The Home

SEVEN

Dinner was barely recognizable as food. It was served on the same beige fiberglass trays that every other group home used. The beige always bled into the meat and gravy, muted the colors, and made it all taste bland. Could be worse, though. Could be Pepto-Bismol pink.

The dining room was small, but Freeman managed to find a corner table off by himself. Dipes came through the line with his tray and briefly caught Freeman's eye. Freeman looked away to dodge any lingering gratitude.

Just keep on moving. Nothing to see here, folks.

Freeman definitely wasn't in the mood to collect acquaintances. The thing with Deke and the book had been a convoluted act of self-preservation. He wasn't here to serve as Defender of the Weak, Protector of the Innocent. Leave that to the comic book heroes and Dirty Harry. His job was to survive long enough to figure a way to get the hell out, preferably in one piece.

One of Freeman's house parents sat at the table, a couple of chairs down. Randy. He had that weathered, beefy look, the kind of guy who was probably smooth with the ladies until they figured out his IQ was equal to the number on his old high school football jersey.

Freeman concentrated on his mashed potatoes. Powdered. Why in the world did they have to be powdered? It's not like real potatoes were that expensive. Maybe the staff dietitian wanted to avoid the dark spots. You couldn't have specks in your potatoes when you were trying to build perfect people.

Randy leaned toward him. "So, Freeman, what do you think of Wendover so far?"

The dollop of potatoes was too small to hide behind. Randy showed teeth, the kind that could bite through his own leg if he ever needed to free himself from a steel trap. A kindness that could kill if necessary.

"It's fine, sir." Freeman stuck a generous forkful of mystery meat into his mouth as an excuse not to say more.

"You'll like it here. We have a lot of success stories."

And I'm sure you 're about to tell me some of them.

But Freeman was wrong. Randy's fork went up and down as steadily as if he were pumping iron, packing away the beige food and building biceps at the same time. Freeman scouted the room.

Bondurant was nowhere to be seen. No surprise there. A warden could eat with neither the convicts nor the guards. Many of the counselors sat together at a long table. There were no empty seats there, and Freeman wondered if Randy had been forced to sit with him. Short straw gets the loser kid.

At the next table over, a group of girls hunched over their trays, giggling. All except the girl at the head of the table. Her skin was nearly as pale as her ash-blond hair. Black eyes, large and moist-looking, stared down at the plate before her. The food was untouched.

She suddenly looked up, directly at Freeman. An image flashed into his brain, a single word: Trust. He swallowed hard, sending the bland and thoroughly chewed meat toward his inner plumbing.

That was weird. It's not like I was trying to triptrap her or anything.

But she was already staring at her plate again. Freeman took the opportunity to study her face. Even though she was a little sickly looking, with dark wedges under her eyes, she was pretty. Except, thinking of a girl as pretty seemed a little freaky. Prettiness made his heart light and his lungs stiff, as if he couldn't get any air into his body. Prettiness was pretty damned scary. Luckily, prettiness had always stayed a safe distance away. Bogart in Casablanca, wrong place, wrong time, that sort of thing.

He recognized the suffocating sadness in her eyes, though. He'd seen it often enough in the mirror. Maybe she hadn't yet learned how to shut it off, to bury it. But that was enough about her. He didn't want to be caught staring again. And he definitely did not want to fool himself into thinking he'd read her mind when he wasn't even trying.

Across the room, Deke was using his spoon as a catapult, flipping navy beans at some eight year olds. That was a tired trick. Maybe Deke had been here so long that he was behind the times, not up on cutting-edge goon techniques.

Starlene, the counselor who had taken him to the Blue Room when he arrived entered the dining room. She had a towel around her neck, and her hair was wet. She was dressed in a red sweat suit, looking like a generous Christmas stocking. Freeman wondered if there was a gym here and if she'd been working out.

She collected a salad and a cup of coffee, then headed Freeman's way. So much for splendid isolation.

"You feeling better?" Randy asked her as she sat between him and Freeman.

"No."

Randy waved a fork at her salad. "I'm surprised you weren't in the mood for fish."

"I only eat the ones I catch. Except for the undersized ones like you, then I throw them back."

That's when Freeman figured it out. Ms. Sweat Suit and Mr. Muscles. The perfect jock couple, a match made in SoloFlex heaven. They probably had his-and-her headbands back at their condo love nest.

Freeman concentrated on his butterscotch pudding. It blended perfectly with the beige tray, and was the first pudding in the history of the world that could have doubled as wall spackle. He could imagine Deke stowing some away for later pranks on Dipes.

"I don't care what you and Dr. Bondurant think," Starlene said to Randy. "I know what I saw."

"We can talk about it later."

Grown-up talk. Freeman tried to will himself into invisibility. Starlene noticed his discomfort and said to him, "Sorry. I'm having a bad afternoon. Even grownups have them from time to time."

"Except grown-ups don't have to apologize." Freeman immediately regretted smart-mouthing her. But Clint Eastwood mode wasn't something you could climb into and out of at the drop of a hat. You had to stay in character. Unlike Kevin Costner in practically anything.

"I did apologize, Freeman."

He tried to triptrap her, just for the hell of it. All he got were ringing ears and the jolt of a live wire slicing through his head. He might as well have slammed his forehead against the dining room's cinder block walls. Some people were like that, natural shields, and even with the ones he could read, there was no way to control which stuff he got. Sometimes it was whatever the person had watched on TV the night before, or a favorite character from a movie. Sometimes it was a sick relative or money and how to get more money. Sometimes…

Sometimes it was the kind of stuff his dad used to think about.

"Is something wrong?" Starlene asked, and Freeman blinked himself back into the dining room.

"I just saw somebody I thought I knew." He poked at the pudding, then glanced at the pale, blond girl. She was staring at him again. She was exotic, dangerous, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown.

Sure, something's wrong, Queen Starlene. Someday when you have a few years, maybe I'll tell you. Until then, ain't no shrink getting inside HERE. Because your kind always has to find something, and you always have to "fix " it, no matter if you break more stuff than you glue back together. So you keep on YOUR side of the table with Mr. Hunk-a-Hunka Burnin' Love there, and I'll sit right here, and both of us will get along just fine.

Just stay out of my head and we'11 be okay. That goes for you, too, Miss Spooky Skeleton Girl who hasn't eaten a bite.

A bell rang, and Randy checked his watch. "Yard time, soldiers," he barked loudly enough for the entire dining room to hear.

Deke slipped in a quick lip-synch in imitation of Randy, eliciting giggles from his goon squad. Chairs scraped and flatware clattered as the kids assembled to dispose of their trays. Freeman took a last stab at the pudding and slipped a forkful into his mouth. It even tasted beige.

Starlene smiled at him, an alfalfa sprout caught between her teeth. Freeman felt guilty for trying to read her. She was the only one here who had been nice to him so far. Maybe he could use it later on, play that particular character flaw to his own advantage. The best victims were those blinded by their own sincerity.

Freeman ended up in line behind the skeletal blonde. He wasn't sure if he'd slowed his pace to arrange the encounter or if it was coincidence. Her hair hung halfway to her waist and looked so soft it was almost translucent against her baggy black shirt. Freeman stared straight ahead hoping she wouldn't turn around and speak to him.

She scraped her plate into the garbage can. It was obvious she had stirred her food but had eaten nothing.

One of the counselors came over, a man in a vee-necked sweater and carefully trimmed mustache. "How was your dinner, Vicky?"

"Fine, Allen," she said.

"Looks like you had a big appetite tonight." Not a hint of sarcasm.

"It was yummy."

He patted her on the shoulder. "We'll have you up to fighting weight in no time."

Allen left and Vicky brushed her hand across the spot he had touched as if ridding herself of cobwebs. Freeman couldn't believe she had fooled the counselor so completely. Either she was smart, or Allen was stone dumb. Or maybe a little of both.

Freeman put his tray in the window slot. A conveyor belt carried the dirty dishes into the mysterious depths of the dishwasher's room. The churning of water and the hum of rubber belts reverberated inside the little space. Freeman stuck his head in to see if an actual human being did the work or if the system was automated like something out of The Jetsons.

Standing beside a large rack of glasses was the strange old guy Freeman had seen shuffling down the hall earlier. Maybe he was a janitor after all. No, not a janitor. Custodian. Everybody got a special name for their jobs these days so they could feel good about themselves.

The man didn't take any notice of Freeman. He probably saw dozens of kids come and go, change placements, rejoin their families, or have the juvenile justice system finally catch up with them. The man's blank eyes were undoubtedly a gift of evolution, a survival mechanism. The less you see, the less you know. The less you know, the better off you are.

Sounded like a pretty good philosophy. If the game was to be invisible, then the man in the dirty gown was a master.

Freeman tossed his fork into a pan of soapy water, then turned and found himself face-to-face with Vicky.

"By the way," she said. "You didn't accidentally read my mind. I read yours."

She walked away, joining the herd of kids gathering to go outside. Her next words slipped inside Freeman's skull without the benefit of sound: You 're not the only one who's special.