Chapter Five

Tomás

Words.

I collected words like serial killers collected trophies.

I'd been assigned a tutor by the name of Dasher T which I thought was a stupid name and expected a matching stupid person. But the guy wasn't that bad. He looked almost like Bucky Barnes if you squinted a little bit. Much skinnier with the long dark hair parted in the middle. He wore a black t-shirt of a band I didn't know with a flannel over it and dark jeans. He also had forearm crutches and his jeans flared. He looked up at me and glared with those deep-set Bucky eyes. "You're late."

I was twenty minutes late. "I got lost," I lied.

He pushed a workbook in my direction. "You have forty minutes to get through those questions when you could've had an hour."

I sat down and flipped through the book. It had a lot of questions. "These are a lot of questions."

He looked at his watch. "Tick Tock."

Dasher was a good teacher but not patient. I didn't finish all the questions when I had to hand the book back. He got up using the crutches as if he'd had them all his life. "What?" he snapped.

"What?" I snapped back.

"Ask."

I shrugged. Even I knew it was rude to stare and ask personal questions about people's disabilities, religious affiliations, and gender. And never, ever, congratulate a girl for being pregnant. She could just be fat. Oops, I meant curvy.

When I didn't say anything, he slung his backpack over one shoulder. I reached for it on instinct to help him but dropped my hand when he glared at me. "Sorry," I said, feeling the need. "I was taught to help people."

Well, that was a lie. It was just ingrained in me for some damn reason. I always helped Mrs. Martinez with her chihuahua, although that furball always wanted to eat me. I'd helped Mr. Aquino mow his lawn when his son was out of town. And I once helped a little ole' lady carry bags into her car at the local food mart. Daniel had laughed his ass off at that one. Called me a pussy. But the lady gave me five bucks, so there was that.

Dasher glared at me and walked away.

During the several weeks of tutoring, I learned to be on time or spend the hour looking for him somewhere in the woods. I once found him in a tree house. A fucking tree house. Now, I wasn't scared of much … but heights and drowning.

"I was just three minutes late!" I had hollered up to the tree in the sky.

"That's three minutes! Now get your ass up here if you want to finish this book!"

I considered leaving him in his tower like some sort of princess, but I really didn't want to go back to Mx. Burnes and tell them I had no clue what the white elephant in that book meant, so … I climbed. And didn't look down.

It was my motto for the rest of the summer with Dasher. Climb and don't look down. Do without thought. Learn without question. Speak without reservation. His brain was filled with shit like that. And sometimes, his mind was a weird place.

Like when he decided to take me out at night. I'd never seen such darkness in my life. He'd turn off the flashlight and I couldn't even see my own hand in front of my face. That's how dark it got. And it was never quiet. But the noises weren't ambulances, cops, or guns, but frogs mostly. The nocturnal creatures of the night.

Up in his tree house one night, we laid out on the balcony to look at the stars. Dasher showed me the constellations and we talked about how astronomers calculated distance via time and light. He always had a lesson in his talks. The guy was super smart. Maybe smarter than Nick.

"How'd you get so smart?" I asked him.

"I had nothing better to do after the accident. It wasn't like I could go anywhere."

"How'd you get hurt?"

"Car accident."

"Well, your parents must be proud of you for being so smart."

He stayed silent. Parents were an off-limits topic of conversation at Arcadia. They were called sponsors. And we didn't have events to bring family on campus. We were dropped off and forgotten.

"Nah," he said finally, his hand up in the sky as if he were trapping a star in his palm. "I wasn't born a girl."

I didn't know what that had to do with being happy for his smarts, but I didn't ask. "This isn't the peaceful Arcadia like Dr. Casera wants us to believe, is it?"

He laughed but it wasn't a real laugh. "Do you know the story of Zeus, the Greek god?"

"I saw the Olympians on TV."

"Well, Zeus was a man-whore. Arcadia is where he stashed his illegitimate son from his wife who wanted to kill the bastard child. The son's name was Arcas. The story goes that Hera turned Arcas's mother into a bear because of the infidelity. One night, Arcas was going to kill her as the bear, not knowing it was actually his mother, but Zeus spared him of that and turned both of them into constellations." He pointed at the sky. "Ursa major and Ursa minor. The big and little dipper."

"That's fucked up."

"Yeah. This place isn't named after a peaceful place. It's named after a sanctuary for bastards. That's what we all are. Bastards born into a family who discarded us."

I turned my eyes up to the night sky. The dots so far away made me feel sad. What Dasher said made me even sadder because I realized why Maddox sent me here.

We were the throwaways.