T-R-O-U-B-L-E

≈ 4 ≈

You get used to the chair. It's just a thing that works. Get used to the idea that what once carried you has to be rolled around on wheels— that your body is a stranger. And people look at that stranger and think it's who you are.

So I live in my head a lot, deep inside. Remembering.

This place is nice. When I was at Grandma Mabel's I felt like I was nothing but a pain in the butt. My Dad didn't have much to do with her, when he was alive. So when she got sick and I got too big to lug around, she put me in a home.

They made you pray all the time. Once, when I got mad and started cussing, I got whipped. By a nun. When she got done, I asked her if Jesus would like watching her whip a kid in a wheelchair, and she really went nuts. I had to get stitches.

This place is secular, which means you don't have to pray or listen to all that bible crap. The aides are pretty nice, considering what they have to put up with. Some of the kids are really bad: sneaky, greedy, mean, smelly. But there are some I get along with. One big Paiute kid, Wayne, calls himself my boyfriend. I don't mind hanging out with him. When we're outside, he's always telling me what to look for— birds and lizards and stuff.

This place is out in the boonies, where the hills rise up towards blue desert mountains, all scraggly and sharp. With my window open I can hear coyotes at night. Early in the morning there are birds singing. Wayne tells me their names.

I was a pretty bad kid. I know it's my fault that Dad and Candy got killed, and now I'm stuck in a body that's busted. Sometimes, I feel like I'm still back there, in Death Valley, stuck in that cheap movie. My life that was.

Trouble or T-R-O-U-B-L-E, whatever.

I don't cry all that much, considering.