The habilitation supervisor in charge of Ronnie’s cell was a former Marine sergeant named Pierce, who ran a very tight ship, and was damned proud that his cell consistently had the highest output-without-returns ratio of any in the workshop. If you worked Pierce’s cell, you worked straight through, non-stop, no chatting, made sure you were back before either of your ten-minute breaks were done, and took no longer than twenty-five minutes to eat your lunch. Ronnie loved it, because it gave him something else to think about besides the Hurting.

But Pierce wasn’t going to be around to help Ronnie—oh, Pierce would be at the dance, all right, but odds were he’d make Ronnie dance with a girl if he tried to hide behind a punch bowl or the record player.

And so Ronnie dipped into his savings and took out enough money to buy himself a new tie and pair of shoes ($24.97 altogether) and spent the first thirteen days that February in a constant state of near-panic.

He also started to get angry—not that he yelled at anyone, or treated others with discourtesy, or was snappish, nothing like that, no; he began to get angry at the unfairness he saw all around him.

It struck him as unfair that everyone in his cell worked nine hours a day, five days a week, always on their feet (some of them skipping both their ten-minute breaks and lunch because they wanted to make more money), and for all that work, all that effort, for all their sore feet and bloodshot eyes and tired backs, they would be handed a pay envelope every two weeks containing maybe, maybe twenty-five dollars if they’d really gotten it “…the hell in gear” as Pierce was fond of saying (twelve dollars or a little less was the usual amount, a whopping twenty-four dollars for a month’s labor); it struck him as unfair that everyone who lived in the group home hardly ever had any visitors, and that the social workers who came to take them out to the movies or for pizza twice a month always seemed distracted, as if there were something else they’d much rather be doing; it seemed unfair to him that anybody felt lonely or stupid or unloved or unwanted; and it really, really struck him as unfair that each and every child from whom he’d taken away the Hurting had somebody in their lives who could have done something to help, to make it better, but for whatever reasons didn’t.

But what made him the angriest, what tore him up whenever he thought about it for too long, what gave him bad dreams and stomach cramps and dark circles under his eyes, what haunted him most of all was the knowledge that the people who had inflicted this Hurting, who’d brought so much pain and misery into the world, who’d treated the children worse than they would have treated a stray dog, these people went unpunished and probably smiled a lot like everything was just fine and went to sleep at night to find nice dreams waiting for them.