Compromised (5 page)

W
hen we get back to Kids Place, I head for the bathroom. The only good thing about school is that I now have my coveted bottle of Pepto-Bismol in hand. I sit in a bathroom stall—my feet up so nobody can see me—and take a swig. A couple of girls come in, zip open makeup cases, spritz on perfume, and talk about going to some school dance. I hold back a sneeze and slip out of the stall.

And there's Nicole sitting in the corner stall, its door ajar. She's flipping through a pile of postcards, a prescription pill bottle next to her.

I leave before she sees me but pause in the hallway, thinking about those pills.
Nah,
I think. She probably just
has allergies or some kind of prescription meds for a cold. Or maybe they prescribed her something while she was in the psychiatric ward.

But what if that's not true? If it's not, what could I possibly say to her? It's her life. If she wants to kick it, that's her deal, not mine.

But I always dream of saying these perfect words to Mom—to make her want to stay. Some stupid Einstein quote. But what would Nicole think if I just went up to her and said it?

Academic bulimia.

I go to our room and wait, holding my breath until Nicole walks in. I sigh, exhaling for the first time all afternoon, and just watch her.

“What?” she asks, and tucks her pack of cloves and bottle behind Marlon Brando.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just, um, kinda glad you're here.”

“Wish I could say the same, Jeopardy.” She glares.

Jess and Shelly give me weird looks.

But late that night, I can't help it. I slip down off the bed and pull up the corner of Nicole's Brando poster to find where she hides her cigarettes in a crack in the drywall. Right next to them is the bottle. I take it out and read
the prescription: Fluoxetine. I count the pills and slip a note into the bottle. Maybe those words do matter. I don't know.

The next morning, getting ready for school, I watch Nicole sweep her hand behind the poster and pull out the bottle. She stares at the note and puts it back in the bottle, carefully covering the hole with her Brando poster. She doesn't say anything. She just throws her pack on and leaves.

“Oxygen waster,” Jess sneers.

I sigh. And things go back to normal.

The monotony continues; the experiment is repeated. And every night I count those stupid pills—she never takes one. That's weird. I watch her. Waiting for the signs. But she's always bigger than life with a huge smile glued to her face. She sometimes hangs out with the younger kids. And she's always talking. Talking, talking, talking. Liborio Bellomo, the Genovese family, the Gambinos. It's like listening to a direct feed of the True Crime radio station. That or some waiter in an Italian restaurant with those tacky checkered tablecloths telling you the day's special.
Today we have Lucchese linguine with some garlic Gotti bread on the side.

But nobody listens.

And she still talks. And talks. Maybe to fill up the emptiness. I don't know.

Every day is the same: school; meetings with counselors and Beulah and the DA; eating tasteless food off heavy plastic trays; avoiding the Triad. I start to mark days off the calendar so I won't lose track.

Then he comes. I see Beulah and Rose bring him in. He's young—ten at the most. And we can all smell his fear. I wonder if I looked that scared.

He sits at a table across the room, not looking up from his food. Nobody at his table talks to him. Talking is a risk. Because if you can just hold it all in until lights-out, you'll be okay. Nobody cares if you cry at night.

I sigh and look over at the Triad. They whisper and stare at the boy. They're planning something—something bad. Probably one of their typical pranks. Shelly's told me all about them: feces on your bed or other even more disgusting bodily fluids, the icy shower, the Dumpster, all followed by getting everything you bring with you stolen.

I hate the Triad. The more often I see them, the angrier I feel. My body turns to ice; my tongue feels like sandpaper; my stomach clenches. It's like my amygdala goes into hyperdrive at dinnertime.

I hate feeling helpless even more.
Weak
. Maybe I am
weak. I feel like I play a part in keeping this whole messed-up place in order. I look back at the boy, his bangs flopping in his eyes. Nicole stands up from her table and walks by the Triad staring them all in the eyes.

They laugh at her. The girl smirks and says, “Oh, real tough. Like you can do anything?”

Nicole sits next to the boy, banging her tray on the table. He still doesn't look up. He's probably gotten the tour already—been assigned his locker with generic soap, sandpaper towels, and dollar-store shampoo.

Everybody here at Kids Place has a locker for their bathroom stuff—toothpaste, toothbrushes, those kinds of things. We have shifts for showering and getting ready. We have shifts for cleaning. There's a bathroom schedule, cleaning schedule, everything's pasted in the hallway. Basically, we all know what everybody else is doing from sunup to sundown.

Routine can be tedious. But it can also be advantageous. I watch as the Triad huddles together, eyeing their new prey.

I finally feel like I might have a little control over something in life.

And I have a purpose.

P
urpose:
Keep the new boy safe. Regain self-dignity

I decide I need to do it tomorrow night. I just hope the boy is safe until then.

Another plus to this whole thing is my Pepto-Bismol supply might not dwindle so fast. If I stop hating the Triad, then my gastritis won't be as bad. If my gastritis is better, I won't need so much Pepto-Bismol. If I don't need so much Pepto-Bismol, I won't have to worry about finding a way to get my next bottle. Science experiments come with all sorts of bonus results.

Now it's time to put things to the test. A perfect pre-Halloween prank.

I smile. Supposedly every scientist should do the test several times, but I don't really think I'll need more than one.

There's nothing like trust. That's how Dad screws people over. I hate using Mr. Hunter's keys to get into the science supplies. He gave them to me so I could open early in case I wanted to study in the mornings before he got there. But I just need a few things—things he probably won't even notice are gone. And one day I'll replace them. It's not like I'm becoming my dad.

I search the shelves of the supply closet and find the one labeled bhut jolokia. Mr. Hunter ordered it from a supply shop in India. We saw how long it took different hot sauces to corrode iron. Not long. Same day I got it on my finger.

With just a few drops, the Triad will be done.

That afternoon Kids Place is like any other day. Nothing has happened. I can tell. There's no buzz. The boy eats dinner at the same table, bangs covering his eyes.

I wait until lights-out and listen as the last shift of security guards locks up. I slip into the boys' locker room first—two locks to pick there—and find the lockers. It doesn't take long to get them open and get a few drops out of the vial onto their brushes. I worry for a second. What if they don't brush their teeth every morning? That's a variable I hadn't thought of before.

I push the thought away. With all the information
out there on dental hygiene, I can't imagine anybody
not
brushing.

I repeat the same thing in the girls' locker room.

Then I lie on the bunk and wait for morning. Odd-numbered rooms have the second bathroom shift today. Luckily the Triad all bunk in even-numbered rooms. That really worked to my advantage. Hey. I never said luck wasn't a little part of science. Think penicillin.

When the sun comes up, I pretend to read. Kids shuffle down the hallway in bathrobes. The water pipes whine awake.

Then we hear the first shriek, followed by two more. Rose's heavy footsteps pound down the hallway, followed by more screams and chaos. Shelly and Jess run out the doorway. Everybody floods the halls, wondering what's happening.

“Hey, Jeops, don't you want to know what's going on?” Nicole eyes me.

I shrug. “Answer in the category Kids Place: This is the region that grows bhut jolokia, the hottest pepper in the world.” I force a smile and go back to reading
Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries.
Dad bought it for me the week before the repo guys came. It was like he had finally paid
attention to what I liked, not what he thought I should like. Too little, too late. I close the book.

Kids Place staff sweep the three of them down the hall. I watch them suffer. And in a horrible way, I feel glad, glad that they hurt as much as I did when they stuffed me in the Dumpster—glad that they're the prey and I'm the predator.

Shelly returns, breathless. Her eyes bulge so much it looks like she has developed a major thyroid problem. “Oh. My. God. You won't believe what has happened,” she says between sniffles, then tells us a pretty blown-up version of what happened, including some kind of explosive device in lockers.

Jess rolls her eyes and says, “It was just Tabasco sauce or something. Anybody could've done that.” Then she says, “But I don't know who would've had the nads to do it. I mean messing with the Triad is suicide.” Then she looks at Nicole.

I jump off my bunk and get ready for school. We're all corralled into the cafeteria for breakfast. A kind of electric expectation fills the air. Everybody's a lot quieter than normal.

My stomach still hurts, though. The oatmeal tastes like sawdust. I choke it down with overfluorinated water, counting the minutes before I can go back to the room
for a swig of Pepto before school. I look at the Triad's empty seats and feel the oatmeal work its way back up my system.

But they don't load us onto the buses. We listen to the phones ring in the offices and watch as the buses idle in the parking lot.

Rose returns after what seems like an eternity. She stands at the front of the cafeteria, hands on heavy hips. “Kelly, Jared, and Wyatt all have blistered tongues and lips—second-degree burns. And their fingers have burns on them as well. This was a serious, brutal attack, and none of us are leaving this room until someone tells me who did this.”

Beulah stands behind Rose in a skirt that sticks to her nylons, making a fizzly sound whenever she moves and tries to unstick the skirt. Major static cling. The skirt is that salmon color you see old ladies wearing at retirement centers in Florida.

“I'm waiting,” Rose says, shifting her weight.

We search one anothers' faces for the truth. Even the new boy looks bright-eyed. Maybe they warned him. Maybe he's been waiting for something bad to happen to him, only to be relieved to see it happened to someone else.

Before Rose can say anything else, I stand up. “I did.”

Silence.

Nobody congratulates me.

Why would they?

You can't congratulate cruelty.

They send everybody off to school and Rose yanks me into her office. I don't even hear what she says. It's like I'm in some kind of bell jar, Rose's words all muted and soft. Phone calls. Reports. Anger management. Therapy. Consequences.

“There will be consequences,” she says, her words ringing clear as her pudgy hand squeezes my shoulder.

I sigh and feel relieved that I've confessed. I wonder if that's how Dad feels. Like all these years of running are done. Behind him. He's free.

“You of all people,” she says. “Why would you do such a thing?”

It seemed so clear before. It made sense. I wanted me back, but what I did to the Triad doesn't change anything. It just changes me. So I can't get me back. She's gone.

In the end, my dad's still in jail and I'll be shipped off with an unknown to who-knows-where. Unless Dad stops being so vague about that mystery relative.

End of experiment.

A
fter a day of talking to counselors and meetings with lots of other random people, they all decide that my punishment is to become a pseudo-indentured servant for Kids Place as well as take anger management classes. That and I've been banned from the Halloween social this weekend. Whoopee.

The plus of orphanages? There're no parents to press charges.

The Triad returns with bandaged tongues and swollen lips. At dinner they stand up in front of everybody and Rose pulls me to face them. She wants to make an example of me so others will be shamed into being good. “Do you have anything to say?” she asks.

“Repent!” I can hear my dad's voice at those tent revivals. Maybe I spent too much time listening to his sermons instead of counting the cash.

You know, lots of people think blind people have a heightened sense of sound, touch, taste, and smell. But we're all born with the same “sensory” capacities, so to speak. A blind person seemingly has heightened other senses because a blind person uses them more.

I wonder if Dad's conscience is turned off. Maybe he was born conscience-impaired, and mine is heightened because I use mine for both of us. It doesn't matter much.

I stare at the Triad—weeping blisters caked with shiny salve.

“Well?” Rose nudges me half a step closer. In her thousand-page manual of rules and regulations for Kids Place, she doesn't once touch on the rules of survival. She doesn't know them. Rose clears her throat. “Maya has something to say.”

I nod and look each one in the eyes. “I will not be generic.” Then I turn on my heels and go to my room.

The next morning, getting ready for school, I open my drawer and find my favorite jeans and sweater. There's a note with scrawly kid handwriting on it. “You aren't generic.”

I pull the sweater over my head and slip on my jeans. I sigh, relieved. Shelly, Jess, and Nicole are gone, so I hug myself and feel strong.

I am not weak.

And the Triad has disbanded. At least for now. Everybody just ignores them. And over the course of the next couple of weeks, I get most of my clothes back. Except for the scarf Jess wears. I say to her one day, “Why don't you just keep it?”

She blushes and mumbles something about me being a rich snot.

But I'm not too at ease. I kind of think the Triad's planning a nasty and painful revenge. Nature is nature. Just ask Roy Horn or Grizzly Man.

Tonight Nicole and I have kitchen duty together. I've had kitchen duty ever since I burned the lips off the Triad.

Nicole hardly looks strong enough to scrub the dinner trays—her arms spindly with blue veins running through tissue-paper skin. She looks up at me and strips off the yellow kitchen gloves. “Brutal stuff.”

“Huh?”

“Bhut jolokia.”

“Yeah.” I'm impressed she remembers the name. “Like
that Mafia guy you talked about—the acid guy who threw finger bones in soup,” I say, and wince at the reference, but that's how I've felt. I finish wiping off the tables and go into the kitchen.

“Carneglia?”

I shrug. “Yeah. I guess. They all have the same-sounding last names to me. With all your Mafia stories, it's hard to keep them straight.”

Nicole scrubs the dishes harder, a line forming between her brows. She looks up. “Easier than listening to your science spew.” She pauses, looking through the steam from the hot water rinsing the dishes. “Why do you go through my stuff?” she asks. “My pills?”

I shrug.

“Don't. Okay?”

I nod. “I, um, tried to disguise my handwriting. On the note.”

Nicole scowls. “You're so absolutely random.”

I guess that does it for my stellar don't-kill-yourself note. It's good to know that it's not as great as I thought it was. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference with Mom after all. Not like that matters to me anyway.

Nicole dries her hands on a dingy towel.

“Nicole?”

“What?”

“I mean it. What I wrote. Really.”

“Why do you give a shit? I didn't care when they threw you in a Dumpster and took your stuff. I didn't care when you walked around feeling sorry for yourself all those weeks. I don't care now.”

“Yeah. But you didn't wear my stuff.”

She shrugs. “You have no style. Don't think it was anything more.”

“And why did everybody give me back my favorite jeans, sweater? The rest of my clothes?”

Nicole smirks. “Carneglia. They don't want to be an ingredient in finger soup. You're scary!” She makes a phantom noise and laughs.

But I know it's more than that. It's like Nicole has some power in this place. The Triad never touched her. Even though the only ones who talk to her are the little kids, others do what she wants them to.

One day Shelly told me it was because of the crazy look. “Her eyes,” she said. “They have that crazy thing to them. Like she could snap at any time.”

I never see that, though. I just see sadness.

Nicole cocks her head to the side and stares at me for a long time. “I'm going for a smoke.” She walks out. Before leaving, she turns back. “The clothes are yours. You earned them. Not a lot of kids here have a vertebra, you know.” I watch her and look out at the empty cafeteria. I feel better about cleaning up the rest of the kitchen alone. It's nice to be alone here, because it almost never happens.

I watch as Nicole paces outside and blows puffs of smoke into the autumn air.

In the meantime, the pepper incident doesn't do anything but make me some kind of underdog hero. Weird. I don't want that, though. I just want things to be back to the way they were. I have these fantasies that Dad gets out of prison; that they aren't processing me into orphanhood; that Oprah's Angel Network will find reason to bail us out.

I think back to all those promises he's made. He's kept some. Okay, a few. But he always found a way to put food on the table and keep me in school.

 

We were having a picnic at a park near our trailer home in El Paso. Yellow tumbleweeds tripped over our blanket; dust pelted my bare legs. Dad wrapped me in his Windbreaker, his heart pounding next to my ear. His cheeks were
sandpaper rough. His shirt smelled like smoke and French fry grease. But when I moved in closer, I could smell the tangy soap he used before working the night shift at the bar.

“I'm going to buy a beautiful home one day, Maya. You'll go to the best schools. There's nothing you won't be able to do.”

I tried to smile. But tent revivals and Arizona were too fresh on my mind. I hated feeling bad for those people. I wondered, though: If they really believed, did Dad do any harm?

Dad said, “What is the easiest human trait to play on?”

“Guilt,” I answered. I had learned well.

He ruffled my hair, then leaned back against the lone tree at the park, his eyes heavy from having spent the entire night feeding drunks. “Greed. Greed beats them all,” he murmured, a smile on his lips.

I let him fall asleep, not wanting to bug him even though I so much wanted to swing. He was so tired all the time. Even then I was trying to take care of him.

The next week Dad took out a simple ad in the
Pennysaver
. And before long, we bought a house. And a swing set.