Paintings from the Cave

I was one of the kids who slipped through the cracks. I had what is euphemistically referred to as a troubled childhood.

We were broke, my parents were drunks, they had—another euphemism here—an unhappy marriage. I was an outsider at school and I pretty much raised myself at home. I had nothing and I was going nowhere.

But then art and dogs saved me.

First reading, then writing. First friend-pets, then sled dogs. They gave me hope that I wouldn’t always be stuck in the horror of my childhood, made me believe that there could be more to my life.

Over the years since I’ve been writing books, I’ve met thousands of kids, either in person or by letter, and it’s not uncommon for young people to confide in me about the nightmare of their home lives, because I’ve always been so open about my own.

One time, though, in Topeka, Kansas, when I was visiting my friend the librarian Mike Printz and talking about my childhood to a bunch of kids in his library, a girl raised her hand and, in a flat, quiet voice, asked me, “But what do you do when it’s bad? When it gets really, really bad?”

I remember wondering what I could possibly say to her that would make a difference to her right then and there. Because, somehow, “Someday things will get better, someday you’ll be old enough to leave home, someday you can put this behind you, someday all of this will feel like it’s a million miles away …” didn’t seem authentic enough to match the honesty of her question.

Because someday, to that girl,
was
a million miles away. She had the here and now to deal with. As so many do. So many heres and nows that are cold and ugly and raw and cruel and vicious, with little to no hope.

As I looked at her across the library, I saw so many faces of kids who believed themselves to be rejected and abandoned, unloved and unlovable.

And so to Jake and Jo and Jamie—three kids in (another euphemism here) unstable environments with nothing and no one to protect and raise them. Except for dogs and art and that little hot worm deep inside us all that, no matter how damaged and broken we are, still allows us to respond to the beauty that art provides or the love that a good dog gives.

S
ometimes you move right, sometimes left, in the dark, out of the light, always moving.

You stop moving, you’re done.

My name is Jake ’cept they call me just J in the building. My aunt, she lives on eighteen, door 1872. I’ve been with her since my ma … went away when I was three, maybe four. So I guess you could call that home, ’cept she looks right through me most of the time, calls me trouble, nothing but trouble, born trouble, so I haven’t really lived in 1872 since I was seven. She never wanted to get stuck with a kid, she tells me, so everything I do that makes her remember I’m around is trouble in her eyes. So I stay away as much as I can, sleep on the couch at Layla’s every night because her ma’s either
sleeping or working. That’s all she does, all she has time to do, she says. Sleep and work, two shifts, every day. I hide in the basement in the day. Stay low.

I’m either eleven or twelve years old now; I lost track and my aunt doesn’t care enough to keep it straight. The school probably has papers on me, they’re big on forms and being official, but it doesn’t really matter how old I am. I learned a long time ago that the only thing that matters is that I gotta keep moving.

You stop, you’re done.

You stop, Blade gets you.