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‘What about the rest? Parents? Childhood address? Grade school?’

‘Why are you so interested in my past?’

Elzey’s lips met in something like a smile. ‘Me and Marko, we’re just askin’ questions here.’

Annabel took Mike’s arm and said, ‘Thanks for all your help.’

Kat was on her feet, watching anxiously, chewing on a backpack
strap. She scurried across to meet them. The whole way to the door, Mike could feel the detectives’ stares boring a hole through
his shoulder blades.

Three minutes past midnight, Mike sees the red lights against the window of the shared bedroom of 1788 Shady Lane and he knows.
The neighboring cot is empty; Shep’s been working as a bouncer at a crappy bar and won’t be home for hours, if at all. Mike
hears the Couch Mother’s steps thundering toward the front door, a quickening drumroll of his own mounting anxiety. He burrows,
wanting to bury his head beneath the sheets. On the plastic stool that serves as his nightstand rests a dog-eared copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
that some genius – no doubt Dubronski or Tony M – has scratched up so the cover reads
The rape of rat
. Around him the others stir. Mike thinks,
It’s all over
.

A half hour later, he is in the all-too-familiar interrogation room, and this time, there will be no kindly Saab-owning grandfather
to rescue his ass.

Yes, that is him in the security-still frame. Yes, he pawned the rare, stolen coin. Yes, he found it on the street.

As always, the detectives are faceless, nameless. They are adults in
Peanuts
cartoons. They are sounds and pointed information.

‘You’re a decent kid,’ they say. ‘We can tell. It’s not too late for you.’ They say, ‘We been looking at your record. Some
run-ins, sure, but a safecracking job? It doesn’t add up. Now, we know you’re buddies with Shepherd White, and that sounds
like something more up
his
alley. That kid is bad news. He’s going down sooner or later. You gonna let him drag you down with him?’

Mike thinks,
Loyalty
. He thinks,
Stamina
.

They say, ‘You’re on your way to college, trying to be a good citizen. Bright future. Shepherd White is a punk and a reprobate.
You do the math.’

But Mike is working out a different equation. He is still seventeen years old. Shep is eighteen, and Shep has two felonies
on his adult record. If Mike rolls on Shep, this will be Shep’s third strike, and he will go away for twenty-five to life.

Mike knows the options, and both scare him so badly that he has sweated through his communal T-shirt.

The detectives are unimpressed with Mike’s willingness to be exculpated. They say, ‘If you don’t want to play ball, here’s
how it goes. You’ve got a shit-stained rap sheet, and we’ve got an angry victim, one Mr Sandoval from Valley Liquors, willing
to say what needs to be said. Juries love safecracking cases; in this day and age, they’re quaint and easy to grasp. One way
or another, we will nail your sorry foster-home ass. Even if we have to take a loss on the burglary, we can make receiving
stolen stick as a felony. Which means you do time. So you better think long and hard about whether your pal is worth it.’

If Shep was present, he would speak up. He would serve a life sentence before letting Mike take the fall, because he is pure,
unlike Mike, who is fighting with himself to do the right thing and wishing Shep were here to step in and take the choice
away from him.

Mike’s throat is dry and tight. He says, ‘He is.’

The detectives are ready for this. They produce an application from Cal State L.A. and say, ‘Read.’

Mike reads question 11b, which is highlighted in yellow: ‘
Have you ever been arrested for, convicted of, or forfeited collateral for any felony or Class A misdemeanor violation?
’

They say, ‘That’s right. This won’t be done when you get out either. This is throwing away college. This is throwing away
your future. Think it over.’

He is arraigned the next day and makes bail.

At home, as he heads up the walk, Mike sees Shep waiting in the bay window. They go out back, plunk down on the rotting swings.

Shep says, ‘No way. I’m going in and telling them.’

Mike says, ‘You go in, you’re not coming back out, Mr Two-Strikes-You’ve-Seen-Me-Play-Ball.’

Shep’s voice, for the first time in a long time, is loud. ‘I don’t care. This is your life. This is
college
. I’m going in.’

‘If you go in, I’ll never come visit you,’ Mike says. ‘I’ll never talk to you again for the rest of my life.’

Shep’s face changes, and for one awful instant Mike thinks he is going to cry.

As promised, receiving stolen property sticks. The judge is tired of kids like Mike, and he is assigned to six months in the
Hall. The night before he is due to report, he asks for a moment alone in the bedroom. The others grant his last request.
Shep’s face shows nothing, but Mike knows he is devastated to be left out with the others. Mike cleans up around his space,
makes his little cot a last time, then pauses to take stock of the room. Resting on the long-broken air conditioner is one
of Shep’s shoes, so big it looks like you could sleep in it. The drawers of the communal dresser tilt at all angles, the tracks
long gone. There on the plastic stool is
The rape of rat
. He picks it up, runs his thumb across the tattered cover. Like the Saab, it seems to encompass everything he cannot have,
everything he is not, everything he can never be. He reaches over and drops it into the trash can.

Dubronski is in the doorway; Mike thinks the asshole has WD-40ed the hinges for occasions such as this. Dubronski has been
watching, but for once that fat bully face is not lit with schadenfreude. He pops a Jelly Belly for a sugar hit, plays with
his pudgy hands. ‘Hey, Doe Boy, I just wanted to say, this sucks ass. I always thought if you could make it, hell, maybe we
all
were worth something.’

And that makes Mike’s insides crumble in a whole new way.

The Hall is tough, but not as violent as billed. Mike knows how to fight, so he doesn’t have to much. But it is hell – the
hell of utter neglect. The others, his peers, represent every dirty part of himself that he never managed to scrub clean.
He watches his back all the time and suffers from vigilance burnout, waking every five minutes, spinning circles down the
corridors, keeping his back against the chain-link during yard time.

The third week he gets summoned to the head office, where the superintendent waits. She is not a warden. Just like he is not
serving a ‘sentence’ but a ‘disposition’, and the hulking guards are called ‘counselors’. All those soft names don’t seem
to make the time any less hard.

She asks, ‘How would you explain your state of mind, son?’

Mike says, ‘Scared straight.’

‘I understand you caught a bad rap. If you keep up the good behavior, I will make sure your time here is pleasant.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I will do my best to get you an early release. In the meantime don’t make me look stupid.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And when you’re out, don’t make me look stupid then either.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

A few days later, a pie-faced guard wakes him at two in the morning and mumbles the news: The Couch Mother is dead.

Details are scarce. The rest of the night, Mike sits on his turned-back sheets with his bare feet on the icy tile, a wall
of static blotting out thought and feeling.

In a hushed morning phone call with Shep, Mike learns that she had a stroke on a rare trip to the bathroom and cracked her
head open on the lip of the tub. She had a good heart, a strong heart to push blood through all that acreage. But still, all
hearts have their limits.

Hearing Shep’s voice jars something loose in Mike’s chest, and
he hangs up and walks down the hall to the bathroom and locks himself in a stall. He sits on the closed toilet, doubles over,
and sobs three times in perfect silence, his eyes clenched, both hands clamped over his mouth.

She may not have seemed like much, but she was what he had.

He is allowed to attend the funeral. Two sheepish uniformed cops, Mike’s escorts, stand in the back of the airless chapel.
As the service begins, the hearse from the previous funeral is still idling in the alley, visible through a side door, and
the folks for the next one are waiting in the reception area. Mike walks the aisle, regards the refrigerator of a casket,
and thinks,
I failed you
.

None of the foster kids will give a speech. The notion of ceremony, of formality, evades them all. Finally Shep gets up. Somber
in an ill-fitting dress shirt, he takes the podium. His mouth is a stubborn line. Silence reigns.

‘She was there,’ he says, and steps down.

Though the by-the-hour pastor frowns, Mike knows that Shep means this as the highest compliment.

Nine weeks later Mike walks from the Hall with a bag of clothes and forty dollars from the state. Shep is waiting for him
outside on the shoulder of the road, leaning against a dinged-up Camaro, arms crossed. Mike has no idea how Shep knew about
the early release date; he just found out himself the morning before.

As Mike approaches, Shep tosses him the keys. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Shep says.

‘Loyalty,’ Mike says. ‘And stamina.’

Over the next few months, he applies for a few real jobs, but that felony charge gets in his way, sitting there like a boulder
in the middle of a canyon road. So he gets a job as a day laborer, working with prison-release guys twice his age, hauling
soot out of firehouses. With his first paycheck, he hires a lawyer out of the yellow pages and has his juvenile record sealed.
But he soon discovers that while prospective employers can’t see his file, they will
always know that it
is
sealed. And what they imagine his transgressions to be, he gleans, is worse than the reality.

At a dingy downtown government office, he stands in line with a bunch of domestic-abuse victims to get his last name and Social
Security number changed. He is assigned a fresh number and a fresh surname, this time of his own choosing. He is Michael Wingate,
and he has no past, no history. He has a clean start.

He gets a proper job as a carpenter, and nights he presses shirts in a purgatory of a dry cleaner. He and Shep drift, riding
separate undercurrents. It is natural, gradual. It goes unspoken.

One day he walks past the window at Blockbuster and sees her standing there between Drama and Comedy. He stops to gawk. The
sight of this woman makes him hurt in the worst way; it makes him
yearn
. But he is too intimidated to go in and talk to her, so instead he goes home and lies awake all night, cursing his unexpected
timidity.

For the next few weeks, he goes back to Blockbuster before work, on break, between jobs. She has to return the movie sometime
– two days, right, then late fees? He grows convinced that she has sworn off rentals, that she leaves the house only at inopportune
times, that she saw him in the window leering like a stalker and was frightened into moving.

But one Sunday she reappears. Without figuring out what he is going to say, he rushes up to her in the parking lot, and only
then does he stop and ask himself,
What are you
doing
?
She appraises him, panting and speechless, and before he can utter so much as a syllable, she bursts into laughter and says,
‘Okay, lunch. But somewhere public in case you’re an ax murderer.’

Lunch lasts through dinner. Engrossed in conversation, they forget to eat, the food no longer steaming on untouched plates.
She works at a day-care center. Her smile makes him dizzy. She touches his arm, once, when laughing at something. He tells
her his story, unedited, in a single breathless burst, how he was six
kinds of stupid when he went into the Hall but has since gotten it down to three or four. He tells her about the Couch Mother
and the Saab Grandfather and the Superintendent Warden, how they all gave him consideration before he really deserved it,
how that probably saved his life, and how he hopes eventually to do the same thing for other people. He tells her he wants
to build houses someday. She says, ‘Dreams are a dime a dozen. But sounds like you actually have the backbone to get there,’
and he burns with pride and says, ‘Stamina.’

She lets him see her to her car, and they pause, nervous in the biting October night. Her door is open, the interior light
shining, but she stands there, waiting. He hesitates, desperate not to blemish the perfect evening.

‘If you had any guts,’ she says, ‘you’d kiss me.’

There is a second dinner, and a fifth. When she invites him over for a meal, he changes outfits three times, and still, to
his eye, his clothes look worn out and blue-collar. As she sautés mushrooms, he patrols her apartment, picking up a sugar
bowl, eyeing the rows of matching candles, fingering vanity curtains that are there only to provide a dab of lavender. He
pictures his bare mattress, his cabinet lined with cans of SpaghettiOs, the poster of Michael Jordan thumbtacked above his
garage-sale desk and realizes that no one ever taught him how to live properly.

That night they make love. She weeps after, and he is convinced he did something wrong until she explains.

She is very different from the girls he met during his tenure at 1788 Shady Lane.

At the movies one night, she giggles at his whispered joke, and the muscle-bound guy in the row in front of them turns and
says, ‘Shut
up
, bitch.’ With a quick jab, Mike shatters his nose. They rush out, leaving the guy mewling in the aisle, his friends looking
on helplessly, clones in matching college football jackets. Outside, Annabel says, ‘I’d be lying to say I didn’t find that
charming and exciting in a fucked-up sort of way, but promise me you won’t ever do something like that again unless you really
have to.’

That’s her – reverent and irreverent at the same time.

Confused, he acquiesces.

Later that week, exhausted, he dozes off at the shirt press and burns a tux vest. The customer, a coked-out dickhead in a
blue Audi, shows up on his way to his black-tie event. ‘Do you have any fucking idea how much that tux cost?’ Mike apologizes
and offers to file a damage claim. ‘And what the hell am I supposed to wear to
night
?’ The customer grows irate, leaning over the counter, jabbing a finger into Mike’s chest. ‘You stupid fucking clown, you
couldn’t pay for that with what you make in a
year
.’ The guy shoves Mike, and Mike sees the angle open up, the downward cross to break the jaw, but instead he takes a step
back. The guy’s rage blows itself out, and he departs, peeling out and flipping Mike the bird. Mike still has a job, his knuckles
aren’t bruised, and there are no cops to contend with. For days he basks in this small triumph.