A List of Cages(13)

I nod, hoping she can understand that a nod means okay.

She asks me to take a seat, so I sit on the couch across from her orange cloth chair. It doesn’t look like the kind of chair she’d choose. Actually, as I take another glance around, I realize none of the furniture looks like it belongs to her. The small coffee table is purple. Her desk is yellow. Nothing matches, and it reminds me of a living room from a show that I must have seen a long time ago on Nick at Nite.

“Julian…” That’s the tone I remember: careful, as if she’s about to give me terrible news. “Do you understand that this is a safe place, and everything you say here is confidential?”

She’s being nice, but it just makes me more nervous, because she expects me to tell her things so personal that they need to be confidential. I don’t know what to say, and it becomes awkward, like it always does. Not because she looks annoyed or uncomfortable like most people, but because she’s not filling in the space either.

I start picking at the tip of my shoelace. The last bit of plastic comes off and falls onto the floor. Dr. Whitlock lifts the wastebasket toward me. I pick up the plastic and drop it in the can, then she tells me to choose a game from her shelf.

Board games were not something we ever did at home. When Mom and Dad and I played something, it was guitar or piano or pretend. But I know Dr. Whitlock likes games, so I choose Sorry, just like last year, because it’s the only one I know how to play.

I learned it from Russell’s nieces when we visited his sister Nora’s house one Thanksgiving. They were obsessed with it, but it seemed like a mean and unnecessarily sarcastic game to me. If you draw the Sorry card, it reads something like SORRY! NOW I’M GOING TO TAKE MY PAWN FROM START AND KILL ANY OF YOURS I WANT.

I set the game onto the purple coffee table. Dr. Whitlock opens the box and asks what color I’d like.

“Any of them.”

She frowns and already I feel like I’ve done something wrong. That’s what playing feels like too: not fun, because she’s watching as if she’s evaluating me on how well I play. And the thing about Sorry is that you can’t be good at it. It’s all luck, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to do well besides counting the spaces correctly and not landing on her when I have the option to do something else.

The only time I’ve ever taken out one of her pawns was when I got the Sorry card and had no choice. Even then I took out the player farthest from her HOME, so it wouldn’t be as mean. But afterward I found her watching me, not the board, and she looked unhappy.





IT’S DARK OUTSIDE, cloudy and starless, when Russell calls me into the living room and aims one long finger down. The hardwood floor is stained, spoiled, like footprints left in wet cement.

Earlier this afternoon I cleaned my shoes using something I found under the kitchen sink. They were gleaming white by the time I set them on the living room floor, but I guess there was still some bleach on the soles.

“You have to learn to respect other people’s things,” Russell says, his voice calm and steady.

“I do.”

“You do?”

“I’m sorry. It was stupid.”

“Yes,” he agrees. “It was.” He pauses, and my stomach knots while I wait for him to decide.

Then he says, “Go get it.”

I freeze for a moment, then walk to the massive cabinet against the dining room wall. Whenever we used to visit this house, my mother would always say how beautiful the cabinet was, the dark cherry wood with shelves of antiques and paper-thin dishes.

I open the long drawer at the bottom filled with lacy tablecloths and napkins. Underneath them is a thin willow switch. I watch my hand shake as I reach out for it, then return to the living room.

I put it in his outstretched hand.

There’s a sudden leap in his throat and the slightest catch in his voice when he says, “Take off your shirt.”

If I really had powers, I could turn off pain the way I can shut my eyes. But I can’t. I feel it. Skin doesn’t get thicker. Instead, it remembers. I know this is true, because the second the air touches my back, it starts to sting like the switch is already falling.

“Turn around,” he says.

This part is hardest. A billion years of evolution tells your cells to run. But you can’t run. You have to turn around and face the desert wall. You have to be still. He doesn’t care if you cry, but you can’t fight.

A sound fills the air, then pain so sharp, you feel sick. Slash after slash, cutting and deep, one on top of the other. They don’t stop until you’re screaming into your palms.





“I TEXTED YOU.” This is Charlie’s pissed-off way of saying hello when he gets to Government. He hefts a chair and drops it next to my desk—he’s too tall to fit his legs under one of his own. “Ms. Stone’s being a bitch.” Apparently Regular Chemistry’s no better than AP Chemistry. I can see another visit to Charlie’s guidance counselor in my future.

“I didn’t get it,” I tell him. “My cell phone broke.”

“You broke another phone?”

“I don’t even know how it happened. I guess it was in the pile of stuff I threw in the washing machine.”

“Idiot.”

Emerald and Camila breeze into class, whispering to each other in a way that looks more secretive than how I’ve ever talked to anyone in my life. Emerald’s shoulders are back like she’s a professional dancer. Below her flowing white dress, her legs are long and bare and strong like a Roman statue come to life. Her mixed-up-colored hair is in dozens of tiny braids that are somehow combined into a larger braid, and then all of that is twirled on top of her head. Sometimes her hair alone makes me think she might be a genius.