battle against injustice. He would protect and defend the unlucky ones.
And there was another reason the orphanage meant more to Cole than just brutal memories, and this had everything to do with his secret life in that cavity under the stairs. And then it had turned into a blessing, not having any friends, because it meant he could disappear and no one would notice; he could hide out for hours without being missed and no one would come looking for him.
It was at Here Be Hope that Cole discovered he could sit and sketch for longer and longer stretches without getting bored or distracted, as he used to do. And for the first time he understood that he carried this in him: the ability to shut everything out—not just the unhappiness of the moment but the past with all its pain and loss and the future with all its question marks—by concentrating on this one thing, which happened also to be the thing that made him happier than anything else he knew how to do.
He imagined this was the way someone like PW or Tracy must have felt when they prayed. He himself had not yet experienced such a feeling while praying. And not that he was saying prayer and drawing were the same, he knew that wasn’t right; but in his mind they lay so close they touched.
“I have here a newspaper article.”
Cole had known Boots was going to bring up the dog.
He never knew exactly where they’d found it. There were the runaways, many of whom you never saw again, and there were the kids who sneaked in and out whenever they felt like it and who sometimes stayed out overnight or even longer—and what were you going to do about it, kick them out for good? They came back with loot like cigarettes and vodka and weed, and bursting with stories about what they’d been up to—usually, if true, even worse than what they did at “home.”
They could have found the dog anywhere. The pandemic had orphaned pets, too, and you couldn’t go far in any direction without seeing strays. Stray dogs formed packs, some harmless but others a danger to anyone they happened to scent. Dogs didn’t get the flu, but neglect or violence had been killing them and other animals off by the score, their unburied remains yet another danger.
Kid Hammer and Dude Snake, brothers two years apart—with Dude Snake, though the younger, being the bigger and meaner—claimed to have hunted and killed the dog, but Cole didn’t believe them. Not that he didn’t think they were capable of this, but the way the muzzle was pinched said the dog had been dead a while.
The dog was dead, but they tortured it anyway.
“Then they cut off its head.”
A female. From the look of her—the thick skull and boxy jaw—Cole thought at least part pit bull. He’d been surprised there wasn’t more blood.
“They stuck the head on a broomstick.”
“Like with the pig in Lord of the Flies?”
“Yeah.”
He had never read Lord of the Flies, though his father had kept pushing it on him. When it was assigned in class, he had SparkNoted it, even though this was against the honor code (which, of course, no one took a molecule seriously), so he knew the story. His father kept saying it was the kind of book boys Cole’s age really liked, and Cole did know kids who said it was off the hook, but the notes made it sound boring. In any case, why would he want to read a whole book about bullies?
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. They kinda marched around with it. They took turns holding the broomstick and chasing other kids with it.”
After a day or so the lips had shrunk away from the teeth, giving the head a vicious mad-dog grin, like it was going to bite you and laugh about it at the same time. Another day or so and it didn’t even look like a dog anymore but more like some kind of wild beast or mutant.
“They propped it up in this closet, and they played this game where they’d catch kids and lock them up alone in the dark with it.”
Little kids. They would scream and pound on the inside of the door. Some of them pissed or shit themselves, or threw up. A boy named Arnie, who’d lost most of his hearing after having the flu, did all three before passing out.
“I understand one time it was you who got