Free Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 01 by Billy Straight Page A

you can pick up things extra-cheap because they don’t want to bother packing it up.
    I bought a green blanket that smelled of wet dog for one dollar and a sleeping bag for three, and I got the guy who was selling the sleeping bag to throw in a pocketknife with three blades, one of them a screwdriver, for free.
    Sometimes the people selling looked at me strangely—like, What’s a kid doing buying underwear?—but they never turned down my money.
    I bought a flashlight, two packets of AA batteries, some old
T-shirts, a sweater, and a round couch pillow that was hard as rock and rotted, a total waste.
    I spent thirty-four more Tampax dollars the first month. Adding the five I got from the dope dealer, that left fifty-four dollars. I found the Five Places and spread my stuff around them.
    I learned when to smile, when not to, who to look at, who to ignore. Found out money is a language.
    I made mistakes. Ate bad food and got sick, one time really bad, throwing up for three days straight, with fever and chills, and sure I was going to die. That time I was in a cave in Three, living with bugs and spiders and not caring. On the third day, I crept out before sunrise and washed my clothes in the brook. My legs were so weak it felt like someone was kicking me in back of my knees. I got better, but since then my stomach hurts a lot.
    I learned about prosties and pimps and saw people doing sex in alleys, mostly women down on their knees sucking on guys who didn’t move, just groaned.
    I realized that to get enough money so no one would use me, I’d have to be educated, but how was I going to do that living in the park?
    The answer I came up with was: teach yourself—meaning schoolbooks, meaning a school. A junior high, because back in Watson, I was in seventh grade, even though a counselor visiting from Bakersfield once showed me some puzzles and told me I could skip to eighth if Mom signed some forms. She said she would, but she never did, and then she lost the forms and the counselor never asked, so I stayed in seventh, and unless I let my imagination race around I was so bored my mind felt like wood.
    I found a Yellow Pages in a phone booth, took it back to the park, and looked up SCHOOLS. There were no junior highs listed and that confused me, so the next day, I called the school board, making my voice as low as possible and saying I’d just moved to Hollywood with my twelve-year-old son and he needed a junior high.
    The woman on the other end said, “One second, ma’am,” and put me on hold for a long time. Then she came back, saying, “Thomas Starr King Middle School on Fountain Avenue,” and she gave me the address.
    I walked over at noon. It turned out to be around two miles away from Place Three, in a grungy-looking neighborhood and gigantic—all these pink buildings with bright blue doors, a humongous yard surrounded by high fences. I watched from across the street and learned that school ended at 1 P.M., with tons of kids flooding out of the yard laughing and punching each other. That gave me a pain in my throat.
    One P.M. dismissal meant I could walk around in the afternoon and not get busted.
    I made a schedule: Mornings would be for washing up, eating whatever I’d put away the night before for breakfast, reading and studying, checking out the Places to make sure no one had found the stuff I hid. Afternoons would be for getting new food and whatever else I needed.
    I went back to King Middle School again, during ten o’clock recess. Kids were out in the yard, and the teachers I saw were talking to each other. I slipped in through one of the gates and walked around like I belonged. There were two separate supply rooms where the books were stored.
    It took eight visits to get what I needed.
    It was easy. Who’d suspect a kid would take books?
    I got myself textbooks for seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, some pens and pencils and pads of lined paper. English, history, science, math all the way up to