The Last Chance Texaco

by Brent Hartinger

  "Hear anything interesting?" I said.

  He stood there stunned for a second more. Then he said, "Huh?" He was talking loudly, pretending like he couldn't hear me over the sound of his music.

  It was a pretty good recovery, but I knew he was faking. "Give it up," I said. I pointed down to the MP3 player. "The damn thing's not even on."

  Once again, I'd left him speechless.

  "I'm Lucy," I said to the boy, because I figured why make enemies unless I had to.

  "Yeah, I know," he said, trying to sound mysterious, which is hard when you have pimples and a paper clip holding your glasses together.

  "That's Damon," Yolanda said.

  "Yeah, I know," I said, imitating the mysterious tone he'd used on me. That got a smile out of him. At least he was smart enough to get my jokes.

  "He's a weasel," Yolanda said.

  "I know that too," I said. This was mostly bluster, but the fact is, I did know something about him. After a few group homes, you start to see patterns in the kids who live in them. Roles people play, like parts in a movie. I knew immediately what part Damon played. He was the Mole, the guy everyone went to for information about everyone else. Kids in group homes did a lot of trading, and what Damon traded was information.

  "Well, Damon," I said, "it's nice to meet you."

  "It's not like I--" he started to say, but I shut the door in his face. Yolanda actually squealed in pleasure.

  When she'd calmed down a little, she said, "Damon's harmless," but I'd already known that too. That's why I'd closed the door in his face.

  It had been a long morning, and I needed to pee, so I waited a second for Damon to make himself scarce--I knew he'd leave after getting busted once. Then I opened the door and headed for where Leon had said the bathroom was.

  The bathroom door was locked. Or was it just stuck? The doorknob turned okay.

  I knocked. "Hello?" I said, but there wasn't any answer from inside. What the hell was it about this house and sticky doors?

  I was just about to give it a good kick when a voice said, "Occupied."

  The voice hadn't come from inside the bathroom, but from farther down the hall.

  I turned. There was a girl walking toward me, about my age. Big hair, big boobs, lots-o'-makeup. But there was fire behind that mascara, and I knew it.

  "You're new," she said. "I'm Joy." I don't think I'd ever heard anybody sound quite that aloof. I knew immediately that, unlike Yolanda and Damon, this one was trouble. Without thinking, I stepped back from the bathroom.

  "Lucy," I said. "There someone in there?" I nodded to the bathroom.

  "Not yet," Joy said. She stepped between me and the door, and gave it a good shove with her shoulder. The door squeaked open, and she stepped inside. "But there is now." Then she slammed the door in my face.

  Ever wonder where the term "pecking order" comes from? It comes from flocks of chickens.

  Chickens create this sort of social ranking where every chicken can peck on any other chicken lower down in the pecking order. The chicken at the bottom of the pecking order is usually the weakest one. And if that chickens weakness is really obvious--like if it's badly injured--the rest of the flock might even peck it to death.

  Just so you know, that's pretty much how it works in group homes too.

  • • •

  Dinner in a group home is the one time when everyone is together in one place. The counselors always say this like it's a good thing. The truth is, dinnertime at a group home is like dusk on the African savannah--it's when everything happens.

  That night, Leon called us down to dinner, and I joined Yolanda and Damon at the long table in the big dining room. Leon was in the kitchen cooking with one of the counselors I hadn't met yet.

  A second later, Joy breezed into the dining room with another girl, who I'd later learn was named Melanie. Her hair was a little smaller than Joy's, and her makeup was a little thicker. And she was just this side of plump, but the fat was in all the wrong places.

  "You're in my chair," Joy said to me.

  Yolanda looked up. "We don't have chairs." My roommate may have been in The System for seven months, but it sounded like she hadn't picked up much except smoking. She still didn't know a challenge when she heard one.

  "We do so have chairs," Joy said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Don't we, Damon?"

  Damon was suddenly fascinated by his spoon. "Oh, yeah." So I'd been right about Damon--at least he was smart.

  "Fine," I said. I was new here, no reason to make waves. So I stood up and took a seat a chair away from Joy--far enough that I wouldn't have to deal with her all through dinner, but not so far that it looked like I was scared of her.

  "Now you're in my chair," Melanie said.

  Of course I was, I said to myself. I wondered, How many times have they played out this little routine?

  Not making waves was one thing, but there was no point in letting myself be pushed around. "Tell you what," I said. "Why don't we share? I'll sit here now, and you can have it after dinner."

  That hit Melanie right between the eyes. She was just about to say something in response when the counselor I hadn't met yet entered with a pitcher of milk from the kitchen. "You must be Lucy!" she said to me. "I'm Gina." She was tall and willowy, with long sandy blond hair.

  "Hey," I said, already irritated by all her teeth.

  "Hope you like lasagna," she said. I would like lasagna, I wanted to say, except I'm allergic to cheese. This was the one part of my file the counselors obviously hadn't read yet. But Gina had disappeared back into the kitchen before I could say anything. It's not like I wanted my three hundred thousandth peanut butter and jelly sandwich, anyway.

  When I looked back at Melanie, she'd taken the seat on the other side of Joy, pretending like our little incident with the chairs had never even happened. So I'd won the first round.

  Just then, the front door burst open, like someone had had to give it the boot again. A second later, a voice called out, "Hi, honey, I'm home!" and I heard a couple of kids groaning from the foyer. Joy and Melanie groaned too, like this was a joke that got made every night. This had to be Ben, Gina's husband. Yolanda had told me the two of them were live-in counselors with their own bedroom upstairs. Ben had been out somewhere with the rest of the kids in the house.

  From my chair, I could see Ben as he entered the kitchen, and it made sense why everyone called him and Gina Ken and Barbie. He looked nothing like Ken--he was a couple of inches shorter than Gina, and was dark and swarthy--but he and his wife were both young and good-looking. They worked in social services, so Gina didn't wear makeup and Ben had a beard, but they were still just too cute for words, especially when they were kissing, which they did over the salad bowl.

  At the same time, the last three of the house's occupants, all guys, descended upon the dining room table like a herd of buffalo. Windows rattled, dishes clanked. I learned their names later, but there was Eddy, the Cute One. Juan, the Big Lug. And Roberto, the Cocky One. Eddy was probably fourteen, and Juan and Roberto were both sixteen or seventeen.

  Except for Joy and Melanie, who both threw me the occasional dirty look, no one paid any attention to me. This made sense. Living in a group home, you get used to people coming and going. For all they knew, I'd be there one night or two, until a bed opened up at the place where I was really supposed to be.

  "Let's eat!" Roberto yelled to the kitchen. "Foooooood!" He started pounding his plate and making snorting sounds, and Juan and Eddy joined in.

  Ben stuck his head into the dining room. "It's coming, it's coming, keep your pants on." Then Ben spotted me. "Hi, I'm Ben, the assistant zookeeper. You Lucy?"

  I didn't get a chance to answer because the other kids had suddenly started laughing and whooping it up. Ben and I turned to see that Roberto had leaped up onto his chair and whipped open the front of his baggy jeans. Now he was wiggling his hips like a go-go boy, and his pants fell down around his thighs, showing us his boxer
s. Ben had told Roberto to keep his pants on, but he'd decided to take them off. Now Melanie was shrieking, "Take it off! Take it off!" and someone else was humming stripper music. The entire room had gone from zero to sixty in five seconds.

  Just so you know, I wasn't shocked or surprised to see Roberto taking off his pants. Kids in group homes tend to be pretty literal. And like I said before, dinnertime can get kind of wild.

  Roberto was still swaying and just starting to slip his boxers down when Ben said, "Roberto, how the hell do you expect us to eat after seeing your pimply ass?"

  Everyone laughed except Roberto, who didn't even smile. In fact, he looked downright pissed. This was his joke, and he didn't like being interrupted. That's when I knew Roberto wasn't just the Cocky One. He was also the Hothead.

  Ben said, "I'll get the food," and headed back into the kitchen to get the lasagna. Roberto had to know he couldn't compete with dinner, because he pulled up his pants and sat down again, only a little bit sulky. This was also pretty typical of group homes. Things start suddenly, but they often peter out just as fast. It's the plus side of thirty-second attention spans.

  I sat and watched the kids around the table. There was the usual spitting of milk and flinging of silverware, and I learned that Melanie had a crush on Eddy, but not the other way around, and that Juan was jealous of Roberto, and that the guys all picked on Damon and the girls all picked on Yolanda.

  When Ben, Gina, and Leon started bringing in dinner, I watched them too. After eight years in The System, I was sure what they were thinking. Damaged goods. That's how they saw us. And when something is beyond repair, you don't bother trying to fix it. If you can't throw it out, then you store it somewhere out of the way, in a basement or storage shed where no one ever goes. Kindle Home didn't look much like a storage shed, but that's what it was--a storage shed for broken teenagers. That's why the counselors didn't even care that, under the table, Roberto and Eddy were whaling away at Damon with their feet.

  "Hey, Damon," Gina said, casually serving up the lasagna. "Thanks for your help today with my computer. I'd be lost without you. What does PPP stand for again?"

  "Point-to-point protocol," Damon said.

  There was a brief moment of silence around the table, and I saw Gina wink at Damon. That's when I knew what she'd said had been no accident. She was helping Damon with Roberto and Eddy. She was saying to them, Lay off the kid or maybe he won't help you the next time you guys need help with the computer. But she was doing it without calling attention to herself. It was actually pretty clever.

  "Pass the grub!" Roberto said.

  "Man, this house sucks," Eddy said. "When are we getting cable?"

  I couldn't help but notice that they'd both stopped kicking Damon under the table.

  At the same time, Leon plopped a plate down in front of me. "Allergic to cheese, right? We made one with soy cheese."

  Okay, I thought to myself, so maybe I'd been a little bit wrong. Maybe Kindle Home wasn't exactly like every other group home I'd ever lived in.

  Chapter Three

  Can I ask you a question?" I said to Yolanda later that night, after we'd gone to bed and turned out the lights.

  "I guess," Yolanda said.

  "Is this place always like this?"

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. It just seems different from the other group homes I've been in." Earlier that evening, we'd played board games. There had only been two throwings of the Pictionary board. This may not sound that great, but compared to other group homes, it was. Trust me on this.

  "I guess," Yolanda said. She thought for a second, and I expected her to say something about Kindle Home. Instead, she said, "Do you ever think about your parents?"

  "No." It was the truth.

  "I do," she said. No kidding, I thought to myself. From what I'd seen so far, that was all she thought about. "I miss em."

  "What happens when someone has a meltdown?" I said. A meltdown is just like it sounds. It's when some kid completely loses control. Throwing the Pictionary board because you're losing the game is not a meltdown, but breaking a window and using a piece of the broken glass to attack a counselor is.

  "It depends," Yolanda said. "When Eric stabbed Juan with a screwdriver, they had to call the cops."

  "What'd they do to him?"

  "Eric? They sent him to some island."

  So the stories were all true. Kindle Home really was the Last Chance Texaco.

  "And then there was Monica. She kept cutting herself with staples and paper clips. They sent her to the island too. And Brian. Melanie said that Brian tried to rape her, but everyone knew she'd been screwing him all along, and she was just jealous that he liked Monica."

  Okay, I thought. I get the picture.

  "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" Yolanda asked.

  "No," I said. This was a lie. I'd had both a brother and a sister. My brother had been killed in the car accident with my parents, but my sister had lived. In the years after the accident, I used to dream that she and I would run off to live in this perfect little cabin up in the mountains--I guess because I was reading Heidi the night before my parents were killed. In my mind, like in the book, the cabin had a sleeping loft and a big stone fireplace, and it was perched on a rocky cliff overlooking jagged, snow-covered peaks and fields of goats and wildflowers. But then my sister had been adopted, and she'd moved into a real house. For a while, her new parents were going to adopt me too, but they'd eventually decided I was too much to handle. A little while later, they'd had to move to another state, and I hadn't heard much from my sister since then.

  "I wish I had a brother or a sister," Yolanda said. "It was just my parents and me."

  "How many chances do they give you?" I said. "Before they send you to the island?"

  Yolanda thought for a second, and I was afraid she was going to say something else about her family. "I don't know. They've never sent anyone right away. Not unless they're really violent."

  "Who makes the decision?"

  Just then the door opened, and light spilled into the bedroom from the hallway. I immediately closed my eyes, and not just because the light was so bright. This was a night spot check. They're real big on knowing where everyone is at all times in group homes, so there are no locks on any of the bedroom doors, and counselors do random spot checks all night long. That way, they can make sure no one is sneaking into any of the other bedrooms to have sex, which is a really big deal, or sneaking away from the house at night, which is an even bigger deal. I heard the squeak of the floorboards, and I knew whichever counselor had opened the door was now walking across the room for a closer view. A second later, a shadow blocked the light in my eyelids, and I knew the counselor was standing right over me, making sure it really was me in my bed. Then the counselor turned to check on Yolanda. I opened my eyes just a slit and recognized Ben's back and butt. Yeah, sometimes guy counselors have to check on a girl's room, and yeah, sometimes they catch you dressing or worse. But you get used to the lack of privacy, just like you get used to everything else.

  The floorboards squeaked again, and I saw Ben heading for the hallway again. A second later he closed the door, leaving Yolanda and me in the dark again.

  I had a hundred other questions to ask my roommate, but the door had barely closed when she said, "We did have two cats. Did you have any pets?"

  • • •

  When I went down to the kitchen the next morning, fists were flying. But it wasn't a fight. It was an old woman kneading dough. She had her back turned toward me, but I knew this had to be Mrs. Morgan, the only counselor I hadn't met yet. It was midmorning, and the rest of the kids in the house had gone off to school. But Kindle Home was in a different district than Bradley Home, and I hadn't been signed up for classes at my new school yet. So I'd slept in, and now Mrs. Morgan and I had the house to ourselves.

  "Hey," I said, still standing in the doorway.

  Mrs. Morgan glanced back at me. She was old, but she was no grand
ma. Yeah, she had wrinkles and white hair cut short like a nun or a lesbian. And she had liver spots and sensible shoes. But she also had eyes that were crystal blue, and the kind of perfect posture that makes you stand up a little straighter, even though you don't normally give a rip about things like posture.

  She stepped away from the counter, revealing a large metal bowl. "Take over," she said.

  "What?" I said.

  "Come here and take over this dough. When we're done here, I'll make you some breakfast."

  I stepped closer. There was an enormous blob of white dough in the middle of the bowl. I'd never kneaded anything before, and I didn't want to start now. I wanted food and a shower.

  "Go ahead," Mrs. Morgan said. "But wash your hands first."