It was harder to get up into the tree than it was to get down. He tried three times to jump up and catch hold of the lowest branch, finally getting hold of it with his fingertips. Groaning and twisting he struggled to get a better grip and pull himself up. If his father came out of the house now he would be dead.

Fear helped launch him up to where he could get his leg over the limb. Then he was in the tree and climbing. It didn’t matter that it was dark. He knew every branch.

He needed to disappear. He needed to go to a place his father couldn’t find him. He would go to his safe place and wait out the storm.

He had to stretch out over space to get hold of the windowsill into his bedroom. If he slipped and fell he would probably die. He didn’t know if he cared.

Flopping through the open window like a seal, he fell to his bedroom floor with a thud. The sounds of a beating came up through the floor. His father yelling, his mother crying. SMACK! SMACK!

Dennis scraped himself up and went into his closet. In the ceiling was a trapdoor with a pull-down ladder leading up into a section of attic. He climbed up the ladder and pulled it up behind him, closing the trapdoor. From the attic he could go out a dormer window onto the roof.

Finally he made it to his hiding place. He could sit behind the old brick chimney, tucked up against the slope of the roof, and no one could see him from below. His father would never think to look there. At least he never had before.

Dennis sat there for a long, long time, cold and shaking. He had wet his pants when his father hit him. His lip was split and his chin was bleeding, but he didn’t care. He didn’t think about anything. He didn’t think about what was going on inside the house below him. He just stared at the moonlit speckles in the shingles on the slope of the roof.

After a long while he heard the back door, then heard his father in the backyard, calling for him and cursing at him. Then his father went back inside the house, and a few minutes later Dennis heard him moving around in his bedroom, still cursing.

Dennis could hear the thumps and crashing as his father searched through his room, tipping over furniture, breaking things, screaming at him to come out. But Dennis never moved, and he never made a sound. He never thought, and he never felt. He never wondered why his mother didn’t come looking for him.