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.
Phil was the math teacher-he told the boys to call him Phil, not Mr. Maris-and he was part of why Dylan liked math best. For one thing Phil was young. Everybody but the inmates was old at Drummond, old and musty like the walls. Draco said Drummond was an elephant graveyard where old prison staffers came to die. Most of them didn’t want to be there any more than the boys they guarded did.
Phil wasn’t more than twenty-three or -four. He wore his hair long. It was light brown and curled on his collar and over his ears. Draco called him a hippy and laughed at Dylan because he didn’t know what that was.
Math and Phil gave Dylan a place to go outside his skull. Dylan’s mom would have called that a blessing. He got to thinking maybe monsters were blessed by some kind of monster god.
They weren’t.
At half-past ten in the morning a couple months after he’d gotten to Drummond, Dylan was called out of class by one of the guards, an old man who was scared of the bigger boys and made up for it on the littler ones.
Ten a.m. was math class. Dylan hated being taken out so he didn’t move as fast or look as meek as he usually did when the guards told him to do something. The old guy made him pay by herding him down the hall with a bitter monologue: “You really think you’re something don’t you you little psycho if you’d been a kid of mine by god you’d never have picked up any axe or I’d have shown you what for and don’t think I won’t do it now you get any kind of idea… ”
Dylan didn’t listen. None of the boys listened. Still the sourness of the man tainted the air. Drummond smelled old and cold. Under the pervasive odor of the benzene the janitors used was the reek of rancid fat, sweat, sauerkraut, farts and fear. The worst thing was that it didn’t smell like home, not like anybody’s home. At first the smell had made Dylan lonely and scared. Now he was okay with it. He was okay with Drummond. Where else could a kid like him be?
On the second floor, above the classrooms and below where the Ward C boys slept, a big hall had been cobbled up into a lot of small rooms with flimsy doors letting off a narrow hallway. Rat maze, the Ward C boys called it. The rooms didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, which was built of beams with this cobwebby chandelier made to look like thorny branches.
The guard told Dylan to stop outside the third door then shouldered him aside as if he might be thinking of rushing through and murdering whoever was inside. Acting like he’d just saved the world from the forces of evil, the guard rapped on the wood. Dylan couldn’t help but look at the billy club on the old guy’s belt; it was all but sticking in his face. Maybe he wanted Dylan to try to take it so he could beat on him, or spray him with Mace and play the hero.
Maybe he was just a stupid old man.
One day it would get him killed.
“Enter,” said a voice. Not “come in” or “just a minute,” but “enter,” like he was a king and they were his subjects.
The guard pushed open the door and said, “Got your nutcase for you, Doc.” He stood aside and Dylan walked past him into a little office. Three of the walls were plywood, painted white. On one there was a nondescript picture of a foggy landscape, no glass in the frame. Dylan knew it was bolted to the wall; a bunch of similar murky paintings were bolted around Drummond. The story was they’d been done by a warden’s wife and he’d put them up. Maybe they thought it would make the place seem less like what it was.
The other wall was of granite, like a castle from the movies. Against one of the plywood walls was a couch, not fancy leather but a faded cloth couch that had once been turquoise. A wing chair was beside it with a little round table at its arm. A single deep-set window let in a suggestion of the short winter day’s light.
A middle-aged man, trim and fit looking, with carefully combed hair and long thin fingers, sat in the room’s only chair. He had a short beard and sandy graying hair. His beard was red and looked as if it belonged on somebody else.
“I’m Dr. Kowalski,” he said and gestured to the couch.
Lying down would be too weird. Dylan perched on the edge of the sofa. The doctor looked at him for a long time-so long Dylan had to stop himself from fidgeting.
“So you’re the Butcher Boy,” the doctor said finally.
Butcher Boy.
Dylan had heard it before but for some reason this time the words made his brain skid forward and back. Time warped. For a second he was back in the courtroom in black and white and Chinese. Eleven years outside seemed as if they’d never happened and the months in juvie felt like all of his life. Life before rushed in, and then receded, and it shook him.
The doctor wanted to shake him; at least Dylan chose to believe that. If it wasn’t a trick to get him to respond in a certain way, then Dr. Kowalski was “one mean fuck,” as Draco would say. One who wanted to pry Dylan’s brain out and look at it under bright lights. Fear shuddered up. He tried not to let it show.