When a new kid, Purvis Something, was moved permanently to psych after dropping a hit of Window Pane, Dylan swore it off completely. His brain was nothing to fuck with. People learned that the hard way.
“Ell-ess-dee,” Kowalski said, playing Timothy Leary’s best pal.
“Cool,” Dylan said and again thought of Draco: You get, you share. If he got a chance, he’d score a few hits for pocket money.
“You seem to be looking forward to it. We shall see… ” the doctor said with more than a hint of malice. “I have cleared the remainder of the afternoon.”
Explaining that the drug had been formulated in a lab at the National Institute for Mental Health to be used for experimental purposes, Kowalski took a vial from his briefcase. There was no label on the glass container. Inside was a square of blue paper with a slight discoloration in the middle. Dylan had been medicated, overmedicated, and eternally messed with; he knew the rituals of medical protocol from the inside. Kowalski was bullshitting him. The hit had been bought on the street. It could be cut with anything-speed, Drano-whatever the cook thought would give more bang and save him a buck.
Kowalski hated him. Dylan read the certainty of it in the set of his mouth, the aggressive jut of the bearded jaw, as he plugged in a tape recorder and arranged the microphone on his desk.
Dylan was unimpressed. Most people hated him. Regular people would have to be crazy not to hate him. He slid down on the couch another six inches, his long legs, strong from ice hockey and Drummond’s stone stairways, taking up more room than Kowalski liked.
“Sit up,” the doctor ordered peevishly.
Dylan didn’t move. His idiot stare grew more vacuous.
Dr. Kowalski flipped the tape recorder on and held out the blue square of contaminated paper.
14
Dylan’s last acid trip hadn’t been all that great, but it hadn’t freaked him out. And though he remembered the look in Purvis Whatshisname’s eyes after he’d dropped and hit the wall-like something had reached in through his nose with red-hot tongs and tried to pull out his soul-he’d never been particularly scared of the stuff. Most of the guys did it, and, other than Purv, who was determined to go nuts one way or another, nobody seemed too busted up by it.
He was scared now, though, that was for damn sure. All gloved-up like he was handling nuclear waste, Kowalski was poking the blue square of paper at him on the end of a pair of tweezers he’d probably used to pull his nose hairs out that morning.
Street shit. Even that didn’t put the fear into him. It was Kowalski’s eyes. The doctor looked crazy, bug-shit, a kind of hungry, desperate crazy. The monkey on his back-the addiction, the need, the lust, the whatever-had been working the doctor over.
For half a second Dylan thought of refusing the acid, of getting up and running out. He was bigger than the doctor. Kowalski couldn’t stop him.
He couldn’t stop Kowalski. Doctors were gods at Drummond. They did what they wanted with the kids, whatever they wanted. Dylan pinched the paper from the tweezers and popped it in his mouth. What the hell? It had to be better than electroshock.
He dry-swallowed, smiled slowly, and said, “Thanks, Doc. The warden know you’re my drug dealer now?”
Kowalski sat down on the edge of his chair, hitched it a couple of inches closer to the couch, and leaned forward.
The doctor was out; the man on the chair was not a psychiatrist or a medical professional. He was scarcely even a man. He was a big fat zero waiting for something to come make him count, fill up the hole.
Welcome to monster world, Doc.
“You are going to fucking remember,” Kowalski said, the obscenity jarring not only because it was the first time Dylan had heard him use anything stronger than “heck” or “darn” but because the word was uttered with the same smooth, pseudocaring voice Kowalski used when he was shrinking kids in front of visitors.
“You are going to fucking remember every whack,” he said, then leaned back and waited.
“Eighty-one,” Dylan said.
“Is the LSD taking effect?” Kowalski checked his watch, as if he genuinely thought he could time street-drug reactions.
“Forty, done. Father, forty-one,” Dylan said to remind Kowalski of the Lizzy Borden poem.
“It’s starting,” the doctor said.
What a stupid fuck. Dylan could say or do anything he damn well pleased, and the fool would write it off to the acid. “Your beard’s on fire.”
“Ahh,” said Kowalski with satisfaction.
“You ever drop acid, Doc?”
“I… I have taken it experimentally.”
Kowalski was lying again. He wanted to seem cool for some reason, wanted to impress a teenage axe murderer. How pathetic was that?
“Good thing you got lab stuff. That street shit’s got some kinky side effects. A kid in detention over in St. Paul got hold of some. His brother said it was pure angel dust. This kid, he’s like Superman all of a sudden. Ripped the door off its hinges. Then ripped the face off a guard.”
Kowalski’s skin paled.
Be scared, you piece of shit, Dylan thought, and enjoyed his petty victory. Meanness and fear were the only kind of power left to Drummond’s inmates.
The doctor pushed his chair back the three inches he’d infringed upon.
“Okay, Dylan, we’ve got work to do. Today, we’re going to go back year by year until we get to the night of the murders. Are you ready to start?”
He was talking in the voice of a TV hypnotist, dreamy and smarmy. It didn’t strike Dylan as funny. It creeped him out. The whole thing, saying fuck, threatening-and there was no way it wasn’t a threat; people on the outside might mistake it but a kid in juvie, never-then acting like everything was normal, was majorly creeping Dylan out. Anxiety, the scalp-crawling, bone-breaking kind he’d learned in the courtroom, started pouring into him, freezing his blood.
Shit. Not on acid, he begged the cosmos. This crap on acid, and a guy could live in la-la land for good.
“You don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with you,” Dylan said desperately.
The doctor had no idea what he was talking about. “That’s right,” he said soothingly, doing Dr. Kildare now instead of a hypnotist on Ed Sullivan.