at home, which is probably supposed to provide some kind of, I don’t know, soothing for our tender emotions.”
“Psychological acclimation,” Luke said. “I guess that makes sense.”
“There’s good food in the caff. We actually order off a menu, limited though it may be. Room doors aren’t locked, so if you can’t sleep, you can wander down there and pick up a midnight snack. They leave out cookies, nuts, apples, stuff like that. Or you can go to the canteen. The machines there take tokens, of which I have none, because only good little girls and boys get tokens, and I am not a good little boy. My idea of what to do with a Boy Scout is to drop him on his pointy little—”
“Come back,” Kalisha said sharply. “Stop the shit.”
“Gotcha.” Nick flashed her that killer smile, then returned his attention to Luke. “There’s plenty of incentive to be good and get tokens. There are snacks and sodas in the canteen, an extremely wide variety.”
“Cracker Jacks,” George said dreamily. “Ho Hos.”
“There are also cigarettes, wine coolers, and the hard stuff.”
Iris: “There’s a sign that says PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY. With kids as young as ten pushing the buttons for Boone’s Farm Blue Hawaiian and Mike’s Hard Lemonade, how hilarious is that?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Luke said, but Kalisha and George were nodding.
“You can get buzzed, but you can’t get falling-down drunk,” Nicky said. “Nobody has enough tokens for that.”
“True,” Kalisha said, “but we do have kids who stay buzzed as much as they can.”
“Maintenance drinkers, you mean? Ten- and eleven-year-old maintenance drinkers?” Luke still couldn’t believe it. “You’re not serious.”
“I am. There are kids who do whatever they’re told just so they can use the booze dispenser every day. I haven’t been here long enough to, like, make a study of it, but you hear stories from kids who were here before you.”
“Also,” Iris said, “we have plenty of kids who are working on a good tobacco habit.”
It was ludicrous, but Luke supposed it also made a crazy kind of sense. He thought of the Roman satirist, Juvenal, who had said that if you gave the people bread and circuses, they’d be happy and not cause any trouble. He guessed the same might be true of booze and cigarettes, especially if you offered them to scared and unhappy kids who were locked up. “That stuff doesn’t interfere with their tests?”
“Since we don’t know what the tests are, it’s hard to say,” George told him. “All they seem to want is for you to see the dots and hear the hum.”
“What dots? What hum?”
“You’ll find out,” George said. “That part’s not so bad. It’s getting there that’s the bitch. I hate getting shots.”
Nicky said, “Three weeks, give or take. That’s how long most kids stay in Front Half. At least Sha thinks so, and she’s been here the longest. Then we go to Back Half. After that—this is the story—we get debriefed and our memories of this place are wiped somehow.” He unfolded his arms and raised his hands to the sky, fingers spread. “And after that, chilluns, we go to heaven! Washed clean, except maybe for a pack-a-day habit! Hallelujah!”
“Back home to our parents is what he means,” Iris said quietly.
“Where we’ll be welcomed with open arms,” Nicky said. “No questions asked, just welcome home and let’s all go out to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate. Does that sound realistic to you, Ellis?”
It didn’t.
“But our parents are alive, right?” Luke didn’t know how it sounded to the others, but to him his voice sounded very small.
None of them answered, only looked at him. And really, that was answer enough.
3
There was a knock at Mrs. Sigsby’s office door. She invited the visitor in without taking her eyes from her computer monitor. The man who entered was almost as tall as Dr. Hendricks, but ten years younger and in far better shape—broad-shouldered and muscled out. His skull was smooth, shaved, and gleaming. He wore jeans and a blue workshirt, the sleeves rolled up to display his admirable biceps. There was a holster on one hip with a short metal rod sticking up.
“The Ruby Red group’s here, if you want to talk to them about the Ellis operation.”
“Anything urgent or out of the ordinary on that, Trevor?”
“No, ma’am, not really, and if I’m intruding, I can come back later.”
“You’re fine, just give me a minute. Our residents are giving the new boy a backgrounder. Come and watch. The mixture of myth and observation