I don’t know why I did it, but I got real angry at Seb. I told him he was stupid, and then I ran away crying. I didn’t want nobody to see me like that, but Thompson followed me.
He told me to call him Thompson when we were alone. No need for the mister, I guess. He sat with me outside for a while, and then he asked me to come with him so I did. He showed me his room, which was INSANE! Full of soda and candy and even TV dinners Mama said I wasn’t allowed to have all that much.
I told Thompson why I was sad and then he fed me one of them TV dinners. It was chicken nuggets, macaroni, and a brownie. He even let me have a soda and gave me that Dubble Bubble gum in the yellow and blue wrapper. I talked and talked about Mama’s new boyfriend and how I was scared he was gonna hurt Mama. I told him I missed her.
He hugged me real tight. Even smooched me right on the forehead. His mustache tickled real weird, so I pushed him away. When I did, he got all serious like the principal at school. He asked me why I was mean to Seb.
I told him I didn’t know. He said it wasn’t nice. I told him I knew that. He told me I had the prettiest hair he everdid see on a little boy. I told him I wasn’t little, or pretty. I was a teenager and I was handsome.
I got my first whooping today. Thompson said it was so I’d remember to be nice next time I felt like being ugly. I cried and yelled at him, but then he told me he got permission from my Mama to do it, and he said I needed to trust the adults. He only wanted what was best for me.
He let me watch TV for a while. He had his own in his little cabin, and it ran cable! We watched a scary movie Mama never would’ve let me see, so it was cool.
My butt still hurts. I think I got a mighty bruise on it. Thompson said it’ll be a good reminder, though. He called me brave.
Gotta trust the adults, right? Maybe I’ll ask Mama about it when I get home.
My stomach roiled. I didn’t want to keep reading. If I kept reading, I’d know the truth about the kind of people who were in the world. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know.
But I kept reading. For Crew’s sake, I kept fucking reading because if he had to go through it, the least I could do was learn about it. Learn what had broken Crew so badly. So as the snow kept falling, pattering softly against the windows in the living room, I kept reading, imagining I was melting with the snowflakes.
July 2014
Thompson was serious again today. I hadn’t even done nothing wrong. I’d been so good lately. I was good ’cus I didn’t want him to hurt me. I guess I still had lessons to learn. At least, that’s what he told me.
First, he gave me some of that gum again, and we played my favorite board game, Candyland. I hadn’t played it in forever, and TV got boring after a while. I won three times ina row, which got me real candy each time. Thompson said they were his secret stash for good kids like me and that I was the only one who had gotten one so far.
But then he told me to take my jacket off. Then my shirt. And my pants. It was the first time I’d ever really been scared of Thompson. When he’d give me whoopings, or slap my face real hard, it worried me and made my stomach hurt but this was different. He looked different. All red in the face and all smiley, too, even though he was telling me it was a new punishment.
Thompson said if I was good while he taught me the new lesson, he’d give me something better than candy as a reward. I didn’t know what was better than candy. I was too scared to say much else, and I don’t know why. It was like my hands froze, and so did my feet…and my head and my mouth and…every part of me. I got all tingly and my stomach felt like when I swung too high on the swing set and jumped off to the ground.
I didn’t like it much. He said he knew I was angry, even though I wasn’t. Said I had a look on my face? Whatever that meant. I just agreed ’cus I was too scared not to. Or maybe I was frozen? Like one of them big ice glaciers I saw in the National Geographic magazines at school. They look real cold and I felt real cold in Thompson’s cabin. Maybe it was because I didn’t have no clothes on.
I got a lotta bruises on my arms and chest and stuff. Places I gotta hide, which means no trying to learn how to swim in the lake. Mama still ain’t taught me, so I thought I’d learn here. I took the hits real good. Didn’t even cry. I wanted to, but I was too stuck to let them out of my eyes.
Since I did so good, Thompson gave me the reward he talked about. I didn’t like it. Not one bit. I didn’t even knowmy body could do that. Mama talked about it a little and so did one of my friends at school. Mama said I was a late bloomer or whatever that meant.
Did Thompson make me bloom? If that’s what it was, I didn’t wanna do it no more.
There wasn’t another entry for a while. Thirteen-year-old Crew drew a lot, though—large, unintelligible scribbles of a child crying out for help. There were frowny faces with fangs on their mouths and blood dripping from them.
One page was the same image over and over, depicting a knife being driven into what looked like a bed, right over the pillow. Another page had angry scribbles that made a dark background, the only tangible thing a view of the lake with what looked to be small canoes on the surface. One large figure stood on the canoe while a smaller figure—labelled “me”—was in the water, its limbs flailing.
Crew didn’t know how to swim. He was drowning in his pictures. And I was drowning with him.
August 2014
I don’t wanna do it anymore. I don’t wanna be here anymore. Thompson says it’s for my own good. How can it be for my own good when it hurts so bad? He says Mama can’t teach me this stuff. I can’t tell no one ’cus Mama would be mad and feel bad about herself. I don’t know if that’s the truth, but thinking about telling Mama what I’ve been doing with Thompson makes me feel icky. Scared. Frozen.
Thompson says its stuff adults do all the time. I’m special and need extra guidance, so I’m getting it early. I can’t tell no one ’cus they won’t believe I’m mature enough to handle it. They think I’m just a little kid.
Nothing he says makes sense. I hardly listen to it all. I just do what he says ’cus if he’s doing it and they trust himenough to make him a counselor here, then he must know what he’s doing, right? Trust the adults.
Trust the adults. Trust the adults. Trust the adults.
Thompson don’t always hurt me. We play games and eat sugar and chew gum and do stuff I’m never allowed to do. He’s nice to me a lot. That has to mean something, right?
I’m confused. Maybe I’ll ask Mama if this is normal when I get home. I won’t tell her that Thompson is doing that stuff to me. I’ll make it hypothetical or whatever they call it. Just to see. That way, I won’t be telling her nothing, and nobody will get mad. Mama works hard enough already. I don’t want her to worry about me.
