Mixer and me got juvie. I finally realized what Mixer was saying that night when I got out of the truck: “We are fifteen.” They sent us to different places, but I can’t imagine his sucks any more than mine does. Juvenile detention is like a school you can’t leave. And it’s even worse than that, if you can believe it, because everyone in there has some kind of major damage, and they all think they’ve got to be cold-blooded 24/7. I don’t have it too bad that way. They think I killed a teacher, and I’m not going to tell them I didn’t.
Anyway, that’s my deal. I’ll be here for the next few years, and I figure I’ll have to move away from Soudley once I get out, in order to find any kind of a job and start saving up to buy that truck, the one with the plow on the front.
In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of time to kill. I finished that book, for one. That dude, Raskolnikov, he didn’t get away with it, either. That didn’t surprise me one bit. The dumbass gave himself up, confessed. They shipped him off to Siberia, which turns out to be a real place. I always thought it was just a figure of speech, sent to Siberia, like Podunk or Palookaville.
There was this one really cool line: “his dream seemed strangely to persist.” Sort of trippy, right? And thinking about what had happened, about Bones swinging away and me just standing there frozen and the red of the blood and all that…It really did seem like a dream now. As for persisting, that was a freaking understatement.
Anyway, once I finished the book, I wrote Haberman about it. I guess that was my way of saying sorry. I’m not going to write out the whole letter here, because it was between me and him. I mostly talked about his class. “I think I get what you were saying with the barrel and the words on the board and all that,” I wrote. “Like at the end of the book”—I threw that in so he’d know I finished—“the dude confessed, but even at the trial, he sort of had to convince them that he’d done it. And, I mean, they sent him away, but is it really ‘punishment’ if that’s what he wanted?”
Stuff like that. I know he got it, because you know what he did? That old dude sent me a carton of Camels, a full frickin’ carton. Do you know what a big deal that is in here?
That many Humpies in one place is like the damn promised land, but Haberman wasn’t going to use them. One thing about spending all that time in a coma is that it cleared all the nicotine right out of his system. He went cold turkey out cold, kicked it clean.
I opened that package and it was like Christmas morning. I read his little note:
I’m glad you liked the book. You are more gifted than you know, and this is still the first chapter for you. I wish you the best. As for the cigarettes, I won’t be needing them.
I folded up the note and put it in my lockbox with the smokes. Won’t be needing them? His loss, I figured.