The Free

by Lauren McLaughlin

  I head back to that patch of wall and open my notebook again. My heart is thumping like a freight train, but I don’t look up to see if anyone has noticed. That’s a rookie move. The trick is to sit down like you own the place and get busy with something. It doesn’t matter what. In sixth grade I used to carry around a broken Blackberry I found in the trash just so I’d have something to tap at while I walked through the halls. That way I didn’t have to look at anyone; eventually, they stopped looking at me. Nobody can make himself more invisible than Isaac West. How do you think I manage to steal so much stuff?

  I’m like a ghost, a mirage. Some kid you half remember drifting through your apartment building or your school. But you forget his name and you don’t spend too much time trying to remember it because you know you’ll never see him again anyway.

  Chapter 17

  “So all I have to do is lie there?”

  Dr. Horton has set up two chairs to act as the pickup and the Escalade. I’m going to play myself lying between them, hooking up the tow line, while Wayne plays Healy.

  “We need a name,” Wayne says. “I’m gonna play this guy I can’t just be partner.”

  “How about Connor?” Riley offers.

  “The hell kind of name is that?” Wayne asks. “Do I look like a Connor? This kid a brother, right? You know any brothers named Connor?”

  “Actually,” Riley says. “Isaac never told us his race, so why are you assuming he’s black?”

  “Yeah, Wayne,” Barbie jumps in. “Maybe this partner of his some white dude. Don’t be such a racist.”

  “Actually,” Riley says. “Who said his partner was male?”

  “Yeah, Wayne,” Barbie says, smiling so that her gold tooth f lashes. “Now you’re being racist and sexist. What’s up with that?”

  “Why don’t we just let Wayne pick a name,” Dr. Horton says. “Unless you have a preference, Isaac?”

  I do not have a preference, and the fact that they’re all assuming my partner is black is an added bonus.

  “Fine,” Wayne says. “Then call me Andre.”

  Barbie stif les a laugh so noisily it makes everyone else laugh.

  “The hell’s wrong with Andre?” Wayne asks.

  “Nothing,” Barbie says, still laughing.

  “Okay, so who’s playing Mr. Christaldi?” Dr. Horton asks, sounding tired.

  Javier raises his hand. “I’ll do it. I don’t mind getting beat.”

  “Yeah, you a little too into that, you ask me,” Barbie says.

  “I didn’t ask you,” Javier replies coolly.

  Wayne digs through the cardboard box and comes out with a yellow Nerf football. He puts it on the f loor next to Sandra’s chair. “I got my rock. Let’s do it.”

  We begin the role-play right before Healy punches Mr. Christaldi. According to Dr. Horton, that and everything that comes after is the “meat of the matter.”

  The theft itself and all the planning that went into it is something we’ll get to, “time permitting.” This is great news for me. The last thing I want to do is invite these vultures into Mr. Flannery’s operation. That would mean a whole new round of lying, and I’m crystal clear on how that turns out.

  Javier is pretty good at acting drunk, but he doesn’t look anywhere near as pathetic as Mr. Christaldi did that night. Christaldi was like one of those slow-moving f lies you could swat with your bare hands. Javier just looks like he’s stumbling home after a killer party.

  Wayne, though, has Healy down cold. He’s got the same f ire in his eyes, like he’s in control most of the time but one wrong move and watch out. That was the thing with Healy. He was great at planning. “Slow and methodical,” according to Mr. Flannery. Healy had a whole notebook full of information on Mr. Christaldi, so much he said he knew him better than his own friends. And he went over the plan with me about twenty times that night before we even rolled up to that cul-de-sac. Great at planning, but the second something went wrong, he lost it. You can’t be like that if you’re going to steal things for a living. Shit goes wrong and you’ve got to roll with it.

  “What the fuck?” Wayne calls out.

  Javier swings at him and misses. When he settles down and gets his footing again, Wayne tap-punches him on the side of the head. “Bam!” he says.

  Javier jumps and runs backward all the way to the wall—just like I wrote in my notebook. When he comes back toward Wayne with his f ists up like a boxer’s, Wayne picks up that Nerf football and taps him on the ear. “Bam!”

  This time Javier hits the f loor. Hard.

  “Okay right there,” Dr. Horton says. “Isaac, what are you thinking?”

  “Um, I’m thinking this is nuts. We shouldn’t even be here.”

  “But you don’t do nothin’?” Barbie says. “You didn’t try to stop it?”

  “It all happened so fast.”

  “Did it?” Dr. Horton asks. “Okay, let’s try it again. Wayne, Javier, I want you to slow it down. Isaac, I want you to put yourself in each individual moment and tell us what you felt. Not what you were thinking. What you felt.”

  This time through, Wayne stops after that f irst punch, the one without the rock.

  “Isaac?” Dr. Horton says.

  “Surprised?” I tell him.

  “Good.” Dr. Horton motions for Wayne and Javier to continue.

  Javier wobbles over with his f ists up. Wayne rears back real big, then taps him on the ear with that Nerf football.

  “Isaac?” Dr. Horton presses.

  “Afraid, I guess.”

  “What else? Close your eyes and take yourself back there.”

  I do as I’m told. “Frustrated,” I tell him. “Like . . . like . . .”

  “Go on,” Dr. Horton says. “Dig into it. Frustrated like what?”

  I try to put myself back there, lying on the asphalt underneath that car, with all those little rocks digging into my back, the vacant lot spreading out beside me like a dark puddle, the tow chain lying heavy across my legs.

  This is called “visualization.” It’s supposed to help you reconnect with the moment. They have all kinds of tricks to send you back to the worst moments of your life. You’re supposed to use all your senses. Remember how cold or hot you were. Remember what you heard, what you smelled. Smell is a big one. I can remember what it smelled like underneath that Escalade. Grease and gasoline. But I wish I couldn’t. If I had my way, the night of May 27 would disappear forever—not just from my own memory, but from everybody’s.

  “Isaac?” Dr. Horton says.

  “I’m thinking.” I know I have to perform for these people, give them something they can paw and pick through. Otherwise Ms. Jomolca won’t write up a good report on me. I remember the chill in the air that night, the sound of the wind in some trees, a helpless feeling, like an ache in my chest. Was it helplessness? Maybe not. I could have slid out from under that Escalade. I wasn’t trapped there. It wasn’t part of the plan to hide like that. But Mr. Christaldi hadn’t seen me yet. At least not my face.

  “I’m thinking I’m safe down there. I’m thinking don’t jump into this. It’s not yours.”

  “Hit him again,” Dr. Horton says.

  Wayne tosses the Nerf ball a few times then reaches way back to set up for the punch.

  “Stop,” Dr. Horton says. “That second. Right there. Could you see that he was going to hit Mr. Christaldi with that rock?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how did you feel?”

  “I guess I was thinking that—”

  “No, not what you were thinking. What you were feeling.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. There were so many thoughts running through my head that night. But what was I feeling ? I wasn’t sure I felt anything. I didn’t want to watch Mr. Christaldi die. I remember that much. I didn’t want to live with that. “Sad?” I say. “Maybe
I was feeling sad?”

  “Maybe?” Dr. Horton asks.

  “No. Def initely. I was def initely feeling sad.”

  “Why? What were you sad about?”

  “I guess because I knew what was about to happen to Mr. Christaldi and I couldn’t stop it.”

  Barbie snorts. “Couldn’t?”

  There isn’t an ounce of pity in those amber eyes. Just the heavy weight of everything she knows. But in that moment I know it too. It wasn’t sadness I felt that night. It was shame. Because I could have stopped it. If I’d have told Healy to put down that rock, he probably would have. Healy was panicking. The plan was blown up and he didn’t know what to do. I should have stepped up. It didn’t matter that I was the “junior partner.” I should have risen to the occasion. Instead I hid under that Escalade like a scared little punk and let Healy drive the whole job right over a cliff.

  “Right there.” Dr. Horton is pointing at me now. “That’s it.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever you’re feeling. That’s what we work with. Let’s go again, from the beginning.”

  We replay the scene maybe a dozen times after that, slowing it down, “digging into it,” trying to bring me back to that moment where I should have done something but didn’t.

  It’s not about solving anything or f inding the answer to why it all happened. It’s about breaking that moment down into the smallest possible parts. It’s not enough to say I was sad or scared or frustrated, or even guilty and full of shame. Those are just words. They’re “closed doors.” They want those doors opened. They want to know what all of those things feel like. In my muscles, in my head. In my chest and my stomach. They want to peel me open and shine a light into parts of myself I don’t want to face, parts I’ve buried deep. They want to make me see it all. When they’re through with me (and that blessed day cannot come soon enough), they’ll have me seeing things that will make me tremble with fear. That’s their promise. And I’m beginning to believe them.

  Chapter 18

  On Saturday a guard tells me I have another visitor. I never realized how popular being in juvie would make me. I f igured I’d be spending these thirty days alone, keeping my head down, enjoying the delicious food. I’m hoping it’s Janelle. But when the buzzer goes, the person who stumbles toward me kills any hope I had.

  My mother is hunched over, pale as a ghost, and even skinnier than the last time I saw her. The red roots of her frizzled blond hair are two inches long, and that’s not a fashion statement. That’s her spending her bleach money on booze. She has to stop halfway for a coughing f it that shakes the building. When she goes down the sinkhole, she does it in style. After she’s coughed up half a lung, she slides into the bench across from me and takes out her pack of Virginia Slims.

  A guard who must have seen this move a million times shakes his head at her.

  She glares at him, but she puts them back in the pocket of her dirty f leece jacket. Yellow with Playboy bunny ears sewn on the chest because, yeah, she’s def initely hot enough to work for that organization.

  “It’s freezing in here,” she says.

  She’s lost another tooth. That makes four. She looks like poor white trash in the best of circumstances. Now she’s starting to look like a hillbilly. I wonder if she pulled it herself, or if she found some way to get past her fear of the free clinic (“all the wrong people there”) and had it professionally yanked.

  “So where is she?”

  That’s her greeting. Not Hello. Not How are you? Not Are they treating you okay? or Have you been beaten and/or raped while incarcerated?

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “But you’re not surprised I’m asking, which means you know she ran away. So how’s that work? She tell you she ran away, but she didn’t tell you where she’s staying?” My mother presses her lips together, which brings out the smoker’s wrinkles above them. She is the oldest-looking thirty-two-year-old in the world. She looks more like sixty-two.

  The stupid thing is, it wouldn’t be that hard for her to f ind Janelle. She’s at school all day, for shit’s sake. Her name’s on a register. Then again, it’s not out of the question that my mother doesn’t know which middle school Janelle goes to, or what grade she’s in, for that matter. For once, her shittiness as a parent is working for us.

  My mother coughs again. “I don’t believe you, Isaac. That girl tells you everything.”

  “She didn’t tell me where she was. What does it matter anyway as long as she’s safe?”

  “Is she living in a car? Is she sleeping on the street ?”

  “All I know is that she’s safe. Is that why you came here?”

  She tries to run her yellow f ingers through her hair, but they get stuck in a knot. She’s drunk, but only a little. The smell of booze is strong but it can’t mask the cigarettes, and even those two stinks working together can’t drown out the stench of that vanilla perfume she always wears. What does she think she is, dessert?

  “Well, I came here to see how my son was doing, if that’s okay with you.”

  My mother will sometimes say the words son and daughter really loud like the only problem in our relationship is that we’ve forgotten how we’re related to her.

  “I’m f ine,” I tell her. “And so’s Janelle.”

  “Oh really. Did you know she’s been sneaking out of the apartment ever since you left? She thought I didn’t notice those plastic crates, but I did. Now what kind of girl goes out at night like that and doesn’t come home?”

  The correct answer is: the kind of girl who wants to be as far away from you as possible. But I don’t say that. I have to think strategically. If I play it right, this little visit could work out perfectly.

  “I know, right?” I say. “She can be so willful.”

  The word willful is straight out of my mother’s playbook, right next to spoilt, cushy, and charmed. The woman sincerely believes Janelle and I are living it up in some Disneyland of comfort and security, thanks to her ace parenting. That’s how divorced from reality she is. The two haven’t seen each other in years. My strategy seems to work though. She softens a bit, which leaves room for the one part of her wrecked face that still has some life in it—a twinkle of mischief in her eye.

  “Sometimes, I swear to God, I just want to knock some sense into that girl.”

  “Me too,” I lie.

  “She’s a good student and all, but she lacks common sense.”

  “Yup.”

  “It don’t matter what your grades are if you’re running all over town. You got to be street smart.”

  “Which she def initely is not.”

  Janelle is actually the best kind of street smart, the kind that stays off the streets. Janelle’s happiest with her nose in a book or her butt in a sports uniform. If there’s a half hour free between volleyball and choir practice, she’ll spend it in the school library, getting a jump start on the next day’s math lesson. Where she gets this I have no idea. It sure as hell skipped me.

  “She got a lot of her father in her, you know,” my mother says. “Always dreaming.”

  I nod along, like, yeah, I’ve always thought that about my father. Like I know anything about the guy. My mother won’t tell me shit, except how he ran out on us. She can get real specif ic about that. How she went looking for him at the donut shop where he worked, and his boss was all pissed about him not showing up for the commuter rush. How she couldn’t track him down because he never introduced her to his family. How they never had a real wedding because it was too expensive. To me, that all adds up to a guy who was never planning to stay. But it doesn’t tell me anything about who he is. She even burned all his pictures.

  Sometimes I look in the mirror and try to subtract my mother just to f igure out what he looks like. But it never works. All I ever see is her there, plus some extra pigment from my father. Other t
han that, he’s a black hole.

  “She’s not like us,” my mother says. “You and me, I mean. She expects too much. She doesn’t understand how the world works.”

  “I know. She takes everything for granted.”

  Another one from my mother’s hit list. Ordinary things like a roof over your head, sheets, and a toilet are not things a thirteen-year-old girl is supposed to expect. They’re luxuries, privileges. The undeserved gifts of a hardworking mother. Whatever. I let her have it. We need to be in league now, working together against Janelle with her “spoilt,” “unreasonable” demands.

  “So maybe this is a blessing in disguise?” I suggest.

  But she’s not buying it. Not yet.

  “I’m just saying, maybe she should get a taste of what it’s like without you to take care of her.”

  “Hah!”

  “See what it’s like in the real world.”

  “She’d never survive.”

  “And I bet you could use a break, right? Focus on yourself for once? Maybe do rehab again?”

  “Oh don’t start with that.”

  “No, I’m just saying—”

  “I do not need rehab.”

  “I know. I was just thinking maybe—”

  “You know what, Isaac? The last thing I need right now is a lecture from you. I’ve got enough going on.”

  “I’m not lecturing you.”

  “You’re always lecturing me. Yes, you are and don’t deny it. You think you know what’s what. Well let me tell you something—”

  “Mom, I’m just saying—”

  “Shut up, Isaac. You don’t know shit!”

  The same guard looks over with a warning.

  My mother absorbs his glare with a sniff, then lowers her voice. “Just stop bullshitting me, okay? I’m in no mood. Where is she?”

  And just like that I’ve lost her. I should have spent more time in her corner, more time criticizing Janelle. My mother’s favorite hobby is criticizing Janelle. How could I have forgotten that? I should have ragged on Janelle’s “stuck-up attitude,” her “self ish” demands, how “privileged” she is with her after-school activities—all the demented complaints my mother has about Janelle. They’re so insane it wouldn’t have cost me a dime to spit them back at her. But I rushed things and now I’ve lost her.