Dylan knew he was killing his chance of any kind of leniency. And he knew he could not show them his pain. Should the least tiny little droplet of it leak out it would breach the dam; the trickle would become a stream, and the stream, a flood. He would be washed away in it.

The last day of the trial a cop took the stand and told the jury Dylan had gone insane and peed in his pants rather than look at what he’d done. He told them how Dylan had laughed. Then two more cops repeated the story. Dylan sort of remembered doing that, but it wasn’t the way they said it was.

When the last cop was telling how Rich nearly died from the hack job on his leg and how Dylan had laughed, Dylan shut down his ears. It was too weird. Somebody else did all those things, not Dylan. A monster got in. Maybe Rich was protecting that monster. His girlfriend. Vondra was always peeking out the windows at them and making up excuses to come by. Maybe she was psycho.

Maybe he was.

Voices washed around him as he sat straight and stiff and stared at the tabletop and tried to remember stuff-not the bad stuff-just stuff. Searching his mind, looking way back into the dark places where dead-and-over things were stored, he saw only fog, thick and white the way fog was from the machines they used in high school plays. But he wasn’t going to go to high school. Even a moron could figure that out.

That afternoon the trial ended. “Dylan, the judge asked you a question!” Mrs. Eisenhart’s voice dragged him out of himself. When she called him, he was seeing a picture in his mind of the butterfly kiss his mom had given him that last night, the tiny gold cross she always wore cool on his cheek. It made him smile.

“Look at him! He’s grinning!” a whisper hissed loud in the courtroom.