Kowalski sat, one knee crossed over the other, hands steepled, fingertips to his lips, pretending he could see through Dylan’s bones.
Dylan opened his eyes a fraction wider and cocked his head to one side. Kowalski recrossed his legs. There was a moth hole in his right trouser cuff. The left lens of his glasses was badly scratched.
Kowalski was in debt, broke, Dylan realized. Wednesdays and Saturdays the loser parents of loser JDs came to visit. Poverty oozed from their pores, leaked onto their clothes; they stank of it. Kowalski was stinking of it now.
Psychiatrists were rich; they didn’t go broke unless they were owned by something—gambling, coke, heroin.
Heroin had been the hot item in Ward C a few years back, but Dylan laid off the stuff. The first time it was offered him, he’d turned it down.
Draco asked, “Saving your virginity for the big house?”
Dylan missed Draco. He’d gotten out when Dylan was thirteen or fourteen, but they still heard from him occasionally. He was doing time in a California state prison for getting caught in a men’s room trying to peddle a dime bag to a cop.
Big-time drug dealer, going to “go ‘to the coast’ and sell coke to the stars.” Dylan smiled.
“I’m glad to see you’re in such a gay mood,” Kowalski snapped from his preshrink silence. He recrossed his legs and checked his watch—the signal that the session was to begin. “I won’t be able to come back to Drummond as often as I’d like,” he said in his reserved, we-both-know-I’m-God sort of way. “I have other commitments—a new job, better.”
Kowalski was lying.
In Drummond, lying wasn’t a sin; it was an art form. Guys in for more than a six-month vacation got to where they could tell when the shit was being shoveled. There was some natural talent nobody could see through. The retard Dylan had been in psych with was too stupid to know whether he was lying or not. Herman, a big Swede kid, dragged off the family farm for raping a ten-year-old girl—nobody could tell when Herman was lying. He’d learned it young, like a second language. Herman probably dreamed in lies.
Kowalski was an amateur.
“There’s no job,” Dylan said bluntly. “You screwed the pooch didn’t you?” Mostly he didn’t call people on their lies. What would be the point? He wasn’t sure why he’d done it this time. Maybe because Kowalski was
so fucking full of himself. Whatever the reason, the instant it came out of his mouth Dylan knew he’d joined old Kowalski in the pooch-screwing department.
Kowalski hadn’t come to Drummond to bid his favorite psycho boy good-bye; he’d come to do something or not do it. Dylan’s mouth had just decided Kowalski to do it.
“We’ve gotten nowhere with your . . . amnesia,” the doctor said. He leaned back and the frayed cuff of his trouser rode up over his sock exposing a white, nearly hairless calf. “Given that our time is limited, we’re going to have to take a more aggressive tack.”
The last time Kowalski had taken an aggressive tack, about a zillion volts of electricity had been pumped through Dylan’s head. Talk about amnesia. After that, he’d had a hell of a time remembering his own name, let alone what happened when he was eleven.
Rich had put a stop to it. Dylan was just a kid; his brother wasn’t all that much older. Vondra Werner was still driving him. The Saturday after Kowalski strapped Dylan down and fried his brains, Rich came to see him like he did every Saturday.
Not wanting to be a pussy, Dylan tried to suck it up, not let his brother see what a mess he was. He thought he was pulling it off until Rich started yelling, “What did you do to my brother? What the fuck have you done to my brother?”
Draco said it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Dylan sitting flopped over the table, limp as a noodle, drooling and babbling, and Rich standing on his chair doing the avenging angel thing. After that Rich got his adopted mom, Sara, to lean
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