Six more minutes. She takes a deep breath and stares at her reflection in the warped mirror. This courthouse bathroom looks like it never gets cleaned; every speck of that old tile would probably set off the black-light pee detector. Cooties in the air and on the old tall radiators, and metal doors all scratched up with initials and nasty graffiti: Tony sucks. Patty fucks. For a good time call the asshole in office 247. Rick is a dick. Put a ring on it. Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m a schizophrenic and so am I.

Now, she opens her phone and listens. “Hello, Ms. Lassiter. Harvey is safe—don’t want to alarm you. But I do need to speak to you again about his behavior.” Pause. “He’s saying some things that upset some of the other children, and I’d like to help you figure this out.” She stares up at the ceiling, where there are wet glops of toilet paper, and tries not to cry. Someone drew a penis in lipstick on the mirror, and someone else drew a cross on the wall, asking that we all be forgiven. Three minutes. “Please call me as soon as you can. Thanks.”

Shelley wipes her eyes and heads out and into the courtroom, takes her seat, and waits, hands on the keyboard ready to go, like on the starting line of a race, like waiting for the spelling bee word to be called; on your mark, get set. The room is filled to capacity, the final act. The man’s wife has returned to hear the verdict, but all those women who were called to testify are absent. The friend of the murdered woman, the one raising that orphaned son, is there in the front, and so are all the people from the retirement home who knew the young woman, who loved her, who called her “our girl.”

Shelley shouldn’t have said “accident” to the judge. What a stupid thing to say, and yet that word seems to fill her life these days and the judge acts like she knows things about her. Does she? Because lately, Shelley can’t stop thinking about her brother and how he looked all those years ago, his shirt torn and face bloody, and how he whispered, “It was an accident,” and how just last night, Harvey showed up scared and bare-legged and crawled into her bed in the middle of the night. “I had an accident,” he whispered, and she told him it was okay, everything would be okay, and just try to get some sleep, but he kept talking; he was thinking of the Munchkins and how sad it was that they had to sit on that porch all day long and couldn’t do anything when people were mean and said hateful things.

“They cussed,” he whispered. “Jason said the Munchkins cussed all kinds of bad words.”