The Magic at the End of the World (Do You Remember, Book 5)

Sunday, February 18, 2001

I'm pretty sure that mom is in big trouble.

Do you remember what I had said about her manipulating several people into thinking that Milton was being abused by his parents when the abuse was from his sister Barbara? I'm sure that karma, for some odd reason, has decided that she would go after my entire family.

But to be certain, mom and dad are kind of in trouble with almost all the other parents in the neighborhood.

Here's how that happened...

Well, Chief Bingham, as smart as he is, doesn't have much of a clue about what really goes on in Milton's life, just like mom (and by extension, dad). Yet the Palmer's next-door neighbor called the cops on the Palmer's live-in cousin because she had claimed to have seen the cousin molesting Milton. Push soon came to shove; now 22-year-old Leyla Palmer is sitting behind bars despite the fact that she was mentally retarded. Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, along with their children Caitlyn and Naomi, are now under scrutiny by the entire community. Milton is taken to the hospital, where mom yells at him for not standing up for himself and that "Jed would NEVER in a million years allow any girl to treat him like filth", as if she didn't have to deal with stopping any fights between myself and Jem while we were growing up.

Well, Milton tried to explain that he was in no position to defend himself and that he assumed that because Leyla was an adult and he was nothing more than an unwanted bastard, he had to do whatever she said. To make matters worse, Caitlyn and Naomi Palmer were not allowed to protect and defend Milton; they were also forbidden to tell anyone about what was going on at their house.

Ironically, it was Caitlyn who had alerted that neighbor, who called the police. Naomi told her grandmother, who told Mr. Palmer. Mrs. Palmer questioned both Milton and Leyla about the abuse, but she didn't get a complete answer from them. Chief Bingham (thankfully) intervened when Milton threatened to destroy mom for "throwing away her disabled child and replacing her with Jed". (How the heck did HE figure that out?? This story is so unrealistic!!)

Anyway, I'm sitting at home after church and Mary is playing with Hadley. Jimmy said to me, "Don't feel too bad, Jed. Your mom didn't know what was happening. How was she to know that Milton had been molested by an older girl?"

"I can't believe it," I said while trying not to throw up.

"You can't believe what?" said Mary.

"It's Milton," said Jimmy. "According to Jed's mother, he was raped by an older girl that lived with his new foster family. And that's right after Jed's mother had gotten him away from his messed-up sister..."

"I don't believe this," said Mary. "I can't believe this at all! What kind of sick bitch would do this to him? And especially when he's already so brain damaged that he can't even take care of himself? Who authorized this?"

"I don't know," said Jimmy. "Milton is now so messed up, I'm just praying that he doesn't decide to go around killing girls and women..."

"Or even worse, he decides that he's had it with girls and he's planning to go gay," I said while laying down. I'm trying not to cry, but my eyes are feeling like an ugly bloody red and my head was pounding like a snare drum. "Once that happens, there's no going back..."

Just then, the phone rings. We all tensed, wondering who could be calling us at this hour. It was Chelsea; she had learned about what had happened to Milton and was currently writing some very nasty letters to the Palmers and their neighbors, as if she wasn't already writing enough nasty letters to the city newspaper regarding everything that happened in the city from January 1, 2001.

Chelsea didn't speak long; she told us that for some odd reason, the Hispanic community stopped sending her death threats after a particularly nasty news article about the Caesar family surfaced on the newspaper's website. Also, everyone in the city now knows about the rumors that the children's show "Fantastic Scales" is causing autistic children to go crazy and kill their own families, friends, and random strangers. (Which Chelsea had started on her MySpace blog right after the meeting. The blog was immediately read by almost everyone on the site.) No one was safe; not even if they had the most secure alarm system in the world. Yet the TV station hasn't said anything about those rumors yet, so there's still hope that the show would be shut down at the end of the month.

Anyway, Claire shows up, saying, "You're not going to believe this!"

"What?" I said. "As if I don't need anything else to worry about right now."

"Nah, but the good news is that I finally know the real reason why you were outed when you were 8 years old," said Claire.

"What are you talking about?" said Jimmy.

"Well, there was an incident where years ago, Emilia's father was a lawyer for a family that sued the Lochland School District because their child was denied entry to Lochland Elementary School because their biological mother was mentally disabled and she was at Barlean," said Claire. "This leads a man named Zachariah Hamilton to reveal an ugly secret about the hospital, claiming that because of some policy set by a Doctor Leslie Carlsen, he had had three children named Jedidiah Hamilton, Spenser Clarke, and Brianna Johnson, all who came from Emily Williams. That scandal wrecked so many lives; I'm shocked that no one called for Jed to be returned to his mother when the story first broke out."

I laughed, saying, "That's funny, because Emilia basically told me the same thing not too long ago. Are you seriously suggesting that PAMELA was the reason why I was literally outed to the rest of the world?"

"Either that, or there's more to your story than we originally thought," said Jimmy.

"I see," said Mary. "What should we do about Pamela now that we know what she knows about me?"

"Maybe instead of sitting around and twiddling our thumbs, we can take a page out of Chelsea's book and write some very mean letters to the Palmer family?" said Claire. "We can shame them for harboring a child abuser, even if they didn't know about the abuse, and before you know it, it'll be game over for them."

"Well, we can't do that to the Palmers because we don't know them," said Jimmy. "But who's to say that we can't go after Leyla? After all, she's an adult and I think that it's time for mentally disabled adults to take some responsibility for everything they do."

"Well, that's a great idea," said Mary. "I didn't know why we didn't figure that out earlier, especially when we were dealing with that Craig Roberts. Now I feel like I have a giant egg on my face because I didn't see that Craig was an adult and he needed to be treated like an adult."

"While that's all fine and dandy, I don't know how the Palmer family will react to us calling Leyla out for all the awful things she did to Milton," I said. "I already know that Chelsea's going to throw her two cents in, if she hasn't done that already, and I already know that the Palmer family will experience some harsh backlash the second this story is exposed to the rest of the world. I can only hope that whatever kids who are living with the Palmer family don't self-destruct because of what's going to happen next."

Well, I'm going to admit that that was easier said than done, because I knew that once Milton is returned to his family, Mr. and Mrs. Holt will not hesitate to sue Mr. and Mrs. Palmer for everything they have because of their son's abuse. I also knew that once the story gets out that Mom tried to force Milton away from his family and called his parents child abusers, my place in the Hamilton family would now be in jeopardy...