If the stomach pump hadn’t siphoned out who and what he really was deep down, then therapeutic captivity made sure to extract and exhibit all his sentimental goo. At heart, he was just another angry kid with no self-control. A self-medicating, self-sorry brat with a dead mother and an asshole immigrant father. Cue the violins. On with the pity parade. Alongside the other inpatient kids, each fully acquainted with abject suffering and god-nullifying cruelty, Henry had no right to complain. At least Papa’d been merciful enough to spare Henry monkey-wrench beatings or a cock in the mouth. So Papa was distant. Strict. Screamed when he had to, rapped Henry on the back of the head when he’d really fucked up, which, admittedly, he’d been doing plenty of lately.

Henry flopped into the wheelchair, his head dipped in surrender. He lifted two fingers in a wimpy wave to the others in the TV room, and then the nurse wheeled him around the metal detectors, past the steel-barricaded doors, and through the Pine-Sol–stinking entrails of the hospital. The nurse’s tennis shoes squeaked on the salt-and-pepper linoleum, lending Henry’s retreat a rubber-ducky drumbeat. All of him went slack in order to funnel any remaining strength to his right foot. Under his sock, between big and index toes, he clutched a precious shred of paper folded down to the size of a pebble. He held his breath as if that might keep it safer from detection.

Papa hadn’t visited once since Henry got transferred to inpatient, hadn’t bothered to bring a fresh set of clothes, so Henry’d been given a choice. Either get rolled out to the pavement in the same scrubs he’d worn throughout his sentence, or else change into the clothes he’d had on in the ambulance two weeks ago. He decided to change. A dramatic flourish of his own, a chance to showcase the aftermath of Papa’s neglect. In a gallon ziplock bag his jeans were stale but fine. The t-shirt, on the other hand, was still crunchy with vomit, the bile’s curry wafting out the instant he unzipped the baggie. But once the nurse wheeled him out into the sunshine, even the stench of his own rot was washed away by the spring air, sweet with lilacs and an almost maritime brine baking off the asphalt. The nurse stopped them under the shade of the emergency entrance awning.

Softly, Henry said his first words to the nurse. “Mind if we wait in the sun?”

“Good call,” the nurse said, then released the wheelchair’s brakes.