As soon as he heard the latch click he opened his eyes again. His room looked like a florist shop: flowers, cards, stuffed bears, balloons. The outpouring of Minnesotans’ inherent kindness had manifested in cash as well as gifts. One of the doctors told him more than two hundred thousand dollars had been sent to the hospital for Richard Raines. The doctor imparted this important fact offhandedly, as if Richard was a child who wouldn’t know what to do with more than movie money.
Even if he could get the money, there was no way they were going to let a freshman in high school live on his own, even though he had a home. The Raines house had belonged to his grandparents; it should be paid for by now, or close to it. It wouldn’t matter; until he was eighteen he’d have to have a guardian. Social workers were having hushed conversations about where to put him, as if he were a towel they could fold and stick on this or that shelf. Their whispers were about as subtle as theatrical asides meant to be heard in the last row.
No one bothered to include him in these sotto voce chats.
An orphanage had been mentioned, but foster care was in the lead so far. People could dress foster care up any way they wanted but they did it for the money: more kids more money. And kids got shifted around. On the radio he’d heard this whole thing about foster kids being given suitcases as presents because at the drop of a hat they were forced to play musical houses.
Vondra’s parents, the Werners, were a possibility. Vondra would try to help, but Mr. Werner didn’t like him. Not that he said anything; Richard had read it behind the man’s eyes. That he’d been with his daughter in the middle of the night when her parents were out didn’t make it any better.
There was a nurse in the ER he remembered. He remembered everything about that night with surreal vividness. Weeks later it still seemed more immediate than the time he inhabited from moment to moment. He’d liked her. She was smart and quiet and gentle with him. Her name was Lackey, Sara-with-no-h Lackey. Nurse Lackey was in her forties and didn’t take care of herself: she was underweight, her hair was a mess, and her nails had been bitten down to pseudopods.
Depressed, he guessed.
The next time a nurse came into his room, a hefty woman with an honest face and strong hands, he said, “There was a nurse who was extra nice to me that… that night. A Miss Sara something. I’d sure like to thank her.”
Hefty beamed approval at him as she deftly set about changing the dressing on his thigh.
“Oh, yes, that’s a sad story, that one,” she said.
When the nurse finished her bandaging and her story, Richard asked if she thought Sara would come see him sometime. “I liked her voice.” Saying it he remembered how good it had felt to hear that warmth, how good it had felt to be the center of her attention when the world was screwed up.
7
For nearly three weeks not much happened except that Dylan was moved from the infirmary into the psych ward. It wasn’t like he’d imagined, with people thinking they were Napoleon and sneaking around at night smothering each other, but it was pretty bad. There were three other kids. One was always screaming because he saw spiders. After half a day of it Dylan was looking around for the spiders himself. A couple times he thought he felt them on him but he didn’t let that show. He didn’t want to be stuck in the psych ward forever.
Not that he deserved anything better; he wasn’t stupid enough to pray for it or pretend he had a right to get out. Still he didn’t want to spend his life with loonies. Another kid was a great big retard, big as a man. There was nothing else wrong with him that Dylan could see. He was stupid but he was nice enough as long as you didn’t try to touch his things. The third boy just sat and plucked at his eyebrows and eyelashes, or where they’d used to be; he was bald-eyed as a bunny and blinked rapidly. At first Dylan thought he was staring at him, but Carl didn’t stare at anybody; he just stared.
Dylan did his share of staring too. Out the windows mostly. Psych was on the third floor on the backside of the building. Outside nothing but snow-covered fields stretched all the way to the snow-white sky. Dylan put himself in the snow and numbed out as much as he could.
After a while, Dr. Olson decided he could go to classes with the sane kids and eat with them in the dining hall. Given that he shouldn’t feel happy or good anymore he felt guilty for being glad to be out of the nut ward. There wasn’t enough snow in Minnesota to numb him clear past boredom. It was so bad he was actually excited about going to the school they had for the inmates. He still spent nights with the crazies and had to shower and use the bathroom there.
Being crazy-Dylan supposed he was and it wouldn’t have mattered if he was as sane as apple pie, crazy was like cooties, highly contagious, and he was living at cootie central-got him picked on by the sane boys. They didn’t beat the crap out of him-not like he’d wanted Rich to that time-but they were always poking and pinching and shoving, making him drop his tray in the dining hall, pushing him so he fell down.
It was still better than doing nothing with the loonies. Being left alone with only his brain to play with was too weird. He’d think about the other kids and what they’d done and he’d think about himself and what he’d done, and then he’d think that they were humans and he wasn’t, that he was this other thing, this monster thing, and if he kept on like that he knew he’d be screaming about invisible spiders before long.
At first Draco was the worst. Then, after a while, he got tired of it and decided to be Dylan’s friend. “Don’t go thinking I like you,” he warned. “But, man, you’re like Wyatt Earp or Doc Holiday, Jesse James. These sad fucks think they gun you down, they’re hot shit. More laughs fucking with them than fucking with you. So you’re this big axe murderer. Big deal. My bet is you did them in their sleep. Or somebody else did them and you took the rap. No way a little fart like you could get it up for forty whacks. You know about ‘forty whacks?’ Lizzy Whatsername slicing and dicing her folks? Worse kids than you been through Drummond. Me for one.”
Draco was always going on like that, like they were all big criminals. Except for Dylan, nobody much was. The other guys were in for stealing cars, or running away from home too many times, or shoplifting. One kid knifed another kid and a couple of older boys were in for armed robbery.
Draco was in for selling marijuana and then stealing the police car when they tried to arrest him. At least that’s what he said. Dylan suspected maybe the police car part was just something he liked to think he did.
After he started hanging around with Draco things got better.
Class was good too. Dylan liked school now. Looked forward to it. He pretended not to because crazy cooties got him in enough trouble. If he started doing teacher’s pet he’d get the crap beat out of him, Draco or no Draco.
English and history weren’t all that great-people could twist them and Dylan was scared of twisty. He’d gotten twisted and twisted and ended up in a psych ward in a jail and didn’t remember doing anything wrong. That meant he didn’t know when he might do it again. That’s why they wouldn’t let him sleep in Ward C. Nobody else knew when he was going to start hacking people up again either. Drummond slept better when Dylan was locked down for the night.
What he really liked was math. Outside, he’d hated it. Now he loved the order of it and that it was always the same. Nobody could twist it. A number stayed the same and if it was added to another number it always, always came out the same way.