Free Black Box by Julie Schumacher

that kids didn’t listen to their parents anymore. He said that personally he was sick of it; he was sick of his son coming in late and going who knew where with his sloppy friends, all of them sloppy and rude like his son—they had no self-respect.
    The boy who must have been his son didn’t even react. He wore the hood of his sweatshirt pulled forward so that it hid almost all of his face, and he didn’t seem to notice that his father had spoken.
    Another crumpled piece of paper landed by my feet. I dragged it under my chair with my sneaker while the parents in the family that had agreed not to yell so much began to shout at each other.
    I reached down and opened my sister’s note. In the middle of the paper Dora had written the word
sad
(
ucf
) and crossed it out. Lower down and to the side she’d written
small
and crossed it out. Then, at the bottom of the page, in pinched-looking letters in the corner, she’d written
nospace nolight noair
.
    The blinking woman called a five-minute break. I put the note in my pocket and went out to the hall and found the girl with the homemade tattoo taking out some serious anger against a vending machine. “Do you have any money on you?” she asked.
    I had a dollar but told her I didn’t.
    Dora sauntered out into the hallway. “Look,” she said. “That’s Siebald. That guy over there with the little goatee.” She waved. “I guess he’s busy. He’s off to ruin somebody’s life now. Bye, Dr. Siebald! See you in therapy!”
    The tattooed girl laughed.
    “Why don’t you get a different doctor if you hate him so much?” I asked Dora.
    The tattooed girl answered. “Because all psychiatrists are crazy. That’s why they’re psychiatrists.” She looked at Dora. “Have you got anything on you?”
    I thought she was still asking for vending machine money, but Dora understood her. “All my meds are at home,” she said. “Sorry.”
    “Next time,” the girl said. She touched a metal stud in her lip. “How many times were you in?” she asked.
    “Once,” Dora said. “How about you?”
    The girl held up three fingers, then walked away.
    “I’d rather drown myself in a sink than go back to Lorning,” Dora said.
    “You wouldn’t have given her any pills,” I said. “Would you?”
    “What do you think?” Dora asked.
    “I think it would be stupid.”
    She grabbed my jeans by the belt loops. “And are you calling me stupid?”
    “No.”
    “Good.” She shook me gently, jerking the belt loops back and forth. “Everything I tell you is confidential, Lay-Lay,” she said. “Every single syllable.”
    I nodded.
    “You’re the only person I can trust. There’s no one else. I need to trust you.”
    I told her not to worry. She could.

40

    The good days outnumbered the bad ones, which seemed important. In my mind I tried to stack the better days against the days when I came home and found Dora in bed, or the day when I found her in the kitchen standing in front of the sink with the water running.
    “What are you doing, Dora?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said.
    I reached around her and turned off the water.
    When the Grandma Therapist asked me how my sister was doing, I felt it was important to be loyal to Dora, so I said fine.

41

    “Hey.” Dora’s friend Lila stopped me in the hall by a long row of lockers. It was a Wednesday in late October. Dora had been home for eleven days. “I just thought I should mention something. You know, maybe it’s none of my business. But Dora isn’t in class as often anymore.”
    “She’s been taking some sick days,” I said. “And sometimes she has a doctor’s appointment. It’s not a big deal.”
    “Yeah, I figured.” Lila removed a hair from her sweater. “But I’m talking about the days when she’s here at school. Like today. She’s in the building somewhere but she isn’t in class.”
    “What do you mean, she isn’t in class?” I felt as if my entire body had been dipped in a vat of cold