The Last Chance Texaco

by Brent Hartinger

  There was a lot more yelling, and Principal High Expectations directed all of it at me. "Nate Brandon, of all people!" he kept saying. "Out of the whole school, you had to attack Nate Brandon!" I said to myself, Who gives a rip about Nate Brandon? Why is he so special? But I already knew the answer. Nate Brandon was a rich kid, and a jock. They obviously got special treatment. The principal never did give me a chance to speak, to tell my side of the story. I wouldn't have bothered telling him anyway. He wouldn't have cared that Nate had said the things he'd said, or that he'd knocked over my avocado sprout.

  Finally, Leon arrived. The principal had called Kindle Home right after the fight, and someone was supposed to come and take me home. For a split second, I was glad it was Leon. Then I remembered it wouldn't make any difference.

  "Get her out of here!" the principal yelled at him. "Get her the hell out of here, and don't bring her back!"

  "You can't kick her out," Leon said, absolutely calm.

  "Why the hell not?"

  "Because it's only her first infraction."

  "She attacked a student in the middle of class!" The principal looked even angrier than Joy had the day before. I thought he was going to pop a blood vessel in his neck.

  "It doesn't make any difference," Leon said. "Read your own handbook. You can't kick her out on the first infraction."

  "That's not true! I have leeway!"

  Leon shook his head. "Not here, you don't. And zero tolerance applies only when there are drugs or weapons involved. But there weren't any drugs or weapons. The worst you can do is put her on detention and probation."

  "Well, she probably has a weapon! I just didn't search her!"

  "So go ahead and search her. Just make sure you search this other guy too. And if you're going to kick her out of biology, kick him out, too. "

  "She attacked him!"

  "Yeah, well, the handbook also says it doesn't matter who 'starts' a fight--all the people involved have to get the same punishment."

  The principal glared at Leon. Meanwhile, from behind his shiner, Nate glared at me, and I glared back at him. There was a hell of a lot of glaring

  going on in that office.

  "Just get her out of here!" the principal said at last. Then he looked at me. "As for you, you're going to have detention until the day you graduate--assuming you ever do! If you so much as forget to tie your shoes, I'm going to lack you out of here so fast it'll make your head spin!"

  Leon didn't say a single word to me until we were out in the parking lot and inside the car. Then, before he'd even turned on the ignition, he said, "Well?"

  "What?" I said.

  He didn't look at me, just clenched the steering wheel and stared out the front window. "Don't do that. Don't you do that whole 'What?' thing! Do you know how hard you make it for every other kid at Kindle Home when you pull bullshit like this? Now I want an explanation!"

  I turned and stared out a window of my own.

  "Goddammit!" he said. "I just put my butt on the line for you in there! The least you can do is tell me why!"

  I didn't say anything, just kept staring out that window.

  "Lucy, don't you know I'm trying to help you!"

  I mustered a cackle. "Yeah, right." Emil had said exactly the same thing--that he was trying to "help" me too.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Leon said.

  I looked at him at last. I still had some glare left in me.

  "Eat-Their-Young Island?" he said. "You think this means you're going to be sent to Eat-Their-Young Island?" This stopped me cold. I'd never heard an adult refer to Rabbit Island as Eat-Their-Young Island before. Not only didn't they use that expression, they always made a really big deal whenever one of us kids did.

  "Doesn't it?" I said.

  "It sure don't help," he said. "But it's only your first offense. They never send a kid there after only one offense. Not something like this, anyway."

  I shrugged. "It doesn't matter. It's only a matter of time."

  "No!" he shouted, so loudly I jumped a little in surprise. "You're not going there! Not if I can help it."

  I looked over at him again. Who the hell was this Leon Dogman guy? But as much as I'd been certain that Emil had been lying to me, I suddenly had this unmistakable feeling that Leon was telling the truth.

  "But I can't keep you from going there by myself," he said, more softly. "You have to help."

  I looked out the front window. The windshield was getting foggy. Finally, I said, "How?"

  "You can start by telling me what happened back in that classroom."

  I thought about this. I knew he was probably just humoring me. Or trying to get some dirt on me for my file that he could then use against me later on. But I still had the feeling he was being straight with me. And I sure as hell didn't want to be sent to Rabbit Island.

  So I told him everything that had happened with Nate and Alicia in the hallway the day before, and what Nate had said to me in the classroom right before I hit him. The Group Home Code didn't apply to non-group home kids, so I laid it on as thick as I could while still telling mostly the truth.

  When I was done, he just sat there, fiddling with his eyebrow ring.

  "Do you believe me?" I asked him.

  "I don't know," he said. "I just met you. You might be lying."

  "I knew it." I tried to sulk, but the truth was, he had a point. We group home kids are pretty good bullshitters.

  "You said if I told you what happened, you'd keep me from being sent away," I said.

  "No," he said. "I said if you helped me, I'd help you."

  "And I helped you!"

  "You started helping me. But there's still more you have to do. A lot more."

  Suddenly, I knew exactly where this was heading. I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it before. I knew now we'd drive to his apartment, or maybe some hotel.

  I took a deep breath. "All right," I said. "Let's go."

  "Go where?" Leon's face hardened. "Not that." He hesitated, clenching his teeth. "Lucy, has a counselor ever asked you to do something like that before?"

  "No," I said. It was mostly the truth.

  He looked relieved, but he also kept staring at me, like he didn't quite believe me. "Look," he said, hesitating again. "Lucy, I know things have been lousy for you. But I swear to God, Kindle Home is different."

  "What do you want me to do?" I asked.

  "What?"

  "Before. You said there was more I have to do--to keep from being sent away. So what do I have to do?"

  He smiled. "Trust us," he said. That was it? That was all he wanted from me? Was this some kind of trick?

  I stared out the window for a long time after he said that. For some reason, the fog on the windshield began to clear--I guess because we d stopped talking.

  Finally, I looked over at him again and spoke a single word. "Okay."

  • • •

  Later that afternoon, before any of the other kids were home from school, I was coming down the stairs, and I happened to stop for a second about a third of the way from the landing. Right then, I heard Leon's voice say, clear as a bell, "She was provoked." It was coming from the office just off the foyer down below, and somehow I knew he was talking about me.

  "She says she was provoked," came the voice of Mrs. Morgan. "She could be lying."

  "And so what if she was provoked?" said Gina's voice. "She still threw the first punch. These kids are always being provoked. That doesn't mean it's okay to slug someone."

  "I'm not saying it is!" Leon said. "I'm just saying she's only been here three days, and she's under a lot of pressure. I say we give her a break."

  "No one's saying we should throw her out into a snowbank," Ben said. "We're just saying there have to be consequences to her actions."

  "There will be consequences," Leon said. "At school. She'll have detention, and she's on probation. But it didn't have anything to do with here, so I don't see why we need to give her consequences too."

  It was
that moment in the week when all four counselors were together at the very same time. And they were using the opportunity to talk about me, about what had happened that morning at school. But how was it that I was able to hear them? I'd been sitting right outside the door when Emil had been having his session with Juan, and I hadn't been able to hear anything at all.

  I took a step down the stairway, and the sound of the voices faded away. I returned to the step I'd been on.

  "She has so much anger," Gina was saying.

  "So do most of these kids," Leon said. "So would you if you were here."

  I took a step up the stairway, and the voices disappeared again. So there was something about the acoustics of the front hall, and the transom above the office door, that made it possible to hear what was being said inside that room, but only from that one single step. If you were moving up or down the steps, you wouldn't notice it at all.

  I returned to the Magic Step.

  "She's convinced we're going to reject her," Leon was saying. "And it's no wonder--rejection is pretty much all she's ever known. Ten different houses in eight years? And then there's the fact that her parents died when she was seven years old. That means she's old enough to remember them."

  "So?" Mrs. Morgan said.

  "So maybe Lucy thinks we're trying to replace them," Leon said. "Maybe that's part of why she's so afraid of letting any adult get close to her--because she's still afraid of somehow betraying her parents."

  Leon knew my file, I had to give him that. But what he was saying was all bullshit, of course. Betraying my parents? Please. It almost sounded to me like Leon was bullshitting the other counselors--telling them what he thought they wanted to hear, so they'd go easier on me.

  "You think that's why she punched that kid at school?" Mrs. Morgan was saying. "Because of something that happened eight years ago?"

  "I don't know why Lucy did what she did," Leon said. "I bet even she doesn't know. Whatever's going on is probably all unconscious. But I do think the key to her is the fact that she's been abandoned so many times, and that she's terrified of being rejected again. So she pushes people away before they can reject her."

  Leon had silenced the other counselors at last.

  Then Ben laughed. "Three days, Leon! You got her all figured out in three days?"

  "Hey, it makes sense to me," Gina said.

  "Oh, it makes sense to me too," Ben said. "And it's not like we haven't seen cases like hers before."

  "I'm not saying Lucy is a hopeless case," Mrs. Morgan said. "I'm just saying we need to be careful. We have had cases like her before. Remember Luke? And Ruani? And Denise?"

  "I remember," Leon said quietly.

  "And remember how they ended up?" Mrs. Morgan said.

  Leon didn't speak for a second. Then he said, "Lucy's different."

  Was I different? I wasn't so sure. But now I knew for a fact that Kindle Home was different, just like Leon had said. The counselors here didn't all see me as damaged goods, beyond repair, fit only to be locked away. And if that was true, it meant one other thing was true too.

  Maybe Rabbit Island wasn't inevitable after all.

  • • •

  So the Kindle Home counselors really did want to help me. But what they wanted wasn't necessarily the same thing as what Emil wanted. And the following week, I had my second session with him.

  "Well," he said. "I see it didn't take you long to get into the swing of things here at Kindle Home." This sounded like a snotty reference to my fight with Nate the week before, but he was writing something on his clipboard when he said it, so I couldn't be sure.

  "So," he said, "you want to tell me about this fight?"

  I thought about what I'd learned on the Magic Step, about Kindle Home being different from other group homes, and what Leon had said in the car, that

  I needed to trust the people there. Did that mean I needed to trust Emil too?

  What the hell, I thought.

  "I bumped against this girl in the hallway," I said. "She said I did it on purpose, but I didn't. Then she and her boyfriend got all mad at me, and told me that I'd better watch out, that they were going to be watching me. Someone had told everyone that I lived here, at a group home, and they were all, like, 'Groupies don't belong at this school.'"

  I couldn't help but notice that Emil wasn't writing anything down. Every time he had a thought about something, he wrote that down in great detail. But I guess my version of events wasn't even good enough to be put in my own file.

  But Leon had put his butt on the line for me, so I kept going. "Anyway," I said, "I had them both in biology, and they kept calling me groupie' and doing things like knocking over my avocado sprout."

  "So," Emil said. "You were feeling singled out because of the fact that you come from a group home."

  I nodded. I was surprised. He'd been listening after all.

  "And you think violence is an acceptable response to that?"

  Leon hadn't meant I needed to trust Emil too.

  "Well?" he said accusingly. "Is it?"

  "No," I said. "That's not what I'm saying."

  He lifted his clipboard, holding it against his chest like some kind of protective vest. "Exactly what are you saying?"

  I tried a different approach. "I want to stay here at Kindle Home." This was true. Being at Kindle Home wasn't just about not going to Rabbit Island anymore. Now it was just as much about really wanting to stay.

  "Well, isn't that just great?" Emil said, and suddenly, he was writing on his clipboard again. But something told me he wasn't writing down what I'd said about wanting to stay at Kindle Home, or even what Leon had said about my being afraid of rejection. No, he was writing yet another reason why I wasn't fit to be living among normal people, or going to school at their normal high school.

  And that's when I knew it didn't matter what I thought about Kindle Home. Because as much as I wanted to stay there, Emil still wanted me gone.

  Chapter Six

  Principal High Expectations gave me eight weeks of detention for punching Nate Brandon in the face. For one hour every day after school, I had to pick up garbage from around the campus, and each day I had to fill at least one big trash bag. And he warned me that if anyone saw me filling my bag with garbage from the Dumpsters, then I'd get four more weeks of detention.

  That was the bad news. The good news was that Nate Brandon was also given eight weeks of detention doing the very same thing. I was positive that if the principal had had his way, Nate Brandon wouldn't have gotten any detention at all. But Leon had said that stuff about it not mattering who "started" a fight--that all the people involved had to get the exact same punishment. And I think Principal High Expectations was smart enough to know that Leon

  was going to check up on him to make sure he'd followed the letter of the law exactly.

  At first, I thought there couldn't be enough garbage on that campus to fill one whole trash bag, much less two bags a day for forty days. But no matter how much trash I picked up, there always seemed to be more. And by the following day, it was as if I hadn't picked up any trash at all.

  For the first week, I avoided Nate, and he avoided me. But the school was pretty spread out, with lots of long, low buildings, so it was impossible for us to know exactly where the other person was at all times.

  The day after my second session with Emil, I was picking up garbage alongside the music building when I spotted a Happy Meal box pushed under some bushes. I wasn't sure who was eating Happy Meals on a high school campus, but this was a real find--with a piece of trash that big, I'd fill my bag that much sooner. I'd still have to spend the rest of the hour wandering around campus looking busy, but I wouldn't have to break my back picking up plastic lids and M&M's wrappers.

  I stepped out onto the sidewalk and reached down for the Happy Meal box.

  "Hey!" said a voice from the other side of the bushes. "That's mine!"

  I jumped in surprise. Of course, it was Nate. He'd been going for the Happy
Meal box at the same time I was. I hadn't seen him up close since our fight. When he'd learned I wasn't getting kicked out of biology, he and Alicia had both transferred to a new class.

  I stood up, holding the box. "Yeah?" I said. "Then how come I'm the one holding it in my hand?"

  "Get choked," he said, that familiar cool tone in his voice. "I saw it first."