LoRaca
by Becky Farris
In the whispers of shifting autumn leaves one could almost imagine the
faint ghosts of children's voices rising up into the electric blue
sky. The air was in that tumultuous shift that marked the end of hot
and the beginning of cold...one moment warm and comforting, before a
cool breeze would sweep by, stirring the leaves and carrying with it
faint smoke and the chill promise of winter.
Smoke.
Leaning against the old iron-wrought gate, now stoppered with weeds and chained with a rusted padlock, Took's green eyes shifted along the brick to the far corner of the yard.
The sugi had grown much larger, its roots spreading and breaking through the heavy chain-link, which wept rust like blood from an old wound. She'd seen pictures of it taken in 1950, a small sapling in a nice circular patch of dirt ringed by decorative brick. Japanese cedar. When she'd first crossed these gates, it had grown enough to break out of the ringed brick.
It wants to get out of here as much as we do, Took.
Behind her glasses her eyes shut momentarily as the ghost of a voice seemed to sift through the smoke on the breeze. The smoke. What she smelled now was probably someone burning leaves a few miles away, or someone stoking up their wood barbecue. But what it recalled...
They say that scent is the most powerful sense linked to memory. With her eyes closed, smelling that smoke and hearing that non-existant voice Took was almost there again. The sugi. That's where the kids had gone to smoke. Behind the shade of the big tree, tucked in the corner where they couldn't easily be spotted. Took had smoked too. Everyone there did. Even some of the seven year olds smoked, given enough time.
She didn't smoke any more. Her last cigarette had been behind this gate. When she'd come out the other side she hadn't picked up another one. Not so much as a single butt. Tobacco was just another bad that had shaken off her shoes along with the dust of this place.
But it hadn't ever really gone, had it?
The huge brick building was boarded up now. It's windows mostly broken. Graffitti painted its sides in swirls of neon green and orange and red. Meaningless tags. Gang symbols. Claims laid on a building no one had wanted to ever lay claim to twenty years ago.
"Hey, Took," Patton called from the car. The wind snapped at Took's jacket, making the smiley face button pinned to the lapel tink against the button holding an image of Papa Smurf's face. Her blonde hair, escaping its haphazard pony-tail, danced like tentacles under the sea. Half tucking her head she shoved her hands in her pockets and glanced at the car.
Patton, that little five foot nothing spitfire sat on the edge of the passenger's seat, hands dangling between her knees beside the propped open door. Her short red hair, naturally touselled, seemed impervious to the breeze. Her eyes squinted a little in concern.
"You okay?" she asked. Took bobbed her head once, then twice, turning back to the gate.
"Yeah. Gimme a minute," she said. Her hands shifted in her pockets. The butt of the .45 Smith and Wesson shifted in its holster at her hip. Unconsciously her hand stole out of her jacket and reseated it more snugly, checking that the snap was in place.
You gonna shoot me, Took? Would if you were smart.
The remaining chain of an abandoned and mostly destroyed swing-set tapped lightly against the metal post supporting it. Took's hand left the gun and slipped into the chain-link, hanging there as she leaned forward a little.
How old had she been when she'd come here? Thirteen. Thirteen years and seventeen foster homes old. It was right after Darren and the 30 Aught 6. Right after she'd seen dead people for the first time. The windows hadn't been broken then. The gate had been strong and black and clean, sliding open quietly on its well oiled hinges as sunlight flashed--
--through the car windows in a march of shade and brilliance that kept her eyes adjusting madly. Taking off the heavy, black-rimmed glasses, Lisa pinched at the bridge of her nose, pressed at her eyes, then blinked in exaggerated motions before sliding the glasses back on. Beside her on the car seat sat a small, battered backpack. In the driver's seat was Mrs. French, the social worker. Every time she moved Lisa got a puff of powdery perfume that made her nose itch. She'd spent most of the trip trying not to sneeze.
"You may have heard some bad things about this place," Mrs. French was saying. "It's all just rumor. LoRaca is the best place for you to be right now. You'll have the best counseling, and you'll make all sorts of new friends who will have gone through similar situations. You'll be right at home in no time."
Lisa only peered out the window again, as the car slowed and the gates began to swing open. The brick building was large and new and reminded Lisa of a factory. If it hadn't been for the three ranked swing-sets, the painted basketball court, and the sandpit, it could well have been.
But then, even with the thin disguise, that's what it was, wasn't it? A factory. It took kids like her, chewed them up and spit out responsible, productive adults. Adults who didn't scream in the middle of the night or hear voices or anything that was wacko.
Right at home, Mrs. French had said. What did that mean? How did she even know how that felt? Would she know when it felt 'right at home?' She'd been abandoned when she was two years old. She'd been moved here, moved there, no place lasting even a year. So how then did home feel? She'd never had one, and didn't know.
She doubted 'home' felt like this place. It was a cold, unsmiling building and even as the car found its way into a small parking stall, Lisa could feel thunder in the air.
She gathered the little backpack, her beat up old Nike's making no sound as they touched the blacktop, taking her weight. She looked up at the sky. Thunder in the air, but not a single cloud to be seen. The sky was blue, carefree, oblivious.
Mrs. French led her inside with the swift motions of one practiced and familiar with the halls. Her hand rested lightly but possessively on Lisa's shoulder. Lisa didn't like it. She didn't like people touching her most of the time.
They passed down a corridor lined with blank doors and floored with scuffed linoleum the same shade some Army jerk would paint his truck, before arriving at the headmaster's office. Mrs. French knocked, and they were ushered in. He was called the headmaster, but Lisa knew a warden when she saw one.
He was tall and gangly, with thick and neatly cut brown hair, a weasely nose, and a trimmed moustache. His suit was tweed with those leather patches at the elbows. He looked like a college professor of some kind. He smiled at her but it never touched his eyes. Those spoke in flecks of broken light and sharp edges of flint. They were crow's eyes, watching and calculating and pondering dark ponderings. She didn't like him right away.
Leaning on his desk, he folded his arms, crossing his legs. Lisa looked up at him over the rim of her glasses, not fooled. Far too many social workers had stood just that way. She supposed they thought it put her at ease but she saw it for what it was. She was a problem they had to tackle, fix, or put in its place.
"Well, Lisa Tookson," he sucked his teeth lightly a moment, pursing his lips. "I read your file while you were on the way over. Hard thing, dear, hard thing..."
"Terrible thing, Mr. Freleigh," Mrs. French bobbed her head in agreement. His fingers tapped on the thick folder beside him on the desk, before he wrinkled his brows at her.
"Do you want to talk about it, Lisa?"
Her gaze above her glasses never wavered. After a sufficient pause he nodded sympathetically. "Well, that's quite all right, dear. Just fine. Well!" He clapped his hands lightly, once. His skin had a dry sound. "Lisa, my name is Ilya Freleigh. I'm the headmaster here at LoRaca. Did they tell you much about LoRaca, Lisa?"
She leaned back, deciding he wasn't worth her time to look at any more. Her eyes went toward the window. It was small and narrow, and reinforced with a web of thin metal strands in a honeycomb pattern. To make it harder to break, she guessed.
As if she'd answered him, he continued on.
"LoRaca is a special facility, Lisa. Everyone here is here to help you. To help you understand, to learn, and to grow. We have wonderful doctors that will talk to you about...oh, well about anything you want to discuss..."
Head-shrinks, Lisa silently intoned.
"...we have classes and people to help you with your studies, and there are many children your age that you can make friends with. You'll find its a very...a very safe and nurturing environment."
She didn't bother to roll her eyes, still looking at the windows. He could candy-coat it all he wanted but she knew what LoRaca was. Everyone who had spent more than a week in any kind of foster home in Washington or Oregon knew what LoRaca was. The boob hatch. The miniature version of the nuthouse for kids. LoRaca was where they sent the troublemakers, the disturbed, the violent, the wacko, or those who had been 'traumatized'. A school. A hospital. An institution. It didn't matter what you called it. Persian or tomcat, they all pissed the same.
"I'm sorry Mr. Freleigh," Mrs. French's voice filled in the space when he stopped and Lisa didn't start. "She doesn't talk much."
"Quite all right, Mrs. French, I totally understand."
Stepping forward a pace he crouched in front of her, his hand moving to rest on hers where it sat half coiled on her knee. The touch, like a jolt of bad electricity, drew her eyes back from the window and to his. The crow watched. The little girl glowered.
His smile was filled with even, fashion-model teeth but never touched those eyes. "We'll get it taken care of, Lisa. I promise you," he said. "You're safe now."
She said nothing, but shifted her hand out from under his, stopping that unwanted, slimy little current. His smile grew a little and he nodded. "There's a chair just outside the door, Lisa. Why don't you wait for us there? I need to speak with Mrs. French for a minute, all right?"
She gathered her bag and stood up, Mrs. French scooting her in a waft of powdery perfume and concerned clucks and reassurances, before the door shut. The chair was hard, molded plastic. She sat, hugging her backpack to her. Mrs. French had closed the door with its frosted glass pane but she could hear their voices still, snippets of conversation floating out to her waiting ears.
Sharp ears. She'd always had sharp ears.
"..really a shame...he was obviously unstable...never should have been approved for foster care.."
"Is she dangerous...file suggests mood swings...?"
"...no, oh no. She just needs some counseling...terrible thing to witness…hasn't had the best of luck, poor thing...won't speak to anyone."
"...make sure she gets the help she needs.."
Lisa snorted softly to herself, kicked her legs slightly and shifted a bit. The hard plastic of the seat was very uncomfortable. Ten minutes, and the door opened. Mrs. French emerged, and squatted in front of Lisa's chair. She spoke as if to a four year old.
"I'm going to show you to your room, all right? It's almost time for classes to end, and then it'll be dinner break. You can go down to the cafeteria with the other children. Someone will make sure you know the way, so don't be frightened, all right?"
Lisa didn't bother to answer. If they wanted an idiot, they were going to get an idiot. Mrs. French's plump brows (heaven help her but yes, even her eyebrows were fat) drew together over her nose, then she nodded, patting Lisa's knee before rising and indicating the girl should follow. Sliding off the chair, giving a light smack to her rump which had fallen to sleep, Lisa followed her along back down the hallway. As she did she took note of the windows this time. All were meshed as the headmaster's had been. Behind one or two she saw the dim shadows of bars.
Welcome to LoRaca, she thought.
Welcome to the nuthatch.
Lisa sat alone on a bench at the side of the play-yard, watching. About forty kids shifted and swirled about the yard. The younger ones gravitated toward the sand pit, the swing set. None under seven. That was the youngest that LoRaca admitted. Several girls knotted about the swing-set, some older boys playing with a basketball. Another group had congregated behind a strange looking fir tree in one corner. Whenever the breeze shifted, she could smell smoke…tobacco mostly, but small under-currents of pot now and again. It made the knot of greasy, grey chicken she'd eaten not an hour before sour and clamp in on itself.
Lisa was more than familiar with the smell of pot. Out of seventeen foster homes, eleven had at least one person who smoked pot. In two, they’d done coke too. One meth. Darren had sold heroin out of his basement. That was part of the reason he’d gone bat-shit.
There was something happening on the stairs, as well. About six kids had gathered in a huddled knot, sitting on the steps but leaned in close together. Near the gate there were a couple of men holding break-sticks in their hands. They had radios on their belts. The sticks were battered and old but looked frighteningly solid. Their eyes kept going over the yard. Looking for fights, no doubt, or someone trying to cut through the chain-link. They kept eyeing the smokers but seemed apathetic about going over there.
The group on the stairs caught more attention. One of the men just kept watching them intently, occasionally nudging his companion and smirking about something.
Something sailed out of the air and slapped Lisa in the face. Her glasses spun away to one side as she fell back off the bench. Her cheek was hot, and she blinked, feeling a burn where her elbow had skinned the asphalt. The basketball limped away toward the grass.
“Hey, nice catch four-eyes,” one of the boys who had been playing taunted. He was a big boy. Maybe fifteen, but with wide shoulders and hefty fists. His lips were thick and fleshy, damp sweat darkening his short, hay-colored hair and making rivulets along his temples. He smirked below narrowed little rat eyes sunk in doughy flesh.
She rolled to her side, hand questing out and finding her glasses. One of the other boys had gone to pick up the basketball. Touching her red cheek she sat up, shook her stringy blond hair from her eyes, and slipped her glasses back on.
The men at the gate were now watching them intently. One had a hand on his radio.
Her skinned elbow burned under her fingertips. As she examined them for traces of blood she was unaware that almost everything in the yard had stopped. Dozens of eyes were fixed on them like chips of diamond-glass in the sun.
“Here, lemme help you up,” the boy grinned, offering his hand. She scrutinized him a moment. His expression was mocking, mean, hidden under a paper thin façade of amiability. Ignoring his hand she pushed herself up. It was a mistake. The façade shredded and vanished.
“Hey!” he barked, his hand slapping into her shoulder with the force of a hammer, slamming her back down to the ground again. She oofed hard as the air escaped her, her glasses jarring to slip down over her lips. “What, I’m not good enough to help you up, is that it??”
There was a hiss of the radio and she could hear slapping steps on the asphalt, warning shouts from the men repeating ‘back off, back off Jeb’. But they were a hundred feet away and it was not them that arrived first.
The kids started chanting fight a heartbeat before the sunlight dazzling Lisa’s eyes broke and scattered away before a shadow. The big boy, Jeb she guessed, staggered back as he was tackled with all the finesse of a linebacker intent on stopping a winning touchdown. A head slammed into his gut hard enough to topple him. He crashed to the ground, unable to recover as fist after fist looped into his face.
There was an almost animalistic snarling. Righting her glasses Lisa sat up, staring. Jeb gasped, recovering his air, and shoved. His attacker lurched back then forward again, leaping right back into him. Another fist flew. Another.
Then the break-sticks were coming down, slamming over shoulders, the men thrusting between the two kids, pulling them apart. One of the men sat on Jeb’s chest, the break-stick over his throat, pinning him down. The other slammed his attacker to the ground with frightening force, kneeling on wrists pinned at the small of her back, laying the edge of the break-stick against her cheek as a warning as he lifted the radio in his other hand, shouting into it.
More men ran up, followed by an angular woman in a brown skirt and keds. Jeb was cussing and bellowing but unable to fight with his neck pinned and the man sitting on him. He was descended on like vultures on a fat kill, hauled up, marched away.
One of the men and the angular woman went to the other kid pinned on the ground. A girl, maybe Lisa’s own age, with thick black hair and pale skin. Her lips were peeled back from her teeth and she was struggling despite the awkwardness of her arms, the weight of the man pinning her.
“Well,” the angular woman demanded as she reached them.
“Jeb was being Jeb,” Radio replied. “She went fuck-all on him.”
“Sarah. Sarah! Stop it, right this instant!” The angular woman knelt and gripped the girl’s hair, scolding her.
“Get this fucking baboon off of me,” she snarled.
“He’ll get off when you stop it,” came the terse reply. “Stop it or I swear to God I will slap you back in!”
She continued to struggle, and the woman tightened her grip on her hair, yanking it with a quick shake. “I mean it! I’ll give you the needle and slap you back in for a week, young lady. Do we have to have Mr. Freleigh talk to you again?”
Instantly she went limp. Small puffs of dust were driven by her heavy panting, her cheek smashed against the ground. Lisa felt numb, able to do nothing but sit there and stare. The girl’s lips skinned back a little again, and one eye…grey like storm-clouds, Lisa noted…rolled up to look at the woman.
“All right, Bones,” she said amiably. “I’ll be good.”
The woman narrowed her eyes suspiciously, then slowly removed her hand. The girl, Sarah, remained limp. Nodding at the man sitting on her the woman withdrew, getting to her feet and dusting off her skirt. The man shifted his weight, maintaining his grip on Sarah’s wrists as he pulled her up. Her black hair hung in curtains around her pale face, and she shook it back with a haughty toss. Her jeans were scuffed and patched, her sneakers worn. One of her pockets bulged strangely. The woman she’d called ‘Bones’ noticed it too. With a glower she stepped forward, jamming her hand into the pocket.
Sarah smirked. “Bones, I didn’t know you felt that way about me,” she stated derisively. “I didn’t think molesting students was your gig.”
Ignoring her, ‘Bones’ pulled out a wad of crumpled dollar bills, a battered watch, and a half-crushed pack of smokes. She held it up like a bloody heart.
“Have you been grifting again?”
“Would I do that?”
“Where did you get all this?”
“My Mama sends me a care package,” Sarah replied with a smart-ass grin. Bones lowered the wad and slapped her with her free hand, hard enough to send Sarah’s head to one side. The red imprint of a palm and fingers began to surface on her white cheek.
“We’ve discussed this, Sarah,” she said sternly. “And we’ve discussed lying, and fighting. How many times must we talk about this before you understand that civilized young ladies don’t behave this way?”
“Six or seven,” Sarah replied. “It’s not that I’m stupid, see? It’s that your teaching fucking sucks.”
Another slap. The woman’s eyes had gone tense and sharp. Looking at Radio she said, “Send her up to see the headmaster.”
“You fucking dried up old cunt!” Sarah suddenly screamed, tiny flecks of foam gathering on her lips. She began to kick and buck. Radio used his free hand to grip her hair and haul her head back, half-guiding, half-carrying her toward the steps. Kids scattered out of the way. She tried to plant her feet against the stone steps and Radio kicked them loose, continuing to drive her forward. Her screams and curses could be heard echoing out of the building long after she and Radio had been swallowed by shadow.
The kids began breaking up, returning to their activities. The sun had lowered enough the sky was going crimson and gold. It would be time to go in soon.
‘Bones’ regarded the handful of money and smokes before she slipped it into a large pocket on the side of her brown skirt. She and one of the other men started inside again, casting long shadows over the yard. Lisa sat ignored and forgotten on the ground, panting in steady, shallow, shaky breaths as the sun dipped low enough to fire off her glasses and blind away her tears.
The real name of the woman dubbed by Sarah to be 'Bones', turned out to be Ms. Mazur. Her first name was Clementine or Gertrude or something old fashioned and long like that. Bones fit her better, Lisa thought. She was all angles and sharp edges, with birdy wrists and knotty ankles. She looked like someone had draped flesh and clothes on some science class laboratory skeleton.
She was one of the counselors at LoRaca. One of the shrinks. Lisa didn’t think she was a very good shrink. Not if she had to slap kids and yank them around by their hair.
She led up one of the ‘group’ meetings, the meetings for girls ages 12-16. The younger girls had group with Mrs. Simonstry, who was plump and rolling and almost viciously condescending. Mrs. Simonstry and Ms. Mazur were friends. Lisa supposed it was because the only people that would be friends with people like them were…people like them.
The first time Lisa met with Ms. Mazur was the morning following her arrival to the school. She was ushered into an office decorated in browns and antiques as old-fashioned and angular as their owner. The desk was beat up and battered, and the chair that Bones indicated Lisa sit in was hard plastic. Of course.
“Don’t slouch,” was the first words out of her mouth, without even looking at the girl before her. Lisa wasn’t slouching, but the comment made her do just that, slumping in the chair as if she were a rag doll that had been forgotten there.
Ms. Mazur sat in her far more comfortable seat and leaned forward, elbows on her desk and hands clasped in front of her mouth as if scrutinizing a specimen. She stared at Lisa so long and in such silence that the girl’s eyes darted away uncomfortably. Almost unconsciously she straightened up from her slump. That seemed to please Bones. At any rate, it prompted her to speak.
“Lisa, I want you to feel comfortable and at home here in LoRaca. I want you to feel that if you have any problems or questions, or just need someone to talk, you can come and see me. Okay? I’m here to help.”
Yeah. Lisa doubted that Bones would ever be the first person she’d run to. Bored and distracted, she let her eyes wander around the room at all the ugly old things.
“I see by your file that you were left at a police station when you were two,” Bones continued with false sympathy. “And that you’ve been in seventeen different foster homes since then. Do you want to talk about them?”
Silence.
“I also know what happened with Mr. Muntazir at your last foster home. I know why they sent you to us.”
Lisa resisted the urge to roll her eyes and again said nothing.
“Lisa, I can’t help you unless you talk to me. We don’t have to talk about your foster homes or Mr. Muntazir. We can talk about anything you like.”
Lisa’s eyes roamed back to hers and she pursed her lips thoughtfully. Bones gave a smile that was probably supposed to be comforting and gratiating, but seemed instead spider-like and hungry.
Anything she liked, hmm?
She fixed Bones with her green eyes. “Where were you going to put her?”
Reedy eyebrows wrinkled a bit, the smile fading only a faint iota. “I’m sorry? I don’t understand the ques-“
“The girl in the playground,” Lisa’s fingers plucked at the seam of her jeans along her hip. “You said if she didn’t stop you were going to ‘put her back in’. Back in what?”
“Lisa, we’re here to talk about y-“
“You said anything I wanted to talk about. I want to talk about that,” Lisa replied. The smile had almost completely faded. Bones leaned back a bit, then nodded slightly.
“Very well. I did say that. If you want to talk about Sarah we’ll talk about Sarah. As you know, Lisa, every student here in LoRaca is here because of traumatic circumstances in their lives…just as you are. They have been through hard times and need help understanding and coming to terms with the past, so they can grow and move on. Unfortunately some of our students have chosen to react in violent or criminal ways as a result of their experiences. They don’t yet understand their anger and have difficulty controlling it. In order to keep them and others safe, if we feel they have become a danger they are put into isolation for a time.”
“Do you put a jacket on them?” Lisa asked with mild interest.
“A what?”
“You know, one of those funny jackets that make you hug yourself.”
The tattered remnants of the smile immediately transformed into pursed lips reminiscent of a cat’s asshole. “We most certainly do not.”
Lisa only looked at her. After an extended moment of silence, Bones threaded her hands and leaned back, steepling her index fingers against her lips. “Lisa, we’re here to help you work through what happened to you, to help you become an upstanding and productive member of society. You do want to be a productive member of society, don’t you?”
Lisa shrugged one shoulder. “I guess.”
“Then let me give you some free advice. Sarah Nelson is going nowhere in her life. I fully expect her to leave our walls and proceed directly to the nearest penitentiary. It’s only a pity we can’t send her there now, but she’s ours to deal with until she’s eighteen. In the mean time, Lisa, if you want to have any hope of leaving here and leading a normal, happy, productive life…you will concentrate very hard on doing nothing even remotely similar to anything that Sarah Nelson does. Am I quite clear?”
Lisa said nothing, only plucked at her seam and stared at Bones with dispassionate eyes. She began to talk about 'progress' and 'goal-setting' and 'lending an ear', but her voice swiftly turned into a drone in Lisa’s ears. She tuned her out, focusing on a blank spot on the wall. She’d long ago learned the art of shutting people out, closing away voices from her ears. She let her mind drift.
Darren’s house hadn’t been so bad. He had been a soft-spoken guy. They weren’t always. Most of them screamed at you, cussed you out when they were drunk in bellowing curds of saliva and belittlement. If you were lucky cussing was all they did. Sometimes they hit. Even the women. Especially the women.
But Darren didn’t scream. He never raised his voice. He was laid back, slow in his speech. His wife was a mousey little harmless thing with a smile that flicked open and shut as if it were afraid to linger. They’d had a son, too. Marcus. He’d been six.
It was amazing how much blood was in a six year old’s body.
“-Lisa? Are you paying attention??”
She blinked, jolting a little as her head lifted. She looked at Bones who had a distasteful expression on her face, as if she’d spotted a fleck of mold on the crust of her sandwich. She sat back a little with a huff.
“Lisa, I can't help you if you don't listen to me. Look, its nearly time for classes, so I'm going to let you go. I will see you this afternoon for group and I expect some level of participation, is that clear?”
Lisa bobbed her head. Whatever. She didn't like this woman. She was fake, like Mr. Freleigh was fake. She didn't care. She didn't want to help. She didn't give two short shits what Lisa had been through, what her fears were, or her hopes. All she cared about was that she was big and 'normal' and Lisa was small and 'wacko' and that gave her power. Power to slap faces, and to pull hair, and to put people in self-hugging jackets if they didn't show her the respect she thought she deserved. If nothing else, seventeen different foster homes had taught Lisa one thing. It was how to tell the genuine from the fake. And Bones was definitely one big fake.
She didn't end up participating in group that day. There were eleven other girls that Bones spent most of her time cussing at, admonishing, and dragging out morbid tales from various abuses that she seemed to eat up like candy. Sarah wasn't there. Sarah should have been, it was her age group, but she wasn't. Lisa almost asked where she was but she was afraid saying anything would draw Bones' attention and that was the last thing she wanted right now. So she stayed silent, and tuned them out, and swung her feet to a tune only she could hear.
Maybe they'd taken her away, and that's why she wasn't here. Maybe she was locked up in that special room with the hugging jacket right now. Lisa normally wouldn't have cared but she didn't quite believe Bones about Sarah. She was puzzled about something and Lisa didn't like being puzzled. Puzzles were there to be sorted out and Sarah had puzzled her.
Why had she tackled such a big boy so violently? And more, why did it seem she had done it to protect Lisa, who she didn't know and had no reason...especially in this place...to care about? That was the puzzle, and it worried at Lisa's mind and fingernails most of the day.
That evening after dinner when they were let out into the yard again, she caught sight of the pale, black-haired girl once again. She was in the knot gathered on the steps, all sitting huddled together like intent wolves around the carcass of a rabbit. Lisa wandered over, a curious bird who knew the wolves were eating well but was still afraid they'd find room for a final snack. She leaned and craned her neck, trying to figure out what they were doing.
Sarah squatted on the step, the tips of her dingy sneakers hanging over the edge of the concrete. Between her feet were three battered playing cards. A couple of wrinkled dollars and three cigs formed a tiny pile nearby. The kids were watching intently as she shuffled the cards on the ground, skipping and dancing them around in random patterns. Finally she lifted her hands and smirked.
"All right? Where is it?"
One boy extended a hand and tapped a card. Sarah flipped it to reveal a two. There were groans and she tsked, as she flipped the two remaining cards, revealing another two and an ace.
"So close, LaMont. You wanna give up or press it?"
The kid grumbled, digging in his pocket and drawing out another dollar and a little plastic hula girl. He tossed them on the pile and Sarah grimaced.
"Fuck do I want a toy for?"
"My Dad gave it to me. It's all I got left," he shot back.
"Then keep it. I don't want your damn toy."
"I'm pressing it, Nelson. That's what I got."
She huffed and snorted. "All right, watch the ace," she said, and then started flipping the cards back over, shuffling them around. Her hands flashed back and forth, then withdrew.
"Okay, which one?"
LaMont pointed. She slid her finger under it and knocked the card on its back.
It was a two.
"FUCKER!" LaMont snarled, rose, and stormed away. Sarah smirked, moving the dollar and the toy over into her pile.
"Okay, who's next. How about you?"
Her gun-metal eyes landed on Lisa, who stood there staring for a long moment. Long enough to prompt Sarah to lift her brows impatiently.
"Well? You deaf or stupid? You gonna shell out or what? It's easy, kiddo. Monte. Just gotta follow the ace."
She edged forward timidly and lowered herself to the steps. Digging into her pocket, she pulled out a pair of dull and dingy quarters and set them on the steps.
"Cheap bet, ain't you got anything else?" Sarah asked.
"These against that," Lisa murmured, pointing at the little plastic hula girl. Sarah squinted at her.
"What's your name, kid?"
"Lisa Tookson..." she replied softly. Sarah tossed this in her mind with a quick back and forth tilt of her head.
"Well, Tooker baby, you got a bet. Your two bits against this cheap piece of shit. Follow the ace, Took. You think you can do that?"
Lisa nodded slowly. Sarah showed the three cards and then flipped them, scooting them around. Lisa's eyes watched her hands intently, never blinking behind her thick glass frames. Finally she held her hands up. "Where is it?"
Lisa's hand stole forward slowly, hesitated, then moved forward again. Toward the cards...then past them, over Sarah's shoe. Her fingers dipped up under the ratty cuff of her old jeans and began to draw out the ace hidden there.
A sharp hand slapped down over hers and she was shoved. Her tailbone hit the ground below the steps with a painful jar, her palms skidding as they fought to catch her. Sarah snatched up the wad of money and smokes and started menacingly down the steps toward Lisa even as the whackers began to run forward, break-sticks in hand.
"Lemme give you a little health note, Tooker," Sarah snarled, pointing at her menacingly. "Don't you ever pull that shit in front of my customers again, understand?"
"Back off Sarah!" one of the whackers warned as he ran up. He pressed his break-stick across her chest to urge her back, one hand on the radio just in case.
Sarah didn't look at him, her eyes still fixed with vicious ferocity on Lisa before she tossed her free hand. Something light thumped into Lisa's chest, then rattled to the ground. Sarah pointed at her again in warning, then backed up, moving away from the whackers and heading toward the smokers behind the tree.
Lisa drew her knees under her and rocked to them, before looking around. Reaching down her fingers closed on what had hit her, lifting it. Her fingers peeled back, revealing the little hula dancer on her palm. It grinned up at her in plastic glee, welcoming her to Paradise.
Quietly she put it in her pocket.
It was the wallet that got Lisa into trouble, and why she suddenly understood how the threat of Mr. Freleigh was enough to take the fight out of Sarah that first afternoon...while being locked in solitary and sedated was not.
It was a leather wallet, well-worn in a few places, and it smelled too strongly of cologne. The wallet was Sarah's fault, and it had come into Lisa's possession the same day she had started smoking.
It was something of a record, how long Lisa was there before she started on the cigs. Most kids, even the youngest ones, were smoking within their first week there, both pot and tobacco. It was the only way to mellow out, an outlet for frustrations and nerves that didn't involve tearing one's soul open for the delighted scrutiny of people like Bones.
Sitting or standing behind that weird old fir tree, Lisa heard stories that she never heard in group. This was the real 'group'. Without Bones eyeing them and picking apart their pain like a vulture cracking bones to get to marrow.
"How'd that make you feel?" Donna Hodges mimicked Bones' voice in a high, mocking falsetto as she leaned against the tree. A joint was pinched between her fingers. Her knuckles had gone white with the amount of pressure she was putting on it. "Fuck that supposed to mean? How the fuck does she think it made me feel? I mean, your old man shoves a broken beer bottle into your arm and calls you a worthless piece of gutter trash when you're nine years old...don't exactly make you feel like hugs and rainbows, right? Christ."
She took a thin draw on the joint as the other kids murmured in agreement. Lisa was sitting on one of the roots, half burned cigarette in her hand. She felt a little nauseous, and her mouth tasted like she'd licked an ashtray, but it was something to hold on to. Something to do. And it felt oddly soothing.
"I thought I was going to lose it when Sarah called Ashley a pussy," Fredericka Barnes smirked.
"Ashley is a fucking pussy," Donna replied. "Her mother's an alcoholic. She's drying out somewhere for two months and poor Ashley gets stuck with a temporary pass to LoRaca and all you fuckin' hear is 'woe is me, my life is so dreadful, I have to spend eight weeks here talking about my feeeelings. Fuck. I'd cut off my right hand to have a mother that was a drunk and only be here for two months."
"She's stupid as shit too," Fredericka agreed. "Sarah Nelson calls you anything you keep your fat trap shut and be grateful she only insulted you. Gutter-trash. That's what Ashley said. 'What would you know about it gutter-trash?' Christ. Sarah smiled at it but..."
"That smile said a broken nose at the very least," Donna took another draw on her joint. "I hope Sarah beats a few dents into her at any rate. Fucking pussy. She deserves a shiv in the side is what she deserves."
"Sarah'd do it too," Fredericka agreed, and several of the other kids bobbed their heads. Lisa, the only one sitting down, looked up at them with reddened, smoke-irritated eyes.
"Would she?" she asked softly. The two girls who had been doing most of the talking blinked at her.
"Would she what?" Donna asked.
"Would she stab someone?"
"Listen, Took," she replied. "She ain't stabbed anyone yet. The whackers are real careful to keep their eye on her. Her and Jeb. You'd best keep your eye on them too. You don't want to get on either of their bad sides."
"I don't think she'd stab anyone," she murmured. Fredericka half choked on her joint and Donna looked like Took was trying to convince her that birds pissed out their nostrils. She crouched closer, the smell of pot from her joint making Lisa a little dizzy.
"Hey, four-eyes. Listen close, ok? There are only two kids in here for murder. Yeah, you heard me, murder. Rest of us, we're here because our folks were fucking idiots, drunks, or liked to 'play' if you get my meaning. Or because we're dump-offs from some foster home like you. Some of us, we've done shit that would put us up in the big house if we were any older. Fredericka here tried to hold up a liquor store. I knocked the shit out of some lady for her dime-change purse. But only two are here because someone actually died."
She lifted a pair of her fingers. She wiggled the index finger. "Jeb, because he held some kid's head down a toilet until the fucker drowned," she lowered the index finger, leaving her middle one stuck in the air as she waved it back and forth almost hypnotically. "And Sarah, because she blew away her old man."
Lisa's brows knit. "That's not what I heard Bones and Simonstry say," she replied. "I heard them talking near the restroom two days ago. They said that someone had broke in and murdered her parents."
"Bones and Simonstry have enough brain-cells between the two of them to make a rock look like a genius, Took," Dana snorted. "Sarah blew away her old man. Then they put her in here. I heard it from her own mouth. Now, she could be lying, couldn't she? Sure. We all fucking lie in here. But I dare you to say it to her face."
Well, lie or not, Lisa certainly wasn't going to call Sarah one to her face, nor was she likely to ask the girl about her parents. Since Sarah had knocked her down the stairs Lisa had done her best not to go near the girl.
Dana lowered her hand, offered the joint. Lisa shook her head and Dana smirked.
"That's all right. More for me. So that’s what you’re in here for? Foster reject?"
Lisa bobbed her head faintly. "My last foster father blew his head off."
"Shit, for real?"
There was more than that but Lisa was not willing to share it, not with Dana or anyone else in the shithole that was LoRaca. So she just nodded again and coughed a little as she took another draw on the cig. Dana swiftly lost interest in her and stood up again, resuming her conversation with Fredericka on what a bitch Ashley was.
The smoke had burned itself down to the filter. Lisa scrubbed it out on the ground and left its sad, twisted and spent corpse there in the dirt. She was just about to stand up when footsteps headed their way. Sarah jerked her chin toward one of the other girls. "Got a bud?"
"You got some green?" the girl asked with a scowl.
"Fuck. I got a couple of Camels, okay?"
"Then smoke your Camels. Do you think its easy getting this shit in here?"
Sarah glowered, then pulled a wallet from her pocket. Immediately all eyes fixed to it.
"Christ, is that-?"
"You so didn't fuckin' knick that. Dude, they are going to pen you up until Judgement Day."
Sarah grinned and cracked it open, drawing out the license and flashing it around. "Did you know his middle name is Perry?"
The kids hooted and cat-called and passed the license around. Fredericka was beaming as she snatched hold of it. "Ilya Perry Freleigh. My Mama's fat ass. Who knew, all this time, we had the famous I.P. Freleigh running this fine establishment!"
More hoots of laughter. Sarah opened the billfold portion of the wallet and drew out a five. "This enough green for the damn bud?"
"Shit, I'll give you four for that," came the reply. Fingers snatched the five from Sarah's fingers and passed over a few joints. Sarah took the rest of the cash out of the billfold and tucked it in her pocket. The license had made the rounds and landed in the dirt at Lisa's feet. She leaned forward and picked it up. She didn't think it possible, but the DMV had made Mr. Freleigh look even more sinister than he normally did.
Sarah planted herself on the next root, setting the wallet in the dirt beside her before lighting up the joint and taking a deep toke. Lisa felt a little uncomfortable sitting so close to the other girl, but she couldn't move without drawing her attention. She wondered if it really was true...if the reason Sarah was in this place was because she murdered her own father.
The cloud of pot from the joint was too close to escape from unless she got up and walked away. She was starting to feel a buzz from it. Dropping the license she rubbed at her eyes and wondered how she could get up and leave without it looking like she was moving just because of Sarah.
A few agonizing minutes later, the horn sounded that put an end to free time. The whackers started calling out, herding kids in toward the door for study hall and bed. Cigarettes were crushed out, joints hidden. Sarah had finished hers and flicked its smoldering remnants against the fence before getting up and joining the flow of kids leaving the tree and heading inside. Lisa waited until she had been gone for a few moments before she put her hand down to push herself up.
It landed on the wallet. Sarah had accidentally left it behind.
Standing, she lifted it, using her free hand to dust off her rear. She didn't dare hang on to it to give it back to the girl. She lifted an arm instead to pitch it over the fence.
A break-stick lightly touched her fore-arm. She gasped and gaped up at the whacker, Mr. Freleigh's wallet still clutched in her numb fingers.
The whacker smiled and plucked it from her hand as easily as a child would pluck a flower from a garden. "Well now," he said amiably. "What's this?"
The chair outside of Mr. Freleigh’s office was just as hard as it had been three weeks prior, when Lisa had first come to LoRaca. Her white-knuckled hands gripped the edges as her arms trembled nervously. One of the whackers stood watching her dispassionately. The other had vanished into the office with the wallet.
Now he emerged, his hand unyielding as he gripped Lisa’s arm and lifted her to her feet. “C’mon. He wants to talk to you.”
The door shutting behind her made the frosted glass rattle loosely in its frame. It sounded like chattering teeth. Lisa might almost have thought her own teeth were chattering if she hadn’t been clenching them so hard.
Mr. Freleigh leaned on his desk as he had before. Sitting beside him on the wood was the wallet. His crow’s eyes were sharp and focused, even as he flicked a faint smile, pointing at the oversized wooden chair that faced his desk.
“Sit.”
Tentatively, she obeyed. Her mouth felt dry and sticky.
He didn’t refold his arms. Instead, the one he’d used to point drifted aside to tap against the wallet. “So, Lisa. How are you adjusting to LoRaca? Ms. Mazur says you are still horribly withdrawn and refuse most times to participate in group.”
He tsked lightly. She didn’t bother to answer his question or reply in any way. He wasn’t wanting her to talk back, even if she was inclined. He was talking to hear himself talk and nothing she said would turn away or soften what was coming.
“She also says you asked some questions about Sarah Nelson, and I heard about the incident with Jeb in the play-yard.”
When she didn’t respond his fake half smile dissolved a bit. His fingers drummed on the wallet, then lifted it. He unfolded it and presented the empty billfold to her. “Where’s the cash, Lisa? There was nearly a hundred dollars in here.”
She half lifted one shoulder, and let it drop. He nodded slowly, closing the wallet again and setting it aside before he straightened. What happened next was so fast that Lisa had no time to react. He took a single step forward, his hand clamping like a vice on the back of her neck. She was hauled out of her seat and thrust forward so fast her feet didn’t touch the ground until her chest and stomach was crashing into the edge of the desk. The air blasted out of her with a painful rush, the earpiece of her glasses digging sharply into her temple as he pinned her head down to the wood with his hand.
“Don’t fuck with me, Lisa,” he growled low in her ear. As air slowly wheezed back into her lungs, tears leaking from her eyes as she tried to breathe, her eyes focused on a decorative clay mug. It was filled with various small office supplies: pens, pencils, a letter opener, and a strange metal thing with a small ball at the top. Along the mug were the words ‘World’s Greatest Dad!’ written in over-excited neon orange.
“Let me fill you in on what is going to happen, all right?” he continued, his breath hot and distasteful against her cheek. “You are going to tell me who stole my wallet and where my money is. Because I don’t buy for a moment that it was you. You haven’t got the balls.”
Her breath hissed in barely suppressed sobs through her clenched teeth. Hand still pressing her head down, he reached over and took that odd metal thing out of the cup. He tossed his hand out a little and it extended like a car antenna. He showed it to her. “Tell me who took my fucking money, you worthless little piece of dog shit,” he bellowed, small flecks of spittle spotting her face. “If you don’t, I’m going to make sure you don’t sit down for a month, do you fucking hear me?”
He punctuated his words by gripping hold of her hair, lifting her head a little, and smacking it down again. Pinned, frightened, her sobbing breaths shuddered and burned through her throat.
Then his body weight suddenly shifted and the antenna whipped over her buttocks. She’d been spanked before, of course. Once even with a belt. But nothing before had felt like that metal rod as it sang against her rear-end, even through the cloth of her jeans. The hot tears multiplied and rushed down her face as she cried out. She heard a faint, thin whistle as it cut through the air again and the burn branded itself anew along her thighs.
“For every second you don’t tell me I’m going to lay another one!” he roared. Only sobs escaped. She heard the whistle, and her entire lower body tensed up in anticipation. That only made it hurt worse.
Tell him! Tell him so he’ll stop!!
I’m not a fucking snitch!!
Another stripe and she wailed. “ME! It was me!!” Her words barely sounded human through her choking cries. He roared in her ear again so loud she thought she might go deaf from it.
“YOU ARE A FUCKING LIAR!”
Whap! This strike was so hard it drew her even higher up on her toes and all that managed to escape her was a high, keening whine. Using his grip on her hair he hauled her back from the desk and all but threw her toward the chair. She missed, the wood edge of the seat cutting her across the back as she landed hard on her bruised buttocks. Her glasses hung by one ear, her sight all but obliterated by the thick tears. Gripping her arm he pulled her up again, slammed her down in the seat. She cried out and he slapped her. She could only dissolve into misery, trembling, her entire body tensed and aching. She heard a click as he closed up the antenna with a sharp gesture. Then he crouched with a long-suffering sigh, pressing the ball end into the soft flesh under her jaw, using pressure to make her turn her head and face him.
“Lisa,” he said almost gently. “Liars and thieves go nowhere. I know you didn’t take my wallet. But I will not tolerate you lying or trying to cover up for some no-good punk out there. Now, you little fuckhead, you will tell me how you got my wallet, who took it, and where my money is, or you will spend the day in isolation.”
She said nothing, only struggled to get her sobs under control. Her back and butt were throbbing, as was her cheek where he’d slapped her. Her nose was running in a way that felt less like snot and more like blood. He frowned, then nodded.
“Very well. Have it your way. Twenty four hours in isolation. I suggest you use it to think about how much you really want to fuck up your life. Because I guarantee you, baby…you fuck around like this much more, and you’ll end up a fucking whore dead in some gutter somewhere, and no one will shed a tear over you.”
He straightened, lifting his voice. “Get in here.”
The door opened, the whackers stepping in. They didn’t so much as bat an eyelash to see Lisa sitting there, sobbing with a bruised cheek and slowly bleeding nose. “Twenty four hours lockup,” he stated, returning the rod to the cup on his desk and dusting his hands. “Oh, and Lisa…after isolation you’re on three days potato duty for coming in my office stoned.”
One of the whackers took her arm and pulled her up out of the chair. With one shaking hand she managed to right her glasses, limping along between them.
The isolation room was on the top floor. They opened a mundane looking door with a key, only to reveal a second door. This one was thick metal covered in chipping paint. They unlocked that one as well. The room within was no bigger than a broom closet. Barely had she stumbled in than they closed the metal door. Instantly pitch black fell, thick and pure and not marred by the slightest hint of light. Groping out, she found one of the walls and carefully lowered herself until she was laying on her side. Her butt and thighs felt like they had been caught on fire. She mopped blindly at her nose, then curled up, winding her arms around her head, sobbing softly and hopelessly into the black.
Darren Muntazir hadn’t been a big man. He had a painter’s hands, soft and always stained a little with ink or acrylic or oil. His eyes, to Lisa, had appeared vacuous despite his lazy smile. She later learned that was because of the heroin. It was also why he had a habit of tying rags around his arms just below where he would roll up his work-shirt sleeves.
His wife was a junkie too. Not as hardcore as Darren was, restricting her doping to pot and occasional morphine pills that Darren got by faking work injuries. That’s also how they lived…fraudulent insurance claims. Their son Marcus had been quiet and sweet, spending his time with his crayons and color books in front of the television set. He didn’t talk much, but had an easy smile that glowed whenever Lisa would praise his coloring work.
There was something wrong with Marcus. She never really knew what. It caused him to have to wear leg-braces and giant glasses with thick lenses, and made him slow to understand things. Once, Jerri (that was Darren’s wife) had said it was because he was born with a funny spine. Another time she said he had water on his brain as a baby. Lisa supposed it didn’t really matter. Marcus was a sweet kid and despite the fraud and the drugs, Darren and Jerri were ok people. They didn’t scream or hit or cuss at her, anyway, and that was just fine with Lisa.
It was a Friday afternoon. She’d walked back to the house from the school bus stop. The sun was bright enough, fall just starting to cool and bring promises of rain and snow. Her key had fit in the door like always. Her shoes had made that same ‘clap clap’ sound as she stepped into the foyer, where Jerri had laid a plastic matt to catch up muddy tracks.
It was the smell that was different. Instead of thin hazes of pot smoke and whatever was cooking for dinner, the house smelled sour somehow. Thick and rank. In the silence after the door clicked shut, she could hear the buzzing of flies.
The neighbor called the cops when she heard Lisa screaming. The cops found her in the garage, jammed under the work bench, hugging her school backpack. This was after they found Darren, Jerri, and little Marcus.
They weren’t sure what set it off. Even Lisa wasn’t. They figured he’d shot Jerri first. Twice in the chest, and once in the face as she slumped against the fridge, leaving a smudge of red along the white plastic surface. The breakfast dishes were still on the table.
Then, it seemed, he’d gone after little Marcus. The boy had been shot in the throat. His glasses were broken. Darren had taken off his braces and set them beside him with inexplicable neatness. The bullet had torn open his jugular and carotid arteries. The boy lay in a lake of blood that had all but swallowed his Mighty Mouse coloring book and his neat yellow pack of crayolas.
Then, for reasons that would eternally be a mystery, Darren stripped naked, sat in the tub, and smoked about six joints before finally putting the gun under his chin and blowing the top of his head off.
It was the breakfast dishes that got Lisa. Finding the bodies had put her in a state of calm shock. She’d stared at Marcus for several minutes before wandering into the kitchen to find Jerri there, then aimlessly moving deeper in the house, wondering where Darren was. She’d stared at him a long while too, before heading back into the kitchen.
One benefit of living with potheads was the munchies. Darren and Jerri kept their cupboards well stocked with potato chips, oreos, and moon pies. Often Lisa came home from school and had some oreos and kool-aid with Marcus as he showed her what he had drawn that day and talked in that slow, eager, stilted way he had about the cartoons on tv. She pulled out the cookies, opened the cupboard, and drew out two glasses. She turned toward the fridge again where Jerri was slumped, the flies rubbing their forelegs together eagerly in the sticky blood that covered the remnants of her face. From there, Lisa’s eyes moved to the table, to the breakfast dishes.
She’d been late that morning. She’d only gulped her food and ran out the front door to catch her bus. Marcus had already wandered into the living room and Darren was downstairs. Jerri had laughed and called after her…something about finishing her eggs. She had already started to clear the table.
Her mind went back far too clearly to her running out the door, swinging her backpack on her shoulder. Had Darren been coming up the stairs? She thought so. Possibly. Had she paused a moment to finish those eggs, or help Jerri to clear the dishes…
That’s when it all seemed to finally filter through her brain, striking her with almost physical force. The scream erupted. By the time she realized the cops were there and they were urging her out from under the work table her throat had gone hoarse. She didn’t even recall how she’d gotten downstairs into the garage. Everything from the first scream was nothing but a blurr.
She grunted with a faint cry, jolting out of her doze as the metal door to the isolation room suddenly creaked open. Light flashed painfully over her eyes. She grimaced up, unable to see anything but a faint shape. A plate slid across the floor. It smelled like rubber macaroni and stale cheese.
“Good night, Lisa,” Bones’ voice echoed with an amused slant before the door slammed shut again.
LoRaca. It was amazing how fast a place like this could suck everything out of you, make you forget there were things outside its walls. The endless droning in group, the endless smoking, the dull traumas that ate at you and could only be released in the company of kids just as screwed up and hopeless and washed out as you were.
Sometimes, the outside world tried to invade with its charity. Christmas was the worst. Boxes would arrive of battered old coats and miscellaneous winter gear. Toys were donated...trash mostly, that other more fortunate kids had grown bored with but their parents couldn't bring themselves to toss in the garbage. Of course, that's what the kids at LoRaca were, weren't they? Just garbage, festering in another type of rubbish heap, waiting....rotting...decomposing.
Often, Lisa would cry herself to sleep, and wake up shouting with nightmares. Kids shouted in the middle of the night all the time. No one ever came. Sometimes when she couldn't sleep she'd sit on the edge of her bed and look out the small, meshed window and wonder if she wasn't just too small for God to take notice of.
This particular night, a year after she'd come to LoRaca, the silence seemed particularly still and deep and pondering. She lay on her bed with her hands tucked under her head, listening to her pulse and wondering, if she concentrated hard enough...would it just stop?
She was fifteen now. She had three more years to go. Three more years and then they'd usher her out the gate with a mandatory diploma, a state-funded check for a hundred and fifty dollars and a not so fond farewell. She wouldn't be their problem any more. She...
Her breath caught as she heard a faint click. Turning her head on the pillow, her hand groped out to find her glasses and slip them on as she sat. Her door, which had been locked, was slowly creeping open. A shadow slipped through, the door swiftly closing and latching behind it.
She cast the blankets aside as a light lanced out of the dark, landing on her face with blinding intensity. She threw up a hand to shield her eyes, blinking and squinting. "Wha---??"
"Shh," Sarah's voice hissed out of the dark, and the flashlight turned away. "Ain't you fuckin' happy to see me, Took?"
She was in her flannel pajamas, just as Lisa was. The flashlight, still on, thumped to the bed. As her eyes adjusted, she grimaced in confusion. Sarah grinned. She had a pillowcase in her hand. Reaching inside she pulled out a lighter, a couple of joints, and a heavy glass bottle. She tossed them to the bed too before sitting down, propping herself against the wall and snatching one of the joints. She tucked it in her mouth and lit it, the spicy smell of marijuana filling the air. Her gun-metal eyes rolled toward Lisa and she blew out a stream of smoke. "Shit, girl, would you mellow? You'd think I was the fucking boogey monster or something. Sit down."
"What are you doing?" Lisa asked warily. Sarah rarely ever spoke to her, and she most certainly didn't come into her room. Ever.
Sarah offered her the joint. Lisa only looked at her blankly until Sarah rolled her eyes. "Just fuckin' hold it a minute, ok? I wanna get the bottle open."
Tentatively, as if it would bite her, Lisa took the joint. Sarah reached into the pillowcase and took out a corkscrew and a pair of cheap plastic cups from the kitchen. As she began to work the cork out of the bottle of Jack she said, "Do you know what today is, Took? Today is my sixteenth birthday. Huzzah huzzah. I've been in this fuckin' place for ten years. We're celebrating."
"We are?"
"I ain't dead, you ain't dead, and we're celebrating, and you're gonna drink some of this shit with me, understand?"
Lisa was scared of Sarah, but she was scared more what would happen if the whackers heard them and reported them to Freleigh. So she bobbed her head once. "Yeah, ok. If you want. Where...where did you get it?"
"Freleigh's office. He's got a liquor cabinet. Never fuckin' locks it. You ever drink?"
"Some beer," she admitted. Sarah smirked, pouring the Jack into one of the cups.
"Well, this ain't beer," she said, and passed the cup to Took, then held her hand out for the joint. Took passed it back, then peered suspiciously into the cup at the amber liquid within.
Sarah poured her own cup, setting the black-labelled bottle aside against the headboard, then eyed the blonde. "Well? Go on."
Licking her lips nervously, she lifted the cup to her mouth, and took a sip. Instantly her tongue and sinuses burned. She swallowed convulsively, the fire following down her throat and shutting it off almost defensively. Gasping, she coughed. Sarah giggled and shook her head. "Girl this is whiskey. You don't sip Jack, Took. Like this."
She took her own cup and tossed it neatly back, draining it in one mouthful. Took wiped the tears from her eyes, and offered the cup back. "I think I'll pass," she said roughly.
Sarah's eyes went stony. "Jesus, don't be such a pussy, Took. It's a fuckin' drink. Drink it."
Lisa frowned, lifted the cup again, then hesitated.
"Fast," Sarah urged. Taking a deep breath, Took gulped the liqour down. Gasping again, she coughed. It was like drinking battery acid.
Sarah grinned, then took the cup from her, passing her the joint. "Take a toke, it helps."
Without even thinking, Lisa took a drag. Sarah refilled both cups, gesturing with her chin for Lisa to sit down. Then she handed her back the refilled cup. She lifted her own. "Happy birthday to me," she grinned, tapping it against Lisa's.
Three shots later and her throat was numb, she had a decided craving for some potato chips (which she didn't even like), and she was well on her way to being totally shit-faced drunk. Both she and Sarah were giggling uncontrollably. Everything seemed to just be so fucking funny.
"Wait wait," she said, waving her hand dramatically and with imperfect coordination. "You said you'd been here ten years and that its your sisteenth birthday."
"Yes'm those words were said," Sarah nodded, tipping more Daniels into her cup.
"How can that be? This shithole doesn't take kids unner seven."
Sarah half tilted her head with a smirk, taking a final toke on the nearly burned out joint before snubbing it out against the bottle. "They made a special esseption in my case," she said. "Didn't know where else ta stick a murderer my age."
Lisa's head felt light and slow as her eyes lifted to regard Sarah the way someone might regard a dog that had been rumored to bite...but was wagging its tail. Sarah arched a brow. "What? Don't believe me?"
Lisa was afraid to say anything. Sarah licked her lips and took another shot of the Jack, before wiping her hand under her nose. "It was always shit when Daddy came home," she said, looking at the empty cup. "I could feel him coming, you know? Like thunder in the distance, the kind you can feel in your chest long before you ever really hear it. He got home around six ever' night. About five thirty I'd start making sure there were no toys out an' that my bed was made an' that there wasn't anything around that would...would make him mad, you know? Give 'im an esscuse. I was always real quiet when he came home. And sometimes, it was nice. He'd kiss Mama's cheek and we'd eat dinner and then...sit and watch tv and it would be...normal. Real nice."
She dropped the remnants of the joint into the empty cup and set it aside, then picked up a fresh one and lit it. Her fingers were shaking a little. Took watched the bob and shift of the smoke in response.
"It was easier b'fore I started school," she continued, eyes glassy, bloodshot with pot, and focused on nothing. "No teachers to wonder how come Sarah's always bumping into things, gosh...I must have been a clumsy kid hmm? Always running into doors and tripping downstairs. Must have got it from Mom. She was always running into doors too. Big doors that wore rings."
She picked up the bottle of Jack, still half full, and took a swig directly from it. Her normally pale cheeks had flushed a bit from the booze...it made her look almost human.
"Uncle Ricky and Uncle James came over that day. James was Dad's brother. Ricky wassn really my uncle. He was a family friend of some kind I think. I think he'us in love with my mother too. I don't know. Fuck does a six year old know about shit like that? After they left Mama came in my room and told me that I needed to get some things together. That the next day, after Daddy went to work, we'd be going away somewhere...going away with Ricky and James. Somewhere doors didn't have rings, I guess."
She took another belt from the bottle. Her eyes were even more glassy than they had been before. When she blinked, a tear fell unnoticed down her cheek. Took watched it with lazy fascination.
"She took some of my clothes into her room. I got this little Mickey Mouse Club bag I'd gotten for my birthday and I packed shit that a kid would pack. You know, crayons, couple coloring books, my blanket, shit like that. I had a little jar that Mom made me put all m'birthday and Christmas money in for college or for the ice cream man, sometimes. I put that in my bag too. Then Mom started making dinner and I went in to help her. I was afraid, you know...afraid it was going to be a bad day when he came home...that he'd know about my Mickey Mouse bag and the jar of money and that it'd be a really fuckin' bad day...but it wasn't. He was all right when he came home, you know? Kissed Mama's cheek and we had dinner and everything was a-ok, groovy, totally boss you know? Watched Dick Van Dyke...Dad laughed so hard I thought he'd fuckin' bust a gut."
She snorted as if this was somehow disgusting, then took a draw on the joint, her fingers tapping on the Jack.
"Then he went in to change for bed. Mama told me to go put my pajamas on and to go to sleep. She kissed me, right here..." she tapped her temple with the index finger of the hand holding the joint. It made thin curlicues of smoke over her ear. Her hand was trembling again. Her eyes had gone thickly glassy once more. She said nothing for a long time. Long enough for Lisa to start worrying. She nearly reached forward. Her hand actually moved, lifting off her lap to...to wave in front of that stare or take her by the shoulder and shake her or pat her hand or...something. But before it got an inch off her lap Sarah blinked, tuning back in.
"Fucker found the suitcase," she said almost casually, drawing on the joint again. "I was in my room in my pajamas and the fucker found the suitcase Mom had hidden. He went down the hall and threw it at her, started screaming and cussing about her leaving, and asking where the fuck she was going. I hid in my closet. Put my hands over my ears but you know, that shit gets in anyway. You can't ever block it out, can you? He was really pissed. Mom was crying and he was screaming and I heard something crash. Something fuckin' heavy, and Mom's voice started to sound strange, you dig? I'd never heard her sound like that and I...I didn't know what to do. I went in the hallway and I could see...fucker'd turned the table over. Turned it over and it had broken. Couple of the legs had come off. Mom was on the ground. She was...all bloody and curled up, hands...hands up like this..."
She ducked her head, curling her hands into claws over her ears and the sides of her head, as if trying to shield herself. She was still shaking. She clenched her eyes shut, talking through grit teeth. "And she was sobbing like...sobbing and begging...'Micheal...Micheal please no...no more...no more no more..."
She licked her lips with a whooping inhale that sounded far too close to a supressed sob to be anything else, and lowered her hands. "Then he hit her in the head with the table leg, whack! and she went limp and funny and trembly, kind of, for a moment. Trembly and then just...just still. And I screamed...I screamed something, I don't even remember doing it. But I screamed and he saw me there and he had blood on his chest and he started to come at the hall and I turned and ran. I ran into his room, because once he'd gone hunting with his friends and he brought back some rabbits and he showed me his rifle. Told me his rifle had killed the rabbits and I knew if it could kill rabbits it could hurt him, stop him. So I went in the closet and I got the rifle and it was heavy...taller than me almost. I didn't even know if it was loaded or how to do anything with it. I just had it because I was scared shitless and Mama wasn't moving and if he got to me I wouldn't move any more either.
"I dropped the damn thing. It was too big and heavy. I got it out of the closet but when the door slammed open and he was there with the blood on him and the table leg in his hand and that look...that look on his face, I dropped it. Kind of. It sort of slipped. Slipped back and the umm...the butt of it hit the ground by my feet and um...it was loaded. It hit hard enough that it went off. Bam. Like dropping a heavy book or slamming a door. Bam. And his face popped, kind of. Popped like a water balloon filled with red ink and he fell and I..."
She shook her head once, twice, sharply as if trying to clear a fly. Her teeth grit hard enough to create sharp tendons on either side of her jaw. She tossed the joint into the cup and lifted the bottle again, taking a short, sharp swig of it.
"And I don't remember shit after that. I don't remember shit until some nurse put me in a car. Put me in a car with a fuckin' teddy bear and a social worker that smelled like hot piss and then here the fuck I was. Here the fuck I was in this shit-hole place!"
Lisa lurched back as Sarah all but leapt off the bed, bottle still in one hand, swinging around as she gestured wildly, snarling through tears. "And here I am! Here I fuckin' am and here I always will fuckin' be! Where the fuck did you go, Uncle James?? I was six fuckin' years old and you left me in this fuck-hole! You left me in this fuck-hole!!"
Lisa plastered a hand over her mouth, her own eyes sore and damp from silent tears, her throat thick and painful. Sarah took a shuddering breath and lowered her arms, before wiping a hand over her face. Then she turned back toward Lisa and smiled a bit. "But that's ok. That's a-ok, Tooker. Just righteous with me, hmm? Because I won't be here for fuckin' ever. Someday I'll be out of this fuckin' shithouse and it'll be a different story then, won't it? My place, my rules. And we'll see how they fuckin' like it then, won't we? We'll see how they all fuckin' like it."
She was shouting but then...kids shouted in the middle of the night all the time, didn't they. And no one came.
No one ever came.
"Whas with all the fuckin' toys?" Sarah asked almost an hour later. The bottle of Jack was nearly gone between the two of them...Sarah having imbibed in the majority of it. She was staggering drunk, wandering in loopy circles between the bed and the window, swinging the bottle in her hand as if she'd forgotten it was there.
The toys in question were lined up on Took's dresser. Small little action figures. A Gonk, its cotton candy pink hair missing in tiny patches from its eternally wizened, grinning head. Couple of matchbox cars. A half bent slinky. And in the middle of the clutter, the plastic Hula girl that Sarah had tossed at her that day she'd pushed down the stairs.
Lisa...terribly drunk, high, and only half in touch with reality, watched her with bleary fascination. Her glasses were gone...she'd set them somewhere. So everything, even Sarah, was blurry and kept swimming in and out of focus.
"I like toys..." she began. Sarah's clumsy, questing fingers knocked over the Gonk. One of the matchbox cars rolled off the dresser and clinked to the ground.
"Whoops," Sarah blinked, then sat down, hard. She giggled. Lisa crawled forward on the bed, tried to get up, and ended up thumping to the ground herself. She rolled onto her back, licking her lips.
"Room's spinning," she mumbled.
"That'd be because yer fuckin' pished," Sarah responded. The nearly empty bottle of Jack clunked down nearby as Sarah scooted forward on her hands and knees. She laid down beside Lisa on the ground with a heavy 'whooo' of expended breath, pressing her hand to her forehead. Both girls were on the trembling edge of passing out.
"Tooker?" Sarah murmured, her eyes closed.
"Hnn?" Lisa grunted, more asleep than awake. The room still seemed to be slowly spinning. It felt like being on a little boat, moving in lazy eddies on some big river somewhere.
"Whuddya wanna do? When all thish washes away?" She lifted one lazy hand, made a bye-bye gesture at the room, then let it thump to her belly. Lisa licked her dry lips a moment, her brow wrinkling.
"I nunno," she mumbled. "I wun' 'elp people I guess."
Sarah made a sleepy snort that may have been a laugh. "'elp 'em do wha?"
"I nunno," she murmured again. "'elp 'em from bein 'urt...from...from bein' put inna dark..."
"Mmm..." Sarah nodded slowly in agreement. Lisa felt herself drifting away.
"Took?"
"Hnn?"
"Think y'cn 'elp me?"
"Mmhnnn."
The response was little more than a deepening thrust of air. Already her mind was dissolving and breaking away into sleep, dropping her into a black unconscious where dead, six-year old little boys didn't stare at her from under broken glasses, and where boogey men could not come.
The morning bell, designed to wake everyone up and alert them that breakfast was in half an hour, had transformed into some nightmarish demon with claws that pierced right through her skull. Gleefully it ground into the bone, pinching and crushing. She wailed almost before she was conscious, winding her arms around her head in a desperate attempt to keep the sound out.
As the sound died away she moaned. Her head went from white hot to a dull red throbbing that pulsed into her eyes. Her mouth tasted like a cat had taken a piss in it. Rolling onto her side she curled there a moment, trying to get past the pain in her head and the slowly rolling nausea to remember what had happened.
Sarah. Pot. Lots of Jack. Her eyes creaked open and fought to remember their function as she squinted against the sunlight coming in the window. Though she was still laying on the floor, Sarah was gone. All traces she’d been there were gone. She’d even picked up the toys she’d knocked over and rearranged them on the dresser.
Groaning, Lisa edged up to her knees. The light gleefully poked pins and needles at her eyes, making her head throb even worse. Never having been hung-over, she had been around enough people who were to recognize what was going on. She hadn’t understood, however, just how god-awful it was.
Knowing if she didn’t come out soon someone would start pounding on her door, she managed to get to her feet. Her glasses were laying on her rumpled pillow, beside something else. She squinted, picking it up. It was a little bottle with three lonely aspirin rattling around in the bottom.
They were sharp and bitter as she chewed them dry, shuffling along toward the bathroom. She was pretty sure she was going to die before she reached it. It seemed every kid in LoRaca had gained a thousand pounds and were stampeding everywhere they went. When she got to the girl’s bathroom she was a bit amazed to see her brain wasn’t actually pushing her eyes out of their sockets.
She did look like shit though. She sipped from the faucet to rinse the bitter aspirin down, then washed her face, brushed her teeth, and got dressed.
She skipped breakfast. The smell from the cafeteria seemed to reach right down her throat and start throttling her stomach. It was Saturday, so no classes but they still were expected to meet for group after lunch. She sat on the front steps where Sarah normally grifted, cradling her head and trying to recover.
The kids filtered out, flooding past Lisa like water past a rock that refused to budge. She kept her head down on her knees, taking deep breaths. She had never wanted to hurl so bad in her life, and it was taking every inch of concentration she had not to. She hated to puke.
Fuck Sarah anyway. Fuck her and her birthday and any man who had ever been born with the name Jack Daniels. Even in her misery, she knew she didn’t really mean that. Well, maybe the Jack Daniels part. But she couldn’t be pissed at Sarah. Even now, though most of last night was a blurry haze, she could remember what Sarah said about her father. Could see the girl with her hands curled up by her head, describing her mother begging ‘please, no more’. No, she couldn’t be pissed. She couldn’t be pissed at that.
Lifting her head a little at the first painful thump of the basketball as it struck the asphalt, she blearily noticed that Jeb and the other boys looked to be settling in for the long haul on the court. Knowing she couldn’t sit there and handle the incessant whapping of the ball and their thundering footsteps she debated going to the smoker’s corner.
Her stomach turned at the thought of cigarettes.
She could go back to her room and crawl miserably under her covers, but that would inevitably bring a whacker to see why she was in there. They’d think she was sick and take her to the infirmary, that dirty little place with the nurse with the bad breath and the dancing little mole on her lip. The nurse would discover she was hung-over and then the shit would really hit the fan. The staff might ‘overlook’ pot use so long as it wasn’t blatantly obvious, but drinking was strictly forbidden. If someone was caught with so much as a beer, they could guarantee a week in isolation at the very least.
As she continued to debate it, she saw Sarah break away from a group near the swings and head toward the smoking tree. She looked like shit too. Paler than she normally did, squinting sourly. Seeing her look and mistaking her for being pissed, kids scattered out of her way. As she passed by the basketball court, Jeb sneered.
“Hey, Nelson,” he barked. Normally when he did this she simply ignored him. But this morning his voice cut through Lisa’s head with sharp pain, and judging by the sudden wince on her face, it did the same to Sarah’s.
“Shit, you fucker,” Sarah paused, planting a hand on her temple. “Why don’t you keep that ugly mug of yours shut??”
Lisa’s hands dropped from her head in what seemed later like slow motion. The whackers near the fence turned their heads and began to take notice. A strange electrical tension seemed to fill the air.
The basketball sailed to one side, batted there by Jeb’s hand. He started forward as the whackers started forward, radios already slipping free of their belt loops. Jeb’s face had gone black. He shouted something but Lisa’s world had turned oddly mute. She could see his mouth moving, his veins bulging, but all noise had vanished from existence. Sarah stood her ground, already bracing herself to meet whatever fury this boy twice her size could mete out with her own.
He drew his hand forward from his waist in an odd motion, swinging and apparently slapping Sarah across the face. That is, Lisa thought it was a slap until she saw the blood arc, until the light flashed off the blade of the pocket knife in his hand. She stood up, screaming something, but her voice was as soundless as Jeb’s had been. The stairs nearly tripped her as she barreled down. The whackers had picked up speed.
Sarah fell backward, twisting a little, landing awkwardly, before flopping over onto her back. Jeb descended, her sneakered foot lifted, he barked in the over-exaggerated motions of a silent film as the kick sunk into his gut.
Lisa was air-born. His skin was hot and slick against hers as her arms clenched around his throat, her weight coming down on his back. She held on with all her strength, trying to cut off his air.
Sound abruptly rushed back into the world. Kids were shouting and screaming and cheering. Jeb was belching and grunting like a wild pig, her blood was rushing through her ears until her skull felt set to split. Radios crackled, whackers shouted, and then descended.
Something hard slammed across her shoulders. Her arms turned into noodles and she slipped backward off of Jeb’s back. As she hit the ground weight came down, pinning her face to the asphalt. Her wrists were clenched in aching misery at the small of her back. Booted feet ran past. More shouting. Something metal skidded in circles across her field of vision. It slid to a halt about two feet in front of her face, just out of sight. She wrinkled her brows, trying to shift her head to see it.
It was the pocketknife, its edge still glittering a bit with smears of crimson.
Her stomach gave up, and when she vomited, the whacker cussed with fury and something hard came down, bringing blackness with it.
Lisa hadn’t thought it possible, just a few hours ago, for her head to feel worse. She was wrong. She woke up on the hard, thin bed in the infirmary feeling as though the entire back of her skull had been stove in. Hurt, dazed, disoriented, she had cried for nearly five minutes before the infirmary nurse bothered to appear and tell her to hush herself.
“That’s what students get for jumping on other students,” she tsked brusquely. “Perhaps a headache will teach you a lesson.”
Twenty minutes later she swiftly bustled over to Lisa, passing her some small white pills and a glass of water. “They’ll help your head,” she insisted, making Lisa suspicious, but the state of her head made any hope of relief impossible to refuse. She choked down the pills, the nurse fussing over her with an intentness that was completely in opposition to how she had behaved only a few minutes before.
The reason for it appeared in the form of a strange man with iron gray hair, a thin little moustache, and a smart suit. He carried a briefcase that smelled of importance and old leather. He stepped into the infirmary just as the pills were slowly dying the throb away, making Lisa feel disconnected and groggy. Beside him came Mr. Freleigh, the two men engaged in conversation. Like a brisk little terrier dog, Bones followed on their heels.
“…no, no, Mr. Freleigh, I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“The girl has a history, Mr. Carstaire. She’s obstinate, disrespectful, a thief-“
The stranger, Mr. Carstaire, chuckled. “Oh, Mr. Freleigh. Show me one child in this home that isn’t disrespectful or obstinate. That is why they are here, remember? As for being a thief, so she plays monte with a few kids for their jacks and bubblegum-“
“More than that,” Bones huffed. “I took nearly twenty dollars off of her last time-“
“And she stole my wallet!” Mr. Freleigh pointed out.
“You have proof she was the one that took the wallet?” Mr. Carstaire asked.
“No, but-“
“She is a wicked girl, mark my words,” Bones warned, then pointed a finger at where Lisa lay, now floating in a fog of painkillers. “She’s influencing the other children to be violent! Lisa could have killed Jebediah!”
“Hang on, hang on,” Mr. Carstaire put up a hand. “Mr. Freleigh, Ms. Mazur. I have every respect for you and I fully understand the frustration you must feel at times dealing with these students. But I cannot simply remand a minor to juvenile detention who has committed no provable crime. And you have not presented enough evidence that this Sarah Nelson is in any way dangerous or criminal enough to remove her from this facility. Now. Jebediah is a different matter. Several witnesses saw him pull a weapon and violently attack another student. I have spoken with him myself and he is clearly combative and hostile, and poses a danger to every child and staff-member in this facility. He will be removed to juvenile detention pending a more formal court ruling.”
Both Bones and Freleigh burst out but he cut his hand through the air before they could get very far. “As far as Sarah is concerned if she pursues or continues in a pattern of violent, miscreant behavior file a formal report and we will re-examine her placement here. Until then, I can only suggest that as her mentor, Mr. Freleigh, and as her counselor, Ms. Mazur, you two find a new approach towards helping her to find balance and to heal, because clearly what you are doing now is not attaining the effect needed.”
The nurse, still lurking by Lisa’s head, made a strange sound which could have been anything from a snort of disgust to one of repressed laughter.
“So what are we going to do with Lisa then,” Bones asked, her face once more pulling off its best impression of the wrong side of a feline. “She could have killed Jeb if the orderlies hadn’t intervened.”
“From what I understand of what happened, Lisa was only attempting to halt Jebediah and protect her friend. Considering he had a knife in his hand she took the only safe route. You yourself said that Lisa isn’t a violent girl, that if anything she’s far too withdrawn and introverted. Be grateful, Ms. Mazur, that she’s finding friendship and opening herself up to people. Perhaps Lisa will help to temper Sarah as well. Nurse?”
He looked at Mole, who blinked at him. As if she’d forgotten the pretense she was putting up, the nurse began to stroke Lisa’s hair a bit too roughly. “Yes, Mr. Carstaire?”
“How is she doing?”
“She has a frightful bump but no permanent damage. She’s on some painkillers now and is a bit groggy, but I expect by tomorrow morning she’ll be none the worse for wear.”
“And Sarah?”
“Shallow cut on her cheek. Looked worse than it was, but it’ll probably scar a bit. Gave her a tetanus shot. She’s up in her rooms. Figured it would be quieter for her up there.”
“Then things are in hand,” he nodded, and looked at his watch. “As Jebediah is uninjured we will be transferring him immediately. The uniformed officers should be here within the hour to escort him to Manchester Juvenile facility. Until then, keep him in the isolation unit and let the officers remove him.”
They drifted out of the infirmary, and Lisa was unable to hear their words any more, though their voices drifted in and out as they slowly faded from distance. The nurse immediately rose and went about her work, all false compassion toward Lisa evaporating like mist in the sun.
Lisa didn’t care. The knot on her head, the thickness of the drugs, and the lingering hangover left little room to even feel bitterness toward the hypocrisy. All she could think, in fact, was how Mr. Freleigh and Ms. Mazur had been put in their place by Mr. Carstaire…and how they would make she and Sarah pay for it.
"You see this, Took?"
The air was chill and sharp. Jeb had left for juvie four days ago. Since he'd gone, the weather had turned charged and stormy. The sky was close and gray but so far no rain had fallen.
She and Sarah were sitting on the steps, old windbreakers from the donations boxes on to cut the sharpness of the breeze. The cut on Sarah's face was an angry line from cheekbone to jaw. It had to be tender and it was bruising around the edges, but Sarah didn't seem to know or care that it existed.
In her fingers she held a battered little dollar bill. It had been folded and refolded so many times that it had wrinkled atrociously, and one corner had been torn a little.
"Yeah, I see it," Lisa replied, wondering what was so important about the dollar.
"Uncle Ricky gave me this. See here? My birthday is in the serial number. He gave this to me when he and Uncle James came to my house that day. He said he'd saved it especially for me and that it was my lucky buck."
She flipped it over and over thoughtfully in her fingers. "Some fuckin' lucky buck, huh Took? Yeah. Same day he gives it to me Dad kills Mom, I kill Dad and end up fucked all the way up in this shithouse."
"Why don't you throw it away then?" Lisa asked. Sarah rolled one shoulder, folded it between two fingers, and stuffed it in her sock.
"I was going to. Then one lucky thing happened."
"What's that?"
"Jeb got put in the shit-can," she grinned. Lisa grinned back. Sarah jerked her chin toward the tree and they got to their feet, wandering over to the smoking area as the older girl pulled out a pair of smokes, passing one to Lisa. A few of the other kids were already there, but paid them no attention. Matches snapped with a faint sulfur smell. Lisa took the smoke into her lungs with a satisfied sigh.
"Can I ask you something," she said after a few moments. Sarah eyed her, lowering her cigarette and blowing out a cloud of smoke.
"So long as I don't feel the need to fuck up your face for it," she replied casually.
"The first day I was here, when Jeb threw the basketball at me...why did you jump on him?"
Sarah squinted off past the tree, then turned and moved closer to the chain-link fence. The roots of the sugi had burrowed under the dirt, and as a result had lifted the bottom of the fence loose from the ground in a couple of small places. Beyond the cold, gray metal web, bushes and underbrush only partially hid a distant road from view. Some broken beer bottles were scattered around just out of reach, dozens of discarded cigarette butts, a few condoms. Sarah leaned on the fence and looked upward at the sugi's branches.
Lisa went and stood next to her, looking up as well. "See that?" Sarah pointed. On a thick branch about ten feet up there was a worn, scarred spot. Lisa nodded. She had seen it before, and some of the kids had told her that one student or another, years ago, had hung themselves from it with the tetherball rope. Lisa had pointed out they didn't have a tetherball post in the yard, and the kids told her that was why...they'd taken it out afterward so no one else would do the same thing.
"I see it."
"When I first came here, I was six," Sarah said, still casually smoking as she looked upward. "There was an older girl here already. Katie Dunfrey. Everyone called her Kitty, see. She said it made her sound like Kit Carson."
"Who's Kit Carson?"
"I don't know, some fuckin' frontier trapper or something. Pay attention. Kitty was sixteen. Ruled the yard, you know? No one fucked with Kitty but she was nice too, dig? Kept all the kids straight but didn't take no shit or she'd put you down on the ground. Shit. Even Bones said good things about Kitty, and Bones would call her own mother a hay-lickin' bitch. Well, I was fucked in the head, you know? Screamed at night a lot. Bad nightmares. You know the whackers don't give a shit if kids had nightmares, but Kitty cared. She came in my room and told me stories and calmed me down. Kitty was fuckin' class A. Fuckin' class A all the way, baby. She was here because her father got her on the needle when she was eleven. He went to jail and she came here. Had tracks all over her arms. Sometimes her hands would shake something awful and she'd stutter a little. Said she had migraines. She took these little white pills sometimes, and sometimes she'd disappear for a few days. Kitty was the shit though. Everyone loved her."
Lisa's eyes dropped from the branch to Sarah's face, and she half-consciously tapped the gathering ash off the end of her cig. Sarah rolled a shoulder. "Anyway, she wore glasses and looked a bit like you, I guess. Fucking taller and less like the wrong end of a mangy dog."
She half smirked, chuckled. "No big deal, anyway. It was Kitty's birthday when you came. When Jeb smacked you with the ball I had a 'what would Kitty do' moment and fucked him up. Not a big fuckin' thing."
Lisa was silent a moment, then dared, "What happened to Kitty?"
Sarah's face went to that familiar stone and Lisa was afraid she'd gone too far this time. Sarah might have this odd affiliation for her but she'd still knock her teeth in given enough incentive. Lisa was hardly immune from her wrath. Sarah flicked the butt at the ground and scooted her foot over it roughly a time or two.
"LoRaca got her," she said at last, her voice tight and angry. "LoRaca got her, that's what. She had another headache, she said. Took one of her pills but it didn't go away. Finally she went to the infirmary. 'Back in a breeze,' that's what she said. 'Back in a breeze, little snub, don't let my seat get cold.' But she didn't come back. Not that night, not all the next day or night either. Next morning during breakfast there was an ambulance in the yard. Police tape everywhere. Fucking uniforms. No one ever told us what happened but it got out. Shit like that always gets out. She hung herself up there. I heard Bones tell Mrs. Simonstry that she'd had some sort of aneurysm or something, or a seizure-like...a black out kind of. That the pain just made her bungo and she hung herself up in the tree to make it stop."
Lisa was silent, looking at the bare spot on the wood as the cold, stormy breeze rattled moved through the sugi, making the wood groan low and mournful. "Weren't no fuckin' aneurysm and it weren't no black out," Sarah finished. "That's what LoRaca will do to some of them. To the good ones. It sucks them dry and tears them down and in the end...LoRaca wins. LoRaca always fuckin' wins in one way or another."
The bell rang. Kids began tossing down cigs and joints, snuffing them out and shuffling toward the door. Sarah half-hunched in her windbreaker and headed toward the door. Glancing one last time at the wounded branch, Lisa trotted after her.
The flow of bodies inside had turned into a trickle as they reached the steps. Two whackers stood at the door, and Bones was there too. As Lisa and Sarah went to go inside, the break-sticks came out and blocked their path. Bones smiled.
"Mr. Freleigh would like to see you girls," she said almost congenially.
The whackers grinned.
"Fuck! Fuck'd we do??" Sarah snarled as the whacker steered her less than gently along the hallway toward Mr. Freleigh's office. One arm was all but cranked up between her shoulders and he was pushing her along so fast she had to fight not to stumble. "Fuck, ease off you shit-for-brains!"
Lisa was coming along a little more sedately, a hand like an iron manacle on her upper arm. She, like Sarah, knew they hadn't done anything...but she'd suspected this was coming. Mr. Freleigh had been pissed after Mr. Carstaire had left. She was just a little surprised that it had taken him this long.
As they approached the office the storm outside broke, rain coming down on the metal roof of the school with a rattling sound. The frosted glass door opened and Mr. Freleigh stood there, a glass of something gold and brown in his hand. Though there was nothing obviously wrong with him Lisa couldn't put aside the notion that something wasn't quite right, either. He looked calm and collected.
"Thank you boys," he said evenly as he stepped aside. The whackers thrust both her and Sarah down into a chair. Mr. Freleigh gestured lightly with the glass at the door. "You can leave them."
"We'll be just outside-"
"No. They'll be needing you in the cafeteria for dinner time," he replied cooly. The whackers hesitated.
"We can't just leave you alone-"
"I can handle two little girls, gentlemen," he said with half a smile. "We're just going to have a little chat. Go on now."
Lisa watched with big, trembling eyes as the two whackers left and closed the door. Sarah said nothing, and as Lisa glanced over at her she noticed her grip on the arms of the seat had gone white-knuckled. She sensed it too. Something was wrong.
Mr. Freleigh was still looking at the door. He seemed to remember the drink in his hand and took a long slow sip at it. Then he turned and set the glass lightly on his desk. A bottle was there. He uncorked it, refilled the glass. As he set it back down Lisa realized it was bourbon. It was also two-thirds empty. She wondered how long he had been drinking before sending for them.
Her bladder felt full and trembly. She tried not to make a sound.
He didn't bother with the cork again. Going to his desk drawer he pulled out what looked like a leather belt. Then he went to the door and lightly turned the latch, locking it.
"I can see my efforts with you, Sarah, have gone in vain," he said slowly, the touch of a slur in his voice. "I've tried to make you into a decent person, heaven knows I have. But clearly I have failed."
Sarah said nothing, not even a typical cuss-out or witty retort. She only glowered at the floor. Mr. Freleigh's slacks rustled as he crouched beside Lisa's chair. He reached out and she flinched back a little. His fingers gently drew off her glasses and folded them closed, before slipping them in his jacket pocket. He then took the leather strap in his hand and buckled her wrist to the chair.
"Lisa, however...you still have a chance, hmm? You've been following along behind Sarah like a pissy little puppy, and we can't have that...no. We can't have that at all. So you will see what happens to her because of what she's done, and I hope that it will clear that little head of yours and show you that her path is one you certainly don't want to follow."
His hand passed almost lovingly over her head and she jerked away from it again. He smiled. His eyes seemed oddly dead.
He straightened, turned.
Sarah suddenly lunged forward, but Mr. Freleigh was incredibly fast for a man his age. He caught the back of her neck, driving her momentum forward until her hip caught the edge of the desk. She half fell, tried to get up again. He snatched hold of her hair, slammed her face down to the wood. She grunted, cussed faintly, tried to struggle. He gripped her tighter and slammed her down again. "Be still you little cocksucker," he snarled in her ear. "I'm not playing around here, you get me? You dig?? I'm not fucking playing with you. This is serious, Sarah. Ser-i-ous."
"Lemme go," she growled faintly into the wood.
"Oh, no. Not until you learn your lesson," he said, his free hand going to the cup and taking out the antennae, extending it with a sharp snap. Lisa's free hand fumbled over the leather strap holding her to the chair but she couldn't figure out how to unfasten it. It was too tight to get her fingers under it.
She winced unconsciously at the first whap that cut across Sarah's back. The girl pressed on the desk jumped a little bit, gasping through her grit teeth. Lisa's hand started shaking, making it even harder for her to get a grip on the strap. Without her glasses and with tears of fear now filling her eyes Mr. Freleigh and Sarah were little more than blurry shapes of color and motion.
Whap, whap, whap!
Mr. Freleigh was hitting her as fast as he could lift and lower his arm. Lisa jolted the chair, trying to tug her arm loose.
"Stop it!" she shrieked. "Stop it! Leave her alone!"
He spun, releasing his hold on Sarah. She slipped away from the desk and hit the ground with a gritted cry of pain. As he spun the antennae whipped across Lisa's face with astonishing force. Then his hand was there against her chin, pinning her head back to the chair.
"DO NOT SPEAK UNTIL I SPEAK TO YOU!" He roared, his breath hot and sour with liquor. She could see sweat along his face, his cheeks ruddy with drink and exertion, little beads of damp gathering in his moustache. His eyes were wild and bloodshot. "You're a little fucking cunt, just like she is!"
He released her face and turned. Sarah was half on her hands and knees, trying to get up. His leg swung back and then sailed forward, his foot belting her in the gut. Sarah grunted, collapsed to her side, and he kicked her again. Lisa once more shouted at him to stop but this time, he ignored her. Sarah curled fetally a moment and Mr. Freleigh calmly picked up his drink, taking a swallow.
"I can see this is going to take more work than I thought," he murmured. "Unfortunately, Sarah...there is nothing more we can do for you here at LoRaca. It's a pity, really."
"Fucker," Sarah half groaned, half gasped, her arms wound around her gut.
"You can't send her to juvie," Lisa shot. "I heard Mr. Carstaire! He won't let you send her to juvie when she didn't do anything wrong!"
Mr. Freleigh smirked, drained his cup, then set it down. Picking up the bottle he poured. "Juvie? Lisa, no. Sarah isn't going to juvie, but she's not staying here, either. No no, tsk tsk. We're done here aren't we Sarah?"
"Fuck..." she was trying to roll to her hands and knees, but her movements were weak and shaky.
"No, Lisa. May I call you Took? That's what most of the kids call you, I understand. Little Took. Anyway, Took, since you and Sarah are thick as thieves can be, I'm sure she's told you about another student that used to live here. Ah, pretty Kitty. Such a pretty Kitty she was. Now there was a student. Do you remember Kitty, Sarah?"
She dry-heaved, panting a bit. He pursed his lips a little thoughtfully. "Yes, you two were buddies, weren't you? My pretty Kitty. Now she knew how to behave. Knew how to treat a headmaster with the respect he deserved. Oh, and she treated me very well, Sarah. Very very well."
"You sick fuck..." she panted.
"Am I?" he smirked. She'd made it onto her hands and knees. Reaching out a foot he planted it on her hip and knocked her over again. "Kitty didn't think so. Well, maybe at first she did but she found out bending over my desk nice was so much better than getting whipped, hmm?"
Sarah snarled and surged weakly up. The retracted antennae still in his right hand, Mr. Freleigh punched her. She thumped back to the ground, hands cupping her bleeding nose and lips. Lisa yanked on the belt strap and began fumbling with it again, trying to get loose.
"But then she got obstinate. She got dismissive. And I'm afraid she just had to go, Sarah. She just had to go. And now, you just have to go too. That tree has been empty for far too long I think. Pity no one realized just how depressed and self-destructive you were."
He downed the bourbon, set the cup aside. Instead of refilling it though he went around his desk, opened a drawer. He pulled out a bit of clothesline. "Stolen from the laundry," he tsked. "I should whip you again for sneaking in there."
"No! No!" Lisa moaned, all but tearing at the strap as he came around the desk. He bunted Sarah over onto her stomach with his foot, then squatted over her, sitting on the small of her back as he began to tie a noose in the end of the line. Sarah tried to struggle again but with his full weight on her aching, bruised back she couldn't get any leverage. She was cussing and spitting blood like a feral cat. He started to hum as he tied up the noose.
Lisa, sobbing madly, barely felt it when one of her fingernails nearly tore off in her attempt to unfasten herself. She finally got her fingers under the strap, began to loosen it, prying at it. The chair squeaked a little as it scooted a bit across the floor. Mr. Freleigh finished the noose with one last snapping tug of the knot.
"I do have to say, this is going to be a big relief, Sarah. No one fuckin' liked you anyway."
Lisa ripped her hand backward and free of the strap. With nothing else at hand she stood up and grabbed the very chair she had been sitting in and swung it.
She wasn't a very big or strong girl but she hit him hard enough to knock him to the side and off of Sarah.
Sarah lurched up to her feet as Lisa retreated a bit, snatching hold of the door handle, forgetting in her panic that it was locked. Mr. Freleigh cussed, throwing the chair aside and getting to his feet. Sarah snatched at the 'World's Best Dad!' mug and then turned. Her dark hair was disheveled, her pale face bruised and smeared with blood from her nose and split lip. But in her eyes was a fury that matched Freleigh's.
As he came at her, reaching out to grab her, she punched him in the throat. He made a strange sound, gagged a little, and gripped her arm. As Sarah ripped her hand back Lisa saw the gleam of the letter opener. Then red. A lot of red.
Sarah hit him again and he fell backward, his fingers digging into her arm as he pulled her back with him. Straddling him now she stabbed him again, then again. Lisa, shrieking, slapped her hand on the frosted glass of the door hard enough to make it rattle, but no one came.
In LoRaca, no one ever came.
She was wedged tightly under the workbench, arms around her head, her chest aching with whooping breaths that seemed to bring her little air. Darren was dead. He was dead with his brains smeared on the porcelain tub. The blood, the blood. Little Marcus was floating in it. His glasses were broken. His glasses...
"Took!"
She jolted with a whirring gasp as hands gripped her wrists. She struggled but the grip was too strong.
"For fuck's sake, Took, look at me!"
It was Sarah, and this was Mr. Freleigh's office. Sarah's face was slightly distorted, her nose and lip swollen, eyes already bruising. Took whooped and gasped and fought not to get sick. Her jeans were damp and chaffing.
"He's dea...he's dea...he's dea..." she kept repeating. Sarah slapped her. It wasn't hard, but sharp and biting. The world seemed to clarify starkly.
"He's dead," Sarah hissed. "Come on, everyone's in for dinner. We got some time."
She released Took and stepped back. Took's eyes automatically went to the floor, but Mr. Freleigh wasn't there. After a moment she noticed his foot protruding from behind the desk. Sarah paced over there, moving awkwardly. The bourbon bottle had spilled, the glass broken on the ground. Sarah got behind the desk and crouched. A moment later she came up with Took's glasses and Freleigh's wallet. Heading back over she crouched and offered the glasses. "I don't think he landed on them. The frame might be cracked."
As Took wiped her face and put them on, Sarah thumbed through the wallet. She took out all the cash, then pitched the wallet at his desk. It slapped into the 'World's Greatest Dad!' mug and sent it spilling onto the carpet. Folding the money she jammed it into her pocket, then grabbed Took's shoulders. "You together?"
Took nodded shakily. Sarah nodded, then rose and unlatched the door, peering out. "Hall's empty. C'mon, let's go."
"Wh-wh-where we going?"
Sarah said nothing, only started out at a hesitant trot. Took got to her feet and went after her. Her legs were shaking and she realized why her pants were cold and wet. She'd lost control of her bladder. Her cheeks heated with embarrassment as she half-limped after the older girl.
They reached Took's room without encountering anyone. Sarah went in, opened the dresser, and pulled out a pair of jeans. She pitched them at Lisa. "Change. Then meet me in my room."
She vanished. Hands shaking, took stripped out of her wet jeans and pulled on the dry ones, grabbing her sneakers. She was fighting not to sob, her whole body feeling like it was shaking. Mr. Freleigh was dead. He was dead and they'd never believe them as to why. They'd both go to juvie.
Changed, she peeked out into the hall. It was empty. Getting to Sarah's room took a lifetime though it was only a few doors down. She opened it to find Sarah had taken out an old battered pack and was stuffing it with a few things. As Lisa closed the door Sarah pulled the ventilation grate off the wall, reached in, and pulled out a mason jar. It was stuffed full of dollar bills and change. She shoved it in the pack.
"Where'd you get all that?" Lisa sniffled. Sarah lifted her eyes momentarily.
"Ten years of grifting, Took. I got nearly a grand in here. I knew I was going to have to beat feet someday."
She took a pack of camels and a couple of joints from her dresser drawer, shoving them in her coat pockets. Then she closed up the bag and shouldered it. "C'mon. Dinner's done in fifteen minutes."
The rain was falling steadily as they reached the schoolyard. It spotted Lisa's glasses. They reached the sugi and Sarah lowered the bag, reaching in her pocket. She took out the joints, put one in her mouth, and lit it. Taking a long, shaking draw on it, she pulled it out again and gave it to Lisa.
This time Lisa didn't argue. She took the joint mechanically and drew it in as Sarah lit the second one. Slowly, the shakiness in her limbs gave way, her hitching breaths slowing into hiccups before becoming steady.
Halfway through her joint, Sarah pulled a battered pair of wire cutters from the bag and began to snip at the chain-link fence, starting where the roots had pushed through.
"Where are you going?" Lisa asked slowly, her tongue thick and her stomach slowly roiling.
"As far as I can fuckin' get out of here," Sarah replied. "You're coming too."
The wind rustled the tree until the branches creaked. Lisa thought about the worn spot on the branch above their heads. "No," she said with weary contemplation. "No, I'm staying here."
Sarah eyed her, slipping the cutters into her pocket. "They'll crucify you. They'll fuckin' pitch you in with Jeb for murder, Took."
"I won't talk to anyone but Mr. Carstaire."
"You think Carstaire is gonna protect your ass?? Christ, Took! This is the real fucking world! Okay? The happy fucking ending doesn't happen to kids like us. Santa's a joke, the fucking easter rabbit was cooked in some redneck's pot, and the only tooth fairy in business is the one that knocks them out to begin with!"
"I won't talk to anyone but Mr. Carstaire."
"Shit Took. Shit you are seriously fucked in the head. Fine. Have it your fuckin' way. But if you tell them which way I ran I will find you and cut your fuckin' throat, do you hear me?"
The wind moaned, the rain drizzled, the branches creaked.
"I'm not a snitch," she said low, softly. Sarah's gun-metal grey eyes narrowed a moment. Then she reached into her sock and stood up. She grabbed Took's hand and pressed the beat-up dollar bill into her palm.
"This thing is out of luck for me, Took, if it ever had any good luck in it to begin with. I make my own fuckin' luck now. When you learn to make your own luck, burn the fucker."
She pressed Lisa's fingers down over it, then bent and grabbed the bag. She peeled the chain-link back and pitched the bag through. Lisa stepped forward, grabbing the flap of metal and holding it while Sarah crawled through. She lowered it back down as Sarah straightened, lifting and shouldering the bag.
She didn't look back, immediately setting off at a trot through the littered underbrush for the road in the distance. That was ok.
Lisa knew she didn't have anything to look back for.
She looked at the wrinkled dollar in her hand, before smoothing it out on her palm and folding it up. She stuck it in her sock, straightened, and pitched the spent joint.
Then she turned and headed inside.
Lisa told them pretty much everything.
She had walked into the cafeteria as dinner was winding down. The food was served by volunteers and charity workers. Lisa went right to one that she didn’t recognize and told her quite calmly that Mr. Freleigh was dead upstairs in his office, and could she please call the police.
When they realized she was telling the truth, the students were locked down, Bones put Lisa in isolation, and the cops were called. Lisa sat there in the dark, feeling weary, drained, yet oddly calm.
Mr. Carstaire had come to talk to her. In a little side office with two uniforms present she told him everything, more or less. How Mr. Freleigh had been drunk. How he had strapped Lisa to the chair. How he had beat Sarah. When she got to the part where he had pretty much admitted to raping Kitty and then hanging her in the tree, Mr. Carstaire’s face went very still. He stood up and talked to one of the uniforms a moment, then sat down again. The uniform left.
She found out later that he had gone to tell them to search Mr. Freleigh’s offices. It took them two hours, but they found a folder in the false bottom of one of the filing cabinets in there. A folder with pictures.
But that was later. Mr. Carstaire asked her if Mr. Freleigh had ever done something like that to her and she told him no, the only thing he’d done was whip her with the antennae, as he had done Sarah. Later on, all the students who had been brought to Mr. Freleigh for discipline were examined. Seven of the fifteen had scars on their backs from the whipping.
She told them pretty much everything, yes…but she never did tell them which way Sarah ran. She wasn’t a snitch.
For the next several weeks LoRaca was the focus of a huge investigation. Uniforms were everywhere. The whackers had vanished. Bones was fired, as was Mrs. Simonstry. Records were painstakingly searched, students questioned, strangers came and went. Several students were reassigned, then several more.
Mr. Carstaire came for Lisa personally. She was smoking alone behind the sugi tree. They had temporarily patched the chain-link, and done a piss-poor job of it. It was six months after Sarah had gone. As far as Lisa knew, they hadn’t found her yet.
“You want to go for a ride?” Mr. Carstaire asked, leaning on the sugi. Lisa shrugged, rubbed out her cigarette and flicked it aside.
“To where?” she asked.
“Group home in Portland. They have an opening and I think you’d fit right in.”
She glanced askance at him, and he smiled a little. “Don’t worry, Lisa. I guarantee its nothing like here.”
“Couldn’t be much worse, could it?” she shrugged a little. He put his hand on her shoulder.
“Go and get your things, kiddo.”
She did, and they left, and he was right…it was nothing like LoRaca.
“Took?”
Patton’s voice interrupted her thoughts. The empty, abandoned building had shriveled to something small and hollowed. Blinking a moment, she lifted her wrist and looked at her watch. She’d been standing out here for an hour. Her fingers were numb.
“I’m sorry, Patton,” she said. “I guess I kind of drifted off a little.”
“It’s okay,” she replied. She regarded the overgrown play-yard and shrugged into her coat. The sun was barely hanging on to the horizon. The yard was mostly in shadow save where a few splashes of crimson and gold light still fought against the evening. “This place creeps me out. Why haven’t they torn it down yet?”
“State never likes to throw anything away. Until they can figure out a use for the land…” She shook her head, then fished into her pocket as her cellphone buzzed. She pulled it out. It was festooned with Peanuts stickers. She flipped it open and put it to her ear.
“Tookson. Great. Be there in half an hour.”
She snapped the phone shut. “That was Greg. They got a lead on where she’s running.”
“About god-damn time,” Patton replied, already heading back for the car. Took turned to join her.
She didn’t look back.
Hell, what the fuck did she have to look back for?
Smoke.
Leaning against the old iron-wrought gate, now stoppered with weeds and chained with a rusted padlock, Took's green eyes shifted along the brick to the far corner of the yard.
The sugi had grown much larger, its roots spreading and breaking through the heavy chain-link, which wept rust like blood from an old wound. She'd seen pictures of it taken in 1950, a small sapling in a nice circular patch of dirt ringed by decorative brick. Japanese cedar. When she'd first crossed these gates, it had grown enough to break out of the ringed brick.
It wants to get out of here as much as we do, Took.
Behind her glasses her eyes shut momentarily as the ghost of a voice seemed to sift through the smoke on the breeze. The smoke. What she smelled now was probably someone burning leaves a few miles away, or someone stoking up their wood barbecue. But what it recalled...
They say that scent is the most powerful sense linked to memory. With her eyes closed, smelling that smoke and hearing that non-existant voice Took was almost there again. The sugi. That's where the kids had gone to smoke. Behind the shade of the big tree, tucked in the corner where they couldn't easily be spotted. Took had smoked too. Everyone there did. Even some of the seven year olds smoked, given enough time.
She didn't smoke any more. Her last cigarette had been behind this gate. When she'd come out the other side she hadn't picked up another one. Not so much as a single butt. Tobacco was just another bad that had shaken off her shoes along with the dust of this place.
But it hadn't ever really gone, had it?
The huge brick building was boarded up now. It's windows mostly broken. Graffitti painted its sides in swirls of neon green and orange and red. Meaningless tags. Gang symbols. Claims laid on a building no one had wanted to ever lay claim to twenty years ago.
"Hey, Took," Patton called from the car. The wind snapped at Took's jacket, making the smiley face button pinned to the lapel tink against the button holding an image of Papa Smurf's face. Her blonde hair, escaping its haphazard pony-tail, danced like tentacles under the sea. Half tucking her head she shoved her hands in her pockets and glanced at the car.
Patton, that little five foot nothing spitfire sat on the edge of the passenger's seat, hands dangling between her knees beside the propped open door. Her short red hair, naturally touselled, seemed impervious to the breeze. Her eyes squinted a little in concern.
"You okay?" she asked. Took bobbed her head once, then twice, turning back to the gate.
"Yeah. Gimme a minute," she said. Her hands shifted in her pockets. The butt of the .45 Smith and Wesson shifted in its holster at her hip. Unconsciously her hand stole out of her jacket and reseated it more snugly, checking that the snap was in place.
You gonna shoot me, Took? Would if you were smart.
The remaining chain of an abandoned and mostly destroyed swing-set tapped lightly against the metal post supporting it. Took's hand left the gun and slipped into the chain-link, hanging there as she leaned forward a little.
How old had she been when she'd come here? Thirteen. Thirteen years and seventeen foster homes old. It was right after Darren and the 30 Aught 6. Right after she'd seen dead people for the first time. The windows hadn't been broken then. The gate had been strong and black and clean, sliding open quietly on its well oiled hinges as sunlight flashed--
--through the car windows in a march of shade and brilliance that kept her eyes adjusting madly. Taking off the heavy, black-rimmed glasses, Lisa pinched at the bridge of her nose, pressed at her eyes, then blinked in exaggerated motions before sliding the glasses back on. Beside her on the car seat sat a small, battered backpack. In the driver's seat was Mrs. French, the social worker. Every time she moved Lisa got a puff of powdery perfume that made her nose itch. She'd spent most of the trip trying not to sneeze.
"You may have heard some bad things about this place," Mrs. French was saying. "It's all just rumor. LoRaca is the best place for you to be right now. You'll have the best counseling, and you'll make all sorts of new friends who will have gone through similar situations. You'll be right at home in no time."
Lisa only peered out the window again, as the car slowed and the gates began to swing open. The brick building was large and new and reminded Lisa of a factory. If it hadn't been for the three ranked swing-sets, the painted basketball court, and the sandpit, it could well have been.
But then, even with the thin disguise, that's what it was, wasn't it? A factory. It took kids like her, chewed them up and spit out responsible, productive adults. Adults who didn't scream in the middle of the night or hear voices or anything that was wacko.
Right at home, Mrs. French had said. What did that mean? How did she even know how that felt? Would she know when it felt 'right at home?' She'd been abandoned when she was two years old. She'd been moved here, moved there, no place lasting even a year. So how then did home feel? She'd never had one, and didn't know.
She doubted 'home' felt like this place. It was a cold, unsmiling building and even as the car found its way into a small parking stall, Lisa could feel thunder in the air.
She gathered the little backpack, her beat up old Nike's making no sound as they touched the blacktop, taking her weight. She looked up at the sky. Thunder in the air, but not a single cloud to be seen. The sky was blue, carefree, oblivious.
Mrs. French led her inside with the swift motions of one practiced and familiar with the halls. Her hand rested lightly but possessively on Lisa's shoulder. Lisa didn't like it. She didn't like people touching her most of the time.
They passed down a corridor lined with blank doors and floored with scuffed linoleum the same shade some Army jerk would paint his truck, before arriving at the headmaster's office. Mrs. French knocked, and they were ushered in. He was called the headmaster, but Lisa knew a warden when she saw one.
He was tall and gangly, with thick and neatly cut brown hair, a weasely nose, and a trimmed moustache. His suit was tweed with those leather patches at the elbows. He looked like a college professor of some kind. He smiled at her but it never touched his eyes. Those spoke in flecks of broken light and sharp edges of flint. They were crow's eyes, watching and calculating and pondering dark ponderings. She didn't like him right away.
Leaning on his desk, he folded his arms, crossing his legs. Lisa looked up at him over the rim of her glasses, not fooled. Far too many social workers had stood just that way. She supposed they thought it put her at ease but she saw it for what it was. She was a problem they had to tackle, fix, or put in its place.
"Well, Lisa Tookson," he sucked his teeth lightly a moment, pursing his lips. "I read your file while you were on the way over. Hard thing, dear, hard thing..."
"Terrible thing, Mr. Freleigh," Mrs. French bobbed her head in agreement. His fingers tapped on the thick folder beside him on the desk, before he wrinkled his brows at her.
"Do you want to talk about it, Lisa?"
Her gaze above her glasses never wavered. After a sufficient pause he nodded sympathetically. "Well, that's quite all right, dear. Just fine. Well!" He clapped his hands lightly, once. His skin had a dry sound. "Lisa, my name is Ilya Freleigh. I'm the headmaster here at LoRaca. Did they tell you much about LoRaca, Lisa?"
She leaned back, deciding he wasn't worth her time to look at any more. Her eyes went toward the window. It was small and narrow, and reinforced with a web of thin metal strands in a honeycomb pattern. To make it harder to break, she guessed.
As if she'd answered him, he continued on.
"LoRaca is a special facility, Lisa. Everyone here is here to help you. To help you understand, to learn, and to grow. We have wonderful doctors that will talk to you about...oh, well about anything you want to discuss..."
Head-shrinks, Lisa silently intoned.
"...we have classes and people to help you with your studies, and there are many children your age that you can make friends with. You'll find its a very...a very safe and nurturing environment."
She didn't bother to roll her eyes, still looking at the windows. He could candy-coat it all he wanted but she knew what LoRaca was. Everyone who had spent more than a week in any kind of foster home in Washington or Oregon knew what LoRaca was. The boob hatch. The miniature version of the nuthouse for kids. LoRaca was where they sent the troublemakers, the disturbed, the violent, the wacko, or those who had been 'traumatized'. A school. A hospital. An institution. It didn't matter what you called it. Persian or tomcat, they all pissed the same.
"I'm sorry Mr. Freleigh," Mrs. French's voice filled in the space when he stopped and Lisa didn't start. "She doesn't talk much."
"Quite all right, Mrs. French, I totally understand."
Stepping forward a pace he crouched in front of her, his hand moving to rest on hers where it sat half coiled on her knee. The touch, like a jolt of bad electricity, drew her eyes back from the window and to his. The crow watched. The little girl glowered.
His smile was filled with even, fashion-model teeth but never touched those eyes. "We'll get it taken care of, Lisa. I promise you," he said. "You're safe now."
She said nothing, but shifted her hand out from under his, stopping that unwanted, slimy little current. His smile grew a little and he nodded. "There's a chair just outside the door, Lisa. Why don't you wait for us there? I need to speak with Mrs. French for a minute, all right?"
She gathered her bag and stood up, Mrs. French scooting her in a waft of powdery perfume and concerned clucks and reassurances, before the door shut. The chair was hard, molded plastic. She sat, hugging her backpack to her. Mrs. French had closed the door with its frosted glass pane but she could hear their voices still, snippets of conversation floating out to her waiting ears.
Sharp ears. She'd always had sharp ears.
"..really a shame...he was obviously unstable...never should have been approved for foster care.."
"Is she dangerous...file suggests mood swings...?"
"...no, oh no. She just needs some counseling...terrible thing to witness…hasn't had the best of luck, poor thing...won't speak to anyone."
"...make sure she gets the help she needs.."
Lisa snorted softly to herself, kicked her legs slightly and shifted a bit. The hard plastic of the seat was very uncomfortable. Ten minutes, and the door opened. Mrs. French emerged, and squatted in front of Lisa's chair. She spoke as if to a four year old.
"I'm going to show you to your room, all right? It's almost time for classes to end, and then it'll be dinner break. You can go down to the cafeteria with the other children. Someone will make sure you know the way, so don't be frightened, all right?"
Lisa didn't bother to answer. If they wanted an idiot, they were going to get an idiot. Mrs. French's plump brows (heaven help her but yes, even her eyebrows were fat) drew together over her nose, then she nodded, patting Lisa's knee before rising and indicating the girl should follow. Sliding off the chair, giving a light smack to her rump which had fallen to sleep, Lisa followed her along back down the hallway. As she did she took note of the windows this time. All were meshed as the headmaster's had been. Behind one or two she saw the dim shadows of bars.
Welcome to LoRaca, she thought.
Welcome to the nuthatch.
Lisa sat alone on a bench at the side of the play-yard, watching. About forty kids shifted and swirled about the yard. The younger ones gravitated toward the sand pit, the swing set. None under seven. That was the youngest that LoRaca admitted. Several girls knotted about the swing-set, some older boys playing with a basketball. Another group had congregated behind a strange looking fir tree in one corner. Whenever the breeze shifted, she could smell smoke…tobacco mostly, but small under-currents of pot now and again. It made the knot of greasy, grey chicken she'd eaten not an hour before sour and clamp in on itself.
Lisa was more than familiar with the smell of pot. Out of seventeen foster homes, eleven had at least one person who smoked pot. In two, they’d done coke too. One meth. Darren had sold heroin out of his basement. That was part of the reason he’d gone bat-shit.
There was something happening on the stairs, as well. About six kids had gathered in a huddled knot, sitting on the steps but leaned in close together. Near the gate there were a couple of men holding break-sticks in their hands. They had radios on their belts. The sticks were battered and old but looked frighteningly solid. Their eyes kept going over the yard. Looking for fights, no doubt, or someone trying to cut through the chain-link. They kept eyeing the smokers but seemed apathetic about going over there.
The group on the stairs caught more attention. One of the men just kept watching them intently, occasionally nudging his companion and smirking about something.
Something sailed out of the air and slapped Lisa in the face. Her glasses spun away to one side as she fell back off the bench. Her cheek was hot, and she blinked, feeling a burn where her elbow had skinned the asphalt. The basketball limped away toward the grass.
“Hey, nice catch four-eyes,” one of the boys who had been playing taunted. He was a big boy. Maybe fifteen, but with wide shoulders and hefty fists. His lips were thick and fleshy, damp sweat darkening his short, hay-colored hair and making rivulets along his temples. He smirked below narrowed little rat eyes sunk in doughy flesh.
She rolled to her side, hand questing out and finding her glasses. One of the other boys had gone to pick up the basketball. Touching her red cheek she sat up, shook her stringy blond hair from her eyes, and slipped her glasses back on.
The men at the gate were now watching them intently. One had a hand on his radio.
Her skinned elbow burned under her fingertips. As she examined them for traces of blood she was unaware that almost everything in the yard had stopped. Dozens of eyes were fixed on them like chips of diamond-glass in the sun.
“Here, lemme help you up,” the boy grinned, offering his hand. She scrutinized him a moment. His expression was mocking, mean, hidden under a paper thin façade of amiability. Ignoring his hand she pushed herself up. It was a mistake. The façade shredded and vanished.
“Hey!” he barked, his hand slapping into her shoulder with the force of a hammer, slamming her back down to the ground again. She oofed hard as the air escaped her, her glasses jarring to slip down over her lips. “What, I’m not good enough to help you up, is that it??”
There was a hiss of the radio and she could hear slapping steps on the asphalt, warning shouts from the men repeating ‘back off, back off Jeb’. But they were a hundred feet away and it was not them that arrived first.
The kids started chanting fight a heartbeat before the sunlight dazzling Lisa’s eyes broke and scattered away before a shadow. The big boy, Jeb she guessed, staggered back as he was tackled with all the finesse of a linebacker intent on stopping a winning touchdown. A head slammed into his gut hard enough to topple him. He crashed to the ground, unable to recover as fist after fist looped into his face.
There was an almost animalistic snarling. Righting her glasses Lisa sat up, staring. Jeb gasped, recovering his air, and shoved. His attacker lurched back then forward again, leaping right back into him. Another fist flew. Another.
Then the break-sticks were coming down, slamming over shoulders, the men thrusting between the two kids, pulling them apart. One of the men sat on Jeb’s chest, the break-stick over his throat, pinning him down. The other slammed his attacker to the ground with frightening force, kneeling on wrists pinned at the small of her back, laying the edge of the break-stick against her cheek as a warning as he lifted the radio in his other hand, shouting into it.
More men ran up, followed by an angular woman in a brown skirt and keds. Jeb was cussing and bellowing but unable to fight with his neck pinned and the man sitting on him. He was descended on like vultures on a fat kill, hauled up, marched away.
One of the men and the angular woman went to the other kid pinned on the ground. A girl, maybe Lisa’s own age, with thick black hair and pale skin. Her lips were peeled back from her teeth and she was struggling despite the awkwardness of her arms, the weight of the man pinning her.
“Well,” the angular woman demanded as she reached them.
“Jeb was being Jeb,” Radio replied. “She went fuck-all on him.”
“Sarah. Sarah! Stop it, right this instant!” The angular woman knelt and gripped the girl’s hair, scolding her.
“Get this fucking baboon off of me,” she snarled.
“He’ll get off when you stop it,” came the terse reply. “Stop it or I swear to God I will slap you back in!”
She continued to struggle, and the woman tightened her grip on her hair, yanking it with a quick shake. “I mean it! I’ll give you the needle and slap you back in for a week, young lady. Do we have to have Mr. Freleigh talk to you again?”
Instantly she went limp. Small puffs of dust were driven by her heavy panting, her cheek smashed against the ground. Lisa felt numb, able to do nothing but sit there and stare. The girl’s lips skinned back a little again, and one eye…grey like storm-clouds, Lisa noted…rolled up to look at the woman.
“All right, Bones,” she said amiably. “I’ll be good.”
The woman narrowed her eyes suspiciously, then slowly removed her hand. The girl, Sarah, remained limp. Nodding at the man sitting on her the woman withdrew, getting to her feet and dusting off her skirt. The man shifted his weight, maintaining his grip on Sarah’s wrists as he pulled her up. Her black hair hung in curtains around her pale face, and she shook it back with a haughty toss. Her jeans were scuffed and patched, her sneakers worn. One of her pockets bulged strangely. The woman she’d called ‘Bones’ noticed it too. With a glower she stepped forward, jamming her hand into the pocket.
Sarah smirked. “Bones, I didn’t know you felt that way about me,” she stated derisively. “I didn’t think molesting students was your gig.”
Ignoring her, ‘Bones’ pulled out a wad of crumpled dollar bills, a battered watch, and a half-crushed pack of smokes. She held it up like a bloody heart.
“Have you been grifting again?”
“Would I do that?”
“Where did you get all this?”
“My Mama sends me a care package,” Sarah replied with a smart-ass grin. Bones lowered the wad and slapped her with her free hand, hard enough to send Sarah’s head to one side. The red imprint of a palm and fingers began to surface on her white cheek.
“We’ve discussed this, Sarah,” she said sternly. “And we’ve discussed lying, and fighting. How many times must we talk about this before you understand that civilized young ladies don’t behave this way?”
“Six or seven,” Sarah replied. “It’s not that I’m stupid, see? It’s that your teaching fucking sucks.”
Another slap. The woman’s eyes had gone tense and sharp. Looking at Radio she said, “Send her up to see the headmaster.”
“You fucking dried up old cunt!” Sarah suddenly screamed, tiny flecks of foam gathering on her lips. She began to kick and buck. Radio used his free hand to grip her hair and haul her head back, half-guiding, half-carrying her toward the steps. Kids scattered out of the way. She tried to plant her feet against the stone steps and Radio kicked them loose, continuing to drive her forward. Her screams and curses could be heard echoing out of the building long after she and Radio had been swallowed by shadow.
The kids began breaking up, returning to their activities. The sun had lowered enough the sky was going crimson and gold. It would be time to go in soon.
‘Bones’ regarded the handful of money and smokes before she slipped it into a large pocket on the side of her brown skirt. She and one of the other men started inside again, casting long shadows over the yard. Lisa sat ignored and forgotten on the ground, panting in steady, shallow, shaky breaths as the sun dipped low enough to fire off her glasses and blind away her tears.
The real name of the woman dubbed by Sarah to be 'Bones', turned out to be Ms. Mazur. Her first name was Clementine or Gertrude or something old fashioned and long like that. Bones fit her better, Lisa thought. She was all angles and sharp edges, with birdy wrists and knotty ankles. She looked like someone had draped flesh and clothes on some science class laboratory skeleton.
She was one of the counselors at LoRaca. One of the shrinks. Lisa didn’t think she was a very good shrink. Not if she had to slap kids and yank them around by their hair.
She led up one of the ‘group’ meetings, the meetings for girls ages 12-16. The younger girls had group with Mrs. Simonstry, who was plump and rolling and almost viciously condescending. Mrs. Simonstry and Ms. Mazur were friends. Lisa supposed it was because the only people that would be friends with people like them were…people like them.
The first time Lisa met with Ms. Mazur was the morning following her arrival to the school. She was ushered into an office decorated in browns and antiques as old-fashioned and angular as their owner. The desk was beat up and battered, and the chair that Bones indicated Lisa sit in was hard plastic. Of course.
“Don’t slouch,” was the first words out of her mouth, without even looking at the girl before her. Lisa wasn’t slouching, but the comment made her do just that, slumping in the chair as if she were a rag doll that had been forgotten there.
Ms. Mazur sat in her far more comfortable seat and leaned forward, elbows on her desk and hands clasped in front of her mouth as if scrutinizing a specimen. She stared at Lisa so long and in such silence that the girl’s eyes darted away uncomfortably. Almost unconsciously she straightened up from her slump. That seemed to please Bones. At any rate, it prompted her to speak.
“Lisa, I want you to feel comfortable and at home here in LoRaca. I want you to feel that if you have any problems or questions, or just need someone to talk, you can come and see me. Okay? I’m here to help.”
Yeah. Lisa doubted that Bones would ever be the first person she’d run to. Bored and distracted, she let her eyes wander around the room at all the ugly old things.
“I see by your file that you were left at a police station when you were two,” Bones continued with false sympathy. “And that you’ve been in seventeen different foster homes since then. Do you want to talk about them?”
Silence.
“I also know what happened with Mr. Muntazir at your last foster home. I know why they sent you to us.”
Lisa resisted the urge to roll her eyes and again said nothing.
“Lisa, I can’t help you unless you talk to me. We don’t have to talk about your foster homes or Mr. Muntazir. We can talk about anything you like.”
Lisa’s eyes roamed back to hers and she pursed her lips thoughtfully. Bones gave a smile that was probably supposed to be comforting and gratiating, but seemed instead spider-like and hungry.
Anything she liked, hmm?
She fixed Bones with her green eyes. “Where were you going to put her?”
Reedy eyebrows wrinkled a bit, the smile fading only a faint iota. “I’m sorry? I don’t understand the ques-“
“The girl in the playground,” Lisa’s fingers plucked at the seam of her jeans along her hip. “You said if she didn’t stop you were going to ‘put her back in’. Back in what?”
“Lisa, we’re here to talk about y-“
“You said anything I wanted to talk about. I want to talk about that,” Lisa replied. The smile had almost completely faded. Bones leaned back a bit, then nodded slightly.
“Very well. I did say that. If you want to talk about Sarah we’ll talk about Sarah. As you know, Lisa, every student here in LoRaca is here because of traumatic circumstances in their lives…just as you are. They have been through hard times and need help understanding and coming to terms with the past, so they can grow and move on. Unfortunately some of our students have chosen to react in violent or criminal ways as a result of their experiences. They don’t yet understand their anger and have difficulty controlling it. In order to keep them and others safe, if we feel they have become a danger they are put into isolation for a time.”
“Do you put a jacket on them?” Lisa asked with mild interest.
“A what?”
“You know, one of those funny jackets that make you hug yourself.”
The tattered remnants of the smile immediately transformed into pursed lips reminiscent of a cat’s asshole. “We most certainly do not.”
Lisa only looked at her. After an extended moment of silence, Bones threaded her hands and leaned back, steepling her index fingers against her lips. “Lisa, we’re here to help you work through what happened to you, to help you become an upstanding and productive member of society. You do want to be a productive member of society, don’t you?”
Lisa shrugged one shoulder. “I guess.”
“Then let me give you some free advice. Sarah Nelson is going nowhere in her life. I fully expect her to leave our walls and proceed directly to the nearest penitentiary. It’s only a pity we can’t send her there now, but she’s ours to deal with until she’s eighteen. In the mean time, Lisa, if you want to have any hope of leaving here and leading a normal, happy, productive life…you will concentrate very hard on doing nothing even remotely similar to anything that Sarah Nelson does. Am I quite clear?”
Lisa said nothing, only plucked at her seam and stared at Bones with dispassionate eyes. She began to talk about 'progress' and 'goal-setting' and 'lending an ear', but her voice swiftly turned into a drone in Lisa’s ears. She tuned her out, focusing on a blank spot on the wall. She’d long ago learned the art of shutting people out, closing away voices from her ears. She let her mind drift.
Darren’s house hadn’t been so bad. He had been a soft-spoken guy. They weren’t always. Most of them screamed at you, cussed you out when they were drunk in bellowing curds of saliva and belittlement. If you were lucky cussing was all they did. Sometimes they hit. Even the women. Especially the women.
But Darren didn’t scream. He never raised his voice. He was laid back, slow in his speech. His wife was a mousey little harmless thing with a smile that flicked open and shut as if it were afraid to linger. They’d had a son, too. Marcus. He’d been six.
It was amazing how much blood was in a six year old’s body.
“-Lisa? Are you paying attention??”
She blinked, jolting a little as her head lifted. She looked at Bones who had a distasteful expression on her face, as if she’d spotted a fleck of mold on the crust of her sandwich. She sat back a little with a huff.
“Lisa, I can't help you if you don't listen to me. Look, its nearly time for classes, so I'm going to let you go. I will see you this afternoon for group and I expect some level of participation, is that clear?”
Lisa bobbed her head. Whatever. She didn't like this woman. She was fake, like Mr. Freleigh was fake. She didn't care. She didn't want to help. She didn't give two short shits what Lisa had been through, what her fears were, or her hopes. All she cared about was that she was big and 'normal' and Lisa was small and 'wacko' and that gave her power. Power to slap faces, and to pull hair, and to put people in self-hugging jackets if they didn't show her the respect she thought she deserved. If nothing else, seventeen different foster homes had taught Lisa one thing. It was how to tell the genuine from the fake. And Bones was definitely one big fake.
She didn't end up participating in group that day. There were eleven other girls that Bones spent most of her time cussing at, admonishing, and dragging out morbid tales from various abuses that she seemed to eat up like candy. Sarah wasn't there. Sarah should have been, it was her age group, but she wasn't. Lisa almost asked where she was but she was afraid saying anything would draw Bones' attention and that was the last thing she wanted right now. So she stayed silent, and tuned them out, and swung her feet to a tune only she could hear.
Maybe they'd taken her away, and that's why she wasn't here. Maybe she was locked up in that special room with the hugging jacket right now. Lisa normally wouldn't have cared but she didn't quite believe Bones about Sarah. She was puzzled about something and Lisa didn't like being puzzled. Puzzles were there to be sorted out and Sarah had puzzled her.
Why had she tackled such a big boy so violently? And more, why did it seem she had done it to protect Lisa, who she didn't know and had no reason...especially in this place...to care about? That was the puzzle, and it worried at Lisa's mind and fingernails most of the day.
That evening after dinner when they were let out into the yard again, she caught sight of the pale, black-haired girl once again. She was in the knot gathered on the steps, all sitting huddled together like intent wolves around the carcass of a rabbit. Lisa wandered over, a curious bird who knew the wolves were eating well but was still afraid they'd find room for a final snack. She leaned and craned her neck, trying to figure out what they were doing.
Sarah squatted on the step, the tips of her dingy sneakers hanging over the edge of the concrete. Between her feet were three battered playing cards. A couple of wrinkled dollars and three cigs formed a tiny pile nearby. The kids were watching intently as she shuffled the cards on the ground, skipping and dancing them around in random patterns. Finally she lifted her hands and smirked.
"All right? Where is it?"
One boy extended a hand and tapped a card. Sarah flipped it to reveal a two. There were groans and she tsked, as she flipped the two remaining cards, revealing another two and an ace.
"So close, LaMont. You wanna give up or press it?"
The kid grumbled, digging in his pocket and drawing out another dollar and a little plastic hula girl. He tossed them on the pile and Sarah grimaced.
"Fuck do I want a toy for?"
"My Dad gave it to me. It's all I got left," he shot back.
"Then keep it. I don't want your damn toy."
"I'm pressing it, Nelson. That's what I got."
She huffed and snorted. "All right, watch the ace," she said, and then started flipping the cards back over, shuffling them around. Her hands flashed back and forth, then withdrew.
"Okay, which one?"
LaMont pointed. She slid her finger under it and knocked the card on its back.
It was a two.
"FUCKER!" LaMont snarled, rose, and stormed away. Sarah smirked, moving the dollar and the toy over into her pile.
"Okay, who's next. How about you?"
Her gun-metal eyes landed on Lisa, who stood there staring for a long moment. Long enough to prompt Sarah to lift her brows impatiently.
"Well? You deaf or stupid? You gonna shell out or what? It's easy, kiddo. Monte. Just gotta follow the ace."
She edged forward timidly and lowered herself to the steps. Digging into her pocket, she pulled out a pair of dull and dingy quarters and set them on the steps.
"Cheap bet, ain't you got anything else?" Sarah asked.
"These against that," Lisa murmured, pointing at the little plastic hula girl. Sarah squinted at her.
"What's your name, kid?"
"Lisa Tookson..." she replied softly. Sarah tossed this in her mind with a quick back and forth tilt of her head.
"Well, Tooker baby, you got a bet. Your two bits against this cheap piece of shit. Follow the ace, Took. You think you can do that?"
Lisa nodded slowly. Sarah showed the three cards and then flipped them, scooting them around. Lisa's eyes watched her hands intently, never blinking behind her thick glass frames. Finally she held her hands up. "Where is it?"
Lisa's hand stole forward slowly, hesitated, then moved forward again. Toward the cards...then past them, over Sarah's shoe. Her fingers dipped up under the ratty cuff of her old jeans and began to draw out the ace hidden there.
A sharp hand slapped down over hers and she was shoved. Her tailbone hit the ground below the steps with a painful jar, her palms skidding as they fought to catch her. Sarah snatched up the wad of money and smokes and started menacingly down the steps toward Lisa even as the whackers began to run forward, break-sticks in hand.
"Lemme give you a little health note, Tooker," Sarah snarled, pointing at her menacingly. "Don't you ever pull that shit in front of my customers again, understand?"
"Back off Sarah!" one of the whackers warned as he ran up. He pressed his break-stick across her chest to urge her back, one hand on the radio just in case.
Sarah didn't look at him, her eyes still fixed with vicious ferocity on Lisa before she tossed her free hand. Something light thumped into Lisa's chest, then rattled to the ground. Sarah pointed at her again in warning, then backed up, moving away from the whackers and heading toward the smokers behind the tree.
Lisa drew her knees under her and rocked to them, before looking around. Reaching down her fingers closed on what had hit her, lifting it. Her fingers peeled back, revealing the little hula dancer on her palm. It grinned up at her in plastic glee, welcoming her to Paradise.
Quietly she put it in her pocket.
It was the wallet that got Lisa into trouble, and why she suddenly understood how the threat of Mr. Freleigh was enough to take the fight out of Sarah that first afternoon...while being locked in solitary and sedated was not.
It was a leather wallet, well-worn in a few places, and it smelled too strongly of cologne. The wallet was Sarah's fault, and it had come into Lisa's possession the same day she had started smoking.
It was something of a record, how long Lisa was there before she started on the cigs. Most kids, even the youngest ones, were smoking within their first week there, both pot and tobacco. It was the only way to mellow out, an outlet for frustrations and nerves that didn't involve tearing one's soul open for the delighted scrutiny of people like Bones.
Sitting or standing behind that weird old fir tree, Lisa heard stories that she never heard in group. This was the real 'group'. Without Bones eyeing them and picking apart their pain like a vulture cracking bones to get to marrow.
"How'd that make you feel?" Donna Hodges mimicked Bones' voice in a high, mocking falsetto as she leaned against the tree. A joint was pinched between her fingers. Her knuckles had gone white with the amount of pressure she was putting on it. "Fuck that supposed to mean? How the fuck does she think it made me feel? I mean, your old man shoves a broken beer bottle into your arm and calls you a worthless piece of gutter trash when you're nine years old...don't exactly make you feel like hugs and rainbows, right? Christ."
She took a thin draw on the joint as the other kids murmured in agreement. Lisa was sitting on one of the roots, half burned cigarette in her hand. She felt a little nauseous, and her mouth tasted like she'd licked an ashtray, but it was something to hold on to. Something to do. And it felt oddly soothing.
"I thought I was going to lose it when Sarah called Ashley a pussy," Fredericka Barnes smirked.
"Ashley is a fucking pussy," Donna replied. "Her mother's an alcoholic. She's drying out somewhere for two months and poor Ashley gets stuck with a temporary pass to LoRaca and all you fuckin' hear is 'woe is me, my life is so dreadful, I have to spend eight weeks here talking about my feeeelings. Fuck. I'd cut off my right hand to have a mother that was a drunk and only be here for two months."
"She's stupid as shit too," Fredericka agreed. "Sarah Nelson calls you anything you keep your fat trap shut and be grateful she only insulted you. Gutter-trash. That's what Ashley said. 'What would you know about it gutter-trash?' Christ. Sarah smiled at it but..."
"That smile said a broken nose at the very least," Donna took another draw on her joint. "I hope Sarah beats a few dents into her at any rate. Fucking pussy. She deserves a shiv in the side is what she deserves."
"Sarah'd do it too," Fredericka agreed, and several of the other kids bobbed their heads. Lisa, the only one sitting down, looked up at them with reddened, smoke-irritated eyes.
"Would she?" she asked softly. The two girls who had been doing most of the talking blinked at her.
"Would she what?" Donna asked.
"Would she stab someone?"
"Listen, Took," she replied. "She ain't stabbed anyone yet. The whackers are real careful to keep their eye on her. Her and Jeb. You'd best keep your eye on them too. You don't want to get on either of their bad sides."
"I don't think she'd stab anyone," she murmured. Fredericka half choked on her joint and Donna looked like Took was trying to convince her that birds pissed out their nostrils. She crouched closer, the smell of pot from her joint making Lisa a little dizzy.
"Hey, four-eyes. Listen close, ok? There are only two kids in here for murder. Yeah, you heard me, murder. Rest of us, we're here because our folks were fucking idiots, drunks, or liked to 'play' if you get my meaning. Or because we're dump-offs from some foster home like you. Some of us, we've done shit that would put us up in the big house if we were any older. Fredericka here tried to hold up a liquor store. I knocked the shit out of some lady for her dime-change purse. But only two are here because someone actually died."
She lifted a pair of her fingers. She wiggled the index finger. "Jeb, because he held some kid's head down a toilet until the fucker drowned," she lowered the index finger, leaving her middle one stuck in the air as she waved it back and forth almost hypnotically. "And Sarah, because she blew away her old man."
Lisa's brows knit. "That's not what I heard Bones and Simonstry say," she replied. "I heard them talking near the restroom two days ago. They said that someone had broke in and murdered her parents."
"Bones and Simonstry have enough brain-cells between the two of them to make a rock look like a genius, Took," Dana snorted. "Sarah blew away her old man. Then they put her in here. I heard it from her own mouth. Now, she could be lying, couldn't she? Sure. We all fucking lie in here. But I dare you to say it to her face."
Well, lie or not, Lisa certainly wasn't going to call Sarah one to her face, nor was she likely to ask the girl about her parents. Since Sarah had knocked her down the stairs Lisa had done her best not to go near the girl.
Dana lowered her hand, offered the joint. Lisa shook her head and Dana smirked.
"That's all right. More for me. So that’s what you’re in here for? Foster reject?"
Lisa bobbed her head faintly. "My last foster father blew his head off."
"Shit, for real?"
There was more than that but Lisa was not willing to share it, not with Dana or anyone else in the shithole that was LoRaca. So she just nodded again and coughed a little as she took another draw on the cig. Dana swiftly lost interest in her and stood up again, resuming her conversation with Fredericka on what a bitch Ashley was.
The smoke had burned itself down to the filter. Lisa scrubbed it out on the ground and left its sad, twisted and spent corpse there in the dirt. She was just about to stand up when footsteps headed their way. Sarah jerked her chin toward one of the other girls. "Got a bud?"
"You got some green?" the girl asked with a scowl.
"Fuck. I got a couple of Camels, okay?"
"Then smoke your Camels. Do you think its easy getting this shit in here?"
Sarah glowered, then pulled a wallet from her pocket. Immediately all eyes fixed to it.
"Christ, is that-?"
"You so didn't fuckin' knick that. Dude, they are going to pen you up until Judgement Day."
Sarah grinned and cracked it open, drawing out the license and flashing it around. "Did you know his middle name is Perry?"
The kids hooted and cat-called and passed the license around. Fredericka was beaming as she snatched hold of it. "Ilya Perry Freleigh. My Mama's fat ass. Who knew, all this time, we had the famous I.P. Freleigh running this fine establishment!"
More hoots of laughter. Sarah opened the billfold portion of the wallet and drew out a five. "This enough green for the damn bud?"
"Shit, I'll give you four for that," came the reply. Fingers snatched the five from Sarah's fingers and passed over a few joints. Sarah took the rest of the cash out of the billfold and tucked it in her pocket. The license had made the rounds and landed in the dirt at Lisa's feet. She leaned forward and picked it up. She didn't think it possible, but the DMV had made Mr. Freleigh look even more sinister than he normally did.
Sarah planted herself on the next root, setting the wallet in the dirt beside her before lighting up the joint and taking a deep toke. Lisa felt a little uncomfortable sitting so close to the other girl, but she couldn't move without drawing her attention. She wondered if it really was true...if the reason Sarah was in this place was because she murdered her own father.
The cloud of pot from the joint was too close to escape from unless she got up and walked away. She was starting to feel a buzz from it. Dropping the license she rubbed at her eyes and wondered how she could get up and leave without it looking like she was moving just because of Sarah.
A few agonizing minutes later, the horn sounded that put an end to free time. The whackers started calling out, herding kids in toward the door for study hall and bed. Cigarettes were crushed out, joints hidden. Sarah had finished hers and flicked its smoldering remnants against the fence before getting up and joining the flow of kids leaving the tree and heading inside. Lisa waited until she had been gone for a few moments before she put her hand down to push herself up.
It landed on the wallet. Sarah had accidentally left it behind.
Standing, she lifted it, using her free hand to dust off her rear. She didn't dare hang on to it to give it back to the girl. She lifted an arm instead to pitch it over the fence.
A break-stick lightly touched her fore-arm. She gasped and gaped up at the whacker, Mr. Freleigh's wallet still clutched in her numb fingers.
The whacker smiled and plucked it from her hand as easily as a child would pluck a flower from a garden. "Well now," he said amiably. "What's this?"
The chair outside of Mr. Freleigh’s office was just as hard as it had been three weeks prior, when Lisa had first come to LoRaca. Her white-knuckled hands gripped the edges as her arms trembled nervously. One of the whackers stood watching her dispassionately. The other had vanished into the office with the wallet.
Now he emerged, his hand unyielding as he gripped Lisa’s arm and lifted her to her feet. “C’mon. He wants to talk to you.”
The door shutting behind her made the frosted glass rattle loosely in its frame. It sounded like chattering teeth. Lisa might almost have thought her own teeth were chattering if she hadn’t been clenching them so hard.
Mr. Freleigh leaned on his desk as he had before. Sitting beside him on the wood was the wallet. His crow’s eyes were sharp and focused, even as he flicked a faint smile, pointing at the oversized wooden chair that faced his desk.
“Sit.”
Tentatively, she obeyed. Her mouth felt dry and sticky.
He didn’t refold his arms. Instead, the one he’d used to point drifted aside to tap against the wallet. “So, Lisa. How are you adjusting to LoRaca? Ms. Mazur says you are still horribly withdrawn and refuse most times to participate in group.”
He tsked lightly. She didn’t bother to answer his question or reply in any way. He wasn’t wanting her to talk back, even if she was inclined. He was talking to hear himself talk and nothing she said would turn away or soften what was coming.
“She also says you asked some questions about Sarah Nelson, and I heard about the incident with Jeb in the play-yard.”
When she didn’t respond his fake half smile dissolved a bit. His fingers drummed on the wallet, then lifted it. He unfolded it and presented the empty billfold to her. “Where’s the cash, Lisa? There was nearly a hundred dollars in here.”
She half lifted one shoulder, and let it drop. He nodded slowly, closing the wallet again and setting it aside before he straightened. What happened next was so fast that Lisa had no time to react. He took a single step forward, his hand clamping like a vice on the back of her neck. She was hauled out of her seat and thrust forward so fast her feet didn’t touch the ground until her chest and stomach was crashing into the edge of the desk. The air blasted out of her with a painful rush, the earpiece of her glasses digging sharply into her temple as he pinned her head down to the wood with his hand.
“Don’t fuck with me, Lisa,” he growled low in her ear. As air slowly wheezed back into her lungs, tears leaking from her eyes as she tried to breathe, her eyes focused on a decorative clay mug. It was filled with various small office supplies: pens, pencils, a letter opener, and a strange metal thing with a small ball at the top. Along the mug were the words ‘World’s Greatest Dad!’ written in over-excited neon orange.
“Let me fill you in on what is going to happen, all right?” he continued, his breath hot and distasteful against her cheek. “You are going to tell me who stole my wallet and where my money is. Because I don’t buy for a moment that it was you. You haven’t got the balls.”
Her breath hissed in barely suppressed sobs through her clenched teeth. Hand still pressing her head down, he reached over and took that odd metal thing out of the cup. He tossed his hand out a little and it extended like a car antenna. He showed it to her. “Tell me who took my fucking money, you worthless little piece of dog shit,” he bellowed, small flecks of spittle spotting her face. “If you don’t, I’m going to make sure you don’t sit down for a month, do you fucking hear me?”
He punctuated his words by gripping hold of her hair, lifting her head a little, and smacking it down again. Pinned, frightened, her sobbing breaths shuddered and burned through her throat.
Then his body weight suddenly shifted and the antenna whipped over her buttocks. She’d been spanked before, of course. Once even with a belt. But nothing before had felt like that metal rod as it sang against her rear-end, even through the cloth of her jeans. The hot tears multiplied and rushed down her face as she cried out. She heard a faint, thin whistle as it cut through the air again and the burn branded itself anew along her thighs.
“For every second you don’t tell me I’m going to lay another one!” he roared. Only sobs escaped. She heard the whistle, and her entire lower body tensed up in anticipation. That only made it hurt worse.
Tell him! Tell him so he’ll stop!!
I’m not a fucking snitch!!
Another stripe and she wailed. “ME! It was me!!” Her words barely sounded human through her choking cries. He roared in her ear again so loud she thought she might go deaf from it.
“YOU ARE A FUCKING LIAR!”
Whap! This strike was so hard it drew her even higher up on her toes and all that managed to escape her was a high, keening whine. Using his grip on her hair he hauled her back from the desk and all but threw her toward the chair. She missed, the wood edge of the seat cutting her across the back as she landed hard on her bruised buttocks. Her glasses hung by one ear, her sight all but obliterated by the thick tears. Gripping her arm he pulled her up again, slammed her down in the seat. She cried out and he slapped her. She could only dissolve into misery, trembling, her entire body tensed and aching. She heard a click as he closed up the antenna with a sharp gesture. Then he crouched with a long-suffering sigh, pressing the ball end into the soft flesh under her jaw, using pressure to make her turn her head and face him.
“Lisa,” he said almost gently. “Liars and thieves go nowhere. I know you didn’t take my wallet. But I will not tolerate you lying or trying to cover up for some no-good punk out there. Now, you little fuckhead, you will tell me how you got my wallet, who took it, and where my money is, or you will spend the day in isolation.”
She said nothing, only struggled to get her sobs under control. Her back and butt were throbbing, as was her cheek where he’d slapped her. Her nose was running in a way that felt less like snot and more like blood. He frowned, then nodded.
“Very well. Have it your way. Twenty four hours in isolation. I suggest you use it to think about how much you really want to fuck up your life. Because I guarantee you, baby…you fuck around like this much more, and you’ll end up a fucking whore dead in some gutter somewhere, and no one will shed a tear over you.”
He straightened, lifting his voice. “Get in here.”
The door opened, the whackers stepping in. They didn’t so much as bat an eyelash to see Lisa sitting there, sobbing with a bruised cheek and slowly bleeding nose. “Twenty four hours lockup,” he stated, returning the rod to the cup on his desk and dusting his hands. “Oh, and Lisa…after isolation you’re on three days potato duty for coming in my office stoned.”
One of the whackers took her arm and pulled her up out of the chair. With one shaking hand she managed to right her glasses, limping along between them.
The isolation room was on the top floor. They opened a mundane looking door with a key, only to reveal a second door. This one was thick metal covered in chipping paint. They unlocked that one as well. The room within was no bigger than a broom closet. Barely had she stumbled in than they closed the metal door. Instantly pitch black fell, thick and pure and not marred by the slightest hint of light. Groping out, she found one of the walls and carefully lowered herself until she was laying on her side. Her butt and thighs felt like they had been caught on fire. She mopped blindly at her nose, then curled up, winding her arms around her head, sobbing softly and hopelessly into the black.
Darren Muntazir hadn’t been a big man. He had a painter’s hands, soft and always stained a little with ink or acrylic or oil. His eyes, to Lisa, had appeared vacuous despite his lazy smile. She later learned that was because of the heroin. It was also why he had a habit of tying rags around his arms just below where he would roll up his work-shirt sleeves.
His wife was a junkie too. Not as hardcore as Darren was, restricting her doping to pot and occasional morphine pills that Darren got by faking work injuries. That’s also how they lived…fraudulent insurance claims. Their son Marcus had been quiet and sweet, spending his time with his crayons and color books in front of the television set. He didn’t talk much, but had an easy smile that glowed whenever Lisa would praise his coloring work.
There was something wrong with Marcus. She never really knew what. It caused him to have to wear leg-braces and giant glasses with thick lenses, and made him slow to understand things. Once, Jerri (that was Darren’s wife) had said it was because he was born with a funny spine. Another time she said he had water on his brain as a baby. Lisa supposed it didn’t really matter. Marcus was a sweet kid and despite the fraud and the drugs, Darren and Jerri were ok people. They didn’t scream or hit or cuss at her, anyway, and that was just fine with Lisa.
It was a Friday afternoon. She’d walked back to the house from the school bus stop. The sun was bright enough, fall just starting to cool and bring promises of rain and snow. Her key had fit in the door like always. Her shoes had made that same ‘clap clap’ sound as she stepped into the foyer, where Jerri had laid a plastic matt to catch up muddy tracks.
It was the smell that was different. Instead of thin hazes of pot smoke and whatever was cooking for dinner, the house smelled sour somehow. Thick and rank. In the silence after the door clicked shut, she could hear the buzzing of flies.
The neighbor called the cops when she heard Lisa screaming. The cops found her in the garage, jammed under the work bench, hugging her school backpack. This was after they found Darren, Jerri, and little Marcus.
They weren’t sure what set it off. Even Lisa wasn’t. They figured he’d shot Jerri first. Twice in the chest, and once in the face as she slumped against the fridge, leaving a smudge of red along the white plastic surface. The breakfast dishes were still on the table.
Then, it seemed, he’d gone after little Marcus. The boy had been shot in the throat. His glasses were broken. Darren had taken off his braces and set them beside him with inexplicable neatness. The bullet had torn open his jugular and carotid arteries. The boy lay in a lake of blood that had all but swallowed his Mighty Mouse coloring book and his neat yellow pack of crayolas.
Then, for reasons that would eternally be a mystery, Darren stripped naked, sat in the tub, and smoked about six joints before finally putting the gun under his chin and blowing the top of his head off.
It was the breakfast dishes that got Lisa. Finding the bodies had put her in a state of calm shock. She’d stared at Marcus for several minutes before wandering into the kitchen to find Jerri there, then aimlessly moving deeper in the house, wondering where Darren was. She’d stared at him a long while too, before heading back into the kitchen.
One benefit of living with potheads was the munchies. Darren and Jerri kept their cupboards well stocked with potato chips, oreos, and moon pies. Often Lisa came home from school and had some oreos and kool-aid with Marcus as he showed her what he had drawn that day and talked in that slow, eager, stilted way he had about the cartoons on tv. She pulled out the cookies, opened the cupboard, and drew out two glasses. She turned toward the fridge again where Jerri was slumped, the flies rubbing their forelegs together eagerly in the sticky blood that covered the remnants of her face. From there, Lisa’s eyes moved to the table, to the breakfast dishes.
She’d been late that morning. She’d only gulped her food and ran out the front door to catch her bus. Marcus had already wandered into the living room and Darren was downstairs. Jerri had laughed and called after her…something about finishing her eggs. She had already started to clear the table.
Her mind went back far too clearly to her running out the door, swinging her backpack on her shoulder. Had Darren been coming up the stairs? She thought so. Possibly. Had she paused a moment to finish those eggs, or help Jerri to clear the dishes…
That’s when it all seemed to finally filter through her brain, striking her with almost physical force. The scream erupted. By the time she realized the cops were there and they were urging her out from under the work table her throat had gone hoarse. She didn’t even recall how she’d gotten downstairs into the garage. Everything from the first scream was nothing but a blurr.
She grunted with a faint cry, jolting out of her doze as the metal door to the isolation room suddenly creaked open. Light flashed painfully over her eyes. She grimaced up, unable to see anything but a faint shape. A plate slid across the floor. It smelled like rubber macaroni and stale cheese.
“Good night, Lisa,” Bones’ voice echoed with an amused slant before the door slammed shut again.
LoRaca. It was amazing how fast a place like this could suck everything out of you, make you forget there were things outside its walls. The endless droning in group, the endless smoking, the dull traumas that ate at you and could only be released in the company of kids just as screwed up and hopeless and washed out as you were.
Sometimes, the outside world tried to invade with its charity. Christmas was the worst. Boxes would arrive of battered old coats and miscellaneous winter gear. Toys were donated...trash mostly, that other more fortunate kids had grown bored with but their parents couldn't bring themselves to toss in the garbage. Of course, that's what the kids at LoRaca were, weren't they? Just garbage, festering in another type of rubbish heap, waiting....rotting...decomposing.
Often, Lisa would cry herself to sleep, and wake up shouting with nightmares. Kids shouted in the middle of the night all the time. No one ever came. Sometimes when she couldn't sleep she'd sit on the edge of her bed and look out the small, meshed window and wonder if she wasn't just too small for God to take notice of.
This particular night, a year after she'd come to LoRaca, the silence seemed particularly still and deep and pondering. She lay on her bed with her hands tucked under her head, listening to her pulse and wondering, if she concentrated hard enough...would it just stop?
She was fifteen now. She had three more years to go. Three more years and then they'd usher her out the gate with a mandatory diploma, a state-funded check for a hundred and fifty dollars and a not so fond farewell. She wouldn't be their problem any more. She...
Her breath caught as she heard a faint click. Turning her head on the pillow, her hand groped out to find her glasses and slip them on as she sat. Her door, which had been locked, was slowly creeping open. A shadow slipped through, the door swiftly closing and latching behind it.
She cast the blankets aside as a light lanced out of the dark, landing on her face with blinding intensity. She threw up a hand to shield her eyes, blinking and squinting. "Wha---??"
"Shh," Sarah's voice hissed out of the dark, and the flashlight turned away. "Ain't you fuckin' happy to see me, Took?"
She was in her flannel pajamas, just as Lisa was. The flashlight, still on, thumped to the bed. As her eyes adjusted, she grimaced in confusion. Sarah grinned. She had a pillowcase in her hand. Reaching inside she pulled out a lighter, a couple of joints, and a heavy glass bottle. She tossed them to the bed too before sitting down, propping herself against the wall and snatching one of the joints. She tucked it in her mouth and lit it, the spicy smell of marijuana filling the air. Her gun-metal eyes rolled toward Lisa and she blew out a stream of smoke. "Shit, girl, would you mellow? You'd think I was the fucking boogey monster or something. Sit down."
"What are you doing?" Lisa asked warily. Sarah rarely ever spoke to her, and she most certainly didn't come into her room. Ever.
Sarah offered her the joint. Lisa only looked at her blankly until Sarah rolled her eyes. "Just fuckin' hold it a minute, ok? I wanna get the bottle open."
Tentatively, as if it would bite her, Lisa took the joint. Sarah reached into the pillowcase and took out a corkscrew and a pair of cheap plastic cups from the kitchen. As she began to work the cork out of the bottle of Jack she said, "Do you know what today is, Took? Today is my sixteenth birthday. Huzzah huzzah. I've been in this fuckin' place for ten years. We're celebrating."
"We are?"
"I ain't dead, you ain't dead, and we're celebrating, and you're gonna drink some of this shit with me, understand?"
Lisa was scared of Sarah, but she was scared more what would happen if the whackers heard them and reported them to Freleigh. So she bobbed her head once. "Yeah, ok. If you want. Where...where did you get it?"
"Freleigh's office. He's got a liquor cabinet. Never fuckin' locks it. You ever drink?"
"Some beer," she admitted. Sarah smirked, pouring the Jack into one of the cups.
"Well, this ain't beer," she said, and passed the cup to Took, then held her hand out for the joint. Took passed it back, then peered suspiciously into the cup at the amber liquid within.
Sarah poured her own cup, setting the black-labelled bottle aside against the headboard, then eyed the blonde. "Well? Go on."
Licking her lips nervously, she lifted the cup to her mouth, and took a sip. Instantly her tongue and sinuses burned. She swallowed convulsively, the fire following down her throat and shutting it off almost defensively. Gasping, she coughed. Sarah giggled and shook her head. "Girl this is whiskey. You don't sip Jack, Took. Like this."
She took her own cup and tossed it neatly back, draining it in one mouthful. Took wiped the tears from her eyes, and offered the cup back. "I think I'll pass," she said roughly.
Sarah's eyes went stony. "Jesus, don't be such a pussy, Took. It's a fuckin' drink. Drink it."
Lisa frowned, lifted the cup again, then hesitated.
"Fast," Sarah urged. Taking a deep breath, Took gulped the liqour down. Gasping again, she coughed. It was like drinking battery acid.
Sarah grinned, then took the cup from her, passing her the joint. "Take a toke, it helps."
Without even thinking, Lisa took a drag. Sarah refilled both cups, gesturing with her chin for Lisa to sit down. Then she handed her back the refilled cup. She lifted her own. "Happy birthday to me," she grinned, tapping it against Lisa's.
Three shots later and her throat was numb, she had a decided craving for some potato chips (which she didn't even like), and she was well on her way to being totally shit-faced drunk. Both she and Sarah were giggling uncontrollably. Everything seemed to just be so fucking funny.
"Wait wait," she said, waving her hand dramatically and with imperfect coordination. "You said you'd been here ten years and that its your sisteenth birthday."
"Yes'm those words were said," Sarah nodded, tipping more Daniels into her cup.
"How can that be? This shithole doesn't take kids unner seven."
Sarah half tilted her head with a smirk, taking a final toke on the nearly burned out joint before snubbing it out against the bottle. "They made a special esseption in my case," she said. "Didn't know where else ta stick a murderer my age."
Lisa's head felt light and slow as her eyes lifted to regard Sarah the way someone might regard a dog that had been rumored to bite...but was wagging its tail. Sarah arched a brow. "What? Don't believe me?"
Lisa was afraid to say anything. Sarah licked her lips and took another shot of the Jack, before wiping her hand under her nose. "It was always shit when Daddy came home," she said, looking at the empty cup. "I could feel him coming, you know? Like thunder in the distance, the kind you can feel in your chest long before you ever really hear it. He got home around six ever' night. About five thirty I'd start making sure there were no toys out an' that my bed was made an' that there wasn't anything around that would...would make him mad, you know? Give 'im an esscuse. I was always real quiet when he came home. And sometimes, it was nice. He'd kiss Mama's cheek and we'd eat dinner and then...sit and watch tv and it would be...normal. Real nice."
She dropped the remnants of the joint into the empty cup and set it aside, then picked up a fresh one and lit it. Her fingers were shaking a little. Took watched the bob and shift of the smoke in response.
"It was easier b'fore I started school," she continued, eyes glassy, bloodshot with pot, and focused on nothing. "No teachers to wonder how come Sarah's always bumping into things, gosh...I must have been a clumsy kid hmm? Always running into doors and tripping downstairs. Must have got it from Mom. She was always running into doors too. Big doors that wore rings."
She picked up the bottle of Jack, still half full, and took a swig directly from it. Her normally pale cheeks had flushed a bit from the booze...it made her look almost human.
"Uncle Ricky and Uncle James came over that day. James was Dad's brother. Ricky wassn really my uncle. He was a family friend of some kind I think. I think he'us in love with my mother too. I don't know. Fuck does a six year old know about shit like that? After they left Mama came in my room and told me that I needed to get some things together. That the next day, after Daddy went to work, we'd be going away somewhere...going away with Ricky and James. Somewhere doors didn't have rings, I guess."
She took another belt from the bottle. Her eyes were even more glassy than they had been before. When she blinked, a tear fell unnoticed down her cheek. Took watched it with lazy fascination.
"She took some of my clothes into her room. I got this little Mickey Mouse Club bag I'd gotten for my birthday and I packed shit that a kid would pack. You know, crayons, couple coloring books, my blanket, shit like that. I had a little jar that Mom made me put all m'birthday and Christmas money in for college or for the ice cream man, sometimes. I put that in my bag too. Then Mom started making dinner and I went in to help her. I was afraid, you know...afraid it was going to be a bad day when he came home...that he'd know about my Mickey Mouse bag and the jar of money and that it'd be a really fuckin' bad day...but it wasn't. He was all right when he came home, you know? Kissed Mama's cheek and we had dinner and everything was a-ok, groovy, totally boss you know? Watched Dick Van Dyke...Dad laughed so hard I thought he'd fuckin' bust a gut."
She snorted as if this was somehow disgusting, then took a draw on the joint, her fingers tapping on the Jack.
"Then he went in to change for bed. Mama told me to go put my pajamas on and to go to sleep. She kissed me, right here..." she tapped her temple with the index finger of the hand holding the joint. It made thin curlicues of smoke over her ear. Her hand was trembling again. Her eyes had gone thickly glassy once more. She said nothing for a long time. Long enough for Lisa to start worrying. She nearly reached forward. Her hand actually moved, lifting off her lap to...to wave in front of that stare or take her by the shoulder and shake her or pat her hand or...something. But before it got an inch off her lap Sarah blinked, tuning back in.
"Fucker found the suitcase," she said almost casually, drawing on the joint again. "I was in my room in my pajamas and the fucker found the suitcase Mom had hidden. He went down the hall and threw it at her, started screaming and cussing about her leaving, and asking where the fuck she was going. I hid in my closet. Put my hands over my ears but you know, that shit gets in anyway. You can't ever block it out, can you? He was really pissed. Mom was crying and he was screaming and I heard something crash. Something fuckin' heavy, and Mom's voice started to sound strange, you dig? I'd never heard her sound like that and I...I didn't know what to do. I went in the hallway and I could see...fucker'd turned the table over. Turned it over and it had broken. Couple of the legs had come off. Mom was on the ground. She was...all bloody and curled up, hands...hands up like this..."
She ducked her head, curling her hands into claws over her ears and the sides of her head, as if trying to shield herself. She was still shaking. She clenched her eyes shut, talking through grit teeth. "And she was sobbing like...sobbing and begging...'Micheal...Micheal please no...no more...no more no more..."
She licked her lips with a whooping inhale that sounded far too close to a supressed sob to be anything else, and lowered her hands. "Then he hit her in the head with the table leg, whack! and she went limp and funny and trembly, kind of, for a moment. Trembly and then just...just still. And I screamed...I screamed something, I don't even remember doing it. But I screamed and he saw me there and he had blood on his chest and he started to come at the hall and I turned and ran. I ran into his room, because once he'd gone hunting with his friends and he brought back some rabbits and he showed me his rifle. Told me his rifle had killed the rabbits and I knew if it could kill rabbits it could hurt him, stop him. So I went in the closet and I got the rifle and it was heavy...taller than me almost. I didn't even know if it was loaded or how to do anything with it. I just had it because I was scared shitless and Mama wasn't moving and if he got to me I wouldn't move any more either.
"I dropped the damn thing. It was too big and heavy. I got it out of the closet but when the door slammed open and he was there with the blood on him and the table leg in his hand and that look...that look on his face, I dropped it. Kind of. It sort of slipped. Slipped back and the umm...the butt of it hit the ground by my feet and um...it was loaded. It hit hard enough that it went off. Bam. Like dropping a heavy book or slamming a door. Bam. And his face popped, kind of. Popped like a water balloon filled with red ink and he fell and I..."
She shook her head once, twice, sharply as if trying to clear a fly. Her teeth grit hard enough to create sharp tendons on either side of her jaw. She tossed the joint into the cup and lifted the bottle again, taking a short, sharp swig of it.
"And I don't remember shit after that. I don't remember shit until some nurse put me in a car. Put me in a car with a fuckin' teddy bear and a social worker that smelled like hot piss and then here the fuck I was. Here the fuck I was in this shit-hole place!"
Lisa lurched back as Sarah all but leapt off the bed, bottle still in one hand, swinging around as she gestured wildly, snarling through tears. "And here I am! Here I fuckin' am and here I always will fuckin' be! Where the fuck did you go, Uncle James?? I was six fuckin' years old and you left me in this fuck-hole! You left me in this fuck-hole!!"
Lisa plastered a hand over her mouth, her own eyes sore and damp from silent tears, her throat thick and painful. Sarah took a shuddering breath and lowered her arms, before wiping a hand over her face. Then she turned back toward Lisa and smiled a bit. "But that's ok. That's a-ok, Tooker. Just righteous with me, hmm? Because I won't be here for fuckin' ever. Someday I'll be out of this fuckin' shithouse and it'll be a different story then, won't it? My place, my rules. And we'll see how they fuckin' like it then, won't we? We'll see how they all fuckin' like it."
She was shouting but then...kids shouted in the middle of the night all the time, didn't they. And no one came.
No one ever came.
"Whas with all the fuckin' toys?" Sarah asked almost an hour later. The bottle of Jack was nearly gone between the two of them...Sarah having imbibed in the majority of it. She was staggering drunk, wandering in loopy circles between the bed and the window, swinging the bottle in her hand as if she'd forgotten it was there.
The toys in question were lined up on Took's dresser. Small little action figures. A Gonk, its cotton candy pink hair missing in tiny patches from its eternally wizened, grinning head. Couple of matchbox cars. A half bent slinky. And in the middle of the clutter, the plastic Hula girl that Sarah had tossed at her that day she'd pushed down the stairs.
Lisa...terribly drunk, high, and only half in touch with reality, watched her with bleary fascination. Her glasses were gone...she'd set them somewhere. So everything, even Sarah, was blurry and kept swimming in and out of focus.
"I like toys..." she began. Sarah's clumsy, questing fingers knocked over the Gonk. One of the matchbox cars rolled off the dresser and clinked to the ground.
"Whoops," Sarah blinked, then sat down, hard. She giggled. Lisa crawled forward on the bed, tried to get up, and ended up thumping to the ground herself. She rolled onto her back, licking her lips.
"Room's spinning," she mumbled.
"That'd be because yer fuckin' pished," Sarah responded. The nearly empty bottle of Jack clunked down nearby as Sarah scooted forward on her hands and knees. She laid down beside Lisa on the ground with a heavy 'whooo' of expended breath, pressing her hand to her forehead. Both girls were on the trembling edge of passing out.
"Tooker?" Sarah murmured, her eyes closed.
"Hnn?" Lisa grunted, more asleep than awake. The room still seemed to be slowly spinning. It felt like being on a little boat, moving in lazy eddies on some big river somewhere.
"Whuddya wanna do? When all thish washes away?" She lifted one lazy hand, made a bye-bye gesture at the room, then let it thump to her belly. Lisa licked her dry lips a moment, her brow wrinkling.
"I nunno," she mumbled. "I wun' 'elp people I guess."
Sarah made a sleepy snort that may have been a laugh. "'elp 'em do wha?"
"I nunno," she murmured again. "'elp 'em from bein 'urt...from...from bein' put inna dark..."
"Mmm..." Sarah nodded slowly in agreement. Lisa felt herself drifting away.
"Took?"
"Hnn?"
"Think y'cn 'elp me?"
"Mmhnnn."
The response was little more than a deepening thrust of air. Already her mind was dissolving and breaking away into sleep, dropping her into a black unconscious where dead, six-year old little boys didn't stare at her from under broken glasses, and where boogey men could not come.
The morning bell, designed to wake everyone up and alert them that breakfast was in half an hour, had transformed into some nightmarish demon with claws that pierced right through her skull. Gleefully it ground into the bone, pinching and crushing. She wailed almost before she was conscious, winding her arms around her head in a desperate attempt to keep the sound out.
As the sound died away she moaned. Her head went from white hot to a dull red throbbing that pulsed into her eyes. Her mouth tasted like a cat had taken a piss in it. Rolling onto her side she curled there a moment, trying to get past the pain in her head and the slowly rolling nausea to remember what had happened.
Sarah. Pot. Lots of Jack. Her eyes creaked open and fought to remember their function as she squinted against the sunlight coming in the window. Though she was still laying on the floor, Sarah was gone. All traces she’d been there were gone. She’d even picked up the toys she’d knocked over and rearranged them on the dresser.
Groaning, Lisa edged up to her knees. The light gleefully poked pins and needles at her eyes, making her head throb even worse. Never having been hung-over, she had been around enough people who were to recognize what was going on. She hadn’t understood, however, just how god-awful it was.
Knowing if she didn’t come out soon someone would start pounding on her door, she managed to get to her feet. Her glasses were laying on her rumpled pillow, beside something else. She squinted, picking it up. It was a little bottle with three lonely aspirin rattling around in the bottom.
They were sharp and bitter as she chewed them dry, shuffling along toward the bathroom. She was pretty sure she was going to die before she reached it. It seemed every kid in LoRaca had gained a thousand pounds and were stampeding everywhere they went. When she got to the girl’s bathroom she was a bit amazed to see her brain wasn’t actually pushing her eyes out of their sockets.
She did look like shit though. She sipped from the faucet to rinse the bitter aspirin down, then washed her face, brushed her teeth, and got dressed.
She skipped breakfast. The smell from the cafeteria seemed to reach right down her throat and start throttling her stomach. It was Saturday, so no classes but they still were expected to meet for group after lunch. She sat on the front steps where Sarah normally grifted, cradling her head and trying to recover.
The kids filtered out, flooding past Lisa like water past a rock that refused to budge. She kept her head down on her knees, taking deep breaths. She had never wanted to hurl so bad in her life, and it was taking every inch of concentration she had not to. She hated to puke.
Fuck Sarah anyway. Fuck her and her birthday and any man who had ever been born with the name Jack Daniels. Even in her misery, she knew she didn’t really mean that. Well, maybe the Jack Daniels part. But she couldn’t be pissed at Sarah. Even now, though most of last night was a blurry haze, she could remember what Sarah said about her father. Could see the girl with her hands curled up by her head, describing her mother begging ‘please, no more’. No, she couldn’t be pissed. She couldn’t be pissed at that.
Lifting her head a little at the first painful thump of the basketball as it struck the asphalt, she blearily noticed that Jeb and the other boys looked to be settling in for the long haul on the court. Knowing she couldn’t sit there and handle the incessant whapping of the ball and their thundering footsteps she debated going to the smoker’s corner.
Her stomach turned at the thought of cigarettes.
She could go back to her room and crawl miserably under her covers, but that would inevitably bring a whacker to see why she was in there. They’d think she was sick and take her to the infirmary, that dirty little place with the nurse with the bad breath and the dancing little mole on her lip. The nurse would discover she was hung-over and then the shit would really hit the fan. The staff might ‘overlook’ pot use so long as it wasn’t blatantly obvious, but drinking was strictly forbidden. If someone was caught with so much as a beer, they could guarantee a week in isolation at the very least.
As she continued to debate it, she saw Sarah break away from a group near the swings and head toward the smoking tree. She looked like shit too. Paler than she normally did, squinting sourly. Seeing her look and mistaking her for being pissed, kids scattered out of her way. As she passed by the basketball court, Jeb sneered.
“Hey, Nelson,” he barked. Normally when he did this she simply ignored him. But this morning his voice cut through Lisa’s head with sharp pain, and judging by the sudden wince on her face, it did the same to Sarah’s.
“Shit, you fucker,” Sarah paused, planting a hand on her temple. “Why don’t you keep that ugly mug of yours shut??”
Lisa’s hands dropped from her head in what seemed later like slow motion. The whackers near the fence turned their heads and began to take notice. A strange electrical tension seemed to fill the air.
The basketball sailed to one side, batted there by Jeb’s hand. He started forward as the whackers started forward, radios already slipping free of their belt loops. Jeb’s face had gone black. He shouted something but Lisa’s world had turned oddly mute. She could see his mouth moving, his veins bulging, but all noise had vanished from existence. Sarah stood her ground, already bracing herself to meet whatever fury this boy twice her size could mete out with her own.
He drew his hand forward from his waist in an odd motion, swinging and apparently slapping Sarah across the face. That is, Lisa thought it was a slap until she saw the blood arc, until the light flashed off the blade of the pocket knife in his hand. She stood up, screaming something, but her voice was as soundless as Jeb’s had been. The stairs nearly tripped her as she barreled down. The whackers had picked up speed.
Sarah fell backward, twisting a little, landing awkwardly, before flopping over onto her back. Jeb descended, her sneakered foot lifted, he barked in the over-exaggerated motions of a silent film as the kick sunk into his gut.
Lisa was air-born. His skin was hot and slick against hers as her arms clenched around his throat, her weight coming down on his back. She held on with all her strength, trying to cut off his air.
Sound abruptly rushed back into the world. Kids were shouting and screaming and cheering. Jeb was belching and grunting like a wild pig, her blood was rushing through her ears until her skull felt set to split. Radios crackled, whackers shouted, and then descended.
Something hard slammed across her shoulders. Her arms turned into noodles and she slipped backward off of Jeb’s back. As she hit the ground weight came down, pinning her face to the asphalt. Her wrists were clenched in aching misery at the small of her back. Booted feet ran past. More shouting. Something metal skidded in circles across her field of vision. It slid to a halt about two feet in front of her face, just out of sight. She wrinkled her brows, trying to shift her head to see it.
It was the pocketknife, its edge still glittering a bit with smears of crimson.
Her stomach gave up, and when she vomited, the whacker cussed with fury and something hard came down, bringing blackness with it.
Lisa hadn’t thought it possible, just a few hours ago, for her head to feel worse. She was wrong. She woke up on the hard, thin bed in the infirmary feeling as though the entire back of her skull had been stove in. Hurt, dazed, disoriented, she had cried for nearly five minutes before the infirmary nurse bothered to appear and tell her to hush herself.
“That’s what students get for jumping on other students,” she tsked brusquely. “Perhaps a headache will teach you a lesson.”
Twenty minutes later she swiftly bustled over to Lisa, passing her some small white pills and a glass of water. “They’ll help your head,” she insisted, making Lisa suspicious, but the state of her head made any hope of relief impossible to refuse. She choked down the pills, the nurse fussing over her with an intentness that was completely in opposition to how she had behaved only a few minutes before.
The reason for it appeared in the form of a strange man with iron gray hair, a thin little moustache, and a smart suit. He carried a briefcase that smelled of importance and old leather. He stepped into the infirmary just as the pills were slowly dying the throb away, making Lisa feel disconnected and groggy. Beside him came Mr. Freleigh, the two men engaged in conversation. Like a brisk little terrier dog, Bones followed on their heels.
“…no, no, Mr. Freleigh, I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“The girl has a history, Mr. Carstaire. She’s obstinate, disrespectful, a thief-“
The stranger, Mr. Carstaire, chuckled. “Oh, Mr. Freleigh. Show me one child in this home that isn’t disrespectful or obstinate. That is why they are here, remember? As for being a thief, so she plays monte with a few kids for their jacks and bubblegum-“
“More than that,” Bones huffed. “I took nearly twenty dollars off of her last time-“
“And she stole my wallet!” Mr. Freleigh pointed out.
“You have proof she was the one that took the wallet?” Mr. Carstaire asked.
“No, but-“
“She is a wicked girl, mark my words,” Bones warned, then pointed a finger at where Lisa lay, now floating in a fog of painkillers. “She’s influencing the other children to be violent! Lisa could have killed Jebediah!”
“Hang on, hang on,” Mr. Carstaire put up a hand. “Mr. Freleigh, Ms. Mazur. I have every respect for you and I fully understand the frustration you must feel at times dealing with these students. But I cannot simply remand a minor to juvenile detention who has committed no provable crime. And you have not presented enough evidence that this Sarah Nelson is in any way dangerous or criminal enough to remove her from this facility. Now. Jebediah is a different matter. Several witnesses saw him pull a weapon and violently attack another student. I have spoken with him myself and he is clearly combative and hostile, and poses a danger to every child and staff-member in this facility. He will be removed to juvenile detention pending a more formal court ruling.”
Both Bones and Freleigh burst out but he cut his hand through the air before they could get very far. “As far as Sarah is concerned if she pursues or continues in a pattern of violent, miscreant behavior file a formal report and we will re-examine her placement here. Until then, I can only suggest that as her mentor, Mr. Freleigh, and as her counselor, Ms. Mazur, you two find a new approach towards helping her to find balance and to heal, because clearly what you are doing now is not attaining the effect needed.”
The nurse, still lurking by Lisa’s head, made a strange sound which could have been anything from a snort of disgust to one of repressed laughter.
“So what are we going to do with Lisa then,” Bones asked, her face once more pulling off its best impression of the wrong side of a feline. “She could have killed Jeb if the orderlies hadn’t intervened.”
“From what I understand of what happened, Lisa was only attempting to halt Jebediah and protect her friend. Considering he had a knife in his hand she took the only safe route. You yourself said that Lisa isn’t a violent girl, that if anything she’s far too withdrawn and introverted. Be grateful, Ms. Mazur, that she’s finding friendship and opening herself up to people. Perhaps Lisa will help to temper Sarah as well. Nurse?”
He looked at Mole, who blinked at him. As if she’d forgotten the pretense she was putting up, the nurse began to stroke Lisa’s hair a bit too roughly. “Yes, Mr. Carstaire?”
“How is she doing?”
“She has a frightful bump but no permanent damage. She’s on some painkillers now and is a bit groggy, but I expect by tomorrow morning she’ll be none the worse for wear.”
“And Sarah?”
“Shallow cut on her cheek. Looked worse than it was, but it’ll probably scar a bit. Gave her a tetanus shot. She’s up in her rooms. Figured it would be quieter for her up there.”
“Then things are in hand,” he nodded, and looked at his watch. “As Jebediah is uninjured we will be transferring him immediately. The uniformed officers should be here within the hour to escort him to Manchester Juvenile facility. Until then, keep him in the isolation unit and let the officers remove him.”
They drifted out of the infirmary, and Lisa was unable to hear their words any more, though their voices drifted in and out as they slowly faded from distance. The nurse immediately rose and went about her work, all false compassion toward Lisa evaporating like mist in the sun.
Lisa didn’t care. The knot on her head, the thickness of the drugs, and the lingering hangover left little room to even feel bitterness toward the hypocrisy. All she could think, in fact, was how Mr. Freleigh and Ms. Mazur had been put in their place by Mr. Carstaire…and how they would make she and Sarah pay for it.
"You see this, Took?"
The air was chill and sharp. Jeb had left for juvie four days ago. Since he'd gone, the weather had turned charged and stormy. The sky was close and gray but so far no rain had fallen.
She and Sarah were sitting on the steps, old windbreakers from the donations boxes on to cut the sharpness of the breeze. The cut on Sarah's face was an angry line from cheekbone to jaw. It had to be tender and it was bruising around the edges, but Sarah didn't seem to know or care that it existed.
In her fingers she held a battered little dollar bill. It had been folded and refolded so many times that it had wrinkled atrociously, and one corner had been torn a little.
"Yeah, I see it," Lisa replied, wondering what was so important about the dollar.
"Uncle Ricky gave me this. See here? My birthday is in the serial number. He gave this to me when he and Uncle James came to my house that day. He said he'd saved it especially for me and that it was my lucky buck."
She flipped it over and over thoughtfully in her fingers. "Some fuckin' lucky buck, huh Took? Yeah. Same day he gives it to me Dad kills Mom, I kill Dad and end up fucked all the way up in this shithouse."
"Why don't you throw it away then?" Lisa asked. Sarah rolled one shoulder, folded it between two fingers, and stuffed it in her sock.
"I was going to. Then one lucky thing happened."
"What's that?"
"Jeb got put in the shit-can," she grinned. Lisa grinned back. Sarah jerked her chin toward the tree and they got to their feet, wandering over to the smoking area as the older girl pulled out a pair of smokes, passing one to Lisa. A few of the other kids were already there, but paid them no attention. Matches snapped with a faint sulfur smell. Lisa took the smoke into her lungs with a satisfied sigh.
"Can I ask you something," she said after a few moments. Sarah eyed her, lowering her cigarette and blowing out a cloud of smoke.
"So long as I don't feel the need to fuck up your face for it," she replied casually.
"The first day I was here, when Jeb threw the basketball at me...why did you jump on him?"
Sarah squinted off past the tree, then turned and moved closer to the chain-link fence. The roots of the sugi had burrowed under the dirt, and as a result had lifted the bottom of the fence loose from the ground in a couple of small places. Beyond the cold, gray metal web, bushes and underbrush only partially hid a distant road from view. Some broken beer bottles were scattered around just out of reach, dozens of discarded cigarette butts, a few condoms. Sarah leaned on the fence and looked upward at the sugi's branches.
Lisa went and stood next to her, looking up as well. "See that?" Sarah pointed. On a thick branch about ten feet up there was a worn, scarred spot. Lisa nodded. She had seen it before, and some of the kids had told her that one student or another, years ago, had hung themselves from it with the tetherball rope. Lisa had pointed out they didn't have a tetherball post in the yard, and the kids told her that was why...they'd taken it out afterward so no one else would do the same thing.
"I see it."
"When I first came here, I was six," Sarah said, still casually smoking as she looked upward. "There was an older girl here already. Katie Dunfrey. Everyone called her Kitty, see. She said it made her sound like Kit Carson."
"Who's Kit Carson?"
"I don't know, some fuckin' frontier trapper or something. Pay attention. Kitty was sixteen. Ruled the yard, you know? No one fucked with Kitty but she was nice too, dig? Kept all the kids straight but didn't take no shit or she'd put you down on the ground. Shit. Even Bones said good things about Kitty, and Bones would call her own mother a hay-lickin' bitch. Well, I was fucked in the head, you know? Screamed at night a lot. Bad nightmares. You know the whackers don't give a shit if kids had nightmares, but Kitty cared. She came in my room and told me stories and calmed me down. Kitty was fuckin' class A. Fuckin' class A all the way, baby. She was here because her father got her on the needle when she was eleven. He went to jail and she came here. Had tracks all over her arms. Sometimes her hands would shake something awful and she'd stutter a little. Said she had migraines. She took these little white pills sometimes, and sometimes she'd disappear for a few days. Kitty was the shit though. Everyone loved her."
Lisa's eyes dropped from the branch to Sarah's face, and she half-consciously tapped the gathering ash off the end of her cig. Sarah rolled a shoulder. "Anyway, she wore glasses and looked a bit like you, I guess. Fucking taller and less like the wrong end of a mangy dog."
She half smirked, chuckled. "No big deal, anyway. It was Kitty's birthday when you came. When Jeb smacked you with the ball I had a 'what would Kitty do' moment and fucked him up. Not a big fuckin' thing."
Lisa was silent a moment, then dared, "What happened to Kitty?"
Sarah's face went to that familiar stone and Lisa was afraid she'd gone too far this time. Sarah might have this odd affiliation for her but she'd still knock her teeth in given enough incentive. Lisa was hardly immune from her wrath. Sarah flicked the butt at the ground and scooted her foot over it roughly a time or two.
"LoRaca got her," she said at last, her voice tight and angry. "LoRaca got her, that's what. She had another headache, she said. Took one of her pills but it didn't go away. Finally she went to the infirmary. 'Back in a breeze,' that's what she said. 'Back in a breeze, little snub, don't let my seat get cold.' But she didn't come back. Not that night, not all the next day or night either. Next morning during breakfast there was an ambulance in the yard. Police tape everywhere. Fucking uniforms. No one ever told us what happened but it got out. Shit like that always gets out. She hung herself up there. I heard Bones tell Mrs. Simonstry that she'd had some sort of aneurysm or something, or a seizure-like...a black out kind of. That the pain just made her bungo and she hung herself up in the tree to make it stop."
Lisa was silent, looking at the bare spot on the wood as the cold, stormy breeze rattled moved through the sugi, making the wood groan low and mournful. "Weren't no fuckin' aneurysm and it weren't no black out," Sarah finished. "That's what LoRaca will do to some of them. To the good ones. It sucks them dry and tears them down and in the end...LoRaca wins. LoRaca always fuckin' wins in one way or another."
The bell rang. Kids began tossing down cigs and joints, snuffing them out and shuffling toward the door. Sarah half-hunched in her windbreaker and headed toward the door. Glancing one last time at the wounded branch, Lisa trotted after her.
The flow of bodies inside had turned into a trickle as they reached the steps. Two whackers stood at the door, and Bones was there too. As Lisa and Sarah went to go inside, the break-sticks came out and blocked their path. Bones smiled.
"Mr. Freleigh would like to see you girls," she said almost congenially.
The whackers grinned.
"Fuck! Fuck'd we do??" Sarah snarled as the whacker steered her less than gently along the hallway toward Mr. Freleigh's office. One arm was all but cranked up between her shoulders and he was pushing her along so fast she had to fight not to stumble. "Fuck, ease off you shit-for-brains!"
Lisa was coming along a little more sedately, a hand like an iron manacle on her upper arm. She, like Sarah, knew they hadn't done anything...but she'd suspected this was coming. Mr. Freleigh had been pissed after Mr. Carstaire had left. She was just a little surprised that it had taken him this long.
As they approached the office the storm outside broke, rain coming down on the metal roof of the school with a rattling sound. The frosted glass door opened and Mr. Freleigh stood there, a glass of something gold and brown in his hand. Though there was nothing obviously wrong with him Lisa couldn't put aside the notion that something wasn't quite right, either. He looked calm and collected.
"Thank you boys," he said evenly as he stepped aside. The whackers thrust both her and Sarah down into a chair. Mr. Freleigh gestured lightly with the glass at the door. "You can leave them."
"We'll be just outside-"
"No. They'll be needing you in the cafeteria for dinner time," he replied cooly. The whackers hesitated.
"We can't just leave you alone-"
"I can handle two little girls, gentlemen," he said with half a smile. "We're just going to have a little chat. Go on now."
Lisa watched with big, trembling eyes as the two whackers left and closed the door. Sarah said nothing, and as Lisa glanced over at her she noticed her grip on the arms of the seat had gone white-knuckled. She sensed it too. Something was wrong.
Mr. Freleigh was still looking at the door. He seemed to remember the drink in his hand and took a long slow sip at it. Then he turned and set the glass lightly on his desk. A bottle was there. He uncorked it, refilled the glass. As he set it back down Lisa realized it was bourbon. It was also two-thirds empty. She wondered how long he had been drinking before sending for them.
Her bladder felt full and trembly. She tried not to make a sound.
He didn't bother with the cork again. Going to his desk drawer he pulled out what looked like a leather belt. Then he went to the door and lightly turned the latch, locking it.
"I can see my efforts with you, Sarah, have gone in vain," he said slowly, the touch of a slur in his voice. "I've tried to make you into a decent person, heaven knows I have. But clearly I have failed."
Sarah said nothing, not even a typical cuss-out or witty retort. She only glowered at the floor. Mr. Freleigh's slacks rustled as he crouched beside Lisa's chair. He reached out and she flinched back a little. His fingers gently drew off her glasses and folded them closed, before slipping them in his jacket pocket. He then took the leather strap in his hand and buckled her wrist to the chair.
"Lisa, however...you still have a chance, hmm? You've been following along behind Sarah like a pissy little puppy, and we can't have that...no. We can't have that at all. So you will see what happens to her because of what she's done, and I hope that it will clear that little head of yours and show you that her path is one you certainly don't want to follow."
His hand passed almost lovingly over her head and she jerked away from it again. He smiled. His eyes seemed oddly dead.
He straightened, turned.
Sarah suddenly lunged forward, but Mr. Freleigh was incredibly fast for a man his age. He caught the back of her neck, driving her momentum forward until her hip caught the edge of the desk. She half fell, tried to get up again. He snatched hold of her hair, slammed her face down to the wood. She grunted, cussed faintly, tried to struggle. He gripped her tighter and slammed her down again. "Be still you little cocksucker," he snarled in her ear. "I'm not playing around here, you get me? You dig?? I'm not fucking playing with you. This is serious, Sarah. Ser-i-ous."
"Lemme go," she growled faintly into the wood.
"Oh, no. Not until you learn your lesson," he said, his free hand going to the cup and taking out the antennae, extending it with a sharp snap. Lisa's free hand fumbled over the leather strap holding her to the chair but she couldn't figure out how to unfasten it. It was too tight to get her fingers under it.
She winced unconsciously at the first whap that cut across Sarah's back. The girl pressed on the desk jumped a little bit, gasping through her grit teeth. Lisa's hand started shaking, making it even harder for her to get a grip on the strap. Without her glasses and with tears of fear now filling her eyes Mr. Freleigh and Sarah were little more than blurry shapes of color and motion.
Whap, whap, whap!
Mr. Freleigh was hitting her as fast as he could lift and lower his arm. Lisa jolted the chair, trying to tug her arm loose.
"Stop it!" she shrieked. "Stop it! Leave her alone!"
He spun, releasing his hold on Sarah. She slipped away from the desk and hit the ground with a gritted cry of pain. As he spun the antennae whipped across Lisa's face with astonishing force. Then his hand was there against her chin, pinning her head back to the chair.
"DO NOT SPEAK UNTIL I SPEAK TO YOU!" He roared, his breath hot and sour with liquor. She could see sweat along his face, his cheeks ruddy with drink and exertion, little beads of damp gathering in his moustache. His eyes were wild and bloodshot. "You're a little fucking cunt, just like she is!"
He released her face and turned. Sarah was half on her hands and knees, trying to get up. His leg swung back and then sailed forward, his foot belting her in the gut. Sarah grunted, collapsed to her side, and he kicked her again. Lisa once more shouted at him to stop but this time, he ignored her. Sarah curled fetally a moment and Mr. Freleigh calmly picked up his drink, taking a swallow.
"I can see this is going to take more work than I thought," he murmured. "Unfortunately, Sarah...there is nothing more we can do for you here at LoRaca. It's a pity, really."
"Fucker," Sarah half groaned, half gasped, her arms wound around her gut.
"You can't send her to juvie," Lisa shot. "I heard Mr. Carstaire! He won't let you send her to juvie when she didn't do anything wrong!"
Mr. Freleigh smirked, drained his cup, then set it down. Picking up the bottle he poured. "Juvie? Lisa, no. Sarah isn't going to juvie, but she's not staying here, either. No no, tsk tsk. We're done here aren't we Sarah?"
"Fuck..." she was trying to roll to her hands and knees, but her movements were weak and shaky.
"No, Lisa. May I call you Took? That's what most of the kids call you, I understand. Little Took. Anyway, Took, since you and Sarah are thick as thieves can be, I'm sure she's told you about another student that used to live here. Ah, pretty Kitty. Such a pretty Kitty she was. Now there was a student. Do you remember Kitty, Sarah?"
She dry-heaved, panting a bit. He pursed his lips a little thoughtfully. "Yes, you two were buddies, weren't you? My pretty Kitty. Now she knew how to behave. Knew how to treat a headmaster with the respect he deserved. Oh, and she treated me very well, Sarah. Very very well."
"You sick fuck..." she panted.
"Am I?" he smirked. She'd made it onto her hands and knees. Reaching out a foot he planted it on her hip and knocked her over again. "Kitty didn't think so. Well, maybe at first she did but she found out bending over my desk nice was so much better than getting whipped, hmm?"
Sarah snarled and surged weakly up. The retracted antennae still in his right hand, Mr. Freleigh punched her. She thumped back to the ground, hands cupping her bleeding nose and lips. Lisa yanked on the belt strap and began fumbling with it again, trying to get loose.
"But then she got obstinate. She got dismissive. And I'm afraid she just had to go, Sarah. She just had to go. And now, you just have to go too. That tree has been empty for far too long I think. Pity no one realized just how depressed and self-destructive you were."
He downed the bourbon, set the cup aside. Instead of refilling it though he went around his desk, opened a drawer. He pulled out a bit of clothesline. "Stolen from the laundry," he tsked. "I should whip you again for sneaking in there."
"No! No!" Lisa moaned, all but tearing at the strap as he came around the desk. He bunted Sarah over onto her stomach with his foot, then squatted over her, sitting on the small of her back as he began to tie a noose in the end of the line. Sarah tried to struggle again but with his full weight on her aching, bruised back she couldn't get any leverage. She was cussing and spitting blood like a feral cat. He started to hum as he tied up the noose.
Lisa, sobbing madly, barely felt it when one of her fingernails nearly tore off in her attempt to unfasten herself. She finally got her fingers under the strap, began to loosen it, prying at it. The chair squeaked a little as it scooted a bit across the floor. Mr. Freleigh finished the noose with one last snapping tug of the knot.
"I do have to say, this is going to be a big relief, Sarah. No one fuckin' liked you anyway."
Lisa ripped her hand backward and free of the strap. With nothing else at hand she stood up and grabbed the very chair she had been sitting in and swung it.
She wasn't a very big or strong girl but she hit him hard enough to knock him to the side and off of Sarah.
Sarah lurched up to her feet as Lisa retreated a bit, snatching hold of the door handle, forgetting in her panic that it was locked. Mr. Freleigh cussed, throwing the chair aside and getting to his feet. Sarah snatched at the 'World's Best Dad!' mug and then turned. Her dark hair was disheveled, her pale face bruised and smeared with blood from her nose and split lip. But in her eyes was a fury that matched Freleigh's.
As he came at her, reaching out to grab her, she punched him in the throat. He made a strange sound, gagged a little, and gripped her arm. As Sarah ripped her hand back Lisa saw the gleam of the letter opener. Then red. A lot of red.
Sarah hit him again and he fell backward, his fingers digging into her arm as he pulled her back with him. Straddling him now she stabbed him again, then again. Lisa, shrieking, slapped her hand on the frosted glass of the door hard enough to make it rattle, but no one came.
In LoRaca, no one ever came.
She was wedged tightly under the workbench, arms around her head, her chest aching with whooping breaths that seemed to bring her little air. Darren was dead. He was dead with his brains smeared on the porcelain tub. The blood, the blood. Little Marcus was floating in it. His glasses were broken. His glasses...
"Took!"
She jolted with a whirring gasp as hands gripped her wrists. She struggled but the grip was too strong.
"For fuck's sake, Took, look at me!"
It was Sarah, and this was Mr. Freleigh's office. Sarah's face was slightly distorted, her nose and lip swollen, eyes already bruising. Took whooped and gasped and fought not to get sick. Her jeans were damp and chaffing.
"He's dea...he's dea...he's dea..." she kept repeating. Sarah slapped her. It wasn't hard, but sharp and biting. The world seemed to clarify starkly.
"He's dead," Sarah hissed. "Come on, everyone's in for dinner. We got some time."
She released Took and stepped back. Took's eyes automatically went to the floor, but Mr. Freleigh wasn't there. After a moment she noticed his foot protruding from behind the desk. Sarah paced over there, moving awkwardly. The bourbon bottle had spilled, the glass broken on the ground. Sarah got behind the desk and crouched. A moment later she came up with Took's glasses and Freleigh's wallet. Heading back over she crouched and offered the glasses. "I don't think he landed on them. The frame might be cracked."
As Took wiped her face and put them on, Sarah thumbed through the wallet. She took out all the cash, then pitched the wallet at his desk. It slapped into the 'World's Greatest Dad!' mug and sent it spilling onto the carpet. Folding the money she jammed it into her pocket, then grabbed Took's shoulders. "You together?"
Took nodded shakily. Sarah nodded, then rose and unlatched the door, peering out. "Hall's empty. C'mon, let's go."
"Wh-wh-where we going?"
Sarah said nothing, only started out at a hesitant trot. Took got to her feet and went after her. Her legs were shaking and she realized why her pants were cold and wet. She'd lost control of her bladder. Her cheeks heated with embarrassment as she half-limped after the older girl.
They reached Took's room without encountering anyone. Sarah went in, opened the dresser, and pulled out a pair of jeans. She pitched them at Lisa. "Change. Then meet me in my room."
She vanished. Hands shaking, took stripped out of her wet jeans and pulled on the dry ones, grabbing her sneakers. She was fighting not to sob, her whole body feeling like it was shaking. Mr. Freleigh was dead. He was dead and they'd never believe them as to why. They'd both go to juvie.
Changed, she peeked out into the hall. It was empty. Getting to Sarah's room took a lifetime though it was only a few doors down. She opened it to find Sarah had taken out an old battered pack and was stuffing it with a few things. As Lisa closed the door Sarah pulled the ventilation grate off the wall, reached in, and pulled out a mason jar. It was stuffed full of dollar bills and change. She shoved it in the pack.
"Where'd you get all that?" Lisa sniffled. Sarah lifted her eyes momentarily.
"Ten years of grifting, Took. I got nearly a grand in here. I knew I was going to have to beat feet someday."
She took a pack of camels and a couple of joints from her dresser drawer, shoving them in her coat pockets. Then she closed up the bag and shouldered it. "C'mon. Dinner's done in fifteen minutes."
The rain was falling steadily as they reached the schoolyard. It spotted Lisa's glasses. They reached the sugi and Sarah lowered the bag, reaching in her pocket. She took out the joints, put one in her mouth, and lit it. Taking a long, shaking draw on it, she pulled it out again and gave it to Lisa.
This time Lisa didn't argue. She took the joint mechanically and drew it in as Sarah lit the second one. Slowly, the shakiness in her limbs gave way, her hitching breaths slowing into hiccups before becoming steady.
Halfway through her joint, Sarah pulled a battered pair of wire cutters from the bag and began to snip at the chain-link fence, starting where the roots had pushed through.
"Where are you going?" Lisa asked slowly, her tongue thick and her stomach slowly roiling.
"As far as I can fuckin' get out of here," Sarah replied. "You're coming too."
The wind rustled the tree until the branches creaked. Lisa thought about the worn spot on the branch above their heads. "No," she said with weary contemplation. "No, I'm staying here."
Sarah eyed her, slipping the cutters into her pocket. "They'll crucify you. They'll fuckin' pitch you in with Jeb for murder, Took."
"I won't talk to anyone but Mr. Carstaire."
"You think Carstaire is gonna protect your ass?? Christ, Took! This is the real fucking world! Okay? The happy fucking ending doesn't happen to kids like us. Santa's a joke, the fucking easter rabbit was cooked in some redneck's pot, and the only tooth fairy in business is the one that knocks them out to begin with!"
"I won't talk to anyone but Mr. Carstaire."
"Shit Took. Shit you are seriously fucked in the head. Fine. Have it your fuckin' way. But if you tell them which way I ran I will find you and cut your fuckin' throat, do you hear me?"
The wind moaned, the rain drizzled, the branches creaked.
"I'm not a snitch," she said low, softly. Sarah's gun-metal grey eyes narrowed a moment. Then she reached into her sock and stood up. She grabbed Took's hand and pressed the beat-up dollar bill into her palm.
"This thing is out of luck for me, Took, if it ever had any good luck in it to begin with. I make my own fuckin' luck now. When you learn to make your own luck, burn the fucker."
She pressed Lisa's fingers down over it, then bent and grabbed the bag. She peeled the chain-link back and pitched the bag through. Lisa stepped forward, grabbing the flap of metal and holding it while Sarah crawled through. She lowered it back down as Sarah straightened, lifting and shouldering the bag.
She didn't look back, immediately setting off at a trot through the littered underbrush for the road in the distance. That was ok.
Lisa knew she didn't have anything to look back for.
She looked at the wrinkled dollar in her hand, before smoothing it out on her palm and folding it up. She stuck it in her sock, straightened, and pitched the spent joint.
Then she turned and headed inside.
Lisa told them pretty much everything.
She had walked into the cafeteria as dinner was winding down. The food was served by volunteers and charity workers. Lisa went right to one that she didn’t recognize and told her quite calmly that Mr. Freleigh was dead upstairs in his office, and could she please call the police.
When they realized she was telling the truth, the students were locked down, Bones put Lisa in isolation, and the cops were called. Lisa sat there in the dark, feeling weary, drained, yet oddly calm.
Mr. Carstaire had come to talk to her. In a little side office with two uniforms present she told him everything, more or less. How Mr. Freleigh had been drunk. How he had strapped Lisa to the chair. How he had beat Sarah. When she got to the part where he had pretty much admitted to raping Kitty and then hanging her in the tree, Mr. Carstaire’s face went very still. He stood up and talked to one of the uniforms a moment, then sat down again. The uniform left.
She found out later that he had gone to tell them to search Mr. Freleigh’s offices. It took them two hours, but they found a folder in the false bottom of one of the filing cabinets in there. A folder with pictures.
But that was later. Mr. Carstaire asked her if Mr. Freleigh had ever done something like that to her and she told him no, the only thing he’d done was whip her with the antennae, as he had done Sarah. Later on, all the students who had been brought to Mr. Freleigh for discipline were examined. Seven of the fifteen had scars on their backs from the whipping.
She told them pretty much everything, yes…but she never did tell them which way Sarah ran. She wasn’t a snitch.
For the next several weeks LoRaca was the focus of a huge investigation. Uniforms were everywhere. The whackers had vanished. Bones was fired, as was Mrs. Simonstry. Records were painstakingly searched, students questioned, strangers came and went. Several students were reassigned, then several more.
Mr. Carstaire came for Lisa personally. She was smoking alone behind the sugi tree. They had temporarily patched the chain-link, and done a piss-poor job of it. It was six months after Sarah had gone. As far as Lisa knew, they hadn’t found her yet.
“You want to go for a ride?” Mr. Carstaire asked, leaning on the sugi. Lisa shrugged, rubbed out her cigarette and flicked it aside.
“To where?” she asked.
“Group home in Portland. They have an opening and I think you’d fit right in.”
She glanced askance at him, and he smiled a little. “Don’t worry, Lisa. I guarantee its nothing like here.”
“Couldn’t be much worse, could it?” she shrugged a little. He put his hand on her shoulder.
“Go and get your things, kiddo.”
She did, and they left, and he was right…it was nothing like LoRaca.
“Took?”
Patton’s voice interrupted her thoughts. The empty, abandoned building had shriveled to something small and hollowed. Blinking a moment, she lifted her wrist and looked at her watch. She’d been standing out here for an hour. Her fingers were numb.
“I’m sorry, Patton,” she said. “I guess I kind of drifted off a little.”
“It’s okay,” she replied. She regarded the overgrown play-yard and shrugged into her coat. The sun was barely hanging on to the horizon. The yard was mostly in shadow save where a few splashes of crimson and gold light still fought against the evening. “This place creeps me out. Why haven’t they torn it down yet?”
“State never likes to throw anything away. Until they can figure out a use for the land…” She shook her head, then fished into her pocket as her cellphone buzzed. She pulled it out. It was festooned with Peanuts stickers. She flipped it open and put it to her ear.
“Tookson. Great. Be there in half an hour.”
She snapped the phone shut. “That was Greg. They got a lead on where she’s running.”
“About god-damn time,” Patton replied, already heading back for the car. Took turned to join her.
She didn’t look back.
Hell, what the fuck did she have to look back for?