I was standing in front of her telling her to move. She said 'No,' and everything went black.

''The next thing I knew, I had her on the wall and I was choking her. It scared me. I let her go real fast when I noticed I was doing that.''

Despite their problems and her own illness, the mother never gave up fighting for custody of her children. She became a fixture at Queens Family Court. ''She started using a cane; then she ended up in a wheelchair,'' said Lisa Tuntigian, a Legal Aid lawyer who has worked with Ariel for about five years. ''She had oxygen tanks. She was using the Access-a-Ride. But unless she was in the hospital, she was in court.''

Ariel, however, was already growing distant. As a smart and strong-willed 12-year-old who had learned how to work the foster-care system, she was now old enough to decide whether she wanted to go home with her mother, or terminate those visits altogether. In the months before her mother's death, at age 33, she did both. She also began to strike out on her own.

Gangsta Girl

On June 1, 2003, Ariel went AWOL from her grandmother's home. Thus began a dizzying, yearlong pattern of disappearing, resurfacing just long enough to be placed in foster care, then disappearing again.

''I was just hanging out, trying to be grown,'' Ariel said on a recent walk down the quiet, tree-lined blocks near her grandmother's house, pointing out a stretch of pavement where she used to play tag, and a pizza parlor that was frequented by members of the Crips gang. ''I went around here, to the park. I slept at my boyfriend's house.''

After a brief stint at a girls' home in the Bronx neighborhood of Gun Hill that ended, according to Ariel, when another girl threatened her with a switchblade, she started going home with people she met on the street. ''I would tell them my situation, and they would say, you know, 'I'll help you out.' Guys, girls. I stayed there until I felt like they wanted something from me. When it got like that, that's when I left and found another one, and another one.''

Ariel casts herself as a tough gangsta girl -- she was at one point a member of the Latin Kings gang -- who smoked marijuana and drank a lot of liquor, just like the guys. To make money, she worked as a stripper. As she tells it, she had a knack for adapting to, and escaping from, bad situations. An older boyfriend abused her, she said, but she left him after he slammed her head against a doorknob.

There is one subject, however, that she is reluctant to discuss. In early 2004, half a year after her mother died, Ariel was hospitalized for what was diagnosed as ''suicidal ideations.'' The behavior that led to the diagnosis had occurred when she was living at an aunt's house in East New York, Brooklyn. One February day when she was home alone, Ariel took a kitchen knife to her heart. Little by little, she said, she applied pressure to the blade until it pierced her skin.

''Then I got, like, scared, and I froze,'' she said. ''I was right in front of the couch, so I just sat down. I couldn't speak about it. It was kind of an embarrassment.''

The event marked a critical juncture in her life. When her aunt got home, Ariel handed her a journal of poems she had written about death and, as she put it, ''how I didn't want to be here, I wanted to be with my mother.''

Over the next several months, Ariel was twice admitted to hospitals for brief periods. That September, the incident with the stolen car occurred. After what social service agency records detail as seven placements, two hospitalizations and five AWOLs, Ariel was ready to trade in her running shoes for a set of wheels.

Yoga, and Cheddar Cheese

For a few weeks after the theft, Ariel stayed in three city juvenile detention centers, the start of a period of strict schedules and institutional food. She played spades, adopted a nickname (Kid Sin), was christened with another (Taz) and had plenty of fights, sometimes just because someone looked at her the wrong way.

Soon Ariel was at Lansing, the upstate center run by the state's Office of Children and Family Services. There she was befriended by a social worker, who taught her to use yoga to overcome anxiety and anger, and walked her through the maze of feelings she had over her mother's death.

Today, Ariel is working to heal herself. She hopes to finish up at the Pleasantville Cottage School in Westchester this summer, and then move in with her grandmother full time. She was on the honor roll at Lansing and said she is keeping up her grades at Pleasantville.

Ariel's bedroom at her grandmother's is decorated in a Pottery Barn palette of neutral tones; she also plans to display on one wall pictures in memory of her mother. In place of the black-and-gold clothing -- the colors of the Latin Kings -- that she used to wear, she is typically outfitted in ironed jeans and incorporates into her wardrobe cheerful touches like a rainbow-colored scarf.

Is she sorry she stole the car? ''Like, I'm sure I'll feel remorse,'' she said as she played with a bottle of Hilary Duff's With Love perfume that was sitting on her dresser. But now, she said, ''I'm not so in tune with my feelings.''

Ronald Richter, a deputy commissioner at the Administration for Children's Services, expressed guarded optimism about Ariel's future, based on a description of her record. ''She seems to have demonstrated resilience,'' he said. ''It sounds like she's developed coping skills.''

But the future, he added, is ''very difficult to predict'' for many teenagers who have undergone traumatic early years. And past is still very much present for Ariel, in ways little as well as big. Remembering the hunger pangs she sometimes felt during her time away, she now stashes cheddar cheese and crackers on a lawn chair next to her bed. Remembering institutional limits on bathroom time, she luxuriates in long showers.

In many respects, Ariel sounds like a girl on the mend. ''It's your choice,'' she said of the life that stretches ahead of her, ''whether you're going to add fuel to the fire, or give it water.''