“Hey.”

John looked up, startled out of his thoughts. Mary Alice Finney was sitting on one of the swings in the playground.

His hatred of her sparked like a flash fire. “What are you doing here?”

She said, “I didn’t know you owned the playground.”

“Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“I skipped.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, snorting a laugh that made him taste blood in the back of his throat. “Shit,” he said, putting his hand to his nose. Blood was coming out like a faucet had been turned on.

Mary Alice was beside him. She had a tissue in her hand—why did girls always have these things?—and she pressed it under his nose.

“Sit down,” she told him, leading him over to the jungle gym. He slumped on the bottom bar, his bony butt feeling the cold through his jeans. “Tilt your head forward.”

He had his eyes closed, but he could feel her hands on him: one on the back of his neck, one holding the tissue to his nose. You were supposed to lean back when your nose bled, but he didn’t care as long as she was touching him.

She sighed. “John. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

He opened his eyes, watched blood drip onto the sand between his feet. “Did you really skip school?”

“I was supposed to have a doctor’s appointment, but my mom forgot to pick me up.”

John tried to turn his head, but she wouldn’t let him. Mothers didn’t miss doctors’ appointments. It just didn’t happen.

“Yeah,” she said, like she could read his mind. “My parents are getting divorced.”

John straightened up quickly, seeing stars for a moment.

She was embarrassed. She clutched her hands together, the bloody tissue between them. “My dad’s been seeing this woman at his office.” He could see the tight smile on her face. Perfect Mary Alice’s parents were splitting up.

She said, “Her name is Mindy. Dad wants me to meet her. He thinks we’ll be great friends.”

John could hear Paul Finney saying this. The guy was a lawyer and he had the arrogance of most lawyers where he figured anything that came out of his mouth was the God’s honest truth.

John stubbed his toe into the sand. “I’m sorry, Mary Alice.”

She was crying, and he could see her watching her tears hit the sand just like he had watched his blood a few moments before.

He hated her, right? Only, he wanted to put his arm around her, tell her it was going to be okay.

He had to think of something to say, something to help her feel better. He blurted out, “You wanna go to a party?”

“A party?” she asked, her nose wrinkling at the thought. “What, with all your stoner friends?”

“No,” he said, though she was right. “My cousin Woody is having a party Saturday. His mom’s out of town.”

“Where’s his dad?”

“I don’t know,” John admitted. He’d never really thought about it, but Woody’s mom was away so much that the guy practically lived alone. “You could drop by.”

“I’m supposed to go to the mall with Susan and Faye.”

“Come after.”

“I don’t really belong with those people,” she said. “Besides, I figured you were grounded after what happened.”

So, the whole school knew about his trip to the emergency room. John had figured he’d get at least a couple of days before the story leaked out. “No,” he said, thinking of his father, the way he had looked at him this morning. It was the same way he had looked at dead Uncle Barry lying in his coffin, thin lips twisted in distaste. Glutton. Womanizer. Used car salesman.

Mary Alice asked, “Where does your cousin live?”

John told her the address, just three streets over. “Come on,” he said. “Say you’ll go.”

She wrinkled her nose again, but this time she was teasing. “Okay,” she said, then to give herself an out, “I’ll think about it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

OCTOBER 11, 2005

John was lying in bed at the flophouse, half asleep, when a knock came at his door. He rolled over and looked at his clock, squinting his eyes to read the tiny numbers. Six-thirty. He had another hour to sleep before he had to get up.

“Knock-knock,” a woman said, and he laid back in bed with a grunt. “Rise and shine, choirboy,” Martha Lam sang. The first thing he had found out about his parole officer was that she loved surprise inspections.

“Just a minute,” he called back, sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

“Not a minute, cowboy,” Ms. Lam insisted, her voice polite but firm. “Open up this door, now, you hear?”

He did as he was told—quickly—because he knew if she got it into her head she could throw him back inside before the day was out.

She stood at the door with one hand on the jamb, a cheerful smile on her face like she was happy to see him. She was dressed up as usual: pressed black shirt, gold lamé vest and tight black leather pants. Between her hoochie-mama shoes and the Glock she wore strapped to her side, she could be the poster girl for a fetish magazine.

She glanced down at the tent in his boxers, then gestured down the hallway to the bathroom. “Go on and salute your little general. I’ll just poke around on my own.”

John put his hands over his crotch, feeling fifteen. “I just have to go to the bathroom,” he explained.

She gave him that cheerful smile again, her southern drawl making her words sound polite. “Fill me up one’a them cups from the cooler in the hall, why don’t you?”

He made his way to the communal bathroom as quickly as possible, peeing as fast as he could, spilling enough into the specimen cup for the random drug screening, then hurried back to his room. Ms. Lam would be going through his stuff now, and even though John knew there was nothing for her to find, he felt guilty, terrified she’d toss him back in prison. Guys back in the joint talked about parole officers, how they planted stuff on you if they didn’t like you, how they were especially hard on sex offenders, looking for any excuse to send you back inside.

She was holding a framed photo of his mother when he got back.

“That was taken last year,” he said, feeling a lump in his throat. Emily was standing in the visitor’s hall at the prison. John had his arm around his mother, the dirty white cinderblock wall behind them serving as a backdrop. It had been his birthday. Joyce had taken the photo because his mother had insisted.

“Nice,” Ms. Lam said. John always called her Ms. Lam, never Martha, because she scared him and he wanted to show her that he was capable of respect.

She opened up the back of the frame and checked it for—what? He didn’t know, but he felt himself sweating until she put the photo back down on the cardboard box that served as a bedside table.

Next, she went through the paperback books he had borrowed from the library, thumbing through the pages, commenting on the titles. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles?” she asked, pausing on the last book.

He shrugged. “I’ve never read it before.” He had been arrested the day after Ms. Rebuck, his English teacher, had announced in class that Tess would be their next major paper.