“The Nazis used the letter ‘X’ to indicate a space between words,” she had said as she lazily traced circles around Patton’s breast with her index finger. “The Enigma machine didn’t have numbers, so they had to spell them out,” as she twined her legs with Patton’s. “The messages were terse—like telegrams. No unnecessary words.” And then they had proceeded to activities that also required no unnecessary words. Patton flushed slightly with the memory, but Nemo didn’t notice. His eyes were closed, though she doubted he was asleep.

Nemo had been fifteen the first time Jack cried out in the night. He had assumed it was a bad dream—foster kids, in Nemo’s experience, had a lot of bad dreams. But then he realized Jack was not in the room. Nemo had loved that room before that night. It reminded him of a room he had seen on an old TV show two or three homes ago—Leave It to Beaver. Two twin beds with a bedside table in between holding a lamp shaped like the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars—a detail that did differ from Wally and Beaver’s room. A desk under the window, bookshelves on one wall, an actual chest full of toys at the foot of the bed. Even a view out the window of that tiny, dusty backyard that seemed so luxurious. That room, as much as the presence of Jack and the bedtime stories of Mrs. Gerrard, made him feel that this home might be different.

He still had the scars, and could still remember the bruises, that marked his passage through his previous foster homes. He had been whipped with a belt on the backs of his legs. He had been thrown down a flight of uncarpeted stairs. He had been slapped across the face so hard that his vision was blurred for two days. Adults, in Nemo’s experience, existed to wage war on children. Lucky for them, every time Nemo had neared his breaking point and vowed to fight back, he had been removed from one home and placed in another, to begin the cycle of hope and disappointment all over. But now, in this room from a television show where the worst thing that ever happened was a slight misunderstanding, what could possibly go wrong?