Dora: A Headcase (21 page)

My ass buzzes. I pull it out. It’s a text. Ida, please call me.

Mother.

“Let’s just go over the steps again,” Little Teena says.

“Yay!” Ave Maria goes.

I laugh but nothing sounds.

“Step one. Enter and distract intake person. Me at desk, Ave Maria hanging back with spooky sister.”

“Check!” Ave Maria sings.

“Step two. Engage script and hand over paperwork to move toward entrance.”

“Check!” An octave higher.

“Step three. Gain entrance, knock the intaker in the head from behind, get Obsidian.”

“Double check!” Ave Maria operatically sings, then says “can I hit the whoever it is with a Coke bottle? There’s an old-school Coke bottle back here – my mom loves this little Mexican market where they sell the old-school Coke bottles.” She hold it up. “Aren’t they cute? They’re little!”

I look over at Little Teena. Then back at Ave Maria. They continue their fake dialogue and their step rehearsals in their fake hair in Ave Maria’s mom’s Jag. Love isn’t what you were ever expecting. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. No voice I mean. I smile. Little Teena interprets the silence correctly. Ave Maria pets my sketchy hair. I shove the last of the bacon in my mouth. It’s salty and rubbery yet crisp. What is bacon but fat and gristle and thin strips of ass meat?

Tastes like … family.

THE HALFWAY HOUSE LOOKS LIKE ONE OF THOSE GROUP homes for tards. You’ve seen them, usually a two-story dingy dark gray number with security bars on the windows and doors and dead grass for yard contained by a crappy-ass chain link fence.

This one has what looks like a tall surveillance mechanism posted sentry-like near the entrance, but on closer inspection? It’s just a goddamn bug zapper.

“Google Earth it,” Ave Maria says from the back seat of the Jag.

Little Teena does. We’re parked about two blocks away. We put our three heads together in the back of the Jag and study the halfway house on the laptop. Pretty much one way in and out. Through the front. Though fire code probably means there’s a back door. It’s the law. It’s bad to let teens burn up. Hard to get social services funding if you, you know, bar-b-que them. So there must be a back exit.

I delete my mother and text on my cell to Little Teena: Can you hack in? Surveillance?

Christ. It looks like somebody’s big huge crackhouse.

Little Teena taps away at the laptop keyboard. Bless the fingers of Little Teena. He chuckles. “All they’ve got going on is like a series of nanny cams. And electronic locks that are … lemme see … ha. Morons. The electronic locks are all controlled at the front desk. They’ve got a password tumbler from like the
Starsky and Hutch
years.” He continues typing code.

“Why, it’s just a dumbass little meanness hotel!” Ave Maria pipes.

“Oh my fucking god,” Little Teena says. “Their password? Get this. Their password is … PASSWORD. I can unlock everything from here and disable their idiotic “safety system” without them even knowing it. Fucking figures. Department of Juvenile Justice? I salute you!” Little Teena salutes the air. “Dumb douches.”

Before we leave the car, I text them both: Hatha Breathing. They know because I taught them. We all close our eyes and hold hands. We breathe in for seven seconds. We hold it for seven seconds. We breathe out for seven seconds. We picture the ocean. We do it seven times. When we open our eyes, we are our characters.

As we walk toward the entrance I can hear bugs die zap deaths in the bug zapper. My role is of course to look troubled, dejected, like I might lash out.

Tough gig, huh.

Little Teena carries his air of authority, his clipboard, his fake wad of papers.

Ave Maria fiddles with her eyepatch. I slap her hand away from her face. “Sorry,” she goes, and then sports a distraught sister face so fast it takes my breath away. Right before we get to the entrance, Ave Maria grabs both of our arms and whisper sings, “You guys? You guys rock!” Then she kisses each of our hands and immediately returns to her role. She’s gonna make an awesome mom someday.

Upon entering it’s clear that “intake” is bogus. Some fat ass guy in a white man jumpsuit with – I shit you not – a box of half-eaten powdered donuts is at the front desk. The computer system? Dell. You heard me. What kind of a monkeyfuck operation is this? Dell computers? This is going to be like taking candy from geriatrics.

Little Teena assesses the situation about as quickly as I do, and launches smoothly into his spiel. “Got an emergency intake on a transport from Bellevue. They can’t take her up at Chelan
so we had to come here. Full up at Chelan. Christ. Kids these days, huh?” Little Teena jams the exquisite pile of false paperwork and the clipboard at the fat ass.

So far everything is proceeding according to the steps.

“I didn’t get any call about an intake tonight. You just hold on here,” fatty blabs. He’s got powdered sugar on his upper lip. Man, you can’t make this shit up.

“Whose this?” Blubbo says pointing at Ave Maria.

Little Teena leans over the counter and points to the data on the fake forms that identifies Ave Maria as “next of kin” and “sister” and “legal guardian.” “Parents are dead,” Little Teena explains. “How these two managed to keep out of child custody services all these years is beyond me. But that one?” Little Teena points at Ave Maria. He leans over the desk and whispers to whale boy. “She’s a nurse. Candy striper.” And then he winks at intake balloon.

I stand there trying to look as silently dangerous as possible. I shoot for a kind of Bob De Niro in
Taxi Driver
look. I smile, then go cold faced, then smile again. I spit on the floor and then for no reason I whistle “When You Wish Upon a Star”.

Everyone turns and stares at me for a minute.

“See what I mean?” Little Teena says, “We’ ve got a live one. Do me a favor and take this little teen monster girl off my hands, will ya? Mind?” he says, moving in to snag a donut.

“I don’t know, I just don’t know … this is highly irregular,” puffy says, shuffling through the paperwork, but the paperwork is jake. Marlene is a pro. Nothing is missing. Everything has the proper signature or seal or whacked out institutional code lingo all over it. I shoot a glance up at a surveillance camera in the back corner behind the human blimp. I smile and pick my nose. I nonchalantly flip on my Zoom H4n.

“It’s just highly irregular,” he says again. He picks up the phone. “I’m gonna have to call it in downtown.”

You know that sound in the movie soundtrack where the
record needle skips and drives a wedge through the album? It’s the oh fuck soundscape.

Ave Maria, no doubt improvising, begins to cry. It’s a unique weeping, of course. Little hiccup sounding whimper lurches. He stares at her, phone in the air between his gut and his ear. Then she amps up the crying and starts this rather impressive erratic breathing thing. Her face gets blotchy. She scratches at the sides of her own arms. I swear she could do performance art.

“Oh shit,” Little Teena says, “you don’t wanna upset this one,” he says, following her lead, stroking one of his lamb chops.

I grit my teeth menacingly.

“Wait a minute here, wait a minute,” the gut says standing up, one hand on his … what the fuck is that? Yeah. Should have guessed. Taser.

I spit.

Little Teena starts to walk around the intake desk where blubberino is. “You better listen to me or we’re gonna have a situation here,” Little Teena says. He moves behind the desk.

“Hey!” white Fat Albert exclaims, “You can’t come back here!”

Ave Maria shoots for a major distraction and turns the volume up to full wail. “If there’s no room here, what are you going to do to my siiiiiiiiiissssssssssster? You can’t put her in jail! Please don’t put her in jail! She can’t go to JJJJJJJJJAAAAAAA-IIIIIILLLLLLLL” wailing and bawling full force – until she’s pretty much textbook … what’s the word I’m searching for? Oh yeah. Hysterical.

“ What the,” chub says, “hey, can you get her to quiet down? We’ve got a houseful of sensitives here – hey! Can you get her to stop that?”

Ave Maria is rocking and crying and pulling her Alice hair making a total scene.

Little Teena’s nearly next to lard-ass behind the intake desk. I start jumping up and down like a bunny.

“Which one of’em did you say was the live one?” fatty goes, his eyes big blue buttons.

“The head case,” Little Teena says pointing at me. I bite my lip until it bleeds and smile.

“That other’s her sister,” Little Teena yells above the ruckus Ave Maria is making, “like I said. Legal guardian, if you can believe it. Sister nearly got her eye put out – but still wouldn’t let us take her without coming along. Families, huh? Buncha crackpots if you ask me.”

“ Well all right, all right,” donut face says, and punches something into his Dell. Then he gets on some kind of walkie talkie device. Like a Toys “R” Us-looking walkie talkie. Budget cuts? Christ this place has the technology of
Sesame Street
.

Pudgeball speaks some mysterious lingo into his Toys “R” Us walkie talkie. Something equally incomprehensible comes back out at him. “I know what time it is. We got an emergency kinda thing down here. We got an immediate intake. We can sort it out in the morning. Get your ass out of bed.” Gibberish white noise comes back.

It begins to look like things are back on track.

“All righty then we’re gonna set her up temporarily in a room here,” pudding says, licking his fingers, “but we’ll need a transfer in the morning. This is a one night deal. I don’t care who signed your paperwork, we’re full up. Got a wetback last night that tried to bite me. Man they just don’t pay me enough for this shit.”

My.

Breathing.

Jackknifes.

Wetback
. This dumb racist motherfucker thinks Obsidian is Mexican. My heart fists my chest. I clench my hands into little bomblets. Little Teena feels me ramping up and shoots me an easy now look. “Yeah, well I’m sure you get all kinds,” Little Teena says. “Say, did you intake that barefoot bandit dude? I heard he ended up in these parts?”

“Naw, we aint that lucky. We just get the real rejects. Had to restrain that wetback. Tight. She’s a looker though,” he says, rubbing his third chin and laughing, “Wouldn’t mind a tap or two, if you know what I mean … but hell. I need this job.”

There is a bomb in my skull. An IED. This guy? This guy has got to go.

Little Teena is shooting me just calm down looks.

You know how sometimes your actual brain gets taken over by your … ID? Pretty sure that’s the correct terminology. The image of this fatass fuck restraining Obsidian and leaning over her with his three chins and chub sweat and donut drool snaps my brain into little black shards of ID. And you know what they say about the ID. It’s a cauldron of seething excitations striving solely to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs.

Guess who I learned that from.

So when fat boy turns to me and says, “You got a name, ugly?”

Fuck the plan.

I step up to his intake desk. Particle board painted white. I’ll tell you who I am, I say in my head. I’m an ID-ridden ball of chaos, motherfucker. I’m your worst nightmare. My eyes feel a little like they are going to shoot out of my head and shatter his face into a zillion pieces. I open my mouth. And then

My.

Throat.

Flaps.

BANG.

Voice.

“YEAH,” I go, much to the surprise of Little Teena and Ave Maria, and maybe even me. “I have a name, assfuck. My name is Dora,” I say, and then I lurch across his pathetic little desk and bite his cheek exactly like a chimp mauling its so-called human parent would.

“GET HER OFF ME GET HER OFF!” THE HUMAN PUFFERFISH screams.

I taste metal. Chub’s blood.

Then I see rainbow lightning? No, it’s Crazy String – you know, that kid crap you shoot out of a can – being shot all over the place, no doubt by a one-eyed blonde girl who is piping high notes all over the room. Before I can say, “Where the fuck did you get Crazy String?” Ave Maria gets a hold of a hand-held bullhorn from tubby the tubs desk – you know, the kind that make the ear -piercing BLAP noise.

BLAP!

And

BLAP!

I swear those things could give you a heart attack.

Lardo struggles away from my monkey attack. I froth and growl.

“Just what the fuck is going on here?” he screams, cupping his newly gnawed on cheek, striking a defensive fat boy pose.

Little Teena deftly dips in and snags the Taser right off of chub butt’s hip holster. Momentarily deafened from the BLAP, also bleeding from the meat of his cheek, also blinded by Crazy String wrapped all over his face and head, intake guy gets three Taser shots from Little Teena straight to the gut. Fatty slaps at the air and then falls out of his chair onto the floor, making a little “maaaaaawwwrrrrllll” sound.

“He’s Tased, bro!” Ave Maria pipes, jumping up and down.

Undeterred and seemingly in control, Little Teena rummages around in the desk drawers. Duct tape is in there like it was waiting for us. He chucks it at me. “Mouth, wrists, ankles,” he shouts, wielding the Taser like a Glock. Man, mutton chops just look right on him. It’s a little disturbing.

I’m pretty much deaf from the BLAP horn too, but I know what to do. Mouth, wrists, ankles. Oh jeez. Blubbo has cankles. While I’m taping Godzilla up, Little Teena climbs a chair and fiddles with the security camera.

“What are you doing?” I go. But then I get it. Duh. He’s taking out the SD card. Now we’ll have a film of ourselves. Brilliant.

But this whole scene has ramped up from zero to sixty pretty fucking fast. I am sweating under my tits and on my upper lip. Fuck. Think straight. Then someone’s tugging on my arm from below. Ave Maria? Little Teena? Security?