Rich fell back into his wheelchair. Mrs. Eisenhart, Dylan’s court-appointed attorney, pulled him from the rail. The judge was pounding his gavel for quiet.
They were all mad for Rich, because he wouldn’t be mad for himself. They hated Dylan. They needn’t have bothered; he hated himself more than they ever could.
He sat down. Mrs. Eisenhart had brought him the suit and tie his mom got for Lena ’s baptism. He’d been nine then, and the suit was too small. He squirmed trying to get the crotch to stop crawling up his butt.
Mrs. Eisenhart kicked him under the table. Rich was being sworn in; Dylan forgot about wedgies.
The other lawyer, the one against Dylan, began asking questions. Rich didn’t want to answer, but he’d sworn on the Bible and had to. He hadn’t seen Dylan do anything. He insisted on that. He’d been next door necking with Vondra Werner. When Rich said that, he looked at Dylan and kind of shrugged.
Dylan turned around with a great big, sheepish grin plastered on his face, looking to see what his mom and dad thought of that. Men in the courthouse were smiling; when they saw his face the smiles whispered out, leaving only the scratching sound of dead leaves in the air. His big old grin brought the undergrowl back into the ambient noise.
The parched silence, the sudden remembering that his parents weren’t there, froze Dylan’s smile in a creepy kind of way. Like a supervillain had zapped him with an ice ray. Flash bulbs popped. “Butcher Boy,” one of the newspaper reporters whispered, and a bunch of them scribbled in their notepads.