Free Counting Backwards by Laura Lascarso

over me like sweaty, red-faced devils. It’s the same thing I did when the cops caught up with me, but I can’t explain that to them. I can barely breathe. Besides, I don’t think they care.
    They haul me to my feet and drag me up the hill. I laugh. They take me into the first floor and shut me in a time-out room, and my laughter escalates to semi-hysteria. I lie down on the cold, hard floor and grip my cramping stomach, trying to calm down, trying to breathe.
    Finally the laughing gives way to spontaneous giggles, then a steady he, he, he and at last, hiccups. I wipe the tears from my eyes and roll over onto my back.
    Now I’m angry.
    That a grown man tackled me—roughly, even by boy standards—and they stuck me in here just for running. Iwant to smash something, but there’s only a toilet, a sink, and a metal chair, all bolted to the floor. There’s nothing I can break, throw, or pound, except something of my own, and I’m too damn sore for that. Plus, there’s a safety outside the door, watching me through the reinforced glass, and a camera behind a cage documenting it all.
    I think back to when I was nine years old and this police officer came up to my car door window, asking me where my mom was. My dad was out of town, and we were parked outside a bar because she needed to get some money from a friend inside, but she’d been in there for a while—two hours at least. I should have just gone inside and gotten her myself, but I’d never been to this place before, and I figured if I just waited long enough, she’d eventually come back out.
    I didn’t want to answer the officer’s questions, but he promised me my mom wasn’t going to be in trouble, so finally I told him. The next thing I know they’ve got my mom in handcuffs, and they’re stuffing her into a police cruiser while I scream and fight with them. All I want is to go with her, wherever they’re taking her, I don’t care, just let me go. But I can’t because that same lying cop is holding me back.
    I spent the night on a cot in a complete stranger’s house, in a room crowded with kids, one of whom spent the whole night wheezing and moaning. I can still smell that room—like Cheez-Its and dirty diapers. It was a night I’ll never forget.
    I’ve got to get out of here.
    I stare up at the one fluorescent light, at the moth pinging into it, over and over again, trying to . . . I have no idea what it’s trying to do, but I feel like that moth, ramming my head against an invisible wall, getting nothing from it but a wicked headache.
    My throat aches with thirst, so I go over to the sink and drink till my belly sloshes around like a bucket of water. The safety drops in a tray of food—dinner—but I’m too unsettled to eat. I sit down in the chair and stare at my thumbs, which is an old habit of mine. Maybe it’s an only-child thing, but when I was little, I used to make my thumbs talk to each other. I’d even draw little faces on them, some happy or surprised, silly even. But I’m too angry for that now. My thumbs would just yell and scream at each other, like my parents. I stare at my thumbs for what seems like hours and try to remember what I was like back then. But I can’t. It seems like that part of me died without me even knowing it.
    Finally a safety opens the door.
    “Not so funny anymore, is it?” I recognize him from earlier that day, not the one who tackled me, but the one who first told me to stop. I glare at his mucky boot heels as he leads me out to the lobby, where Tracy is waiting. She crosses her arms over her chest and looks at me like I should have known better.
    “I left my dinner behind. Can I go back and get it?” I ask. I’m suddenly starving. Tracy agrees, but the first-floor safety tells me dinnertime is over and besides, it’s already been thrown out.
    “Seems you caused quite a ruckus out there today,” Tracy says to me on our way up to the third floor.
    “I just went for a run.”
    “Well, those boys