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the border of Wisconsin with other bad children, miles from the nearest hitchhiking road, surrounded by brown trees, trunks as thick as truck tires. All the doors are locked and you have to ask permission just to use the bathroom. They run it on a point system. Henry Horner Children’s Adolescent Center on the grounds of Reed Mental Hospital uses time-out rooms and drugged Kool-Aid and straps you to a bed when things get out of hand. Thorazine was big for kids in the 80s. They never let you speak in court. They keep log books full of your flaws. Pass notes about you back and forth, from social worker to case worker to therapist to hospital intern. They never let you read what they’ve written.
    I want to tell Ambellina something, but I don’t trust her. She squeezes the handcuffs closed on my wrists. She also has a blindfold, which she wraps over my eyes. She runs tape over my mouth and I start to shake my head no and scream but it’s just muffled and she’s telling me to shut up again but I can’t. I knock into the wall. Bang my head against the wall. Everything inside of me is black and rushing forward, stopping in front of that big wad of tape. She pins me with her leg while she chains my ankles. I’m telling myself not to scream but as I struggle the handcuffs get tighter, cutting the circulation to my wrists. I keep screaming strange, muffled sounds into this tape. I can’t control myself. My mouth fills with glue. And she’s slapping me and then punching me. “Stop it,” she says, reaching between my legs, squeezing hard, her other fist landing against my eye. “Stop it.” It’s like glass, like a car crash, like being held underwater.
    I’m on the floor and Ambellina is on the mattress, my face between her legs when she rips the tape off my mouth. I feel the skin of her thighs. It feels warm and it feels like it is everywhere around me and I’m floating and breathing somehow in this dark pool. “Do you want me to take the blindfold off?” she asks and I whisper no. But it hardly comes out so I shake my head no and she touches my hair. I’m damp. I feel her body moving around me and the dark room. I feel safe. She says something about her child. A girl. She sounds sad but I can’t make out what she’s saying. Something about her husband and her child. She’s very sad about something.
    ***
     
    In the morning Valerie has a black eye and I do too. She’s stacking plates. I heft a forty-pound sack of beans from beneath the counter. Somebody knocks on the door and then runs away. We’re still closed. My body hurts and I feel like I will never get better.
    “I don’t want to talk about it,” Valerie says. Valerie’s black eye extends down her cheekbones where it becomes yellow.
    It’s seven o’clock. We’re done setting up. Neither of us makes a move to open the door. A lady in black pants, a white shirt, and a blazer is knocking. Valerie stares at her but doesn’t do anything. Valerie shouldn’t worry. This is our café. I pull out a rag and rub down the display case. The lady knocks harder and pulls on the handle,
cack cack cack
, as the deadbolt rattles through the plate glass. “She doesn’t need any coffee,” I say. “She’s already awake.”
    But Valerie goes to the door and lets the woman in. The woman has a tight face that pulls forward to the tip of her nose, her skin stretched over the hollows of her cheeks, her mouth small and circular. She looks from Valerie to me, sees our black eyes, and decides not to say anything more than “One large coffee please.” She looks at her thin gold watch. “I’m late,” she says helplessly.
    The lady leaves but more people follow and Valerie and I run back and forth, turning the crank that keeps the shop operating. The junkies fill up the back room. We pour old espresso into the ice coffee jug, stack orange juice and mini-containers full of lox spread and white fish salad. Philc comes in at some point. He pushes the girl who is on the nod