THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO
By
Brent Hartinger
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Buddha Kitty, Inc. on Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 by Brent Hartinger
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For Michael Jensen
The person I call home
And for Jennifer DeChiara
Who is always welcome to visit
Chapter One
The door was locked, and I sure as hell didn't have the key.
I was standing on a front porch, and the door before me was tall and wide and arched, with a fancy black iron handle and hinges, like the door to a church or a haunted house. I should know—I'd been dragged into a whole lot of different churches over the years, and while none of the many houses I'd lived in had actually been haunted, most of them had been plenty scary.
But this wasn't the door to a church or a house like any I'd been in before. No, it was the entrance to this big mother of a mansion looking out over the bay. Years ago, back when this place was the home of Mr. Rich Bastard, Esquire, and his wife, Greedula, the house had probably even had a name. I'm-So-Impressed Manor, or something like that.
But that had been a long time ago, and the door had taken its share of scratches and scuffs since then. The rest of the house had pretty much gone to the dogs too, with peeling paint and crooked gutters and a shaggy yard where all the plants seemed to be overgrown and dying at exactly the same time. So now the place had a different name. Kindle Home. It had a different purpose too, about as far as you could get from the one it had been built for, which was to house filthy-rich people and impress the neighbors. Now it was a group home for teenagers in "state custodial care." Orphans and shit. It also happened to be my new home.
Why am I spending so much time describing this house and its damn front door? Because this is partly the story of that house, and I figured I should start at the very beginning. And unless you break in through a window, which I've been known to do, you first enter a house through its front door. Which, as I've already told you, in this case was locked.
"It's not locked," Leon said. "Sometimes you just need to give it a good kick."
Leon was the guy standing behind me on the front porch. He was the Kindle Home counselor who'd picked me up at my former group home that morning to bring me here. He was a little like the house itself, because he hadn't been what I was expecting at all. For one thing, he was Native American. "Lucy Pitt?" he'd said to me thirty minutes earlier, in the front room of my old group home. "I'm Leon Dogman." In group homes, the best way to tell the difference between the kids and the counselors is usually the color of their skin, and just for the record, it's not the counselors who are black and brown and red. Leon was also younger than most counselors, probably still in his twenties, and he had a scraggly black beard and a pierced eyebrow and three visible tattoos.
But even if Leon didn't look like the other group home counselors I'd seen, I knew he'd act just like them. I'd been in the foster care system since I was seven years old—a grand total of eight years—and I knew how the adults operated. The first few times I'd screwed up, back when I was seven or eight years old, everyone had said I'd just been upset over the death of my parents. But I was fifteen now, past the Point of No Return, and no counselor or therapist or foster parent had the time or energy to spend on a lost cause like me.
Leon had said to give that front door a lack, so I gave it a swift one, and what do you know, it opened. Being in foster care as long as I had, I guess I d learned a lot about swift kicks.
"What'd I tell you?" Leon said. "That's the thing about a big old house like this. Everything is one-of-a-kind. When something breaks, you can't just run over to the hardware store and replace it. So you learn to live with things the way they are." He grinned a little and kind of rolled his eyes. "There's hardly anything in Kindle Home that isn't broken somehow."
I nodded once, trying hard not to look too interested, and pushed my way inside.
I found myself in a front room that led off into other rooms—a foyer, I guess they're called. Directly in front of us was this giant carved stairway that flowed down from a landing halfway to the second floor like a great river of wood.
Leon was still right behind me. "Well, this is it," he said. "Welcome to Kindle Home." He didn't overdo it with the phony enthusiasm, which I appreciated.
I glanced around. There were holes in the walls and burns in the carpet, and the smell of Pine-Sol and burned popcorn in the air. What the hell is it about group homes and burned popcorn? But that staircase was pretty cool. And there was this explosion of a chandelier hanging from the ceiling way over our heads. A few of the bulbs were burned out and it was dusty, but the crystal jingly things still sort of sparkled, and I don't think I'd been that close to anything like it in my life.
"Come on, I'll show you around," Leon said. He looked over at my backpack. "You wanna set that down for a second? We won't go far."
"No," I said. It was heavy, but when everything you own fits into one bag, you learn to keep a pretty good grip on it.
I followed Leon across the foyer. "That was the library," he said, pointing to the door to the right of the front door. "Now it's the office and therapist's room. And there's the kitchen." He gestured to the open doorway to the right of the staircase, and I caught a glimpse of beige linoleum and stainless steel.
Finally, we came to the double doorway to the left of the stairway. It led into an enormous living room that connected to a dining room almost as big, and that, in turn, must have connected back up with the kitchen. The style of furnishing was Classic Group Home: sagging thrift-store sofas, no sharp edges or anything breakable anywhere, and absolutely nothing that anyone could possibly turn into a weapon. It was as close as you could get to a padded cell and still have chairs. But at the same time, there were reminders of the days before the house had become a dumping ground for teenage rejects. Faded gold velvet curtains. A fireplace with a carved wooden mantel that matched the stairway and was almost tall enough to stand upright in. And big sweeping picture windows, which must have once looked down on the water before trees had grown up to block the view.
"Well?" Leon said. "How do you like your new home?" New home? Was he trying to be funny? "Brief rest stop" was more like it. But Leon didn't look like he was being sarcastic. No, his face looked open—warm, even. Either he was a moron or he hadn't read my file yet.
A cat stepped out from behind the couch. He must have been sleeping on the heating duct, because he stretched like he'd just woken up. He was really skinny, with brown tiger stripes, and was pretty mangy too. He was missing a lot of fur, but it was all on the lower half of his body, like he'd licked it off himself. I wasn't surprised. Group home cats were usually just as messed up as the kids.
"That's Oliver," Leon said. "You know, Oliver Twist?"
I looked at him blankly, even though I knew that Oliver Twist was a famous orphan from a book. No need to let Leon know I wasn't a moron.
"Where is everyone?" I asked.
"Upstairs," Leon said. "And I think Ben took some kids to the park."
I nodded, and we both fell silent, watching Oliver saunter out toward the kitchen. I knew that Leon probably wanted me to ask him about the house, that he had what he thought was some great story to tell. But I also knew that if I waited until a few weeks later to start acting chummy, he'd be much more grateful, and I'd get a lot more out of him.
"There's an interesting story about this house," Leon said.
I had to fight to keep from rolling my eyes. Counselors were so incredibly easy to read. But at the same time, I decided to throw this one a bone. "Yeah?" I said.
"It was built by a man named Howard Kindle back in the nineteen-thirties. He was this big timber baron, really rich and really ruthless. But when he died in the nineteen-sixties, he left a will that gave this house to our program, saying we should use it for kids with no homes. As far as we know, he'd never talked to anyone from the program, and he'd never given much money to charity either, so no one could figure out why he'd done what he did. Then, a year after Kindle died, one of our workers was clearing the last of his junk out of the basement, and he made a very interesting discovery."
That he'd been an orphan himself, I thought to myself. Give me a break. This was the oldest story in the book.
"Turns out he'd been murdering people and burying them in the crawl space," Leon said.
"What?" I said. "You're kidding!"
Leon grinned, all teeth and whiskers and dimples. "Yeah. Just wanna see if you're paying attention. Actually, no one knows why he gave his house to us. But boy, his kids sure were pissed. They still live around here, and every couple of years, they try to reopen the case and fight that will all over again. Fact is, I don't care why Kindle did it. I'm just glad he did. There's no other group home like it in the state."
Leon was right about Kindle Home looking different from Bradley Home and Ryden Home and Haply House and the other three group homes I'd lived in. And I hope it goes without saying that none of the four foster families I'd lived with had lived in anything like a mansion, even a run-down, child-proofed mansion like this one. It felt different too. Solid. You could feel it under your feet. The doors stuck, and things might be cracked and dusty, but the underlying structure was sound.
But even if it looked and felt different from the other houses I'd lived in over the years, I knew it wasn't really. Leon hadn't told me the real story behind Kindle Home, the one that mattered to me. He hadn't needed to. Every kid in my foster care district already knew it. To us, Kindle Home was known as the Last Chance Texaco. The name came from those gas stations on long stretches of empty highway, the ones that have signs that say they're the "last chance" to get gas or have repair work for a whole bunch of miles, like right before a big, barren desert.
Kindle Home became a group home in the 1960s. And from the start, it was the group home for the kids who'd screwed up again and again, but who supposedly still had one last shot to turn things around. It wasn't a big, barren desert that came after our Last Chance Texaco—it was a high-security facility for teenagers called Eat-Their-Young Island, the place for the foster care system's truly hopeless cases.
Eat-Their-Young Island was located on a real island, but that wasn't its real name. It was really called Rabbit Island, but some kid had renamed it too, I guess because rabbits sometimes eat their young. Basically, it was a prison for kids. Surveillance cameras. Locks on all the doors, and sometimes restraints on the beds at night. Therapists and counselors could call Rabbit Island a "treatment center" all they wanted, but no one ever got better from their "treatment," and the only way anyone ever got out was by turning eighteen.
I knew I'd be there soon enough. It had taken me eight long years to work my way through The System, but now here I was, at the head of the line. It was only a matter of time before it was my turn to take the ride, only it wasn't a roller coaster we were talking about—not the fun kind, anyway. The counselors here all knew it too, or they would soon enough, once they'd read my file. Their job was to keep me waiting in line until it was my time to ride the Rabbit Island roller coaster.
Standing in the doorway to the living room at Kindle Home, Leon was still looking at me, waiting for me to react to his little story about Howard Kindle.
But I just turned toward the stairway and said, as flatly as I could, "Can I see my room now?" I was tired of talking. Besides, my backpack was heavy and cutting into my shoulders.
"Sure," Leon said. "Follow me upstairs." He didn't sound annoyed at all by my slight, which irritated me more than I wanted to admit.
As we stepped to the base of the stairs, he looked over at my backpack again. "You know," he said, "that thing looks heavy. Any chance you'll let me carry it upstairs?"
Chapter Two
We caught my new roommate red-handed, with a lit match in her hand.
"Yolanda!" Leon said. "What'd we tell you about smoking inside the house?" He'd knocked on the bedroom door, then opened it, only to find my future roommate just lighting up a cigarette.
At first she tensed, all set to try to throw the cigarette out the window. But when she saw she was busted, she relaxed a little and actually took a drag. "You said I couldn't smoke in the bathroom."
Leon rolled his eyes. "Yolanda, don't play that game. You know the rules. That's five points." He glanced out at the hallway and lowered his voice. "Next time ..."
She ground the cigarette out on the windowsill.
"Lucy," Leon said, "this is your roommate, Yolanda." She was small and pretty, and her skin was the color of the wood in the staircase in the foyer. I had no control over what Leon and the other counselors thought of me, but Yolanda was my roommate. I could control what she thought of me, and I knew how important it was to get and stay on her good side.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," she said, and I couldn't help imagining how I looked through her eyes. White skin, black hair, dark eyes. But even more important than what she could see was what she couldn't see, which was basically anything on my face, anything that I was thinking. The front door of my face was locked and deadbolted, and that was exactly the way I wanted it.
"Well," Leon said to me, "I'll let you get unpacked. Mrs. Morgan will go over the house rules with you tomorrow. Till then, just shout if you have any questions. Bathroom's two doors down."
Then Leon was gone, and I was alone with Yolanda. I closed the door behind him. I used to feel nervous or excited when I first met a roommate, but I wasn't nervous or excited now. How could I be? Meeting a roommate was such a familiar action, something I just had to do every so often, like clipping my toenails.
"That's your dresser," Yolanda said, nodding to one of the chests of drawers and sucking on the unlit cigarette, which I now saw she'd been careful not to bend.
I glanced at the dresser—vintage Goodwill—but I wasn't about to unpack my stuff Why bother? I knew I wouldn't be here long enough to make it worth my while.
"Where you from?" Yolanda asked, settling back on her bed, watching me. Kids in group homes don't have hometowns or nationalities. They have their previous group home. No matter how many different ones you've lived in, it's only the one right before that matters.
"Bradley Home," I said. "You?"
"Ryden," she said. I'd lived in Ryden for eight months two years earlier, but I didn't tell Yolanda that.
"Like it here?" I said. There was no point in reminiscing about Ryden Home, but talking about the here and now made a lot of sense. Yolanda might tell me something I'd need to know.
" Sokay," she said. She stared out the window for a second, then said, "My parents were killed in a propane explosion. We were gonna have a barbecue."
Where had that come from? And why was she was telling me this now? This wasn't how things worked. Didn't she know I could someday use it against her?
"How long you been in?" I asked. I meant how long had she been in the foster care system, but I knew she knew that.
"Seven months." Her parents had been killed only seven months earlier? That meant she was a newbie. But seven months and she was already at the Last Chance Texaco? What had she done to end up here so soon? It had to be something worse than smoking inside.
"How 'bout you?" she said.
"Since I was seven," I said. "Eight years." I didn't really remember life before The System, before my parents had been killed in the car accident. There were images in my head, frozen pictures, but they weren't connected to me. They were like snapshots blowing down the sidewalk, farther and farther away from me.
"So you meet Ken and Barbie?" Yolanda asked.
"Shhh," I said.
"What?"
I wasn't exactly sure what. I just knew someone was listening in on us. You live with groups of people long enough, you pick up sort of a sixth sense.
I jerked open the door. Sure enough, there was a kid standing just outside, head bent, like he'd been listening in. He was young, twelve or thirteen, with glasses and a part in the middle of his hair. He had an MP3 player and was wearing the headphones, but I figured he wasn't listening to music. He'd been listening to Yolanda and me through the door. I knew this for sure when he looked up and I saw the shocked expression on his face.
"Hear anything interesting?" I said.
He stood there stunned for a second more. Then he said, "Huh?" He was talking loudly, pretending like he couldn't hear me over the sound of his music.
It was a pretty good recovery, but I knew he was faking. "Give it up," I said. I pointed down to the MP3 player. "The damn thing's not even on."
Once again, I'd left him speechless.
"I'm Lucy," I said to the boy, because I figured why make enemies unless I had to.
"Yeah, I know," he said, trying to sound mysterious, which is hard when you have pimples and a paper clip holding your glasses together.
"That's Damon," Yolanda said.
"Yeah, I know," I said, imitating the mysterious tone he'd used on me. That got a smile out of him. At least he was smart enough to get my jokes.
"He's a weasel," Yolanda said.
"I know that too," I said. This was mostly bluster, but the fact is, I did know something about him. After a few group homes, you start to see patterns in the kids who live in them. Roles people play, like parts in a movie. I knew immediately what part Damon played. He was the Mole, the guy everyone went to for information about everyone else. Kids in group homes did a lot of trading, and what Damon traded was information.
"Well, Damon," I said, "it's nice to meet you."
"It's not like I—" he started to say, but I shut the door in his face. Yolanda actually squealed in pleasure.
When she'd calmed down a little, she said, "Damon's harmless," but I'd already known that too. That's why I'd closed the door in his face.
It had been a long morning, and I needed to pee, so I waited a second for Damon to make himself scarce—I knew he'd leave after getting busted once. Then I opened the door and headed for where Leon had said the bathroom was.
The bathroom door was locked. Or was it just stuck? The doorknob turned okay.
I knocked. "Hello?" I said, but there wasn't any answer from inside. What the hell was it about this house and sticky doors?
I was just about to give it a good kick when a voice said, "Occupied."
The voice hadn't come from inside the bathroom, but from farther down the hall.
I turned. There was a girl walking toward me, about my age. Big hair, big boobs, lots-o'-makeup. But there was fire behind that mascara, and I knew it.
"You're new," she said. "I'm Joy." I don't think I'd ever heard anybody sound quite that aloof. I knew immediately that, unlike Yolanda and Damon, this one was trouble. Without thinking, I stepped back from the bathroom.
"Lucy," I said. "There someone in there?" I nodded to the bathroom.
"Not yet," Joy said. She stepped between me and the door, and gave it a good shove with her shoulder. The door squeaked open, and she stepped inside. "But there is now." Then she slammed the door in my face.
Ever wonder where the term "pecking order" comes from? It comes from flocks of chickens.
Chickens create this sort of social ranking where every chicken can peck on any other chicken lower down in the pecking order. The chicken at the bottom of the pecking order is usually the weakest one. And if that chickens weakness is really obvious—like if it's badly injured—the rest of the flock might even peck it to death.
Just so you know, that's pretty much how it works in group homes too.
* * * * *
Dinner in a group home is the one time when everyone is together in one place. The counselors always say this like it's a good thing. The truth is, dinnertime at a group home is like dusk on the African savannah—it's when everything happens.
That night, Leon called us down to dinner, and I joined Yolanda and Damon at the long table in the big dining room. Leon was in the kitchen cooking with one of the counselors I hadn't met yet.
A second later, Joy breezed into the dining room with another girl, who I'd later learn was named Melanie. Her hair was a little smaller than Joy's, and her makeup was a little thicker. And she was just this side of plump, but the fat was in all the wrong places.
"You're in my chair," Joy said to me.
Yolanda looked up. "We don't have chairs." My roommate may have been in The System for seven months, but it sounded like she hadn't picked up much except smoking. She still didn't know a challenge when she heard one.
"We do so have chairs," Joy said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Don't we, Damon?"
Damon was suddenly fascinated by his spoon. "Oh, yeah." So I'd been right about Damon—at least he was smart.
"Fine," I said. I was new here, no reason to make waves. So I stood up and took a seat a chair away from Joy—far enough that I wouldn't have to deal with her all through dinner, but not so far that it looked like I was scared of her.
"Now you're in my chair," Melanie said.
Of course I was, I said to myself. I wondered, How many times have they played out this little routine?
Not making waves was one thing, but there was no point in letting myself be pushed around. "Tell you what," I said. "Why don't we share? I'll sit here now, and you can have it after dinner."
That hit Melanie right between the eyes. She was just about to say something in response when the counselor I hadn't met yet entered with a pitcher of milk from the kitchen. "You must be Lucy!" she said to me. "I'm Gina." She was tall and willowy, with long sandy blond hair.
"Hey," I said, already irritated by all her teeth.
"Hope you like lasagna," she said. I would like lasagna, I wanted to say, except I'm allergic to cheese. This was the one part of my file the counselors obviously hadn't read yet. But Gina had disappeared back into the kitchen before I could say anything. It's not like I wanted my three hundred thousandth peanut butter and jelly sandwich, anyway.
When I looked back at Melanie, she'd taken the seat on the other side of Joy, pretending like our little incident with the chairs had never even happened. So I'd won the first round.
Just then, the front door burst open, like someone had had to give it the boot again. A second later, a voice called out, "Hi, honey, I'm home!" and I heard a couple of kids groaning from the foyer. Joy and Melanie groaned too, like this was a joke that got made every night. This had to be Ben, Gina's husband. Yolanda had told me the two of them were live-in counselors with their own bedroom upstairs. Ben had been out somewhere with the rest of the kids in the house.
From my chair, I could see Ben as he entered the kitchen, and it made sense why everyone called him and Gina Ken and Barbie. He looked nothing like Ken—he was a couple of inches shorter than Gina, and was dark and swarthy—but he and his wife were both young and good-looking. They worked in social services, so Gina didn't wear makeup and Ben had a beard, but they were still just too cute for words, especially when they were kissing, which they did over the salad bowl.
At the same time, the last three of the house's occupants, all guys, descended upon the dining room table like a herd of buffalo. Windows rattled, dishes clanked. I learned their names later, but there was Eddy, the Cute One. Juan, the Big Lug. And Roberto, the Cocky One. Eddy was probably fourteen, and Juan and Roberto were both sixteen or seventeen.
Except for Joy and Melanie, who both threw me the occasional dirty look, no one paid any attention to me. This made sense. Living in a group home, you get used to people coming and going. For all they knew, I'd be there one night or two, until a bed opened up at the place where I was really supposed to be.
"Let's eat!" Roberto yelled to the kitchen. "Foooooood!" He started pounding his plate and making snorting sounds, and Juan and Eddy joined in.
Ben stuck his head into the dining room. "It's coming, it's coming, keep your pants on." Then Ben spotted me. "Hi, I'm Ben, the assistant zookeeper. You Lucy?"
I didn't get a chance to answer because the other kids had suddenly started laughing and whooping it up. Ben and I turned to see that Roberto had leaped up onto his chair and whipped open the front of his baggy jeans. Now he was wiggling his hips like a go-go boy, and his pants fell down around his thighs, showing us his boxers. Ben had told Roberto to keep his pants on, but he'd decided to take them off. Now Melanie was shrieking, "Take it off! Take it off!" and someone else was humming stripper music. The entire room had gone from zero to sixty in five seconds.
Just so you know, I wasn't shocked or surprised to see Roberto taking off his pants. Kids in group homes tend to be pretty literal. And like I said before, dinnertime can get kind of wild.
Roberto was still swaying and just starting to slip his boxers down when Ben said, "Roberto, how the hell do you expect us to eat after seeing your pimply ass?"
Everyone laughed except Roberto, who didn't even smile. In fact, he looked downright pissed. This was his joke, and he didn't like being interrupted. That's when I knew Roberto wasn't just the Cocky One. He was also the Hothead.
Ben said, "I'll get the food," and headed back into the kitchen to get the lasagna. Roberto had to know he couldn't compete with dinner, because he pulled up his pants and sat down again, only a little bit sulky. This was also pretty typical of group homes. Things start suddenly, but they often peter out just as fast. It's the plus side of thirty-second attention spans.
I sat and watched the kids around the table. There was the usual spitting of milk and flinging of silverware, and I learned that Melanie had a crush on Eddy, but not the other way around, and that Juan was jealous of Roberto, and that the guys all picked on Damon and the girls all picked on Yolanda.
When Ben, Gina, and Leon started bringing in dinner, I watched them too. After eight years in The System, I was sure what they were thinking. Damaged goods. That's how they saw us. And when something is beyond repair, you don't bother trying to fix it. If you can't throw it out, then you store it somewhere out of the way, in a basement or storage shed where no one ever goes. Kindle Home didn't look much like a storage shed, but that's what it was—a storage shed for broken teenagers. That's why the counselors didn't even care that, under the table, Roberto and Eddy were whaling away at Damon with their feet.
"Hey, Damon," Gina said, casually serving up the lasagna. "Thanks for your help today with my computer. I'd be lost without you. What does PPP stand for again?"
"Point-to-point protocol," Damon said.
There was a brief moment of silence around the table, and I saw Gina wink at Damon. That's when I knew what she'd said had been no accident. She was helping Damon with Roberto and Eddy. She was saying to them, Lay off the kid or maybe he won't help you the next time you guys need help with the computer. But she was doing it without calling attention to
herself. It was actually pretty clever.
"Pass the grub!" Roberto said.
"Man, this house sucks," Eddy said. "When are we getting cable?"
I couldn't help but notice that they'd both stopped kicking Damon under the table.
At the same time, Leon plopped a plate down in front of me. "Allergic to cheese, right? We made one with soy cheese."
Okay, I thought to myself, so maybe I'd been a little bit wrong. Maybe Kindle Home wasn't exactly like every other group home I'd ever lived in.
Chapter Three
Can I ask you a question?" I said to Yolanda later that night, after we'd gone to bed and turned out the lights.
"I guess," Yolanda said.
"Is this place always like this?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. It just seems different from the other group homes I've been in." Earlier that evening, we'd played board games. There had only been two throwings of the Pictionary board. This may not sound that great, but compared to other group homes, it was. Trust me on this.
"I guess," Yolanda said. She thought for a second, and I expected her to say something about Kindle Home. Instead, she said, "Do you ever think about your parents?"
"No." It was the truth.
"I do," she said. No kidding, I thought to myself. From what I'd seen so far, that was all she thought about. "I miss em."
"What happens when someone has a meltdown?" I said. A meltdown is just like it sounds. It's when some kid completely loses control. Throwing the Pictionary board because you're losing the game is not a meltdown, but breaking a window and using a piece of the broken glass to attack a counselor is.
"It depends," Yolanda said. "When Eric stabbed Juan with a screwdriver, they had to call the cops."
"What'd they do to him?"
"Eric? They sent him to some island."
So the stories were all true. Kindle Home really was the Last Chance Texaco.
"And then there was Monica. She kept cutting herself with staples and paper clips. They sent her to the island too. And Brian. Melanie said that Brian tried to rape her, but everyone knew she'd been screwing him all along, and she was just jealous that he liked Monica."
Okay, I thought. I get the picture.
"Do you have any brothers or sisters?" Yolanda asked.
"No," I said. This was a lie. I'd had both a brother and a sister. My brother had been killed in the car accident with my parents, but my sister had lived. In the years after the accident, I used to dream that she and I would run off to live in this perfect little cabin up in the mountains—I guess because I was reading Heidi the night before my parents were killed. In my mind, like in the book, the cabin had a sleeping loft and a big stone fireplace, and it was perched on a rocky cliff overlooking jagged, snow-covered peaks and fields of goats and wildflowers. But then my sister had been adopted, and she'd moved into a real house. For a while, her new parents were going to adopt me too, but they'd eventually decided I was too much to handle. A little while later, they'd had to move to another state, and I hadn't heard much from my sister since then.
"I wish I had a brother or a sister," Yolanda said. "It was just my parents and me."
"How many chances do they give you?" I said. "Before they send you to the island?"
Yolanda thought for a second, and I was afraid she was going to say something else about her family. "I don't know. They've never sent anyone right away. Not unless they're really violent."
"Who makes the decision?"
Just then the door opened, and light spilled into the bedroom from the hallway. I immediately closed my eyes, and not just because the light was so bright. This was a night spot check. They're real big on knowing where everyone is at all times in group homes, so there are no locks on any of the bedroom doors, and counselors do random spot checks all night long. That way, they can make sure no one is sneaking into any of the other bedrooms to have sex, which is a really big deal, or sneaking away from the house at night, which is an even bigger deal. I heard the squeak of the floorboards, and I knew whichever counselor had opened the door was now walking across the room for a closer view. A second later, a shadow blocked the light in my eyelids, and I knew the counselor was standing right over me, making sure it really was me in my bed. Then the counselor turned to check on Yolanda. I opened my eyes just a slit and recognized Ben's back and butt. Yeah, sometimes guy counselors have to check on a girl's room, and yeah, sometimes they catch you dressing or worse. But you get used to the lack of privacy, just like you get used to everything else.
The floorboards squeaked again, and I saw Ben heading for the hallway again. A second later he closed the door, leaving Yolanda and me in the dark again.
I had a hundred other questions to ask my roommate, but the door had barely closed when she said, "We did have two cats. Did you have any pets?"
* * * * *
When I went down to the kitchen the next morning, fists were flying. But it wasn't a fight. It was an old woman kneading dough. She had her back turned toward me, but I knew this had to be Mrs. Morgan, the only counselor I hadn't met yet. It was midmorning, and the rest of the kids in the house had gone off to school. But Kindle Home was in a different district than Bradley Home, and I hadn't been signed up for classes at my new school yet. So I'd slept in, and now Mrs. Morgan and I had the house to ourselves.
"Hey," I said, still standing in the doorway.
Mrs. Morgan glanced back at me. She was old, but she was no grandma. Yeah, she had wrinkles and white hair cut short like a nun or a lesbian. And she had liver spots and sensible shoes. But she also had eyes that were crystal blue, and the kind of perfect posture that makes you stand up a little straighter, even though you don't normally give a rip about things like posture.
She stepped away from the counter, revealing a large metal bowl. "Take over," she said.
"What?" I said.
"Come here and take over this dough. When we're done here, I'll make you some breakfast."
I stepped closer. There was an enormous blob of white dough in the middle of the bowl. I'd never kneaded anything before, and I didn't want to start now. I wanted food and a shower.
"Go ahead," Mrs. Morgan said. "But wash your hands first."
I ran my hands under the faucet, then gave the dough a few feeble pokes. It seemed pliable at first, but it wasn't really. Under the surface, it was stiff. You could push it, but it pushed back, stubborn-like.
"Fold it over," Mrs. Morgan said. "Like this." She demonstrated, and I saw that she had hands like the roots of an old oak tree. I wondered how much of her life she'd wasted kneading dough. Hadn't she heard about bakeries? But I had to admit, the dough went where Mrs. Morgan pushed it and stayed there.
I tried to do what she'd done.
"Harder," she said. "And always in only one direction."
I tried again. Mrs. Morgan just watched my hands. She didn't say anything, so I guess that meant I was doing it right.
"I'm Mrs. Morgan," she said.
"Lucy," I said.
"I'm going to go over the house rules with you."
"Yeah, I know."
She kept watching, only now it seemed like she was watching more than just my hands. Suddenly, I was glad I hadn't showered or changed out of my bathrobe. If she didn't like it, that was her problem.
"Okay," she said at last. "Stop kneading. Now we have to roll them into shape."
"What are you making? Isn't this bread?"
"No, it's soft pretzels. So we have to roll it out into ropes and twist them into shape."
I didn't want to roll it out into ropes and twist it into shape! I wanted to eat breakfast and then maybe watch some television. How often did I get a day off? But I watched as Mrs. Morgan scooped up a gob of dough and began rolling it between her hands. In ten seconds, she'd whipped out a cord of dough about two feet long and about half an inch thick. Then she placed it on the counter and twisted it into a big pretzel, like the kind you'd buy at a movie theater if they weren't so damn expensive.
"Now you try," she said.
I sighed and reached for a hunk of dough. I rolled it into a two-foot rope between my palms, but it immediately shrank back to about half that size.
"You have to be tough," Mrs. Morgan said. "Make it go where you want it to go. If you force it hard enough, it'll stay."
I tried it again, forcing it this time, and it sort of worked.
"Now twist it," Mrs. Morgan said. It was almost a command. What was she, the Kindle Home drill sergeant?
I twisted it. Of course, it didn't stay in the right shape.
"Press it down," Mrs. Morgan said, starting in on her next pretzel. "Be firm with it."
We kept rolling and twisting, and I got better. While we worked, Mrs. Morgan went over the house rules. I won't bore you with them all. Basically, they were divided into two categories. There were the Rules and Regulations, which were all the picky little things you had to do or not do, like weekly chores and not smoking in the house. If you broke these rules, you got points, which were totaled up at the end of the week. The more points you had, the fewer privileges you got the following week—privileges like being allowed to watch television or go to a football game. If you did something especially good, or if you did extra chores, you could also earn tokens, which you could exchange for money or use to buy down your point total.
Then there were what Mrs. Morgan called the Mortal Sins. These were the really important rules, like no weapons or drugs or sex and no sneaking out of the house at night. Break these rules, she said, and you could get kicked out of Kindle Home. She didn't say where kids went when they got kicked out of the house, but she didn't need to. I already knew.
"Any questions?" Mrs. Morgan said when she was done.
"Yeah," I said. "Now do we bake them?" Just as she'd finished going over the rules, we'd also finished rolling out all the dough and twisting it into pretzels.
"No," Mrs. Morgan said. "We boil them first and then glaze them with egg whites. Then we bake them. But I meant questions about the rules."
"Oh." I felt stupid. "No."
She turned toward the stove, where she already had a big pot of water boiling.
It was only then that I realized I'd forgotten about being hungry and wanting a shower. I'd never made pretzels before, and it was really kind of interesting.
"Okay," Mrs. Morgan said. "Hand me the first pretzel."
I gave her one. The adults at Kindle Home were all pretty different, I had decided. But none of them seemed too bad.
That's what I was thinking then. Of course, that was before I met Emil.
* * * * *
That afternoon, I was alone in my bedroom reading when someone knocked on the door. I'd long since learned that counselors got suspicious whenever they saw a kid doing anything really unusual, like reading a novel, so I slipped the book under my bedspread.
"Yeah?" I said.
Mrs. Morgan opened the door. "Time for your session with Emil," she said.
Every group home has a house therapist—someone who meets with all the kids once a week in individual sessions. Just so you know, in a group home, a therapist is different from a counselor. A therapist is the person you sit with in some room and talk to about your feelings. But "counselor" is the name for the people who handle the day-to-day operations of the group home—the cooking, the night spot checks, the wrestling to the floor of some pencil-wielding kid in the middle of a meltdown. Why they're called counselors I don't know, because they don't do any actual counseling. Maybe it's like a summer-camp counselor.
Anyway, Emil was Kindle Home's house therapist, and I was supposed to have my first session with him that afternoon.
"Sure," I said to Mrs. Morgan.
The old woman led me down to the little room that used to be the library, just off the foyer. The door was closed, but there was a little bench just outside.
"Wait here until he comes out for you," she said.
I took a seat. I could hear muffled voices through the door, and I figured the therapist was in the middle of a session with one of the other kids, who'd since come home from school. I tried hard to make out the words, but it was all a garble.
Just when I'd gotten tired of trying to listen, the door opened and Juan stepped out.
His face was a complete blank. I knew that look well. I'd used it on Leon and Yolanda.
"Lucy?" said a voice, and I turned to see a man in a beige jacket and Hush Puppies standing in the doorway.
"Yeah," I said.
He stepped back into the office. "Come on inside."
Once inside, I saw he'd taken the armchair, leaving me the couch. He had a clipboard in his lap and was busy jotting down notes. "Go ahead and have a seat," he said, without looking up. "Give me just a second, okay?"
I took a seat on one end of the couch. The therapist was the kind of guy who is hard to describe unless you're looking right at him, mostly because there wasn't anything very unusual about him. He had brown hair and a medium nose and average-sized feet and skin that was white, but not quite pale. He looked liked the actors who play ordinary dads or postal carriers in the commercials on television.
I kept sitting there, minute after minute, listening to the scratch of a pen against paper. He would write, then stop and stare at what he had written, fascinated, like it was a bonfire in the night. Then he would write some more. Mrs. Morgan hadn't introduced herself right away either, but this felt different from that. This felt like I was being ignored.
Finally, he stopped writing. He made a big show of putting his notes into a file and putting that file to one side.
"There," he said. "Sorry about that. Now, then." Then he made just as big a show of reaching for a second file—my file—and taking out the papers and putting them on his clipboard. He took a long time, making sure they were lined up, perfectly even, in the very center of the clipboard.
Only then did he finally look up at me and say, "So! I'm Emil." He almost sounded sincere.
"Oh," I said. I would have told him my name again, but I knew he knew it. Since he had my file, I knew he knew everything else about me too.
"So?" he said. "What do you think?"
"Of what?"
"Well, Kindle Home." His voice was earnest and gentle—so why did he seem so impatient?
'"Sokay," I said.
"And the counselors?"
"They're okay too." Suddenly, I knew my expression was even blanker than before. The window that was my face was locked, with the curtains drawn and the shutters barred. But it wasn't my fault. I was just getting a worse and worse feeling about this session.
"Glad to hear it," Emil said, looking down at his clipboard again. "So. I've been looking over your file."
My file already? So much for building rapport.
"There are a couple of things that caught my eye," Emil said, settling back in his chair, flipping through the pages of my file. "I see you like a good fight."
"I hate fighting," I said.
"Oh? Linda Woodhorne might have something to say about that. Eight stitches and a broken index finger?"
"She started it." She had started it. She was a kid in one of the foster homes I'd stayed in, and she'd had it in for me from Day One.
Emil said, "Is that right? What about Moni Wright and Jessica Birgel and Jose Hernandez? Did they start their fights too?"
As a matter of fact, they had. Moni had attacked me in the showers, and Jose had jumped me from a tree. Okay, so maybe I had punched Jessica, but she'd deserved it. Of course, no therapist had ever understood any of this. So I didn't bother trying to explain it to Emil.
"I screwed up, okay?" I said. "That's why I'm here." I had screwed up. Not the fighting part. The getting-caught part. That wouldn't happen again.
Emil glanced down at the file. "And then there's this Mark Wolton incident. At Bradley Home, they caught you in his room after hours. Twice. What were you doing?"
"What do you think?" I said. I knew I was making it sound like Mark and I were having sex. Well, why not? That's what everyone at Bradley Home thought. It was almost funny how wrong they were. Mark was gay. I'd been in his room after hours—a lot more than twice, actually—because he'd been planning to shoot himself, and I'd been trying to talk him out of it. But once we'd been caught, I couldn't tell anyone the truth without also telling them something that Mark didn't want anyone to know. So I'd let them think we were having sex, and I'd ended up with another big black X in my file. Two weeks later, Mark had ended up killing himself anyway—probably because he no longer had anyone to talk him out of it.
But Emil had already moved on to the next page in my file. "Tell me, Lucy. You clean?"
So he'd saved the best for last. My Oxy addiction. Yeah, it was a big deal, and I don't have any excuses for this one. But it was also ancient history. I hadn't had Oxies for over a year. I'd decided they just weren't worth the trouble.
"Yeah," I said.
"Yeah, what?"
"Yeah, I'm clean. You've got my file. Isn't that in there too?"
Emil stared at me, like now I was the fire in the night—but not a controlled one, not a bonfire. No, like I was a wildfire—violent, out of control, threatening to take everything down. It was only for an instant, and then his face became completely expressionless, just like mine. But it was that moment when I knew that he hated me. I didn't know why, but I knew it was true.
Emil closed the file and set it to one side. Oh, sure, now he didn't want to talk about my file anymore. Now that he'd used it to put me in my place.
"Lucy," Emil said, and his voice had that fake-gentle tone again. "I'll level with you."
He was very worried about me.
"I'm very worried about you," he said.
He'd seen cases like mine before.
"I've spent a lot of time around kids. And I've dealt with kids like you before."
He didn't think the signs looked good. But I was being given one more chance at this new group home.
"You've made some pretty serious mistakes," Emil said. "But you've been given a fresh start here at Kindle Home."
But he didn't think it would matter, because I was a complete fuck-up, and I'd be out of here before the end of year.
"I really want to help you," he said. "That's why I'm here, to help you."
Okay, so maybe he hadn't said that last part about my being a fuck-up and that I'd be out of Kindle Home before the end of the year. But that's what he was thinking. I knew that for a fact. I also knew that if Emil got his way, I would be out of there, probably in less than a month.
In other words, Eat-Their-Young Island, here I come.
Chapter Four
The next day, Leon said he'd drive me to my new school. He told me it was so he could introduce me to the principal, and to make sure all the paperwork was in order. But he made all the other kids take the bus as usual, which told me he was looking to have some kind of bonding moment with me in the car.
For a long time, we drove in silence. I stared out at the neighborhood surrounding Kindle Home. It was an older part of town where the thick roots of giant trees tore up the sidewalks in great big chunks. I saw now that Kindle Home had once been the biggest and most impressive house in the whole neighborhood, set back from the others like a king overlooking his court. But this king had since fallen on hard times, while his subjects had moved up in the world. With their fresh coats of paint and neatly trimmed lawns, the surrounding houses ruled now.
Meanwhile, Kindle Home was still set back, making it look like the other houses were giving it the cold shoulder.
"It sucks starting at a new school," Leon said at last. "Especially in the middle of the year."
I just shrugged and kept staring out the window. I'd been right about Leon wanting to make some land of connection with me, but it was way too early in the morning for me to start baring my soul. Still, he was right about how lousy it was to start school in the middle of the year. By early November, people would already have made their friends for the year, and no one would be in a very let's-give-the-new- kid-a-break kind of mood.
"And it's gotta be tough coming from a group home," Leon said. "I mean, word gets out pretty quick, huh?"
I glared at Leon over in the driver's seat. "You know, you're not exactly cheering me up."
He laughed. "Oh. Sorry." But the fact was, he was right about this too. At first, students and teachers treated you mostly normal. But by the end of the second day, the whole school knew that you were one of "them"—one of the kids from the local group home. They didn't know your name, but they knew you were trouble, and not just in a spit-wads and late-for-class land of way.
A few minutes later, we pulled into the high school parking lot, and Leon turned off the engine. "High school is bullshit," he said to me.
"What?" I said. I was surprised. I'd expected him to say something like just be myself and eventually people would see me for who I really was, and everything would be all hunky-dory. That's what group home counselors always said to you on your first day at a new school. But if I'd learned anything so far, it's that Kindle Home counselors weren't like the ones at other group homes.
"It's important," Leon went on, "because if you don't graduate from high school, you're really screwed. It's a hoop you gotta jump through, and it's a really important one. But it's still bullshit. High school is about hair gel and sideburns and blue jeans and pom-poms. Most of the time, it's not about anything real. And it's not about who you really are." He looked over at me with an intensity that scared me a little. "You understand?"