Ave Maria fiddles with her eyepatch. I slap her hand away from her face. “Sorry,” she goes, and then sports a distraught sister face so fast it takes my breath away. Right before we get to the entrance, Ave Maria grabs both of our arms and whisper sings, “You guys? You guys rock!” Then she kisses each of our hands and immediately returns to her role. She’s gonna make an awesome mom someday.
Upon entering it’s clear that “intake” is bogus. Some fat ass guy in a white man jumpsuit with — I shit you not — a box of half-eaten powdered donuts is at the front desk. The computer system? Dell. You heard me. What kind of a monkeyfuck operation is this? Dell computers? This is going to be like taking candy from geriatrics.
Little Teena assesses the situation about as quickly as I do, and launches smoothly into his spiel. “Got an emergency intake on a transport from Bellevue. They can’t take her up at Chelan so we had to come here. Full up at Chelan. Christ. Kids these days, huh?” Little Teena jams the exquisite pile of false paperwork and the clipboard at the fat ass.
So far everything is proceeding according to the steps.
“I didn’t get any call about an intake tonight. You just hold on here,” fatty blabs. He’s got powdered sugar on his upper lip. Man, you can’t make this shit up.
“Whose this?” Blubbo says pointing at Ave Maria.
Little Teena leans over the counter and points to the data on the fake forms that identifies Ave Maria as “next of kin” and “sister” and “legal guardian.” “Parents are dead,” Little Teena explains. “How these two managed to keep out of child custody services all these years is beyond me. But that one?” Little Teena points at Ave Maria. He leans over the desk and whispers to whale boy. “She’s a nurse. Candy striper.” And then he winks at intake balloon.
I stand there trying to look as silently dangerous as possible. I shoot for a kind of Bob De Niro in Taxi Driver look. I smile, then go cold faced, then smile again. I spit on the floor and then for no reason I whistle “When You Wish Upon a Star”.
Everyone turns and stares at me for a minute.
“See what I mean?” Little Teena says, “We’ ve got a live one. Do me a favor and take this little teen monster girl off my hands, will ya? Mind?” he says, moving in to snag a donut.
“I don’t know, I just don’t know … this is highly irregular,” puffy says, shuffling through the paperwork, but the paperwork is jake. Marlene is a pro. Nothing is missing. Everything has the proper signature or seal or whacked out institutional code lingo all over it. I shoot a glance up at a surveillance camera in the back corner behind the human blimp. I smile and pick my nose. I nonchalantly flip on my Zoom H4n.
“It’s just highly irregular,” he says again. He picks up the phone. “I’m gonna have to call it in downtown.”
You know that sound in the movie soundtrack where the record needle skips and drives a wedge through the album? It’s the oh fuck soundscape.
Ave Maria, no doubt improvising, begins to cry. It’s a unique weeping, of course. Little hiccup sounding whimper lurches. He stares at her, phone in the air between his gut and his ear. Then she amps up the crying and starts this rather impressive erratic breathing thing. Her face gets blotchy. She scratches at the sides of her own arms. I swear she could do performance art.
“Oh shit,” Little Teena says, “you don’t wanna upset this one,” he says, following her lead, stroking one of his lamb chops.
I grit my teeth menacingly.
“Wait a minute here, wait a minute,” the gut says standing up, one hand on his … what the fuck is that? Yeah. Should have guessed. Taser.
I spit.
Little Teena starts to walk around the intake desk where blubberino is. “You better listen to me or we’re gonna have a situation here,” Little Teena says. He moves behind the desk.
“Hey!” white Fat Albert exclaims, “You can’t come back here!”
Ave Maria shoots for a major distraction and turns the volume up to full wail. “If there’s no room here, what are you going to do to my siiiiiiiiiissssssssssster? You can’t put her in jail! Please don’t put her in jail! She can’t go to JJJJJJJJJAAAAAAA-IIIIIILLLLLLLL” wailing and bawling full force — until she’s pretty much textbook … what’s the word I’m searching for? Oh yeah. Hysterical.
“ What the,” chub says, “hey, can you get her to quiet down? We’ve got a houseful of sensitives here — hey! Can you get her to stop that?”
Ave Maria is rocking and crying and pulling her Alice hair making a total scene.
Little Teena’s nearly next to lard-ass behind the intake desk. I start jumping up and down like a bunny.
“Which one of’em did you say was the live one?” fatty goes, his eyes big blue buttons.
“The head case,” Little Teena says pointing at me. I bite my lip until it bleeds and smile.
“That other’s her sister,” Little Teena yells above the ruckus Ave Maria is making, “like I said. Legal guardian, if you can believe it. Sister nearly got her eye put out — but still wouldn’t let us take her without coming along. Families, huh? Buncha crackpots if you ask me.”
“ Well all right, all right,” donut face says, and punches something into his Dell. Then he gets on some kind of walkie talkie device. Like a Toys “R” Us-looking walkie talkie. Budget cuts? Christ this place has the technology of Sesame Street.
Pudgeball speaks some mysterious lingo into his Toys “R” Us walkie talkie. Something equally incomprehensible comes back out at him. “I know what time it is. We got an emergency kinda thing down here. We got an immediate intake. We can sort it out in the morning. Get your ass out of bed.” Gibberish white noise comes back.
It begins to look like things are back on track.
“All righty then we’re gonna set her up temporarily in a room here,” pudding says, licking his fingers, “but we’ll need a transfer in the morning. This is a one night deal. I don’t care who signed your paperwork, we’re full up. Got a wetback last night that tried to bite me. Man they just don’t pay me enough for this shit.”
My.
Breathing.
Jackknifes.
Wetback. This dumb racist motherfucker thinks Obsidian is Mexican. My heart fists my chest. I clench my hands into little bomblets. Little Teena feels me ramping up and shoots me an easy now look. “Yeah, well I’m sure you get all kinds,” Little Teena says. “Say, did you intake that barefoot bandit dude? I heard he ended up in these parts?”
“Naw, we aint that lucky. We just get the real rejects. Had to restrain that wetback. Tight. She’s a looker though,” he says, rubbing his third chin and laughing, “Wouldn’t mind a tap or two, if you know what I mean … but hell. I need this job.”
There is a bomb in my skull. An IED. This guy? This guy has got to go.
Little Teena is shooting me just calm down looks.
You know how sometimes your actual brain gets taken over by your … ID? Pretty sure that’s the correct terminology. The image of this fatass fuck restraining Obsidian and leaning over her with his three chins and chub sweat and donut drool snaps my brain into little black shards of ID. And you know what they say about the ID. It’s a cauldron of seething excitations striving solely to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs.
Guess who I learned that from.
So when fat boy turns to me and says, “You got a name, ugly?”
Fuck the plan.
I step up to his intake desk. Particle board painted white. I’ll tell you who I am, I say in my head. I’m an ID-ridden ball of chaos, motherfucker. I’m your worst nightmare. My eyes feel a little like they are going to shoot out of my head and shatter his face into a zillion pieces. I open my mouth. And then