The Last Chance Texaco

by Brent Hartinger

  I ran my hands under the faucet, then gave the dough a few feeble pokes. It seemed pliable at first, but it wasn't really. Under the surface, it was stiff. You could push it, but it pushed back, stubborn-like.

  "Fold it over," Mrs. Morgan said. "Like this." She demonstrated, and I saw that she had hands like the roots of an old oak tree. I wondered how much of her life she'd wasted kneading dough. Hadn't she heard about bakeries? But I had to admit, the dough went where Mrs. Morgan pushed it and stayed there.

  I tried to do what she'd done.

  "Harder," she said. "And always in only one direction."

  I tried again. Mrs. Morgan just watched my hands. She didn't say anything, so I guess that meant I was doing it right.

  "I'm Mrs. Morgan," she said.

  "Lucy," I said.

  "I'm going to go over the house rules with you."

  "Yeah, I know."

  She kept watching, only now it seemed like she was watching more than just my hands. Suddenly, I was glad I hadn't showered or changed out of my bathrobe. If she didn't like it, that was her problem.

  "Okay," she said at last. "Stop kneading. Now we have to roll them into shape."

  "What are you making? Isn't this bread?"

  "No, it's soft pretzels. So we have to roll it out into ropes and twist them into shape."

  I didn't want to roll it out into ropes and twist it into shape! I wanted to eat breakfast and then maybe watch some television. How often did I get a day off? But I watched as Mrs. Morgan scooped up a gob of dough and began rolling it between her hands. In ten seconds, she'd whipped out a cord of dough about two feet long and about half an inch thick. Then she placed it on the counter and twisted it into a big pretzel, like the kind you'd buy at a movie theater if they weren't so damn expensive.

  "Now you try," she said.

  I sighed and reached for a hunk of dough. I rolled it into a two-foot rope between my palms, but it immediately shrank back to about half that size.

  "You have to be tough," Mrs. Morgan said. "Make it go where you want it to go. If you force it hard enough, it'll stay."

  I tried it again, forcing it this time, and it sort of worked.

  "Now twist it," Mrs. Morgan said. It was almost a command. What was she, the Kindle Home drill sergeant?

  I twisted it. Of course, it didn't stay in the right shape.

  "Press it down," Mrs. Morgan said, starting in on her next pretzel. "Be firm with it."

  We kept rolling and twisting, and I got better. While we worked, Mrs. Morgan went over the house rules. I won't bore you with them all. Basically, they were divided into two categories. There were the Rules and Regulations, which were all the picky little things you had to do or not do, like weekly chores and not smoking in the house. If you broke these rules, you got points, which were totaled up at the end of the week. The more points you had, the fewer privileges you got the following week--privileges like being allowed to watch television or go to a football game. If you did something especially good, or if you did extra chores, you could also earn tokens, which you could exchange for money or use to buy down your point total.

  Then there were what Mrs. Morgan called the Mortal Sins. These were the really important rules, like no weapons or drugs or sex and no sneaking out of the house at night. Break these rules, she said, and you could get kicked out of Kindle Home. She didn't say where kids went when they got kicked out of the house, but she didn't need to. I already knew.

  "Any questions?" Mrs. Morgan said when she was done.

  "Yeah," I said. "Now do we bake them?" Just as she'd finished going over the rules, we'd also finished rolling out all the dough and twisting it into pretzels.

  "No," Mrs. Morgan said. "We boil them first and then glaze them with egg whites. Then we bake them. But I meant questions about the rules."

  "Oh." I felt stupid. "No."

  She turned toward the stove, where she already had a big pot of water boiling.

  It was only then that I realized I'd forgotten about being hungry and wanting a shower. I'd never made pretzels before, and it was really kind of interesting.

  "Okay," Mrs. Morgan said. "Hand me the first pretzel."

  I gave her one. The adults at Kindle Home were all pretty different, I had decided. But none of them seemed too bad.

  That's what I was thinking then. Of course, that was before I met Emil.

  • • •

  That afternoon, I was alone in my bedroom reading when someone knocked on the door. I'd long since learned that counselors got suspicious whenever they saw a kid doing anything really unusual, like reading a novel, so I slipped the book under my bedspread.

  "Yeah?" I said.

  Mrs. Morgan opened the door. "Time for your session with Emil," she said.

  Every group home has a house therapist--someone who meets with all the kids once a week in individual sessions. Just so you know, in a group home, a therapist is different from a counselor. A therapist is the person you sit with in some room and talk to about your feelings. But "counselor" is the name for the people who handle the day-to-day operations of the group home--the cooking, the night spot checks, the wrestling to the floor of some pencil-wielding kid in the middle of a meltdown. Why they're called counselors I don't know, because they don't do any actual counseling. Maybe it's like a summer-camp counselor.

  Anyway, Emil was Kindle Home's house therapist, and I was supposed to have my first session with him that afternoon.

  "Sure," I said to Mrs. Morgan.

  The old woman led me down to the little room that used to be the library, just off the foyer. The door was closed, but there was a little bench just outside.

  "Wait here until he comes out for you," she said.

  I took a seat. I could hear muffled voices through the door, and I figured the therapist was in the middle of a session with one of the other kids, who'd since come home from school. I tried hard to make out the words, but it was all a garble.

  Just when I'd gotten tired of trying to listen, the door opened and Juan stepped out.

  His face was a complete blank. I knew that look well. I'd used it on Leon and Yolanda.

  "Lucy?" said a voice, and I turned to see a man in a beige jacket and Hush Puppies standing in the doorway.

  "Yeah," I said.

  He stepped back into the office. "Come on inside."

  Once inside, I saw he'd taken the armchair, leaving me the couch. He had a clipboard in his lap and was busy jotting down notes. "Go ahead and have a seat," he said, without looking up. "Give me just a second, okay?"

  I took a seat on one end of the couch. The therapist was the kind of guy who is hard to describe unless you're looking right at him, mostly because there wasn't anything very unusual about him. He had brown hair and a medium nose and average-sized feet and skin that was white, but not quite pale. He looked liked the actors who play ordinary dads or postal carriers in the commercials on television.

  I kept sitting there, minute after minute, listening to the scratch of a pen against paper. He would write, then stop and stare at what he had written, fascinated, like it was a bonfire in the night. Then he would write some more. Mrs. Morgan hadn't introduced herself right away either, but this felt different from that. This felt like I was being ignored.

  Finally, he stopped writing. He made a big show of putting his notes into a file and putting that file to one side.

  "There," he said. "Sorry about that. Now, then." Then he made just as big a show of reaching for a second file--my file--and taking out the papers and putting them on his clipboard. He took a long time, making sure they were lined up, perfectly even, in the very center of the clipboard.

  Only then did he finally look up at me and say, "So! I'm Emil." He almost sounded sincere.

  "Oh," I said. I would have told him my name again, but I knew he knew it. Since he had my file, I knew he knew everything else about me too.

  "So?" he said. "What do you think?"

  "Of what?"

  "Well, Kindle
Home." His voice was earnest and gentle--so why did he seem so impatient?

  '"Sokay," I said.

  "And the counselors?"

  "They're okay too." Suddenly, I knew my expression was even blanker than before. The window that was my face was locked, with the curtains drawn and the shutters barred. But it wasn't my fault. I was just getting a worse and worse feeling about this session.

  "Glad to hear it," Emil said, looking down at his clipboard again. "So. I've been looking over your file."

  My file already? So much for building rapport.

  "There are a couple of things that caught my eye," Emil said, settling back in his chair, flipping through the pages of my file. "I see you like a good fight."

  "I hate fighting," I said.

  "Oh? Linda Woodhorne might have something to say about that. Eight stitches and a broken index finger?"

  "She started it." She had started it. She was a kid in one of the foster homes I'd stayed in, and she'd had it in for me from Day One.

  Emil said, "Is that right? What about Moni Wright and Jessica Birgel and Jose Hernandez? Did they start their fights too?"

  As a matter of fact, they had. Moni had attacked me in the showers, and Jose had jumped me from a tree. Okay, so maybe I had punched Jessica, but she'd deserved it. Of course, no therapist had ever understood any of this. So I didn't bother trying to explain it to Emil.

  "I screwed up, okay?" I said. "That's why I'm here." I had screwed up. Not the fighting part. The getting-caught part. That wouldn't happen again.

  Emil glanced down at the file. "And then there's this Mark Wolton incident. At Bradley Home, they caught you in his room after hours. Twice. What were you doing?"

  "What do you think?" I said. I knew I was making it sound like Mark and I were having sex. Well, why not? That's what everyone at Bradley Home thought. It was almost funny how wrong they were. Mark was gay. I'd been in his room after hours--a lot more than twice, actually--because he'd been planning to shoot himself, and I'd been trying to talk him out of it. But once we'd been caught, I couldn't tell anyone the truth without also telling them something that Mark didn't want anyone to know. So I'd let them think we were having sex, and I'd ended up with another big black X in my file. Two weeks later, Mark had ended up killing himself anyway--probably because he no longer had anyone to talk him out of it.

  But Emil had already moved on to the next page in my file. "Tell me, Lucy. You clean?"

  So he'd saved the best for last. My Oxy addiction. Yeah, it was a big deal, and I don't have any excuses for this one. But it was also ancient history. I hadn't had Oxies for over a year. I'd decided they just weren't worth the trouble.

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Yeah, what?"

  "Yeah, I'm clean. You've got my file. Isn't that in there too?"

  Emil stared at me, like now I was the fire in the night--but not a controlled one, not a bonfire. No, like I was a wildfire--violent, out of control, threatening to take everything down. It was only for an instant, and then his face became completely expressionless, just like mine. But it was that moment when I knew that he hated me. I didn't know why, but I knew it was true.

  Emil closed the file and set it to one side. Oh, sure, now he didn't want to talk about my file anymore. Now that he'd used it to put me in my place.

  "Lucy," Emil said, and his voice had that fake-gentle tone again. "I'll level with you."

  He was very worried about me.

  "I'm very worried about you," he said.

  He'd seen cases like mine before.

  "I've spent a lot of time around kids. And I've dealt with kids like you before."

  He didn't think the signs looked good. But I was being given one more chance at this new group home.

  "You've made some pretty serious mistakes," Emil said. "But you've been given a fresh start here at Kindle Home."

  But he didn't think it would matter, because I was a complete fuck-up, and I'd be out of here before the end of year.

  "I really want to help you," he said. "That's why I'm here, to help you."

  Okay, so maybe he hadn't said that last part about my being a fuck-up and that I'd be out of Kindle Home before the end of the year. But that's what he was thinking. I knew that for a fact. I also knew that if Emil got his way, I would be out of there, probably in less than a month.

  In other words, Eat-Their-Young Island, here I come.

  Chapter Four

  The next day, Leon said he'd drive me to my new school. He told me it was so he could introduce me to the principal, and to make sure all the paperwork was in order. But he made all the other kids take the bus as usual, which told me he was looking to have some kind of bonding moment with me in the car.

  For a long time, we drove in silence. I stared out at the neighborhood surrounding Kindle Home. It was an older part of town where the thick roots of giant trees tore up the sidewalks in great big chunks. I saw now that Kindle Home had once been the biggest and most impressive house in the whole neighborhood, set back from the others like a king overlooking his court. But this king had since fallen on hard times, while his subjects had moved up in the world. With their fresh coats of paint and neatly trimmed lawns, the surrounding houses ruled now.

  Meanwhile, Kindle Home was still set back, making it look like the other houses were giving it the cold shoulder.

  "It sucks starting at a new school," Leon said at last. "Especially in the middle of the year."

  I just shrugged and kept staring out the window. I'd been right about Leon wanting to make some land of connection with me, but it was way too early in the morning for me to start baring my soul. Still, he was right about how lousy it was to start school in the middle of the year. By early November, people would already have made their friends for the year, and no one would be in a very let's-give-the-new- kid-a-break kind of mood.

  "And it's gotta be tough coming from a group home," Leon said. "I mean, word gets out pretty quick, huh?"

  I glared at Leon over in the driver's seat. "You know, you're not exactly cheering me up."

  He laughed. "Oh. Sorry." But the fact was, he was right about this too. At first, students and teachers treated you mostly normal. But by the end of the second day, the whole school knew that you were one of "them"--one of the kids from the local group home. They didn't know your name, but they knew you were trouble, and not just in a spit-wads and late-for-class land of way.

  A few minutes later, we pulled into the high school parking lot, and Leon turned off the engine. "High school is bullshit," he said to me.

  "What?" I said. I was surprised. I'd expected him to say something like just be myself and eventually people would see me for who I really was, and everything would be all hunky-dory. That's what group home counselors always said to you on your first day at a new school. But if I'd learned anything so far, it's that Kindle Home counselors weren't like the ones at other group homes.

  "It's important," Leon went on, "because if you don't graduate from high school, you're really screwed. It's a hoop you gotta jump through, and it's a really important one. But it's still bullshit. High school is about hair gel and sideburns and blue jeans and pom-poms. Most of the time, it's not about anything real. And it's not about who you really are." He looked over at me with an intensity that scared me a little. "You understand?"

  "Yeah," I said. I did understand, even though it was the exact opposite of everything I'd been told all my life. It was funny how you needed to hear the truth only one single time to know that it was the truth.

  I hesitated before getting out of the car. "Thanks," I said at last, and part of me actually meant it.

  • • •

  The minute I saw the inside of the school, I knew that I had bigger problems than just starting school in the middle of the year. Almost everyone was white.

  It's not like I'm racist or anything. It's just that the only time kids in a public school are almost all white is when they're mostly rich. And believe me when I say that it's rich kids, a
nd the parents of rich kids, who have the biggest problem with a kid from a group home going to the same school they do. I'd known Kindle Home was in a rich part of town from the look of the other houses. But I hadn't expected the neighborhood to be so rich that the parents didn't even have to bother sending their kids to private schools to keep them away from the black, brown, and red kids.

  Leon and I met with the fat, bald principal, who shook Leon's hand, but not mine.

  "Welcome to Woodrow Wilson High School, Lisa," the principal said to me.

  "Lucy," Leon said.