Thrust: A Novel

After the first month and the second had passed, and she’d settled on the same black pencil skirt and crisp white blouse and black blazer to wear every day, she found her legs taking her back toward the library. Almost as if she were an ordinary visitor.

—

Her newest case was a lost cause. Dangerous, or so they said.

“That one’s yours?” the guard said. “Don’t even bother. He won’t respond.” Blotches of sweat stained the guard’s gray-blue shirt.

“Is that so,” Lilly muttered, looking past the guard at the boy-nearly-man standing awkwardly across the facility grounds. “Why’s that?” Standing out there with this guard, in this patchy shadeless yard, she felt the humidity weighting her breath. Why were there no trees, no bushes or shrubs? What few trees there were had been shoved out toward the perimeter, a safe distance. Even the grass looked like dirt.

“He’s a tough nut. Probably run out of chances. Kid’s fifteen — nobody in their right mind even tries to save a boy like that anymore. I’d say he’s in the system for good now. From here right into some institution.”

“Institution? He’s a long way from eighteen.” Lilly dug into the ground with the tip of her shoe. “When did he stop speaking?” she asked.

The guard removed his sunglasses, swabbed sweat from his forehead with his forearm. “ ’Bout two years in. Used to scream every night. All night. During the day, he just raged at anyone or anything he could. He’d fight with the other boys, cafeteria workers, counselors, guards. Then it all escalated. He started fires. He shoved another kid’s head into a wall so hard that one of his eyes popped loose. One day, the guard checking his cell found him trying to cut off his own hand at the wrist with a torn-up piece of scrap metal—shit, the blood. Came this close to losing that hand.” The guard kicked at the dirt between them. “See how his right hand hangs different?” He pointed through the chain-link fence to the boy across the yard. “Lost feeling in most of the fingers on that hand.”

Lilly squinted to focus her gaze. Sure enough, one hand looked loose and limp. The boy’s hair was shoulder-length, tucked behind his ears. Blond like wood shavings. She wasn’t close enough to make out his expression.

“Then one day — this was after every last object in his room was taken away from him, all but one flat pillow — he kept damaging property; walls, floors, you name it— he started saying, There’s a blast coming that will change everything. He said it to us, he said it to other boys, he said it to his caseworker. The caseworker before you started getting concerned, and come to find out, the boy had been communicating with some nutball latter-day white supremacists hell-bent on making trouble, thanks to some other kid who came through here who had connections with those idiots. So the caseworker alerted the Feds. It was around then that this one went silent. But his eyes… there’s a world of shit in those eyes. All you’re gonna get are the eyes. Whatever he knows, or doesn’t know — these boys, after a certain age, they’re just lost… When a kid like that starts to see that his own future has got nothing in it for him, he turns rageful. Fills up with whatever makes him feel like he exists.” He spit.

“All the same, I need to meet with him.” Lilly retrieved her own sunglasses and put them on. The guard just stood there, dull and thick and reluctant. “Now, please.” She glanced back across the field; the boy was already watching her.

As she and the guard walked back to the main building, the boy seemed to track their movements. She thought about what she’d read so far in his file: Single immigrant foster father. Child maltreatment. Poor family-management practices. Low parent involvement. And yet he’d achieved high grades — very high — in elementary school. Until he didn’t.

What put this boy in high-security detention was infanticide and patricide. Or so it was alleged.

The details were shadowed and layered, like some irrecoverable palimpsest. Some saw his case as prosecutable; others dismissed the boy as hopeless, a mental health casualty, with no known relatives, who’d slipped through the cracks. The evidence wasn’t much, but the boy’s fingerprints were everywhere — whatever that meant. (The alleged crime took place in his own apartment building.) If anyone had been around to give a shit about him, to take him in, he might have had an entirely different life. How the hell did he go from straight-A student, shy little misfit with glasses, possibly a savant, to this? There was no record of mental or physical illness in his files prior to the incident. No record of any trouble at all. Just a low-income immigrant foster father’s oddball son.