Outside I can hear the grunting roars of walruses that sometimes hang out on the beach up here on the north side of Swan. I’m so anal about anything getting into the room that it makes me jump a little, like the noise is going to break the darkness and ruin the copying process. It takes a second for me to realize the difference between sound and light. My mother liked to hike up here and watch the walruses after Lolly brought us all over, before they ditched me here. We went for a walk together pretty much every day. My mother asked if walruses would eventually evolve out of their blobby shape into something more elegant. I told her that’s not how evolution works, which just made us both feel like assholes. She was just making conversation. I didn’t need to be mean about it.

We’d been living outside Boston, my parents and me. It was a little communal organic farm in Vermont before that, but my folks got us kicked out. I didn’t have to ask why. Work was patchy in Boston and my parents were home a lot, which was the best incentive for me to go to school every day. It wasn’t that bad. The other kids let me keep to myself, and I even started to get interested in a couple of subjects, mostly English and French. Eventually a herd of my parents’ new friends started coming around, playing guitars and watching TV, smoking tina late into the night, making it impossible for me to sleep. I started missing so much school that I couldn’t keep up with the other kids and it was too embarrassing to go. The school sent letters but we all just ignored them until finally Child Services turned up. A teacher had tipped them off when I stopped going to school. As they snooped around the apartment, I kept trying to will the cockroaches to crawl back under the speckled beige countertops, but they were bolder than ever, like they were trying to get us in trouble. There was a little orange syringe cap on the floor but I don’t think they saw it before I kicked it under the couch. We answered their questions on our best behavior. My mother spoke to them sweetly about all my problems, insomnia, trouble concentrating, social anxiety, looking over at me now and then, like she was simply telling them things we talked openly about all the time, some funny, homegrown mystery that had nothing to do with her. My dad rubbed her back or squeezed her shoulder or patted her knee, all sensitive and supportive.

The narcs didn’t buy it. The second time they came, they took me with them. My folks were too fucked up to say anything; they stayed in the living room while I packed my stuff. Sometimes I wonder if they noticed at all.