Dead and Gone

That same night, Lune started looking for a seam in the fabric.

He found one so fast I didn’t trust it at first. I thought he’d look for a ventilation duct we could crawl through or something like that. But Lune told me to keep an eye on a kid named Swift. Not let anyone see I was doing it, but watch him close. I already knew how to do that.

Swift wasn’t one of the tough kids, and he wasn’t mobbed up. But he had a nice bunk in a good section of the dorm, and he always had comic books and candy bars. Even a portable radio—in fact, that was where I’d gotten my antenna.

I couldn’t figure out why Hunsaker’s clique hadn’t made a move on him, especially when it came time to draw commissary, but they never did. For sure, Swift wasn’t scoring off his parents; he never had any visitors. There were things you could do to get stuff in there, but he didn’t have enough horsepower to rough it off, and I never caught him creeping anybody’s stash, either.

It didn’t add up. I started sleeping most of the day, like the meds were really doing me in. Of course, I tongue- palmed the fucking things whenever they gave them to me, and I stayed quiet enough not to court the hypo again. So I was awake at night. All night.

In the dark, I slitted my eyes and watched, trusting Lune and his patterns.

I was watching real late one night—I didn’t have a watch, and there was no clock in the dorm—when Swift sat up. He looked around, real careful. I figured, okay, now he was going to make his move; now I’d see where he scored all his stuff from.

He got up like he was going to the bathroom, a big white place with hard tile and no door. He walked right past it, straight to the dorm door. The one they locked every night.

He pulled down on the handle, very slow and careful. And the door opened! I couldn’t believe it. I knew that they locked that door every night. And that the late-shift guard would walk by the giant wire-meshed window that gave him a good view of the whole dorm every couple of hours or so. But Swift pulled the door closed behind him and he was gone.

In another minute, so was I, my bare feet soundless on the filthy linoleum as I stalked him down to a long, dark hall where the floor switched to carpet. I knew where that hall led—right to the part of the building where the big shots had their offices. I figured I knew what he was up to then. I’d always wished I could get in there one night and do a number on all that nice furniture and paintings and plants and trophies and … all of it.

But everything changed when I ghosted around a corner and saw Mr. Cormil. We had to call all the guards “mister” or “sir.” Cormil was the guy who was supposed to be cruising by the big window, looking at all the crazy fish in the concrete aquarium. But he wasn’t doing that. He was doing Swift.

He held Swift’s hand like he was his father. They walked along until Cormil opened one of the offices with a key from the big ring he wore on his belt. They went inside. Cormil left the door open, probably so he could hear if anyone was coming.

But he never heard me coming. They don’t call it reform school for nothing.

It didn’t look like rape. Not to me. Not to a kid my age. Not to a State-raised kid who’d seen rape. It looked like … like Swift on his knees, sucking Cormil off while the guard leaned forward and stroked the kid’s hair. And then it looked like Cormil pulling his cock out and helping Swift stand up. And bend over. He smeared some greasy stuff on his cock and fucked Swift in the ass. But slow and gentle, talking to him like a lover all the while.

It wasn’t anything like I knew rape to be. There was no gun. No knife. No fist. No threats.

It took a lot of years before I understood what I had seen that night.

As soon as we were alone the next morning, I told Lune. He just nodded—you could see his mind was somewhere else.

“How’d you know?” I badgered him.

“I didn’t,” he said. “But I knew there was a pattern. Swift had things. He had to get them from somewhere. He was … special. How come? I didn’t know. But I knew, if you watched him close enough, we’d find out.”

“You’re a dangerous motherfucker,” I told him.

Lune and I didn’t speak the same language. He didn’t get that I was showing him high respect. “I just want to find my real parents,” he said, sadly.

After that, the only hard part about busting out was waiting for Swift to visit Cormil again. And keeping Lune from screwing things up. He didn’t know how to move quiet. And he was so nervous, I thought they’d hear his raspy breathing as we slipped past the room where Cormil and Swift were doing what they did.

But once we made it past them, it was easy. We dropped down flat on the carpet in the hall until they were finished. As soon as they walked back down the corridor together, we made our move. I loided the door to the big cheese’s office—it was nothing but a doorknob lock, no deadbolt—and we went inside.

I picked that room because I’d been in there before. That’s how I knew there was no deadbolt. And what was right outside the window. A parking lot. A parking lot outside the walls around the hospital where they kept us.

I opened the window, moving real slow against it squeaking, but it didn’t make a sound. The office was right on the first floor, and we dropped down easy. Then I pulled the window back closed.

The parking lot was almost empty—just a few scattered cars, and not a Cadillac in the bunch. The big shots wouldn’t be showing up for hours.

I didn’t know how to hotwire a car then. And even if I had known, it would have been a dumb risk.

I had nine dollars in singles. Lune didn’t have anything. I didn’t know where we were, but I could see it was out in the country someplace.

We could have tried hitchhiking, but it was too close to the nuthouse. And if a cop cruised by …

So we walked, following the road but staying in the darkness of the shoulder. I was looking for a place where