The first time Lilly tried to walk from her apartment to the library, not long after she moved to the city, her feet looked ridiculous to her. The feet of an immigrant, she thought. But I’ve changed; these shoes do not belong to me. That day, instead of going to the library, she found a boutique and bought a pair of tall black leather boots. Then she strode back down the sidewalk until she came to a posh bar with a partial view of the city’s great monument—Just the tip, she joked in her head. There she drank whiskey for five hours until the obelisk began to sag on its axis. On the way home, her toes and ankles burned in their stiff new leather casing. But the heel-toe heel-toe tap, hypnotic against the blacktop, brought her home. Freedom, she thought.
After the first month and the second had passed, and she’d settled on the same black pencil skirt and crisp white blouse and black blazer to wear every day, she found her legs taking her back toward the library. Almost as if she were an ordinary visitor.
—
Her newest case was a lost cause. Dangerous, or so they said.
“That one’s yours?” the guard said. “Don’t even bother. He won’t respond.” Blotches of sweat stained the guard’s gray-blue shirt.
“Is that so,” Lilly muttered, looking past the guard at the boy-nearly-man standing awkwardly across the facility grounds. “Why’s that?” Standing out there with this guard, in this patchy shadeless yard, she felt the humidity weighting her breath. Why were there no trees, no bushes or shrubs? What few trees there were had been shoved out toward the perimeter, a safe distance. Even the grass looked like dirt.
“He’s a tough nut. Probably run out of chances. Kid’s fifteen — nobody in their right mind even tries to save a boy like that anymore. I’d say he’s in the system for good now. From here right into some institution.”
“Institution? He’s a long way from eighteen.” Lilly dug into the ground with the tip of her shoe. “When did he stop speaking?” she asked.
The guard removed his sunglasses, swabbed sweat from his forehead with his forearm. “ ’Bout two years in. Used to scream every night. All night. During the day, he just raged at anyone or anything he could. He’d fight with the other boys, cafeteria workers, counselors, guards. Then it all escalated. He started fires. He shoved another kid’s head into a wall so hard that one of his eyes popped loose. One day, the guard checking his cell found him trying to cut off his own hand at the wrist with a torn-up piece of scrap metal—shit, the blood. Came this close to losing that hand.” The guard kicked at the dirt between them. “See how his right hand hangs different?” He pointed through the chain-link fence to the boy across the yard. “Lost feeling in most of the fingers on that hand.”
Lilly squinted to focus her gaze. Sure enough, one hand looked loose and limp. The boy’s hair was shoulder-length, tucked behind his ears. Blond like wood shavings. She wasn’t close enough to make out his expression.
“Then one day — this was after every last object in his room was taken away from him, all but one flat pillow — he kept damaging property; walls, floors, you name it— he started saying, There’s a blast coming that will change everything. He said it to us, he said it to other boys, he said it to his caseworker. The caseworker before you started getting concerned, and come to find out, the boy had been communicating with some nutball latter-day white supremacists hell-bent on making trouble, thanks to some other kid who came through here who had connections with those idiots. So the caseworker alerted the Feds. It was around then that this one went silent. But his eyes… there’s a world of shit in those eyes. All you’re gonna get are the eyes. Whatever he knows, or doesn’t know — these boys, after a certain age, they’re just lost… When a kid like that starts to see that his own future has got nothing in it for him, he turns rageful. Fills up with whatever makes him feel like he exists.” He spit.
“All the same, I need to meet with him.” Lilly retrieved her own sunglasses and put them on. The guard just stood there, dull and thick and reluctant. “Now, please.” She glanced back across the field; the boy was already watching her.
As she and the guard walked back to the main building, the boy seemed to track their movements. She thought about what she’d read so far in his file: Single immigrant foster father. Child maltreatment. Poor family-management practices. Low parent involvement. And yet he’d achieved high grades — very high — in elementary school. Until he didn’t.
What put this boy in high-security detention was infanticide and patricide. Or so it was alleged.
The details were shadowed and layered, like some irrecoverable palimpsest. Some saw his case as prosecutable; others dismissed the boy as hopeless, a mental health casualty, with no known relatives, who’d slipped through the cracks. The evidence wasn’t much, but the boy’s fingerprints were everywhere — whatever that meant. (The alleged crime took place in his own apartment building.) If anyone had been around to give a shit about him, to take him in, he might have had an entirely different life. How the hell did he go from straight-A student, shy little misfit with glasses, possibly a savant, to this? There was no record of mental or physical illness in his files prior to the incident. No record of any trouble at all. Just a low-income immigrant foster father’s oddball son.
And why had it taken years for him to land on her desk? Christ. The kid was fifteen now. When he was still ten, maybe she’d have had a chance. Kids you could work with. Boy teens, though, they were hard cases. Belligerent, pissed off, hormonal hard cases. Sometimes she wondered if boys carry all our sins for us so that the rest of us can feign innocence of the world we made — a world with less and less space for them to feel loved.
—
Mikael walked the yard, kicked dirt up with each step. He spit on his arm, rubbed the spit into his flesh until a sheen appeared. He studied the word he’d carved into his own arm with a sharpened-toothbrush shiv: indigo. He’d filled the letters with pen ink. Now he was no longer allowed to have pens or even a toothbrush.
He could see the woman across the yard. Yet another caseworker assigned to him. A thought crossed briefly through his mind: breaking her arms himself. Why not? His story had no beginning anymore, so his story had no ending. His story was lost to meaning.
A horn blared: return inside.
Back inside, he walked down the hall to his room, scraping his knuckles against the concrete wall as he went. He passed a boy of about nine, his pants too high, clutching his own forearms. Glasses, like he used to have. Mikael couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen things properly. He’d stopped wearing them after that day in the yard when he stabbed a boy in the throat with one of the temples. No one tried to fuck him after that, or hold him down, or anything. He’d almost been sent to the adult system then, but the prisons were too crowded to take him. Now, as he walked past the nine-year-old, he knocked the boy’s throat with his forearm, sending him like a slingshot to the floor. He couldn’t remember ever being nine.
In the facility, when the other boys had held him down — one of them even put a boot to the back of his neck there on the concrete floor — he remembered smelling the knees of the boy forcing himself into him. The other boy’s knees dragging bloody on the hard concrete surface of the facility floor. Just be flat, he thought. Just wait. Later you can kill anyone. You’re a killer now. It’s official.