I am five years old, and I have been made to do something very wrong.
Mister Butch seems tired of sharing money with his friends after kicking me down the stairs. The last time he got mad because I hit my head so hard that I went to sleep for a long time. Danielle says I was on the floor all afternoon. Miss Gina yelled at Mister Butch about me and then she had to pay money for a nurse to come to the house and take care of me. Miss Gina and Mister Butch had a huge scary fight. Carl is still awful mean to me, and Mister Butch still kicks me, but not down the stairs anymore.
Danielle and I have been visiting a playground around the corner. I like it there. Other kids my age talk to me and play with me, and no one is mean. Some of the boys talk about a place they go in the mornings to learn about colors and shapes and letters from a nice lady they call a teacher. The place they go is some kind of kid garden, but I don’t know the word. No one reads to me in my house, so I do not read. Danielle has books from her school, and sometimes I look at the pictures in them and make up stories in my head about what the people in the pictures are doing. Garrison likes to sit with me when I tell the stories. He listens to me. No other grown-ups ever do.
Mister Butch and Carl have started to act weird. Since a few weeks ago, Carl looks at Danielle funny. He just stares at her whenever she walks through the house, running his hand through his thick, red hair, not saying anything. The way he looked at her made me afraid for Danielle, but I’m not sure why. He would smile as he watched her, but it wasn’t a nice smile. His smile is like the mean smile from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Then Mister Butch started being near Danielle all the time. He would stand behind her while we were eating breakfast and play with her hair. She hated it. She would always look at me while Mister Butch ran his fingers through her hair, and she would squeeze her eyes shut. Then he would put his hands on her shoulders and tell her how cute she was and how all the boys wanted to marry her and stuff. She would be too scared to say anything, so she would just wait for him to stop. One time she was crying, but Mister Butch didn’t see.
He never did that when Miss Gina was in the room.
Miss Gina has been gone a lot now. She used to stay home with us mostly, but now she says she has to go to work at a job because taking care of us costs a lot of money. She wasn’t always very happy or nice, but she was way nicer than Mister Butch and Carl. She seems smiley and happy when she leaves for work. I wonder if she’s happy because she doesn’t have to take care of me and Danielle.
Last week Mister Butch had one of his friends over when we came downstairs for breakfast. I’d seen this man a few times before, laughing and passing money after I would wake up at the bottom of the stairs from being kicked. Mister Butch calls him Rocko. He never talks to us, only to Mister Butch.
Rocko is so ugly that he scares me. The skin on his face is all lumpy and scarred. When I had the chicken pox, it left little holes in the places where the chicken pox sores were. I think Rocko must have had chicken pox on his whole face.
He has a long and jagged raised line that goes from the corner of one eye down to his ear. It looks like a zipper. He also has some weird dark gray words and letters painted all around his neck and shoulders. There are some scary Halloween-looking faces in the paint, and things that must be words. He has the same kind of things painted on top of both of his huge hands, and he always has black stuff under his fingernails.
Last week Rocko came to breakfast again, and he had a big box with him. It had all kinds of black wires and cords sticking out of it. Mister Butch carried the box upstairs and put it on the floor outside of our room. I thought maybe they were giving us a TV of our own.
I was wrong.
That morning during breakfast, Rocko walked upstairs and started digging into the box, and he asked Carl to help him. Mister Butch told Danielle that he needed her to do something for him, and he said he needed me to help. He was being much nicer than usual.
I was excited that he wanted my help with something! Danielle did NOT seem excited.
Mister Butch took Danielle’s hand and led her upstairs to our room. He told me to stay at the table until he called for me to help him. Smiling as I ate, I patiently waited for the chance to be the helper.
When he finally called down the stairs, I took two stairs at a time.
“I’m ready to help!” I said, running into our room. It was so bright in there, at first I thought I had gone in the wrong door. I didn’t understand why there were a bunch of lamps from around the house that were on in our room.
I saw Carl and Rocko just inside the door standing behind a big black square thing that sat on top of three tall metal sticks that went all the way to the floor. The black square thing had a cord plugged into the wall, and there were several buttons and tiny glowing lights on it. Rocko was pressing some of the buttons and moving the black thing around.
The black square thing had a part on the front of it that looked like something one of the boys had brought to the playground a few days ago. He’d called it a telescope. Rocko leaned in close to the back of the square thing and put his eye right up to a big hole. He pressed another button that made a beep and told Mister Butch that his camera was all set.
Then I saw Danielle lying on top of her bed. But where were her clothes? She must have been so cold! Her face was red and splotchy.
Mister Butch grabbed my hand and leaned down to come face to face with me. His eyes were squinty and he looked at me like I had just wet the bed again. He smelled like cigarettes and stinky armpit.
“Danny-boy,” he said, his voice low and scary. “You and your sister are going to help me with something. You are going to do exactly as you are told, and you will not tell anyone. Ever. If you disobey me, I will hurt you, and then I will hurt your sister, and it will be your fault. Do you understand me?”
I nodded, too scared to even open my mouth. Then Garrison walked into the room.
Mister Butch led me by the hand over to my sister. He said I had to take off my clothes and lay next to her, and then I had to do exactly as he instructed.
As Garrison walked toward me, I started to feel better as everything faded away to sleeping black.
Waking up awhile later to more beeping from the black square thing Mister Butch called a camera, I see Carl take off his Yankees baseball hat and run his hand through his thick red hair to get it up off of his forehead as he tells Mister Butch they’re done. Done with what? And why am I lying here beside my sister? Then Mister Butch starts unplugging the lamps as Rocko and Carl take apart the black metal sticks and return everything to the box and leave the room.
Now I realize my clothes are on the floor, and I have done something very, very wrong.
I cannot look at Danielle as she jumps off of her bed and throws her clothes on. She cries hard as she runs down the stairs and out the side door. I think maybe she’s going to walk to school, but she’s left her schoolbooks on her desk.
My green lovey blanket and stuffed elephant invite me to run to my bed and cover up. I’m not sure what to do but just lay here under my lovey. My body shakes and I can’t stop it, and I think I might want to throw up. Garrison isn’t here anymore.
“What have you done, Danny-boy?” A lady’s voice makes me jump.
Looking toward the voice, I see a woman standing by the open door. Her hair is all twisted up into a ball on the top of her head, and she wears ugly black eyeglasses. She has a pile of papers clipped on a wooden board resting in one elbow and a pen in the other hand. She looks meaner than the wicked witch of the west.
I start to shake and cry, and my tummy starts doing flips.
What have I done?!
“This is your fault, you know,” she says as she writes, her voice hard and sharp like a whip. “This will have to go on your permanent record.”
Permanent record?! I remember the mean man at the courthouse saying something about a permanent record, and I think Miss Gina told Danielle that getting into trouble at school goes onto her permanent record. I don’t know what a permanent record is, but it must be bad. I cry even harder.
Looking down at me from over her glasses, the lady stops writing. “Good little boys don’t behave like this, Danny. Do you want to be a bad little boy or a good little boy? From what I see, you are not a good little boy.”
Sniffing and wiping my nose on the back of my hand, I have a hard time making words come out. “I... I want to be good.” My voice squeaks like a mouse.
She smiles, happy with my answer. “My name is Kendra,” she says as she slides her pencil over one ear and holds her papers to her chest. “My only job is to make sure that you behave like a good little boy should. I will be keeping very clear notes about absolutely everything you do. Someone has to make sure that the list of naughty things is smaller than the list of good things. That is how I can be sure that you are a good little boy.”
My cheeks turn bright red as a heavy sense of wrongness and badness washes over me. “Are you going to tell anyone?”
Taking a deep breath, she smiles, but her eyes are still mean and scary. “Garrison knows that I’m here. He already knows everything. But I will have no choice but to tell other people if the things on the naughty list continue.” Spinning around, she stomps out of my room.
She can see and hear Garrison, too.