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shut down his ears. It was too weird. Somebody else did all those things, not Dylan. A monster got in. Maybe Rich was protecting that monster. His girlfriend. Vondra was always peeking out the windows at them and making up excuses to come by. Maybe she was psycho.

    Maybe he was.

    Voices washed around him as he sat straight and stiff and stared at the tabletop and tried to remember stuff—not the bad stuff—just stuff. Searching his mind, looking way back into the dark places where dead-and-over things were stored, he saw only fog, thick and white the way fog was from the machines they used in high school plays. But he wasn’t going to go to high school. Even a moron could figure that out.

    That afternoon the trial ended. “Dylan, the judge asked you a question!” Mrs. Eisenhart’s voice dragged him out of himself. When she called him, he was seeing a picture in his mind of the butterfly kiss his mom had given him that last night, the tiny gold cross she always wore cool on his cheek. It made him smile.

    “Look at him! He’s grinning!” a whisper hissed loud in the courtroom.

    “Huh?” It took him longer than it should have to make sense of what she’d said. He sounded retarded.

    “We are going into the sentencing phase now. Judge Farnsworth wants to know if you want to say anything in your own behalf.”

    Then he did a stupid thing. He meant to ask if the jury had found him guilty. He meant to say, “I’m guilty?” with the end of the sentence going up, so everybody would know it was a question. What came out was, “I’m guilty.”

    After that he got so confused he decided not to say anything else.

4

    Dylan was sentenced to a juvenile detention center in Drummond, Minnesota, until he was eighteen years of age. On his eighteenth birthday he was to be transferred to the state penitentiary where he would be imprisoned until the age of twenty-seven.

    The gavel rapped and the judge rose. Mrs. Eisenhart stood as well, chunked her papers into order on the top of the desk and fed them to her briefcase. Dylan watched as the leather jaws clamped shut on their catch.

    “That, as they say, is that,” Mrs. Eisenhart said. She found Dylan’s dead-fish right hand and shook it perfunctorily. “Call me if you need anything.” Clack, clack, clack, and the double doors ate her as neatly as the leather had swallowed the papers.

    A quiet man, maybe the bailiff, with a big gut and eyes that were kind even when he looked at Dylan, said: “Come on, boy. Let’s get this over with.” For a horrible second, Dylan looked around desperately for his mom and dad. The bailiff cuffed him, putting the manacles on carefully so the sliding part wouldn’t pinch his wrists, and asked, “That too tight?” This casual kindness was too rich to bear. Dylan couldn’t even say thank you and, seeming cold and ungrateful, he walked toward the door.

    As before—the before between the night the things happened and the trial—Dylan was put in rooms. Taken out of rooms. People talked over and around him. He held himself tight and still so he wouldn’t blast apart and hurt them with the shrapnel of his bones. Finally he was escorted to a big van, the kind church groups use, but with iron mesh and seats where handcuffs could be locked.

    For the first part of the four-hour drive to the detention center the bailiff rode in front with the driver. From what they said Dylan guessed the bailiff was getting a lift home. They pretty much ignored him, and when they did talk to him, they were nice enough. If he could have made their words line up in his brain, he would have answered them; but he couldn’t, and trying made the panic so bad he was afraid he was going to vomit. Then they’d think he was carsick, like a little kid.

    After the bailiff got out the driver started talking to Dylan. “So you’re the famous Butcher Boy, eh.” He didn’t sound mean, just making conversation, the way somebody might say, “So you’re Frank