—What do you think it’s worth, he said, a book like this?
Lydia spun the book in her hand, quite expertly, and looked at the bar-coded label on the back. Though brand-new, the book had been marked down and down and was now selling for a whopping forty-eight cents. Depressing.
—Looks like a really good deal, she said.
Joey flattened his palms on the wooden counter. His hands were long and skinny, scarred across the knuckles but soft.
—I mean what’s it worth. Not what’s it cost.
Lydia stared at him, trying to measure his intent. She took a tiny step back.
—I guess it just bugs me to be paying so little, he added. Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet. Or a Coke. Values-wise.
Lydia sighed in agreement. Joey touched the book between them, a gentle finger-tap.
—These things saved my life, he said, in nearly a whisper. That’s no small thing.
—You’re not alone there.
—See, people say that all the time but for me they really did.
Joey pulled off his hat and wrung it between his palms as if it were a washcloth. His eyes appeared so green against his bronze skin and dark eyebrows that they seemed to glow from behind, as if hollowed from jade. He was a beautiful boy.
—I don’t know what I would have done without reading, he said. My whole life, really, but especially in prison. You know I was in prison, right?
—I heard that.
Joey looked to his left, then to his right, then gently tugged down the front of his black shirt until she could see the dark outline of a leafless tree tattooed up the center of his sternum.
—Prison, he said. Do you know what they use for weapons in there? Candy. Seriously. They make knives out of Jolly Ranchers. And if you heat up a candy bar with caramel and chocolate you can basically burn someone’s face off. So I was told.
Lydia nodded carefully but didn’t say anything. She wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, yet she was aware of how utterly odd this conversation was, in large part because of a silent agreement among the BookFrogs to never talk about their past—a quality that made her the perfect candidate to be their unspoken, unelected, unassuming ambassador. She was all about silencing the past.
—How long were you in? she said.
—Actual prison? From seventeen to nineteen, around two years.
—Seventeen?
—Sixteen, if you include all the time while I waited for my sentence. You know what the Pooh-Bah told me on the day of my intake? Tried as an adult, treated as an adult. I think he was trying to scare me. It worked.
—Seventeen, she said.
—I know I deserved it, I really did, but it was unbearable all the same. It does things to you, Lydia. Unrecommended things.
—Enter books, she said.
—Yeah. Enter books.
Joey fiddled with the loose threads of his hat, and she thought she should hold on to the moment; she thought he was telling her all of this for a reason.
—Do you want to tell me what you did? she said. It’s okay if you don’t.
Joey was quiet, but he seemed ready to speak when a chubby businessman with a tie hanging out of his blazer pocket strolled through and bought a daily newspaper and offered Lydia a wink. Joey stepped aside and his eyes, so often buzzing about, went completely still until the man left. She could see his face warming up, growing pink beneath his cheeks. He hadn’t put his hat back on and his hair was tied in a knot in the back, and, she noticed for the first time, there were tiny pieces of leaf and paper clinging to its strands.
—It wasn’t me, he said. I mean I did it, I’m responsible, but I was just a teenager, so it wasn’t really me.
Joey leaned into the counter and began to speak, just above a whisper, and never once met her eye, as if he were talking to a ghost who was just behind her and slightly to the left.
—I try to tell myself it didn’t count, he continued. Because I was so young.
—I’m listening.
When Joey was fifteen, he was placed in a vocational group home with about a dozen other teenage boys in North Denver. They lived together and did household chores and took classes to learn carpentry and mechanics, spatial relations, basic work skills. They kept themselves occupied by drinking cleaning products and huffing Wite-Out and computer duster and snorting nutmeg or cloves, most of which they would steal on trips to the grocery store and much of which was ineffective at inducing any state but nausea. And a few of them discovered that if they just didn’t sleep for days on end—if they lay in bed and poked themselves with needles or pulled their own hair or slapped their cheeks any time they were about to drift off—they could fight their way through the exhaustion and, after two or three days, climb over what Joey called the Wall of Tired and bring themselves beyond the brink and into hallucinations.
One day in May a group of four of them started out and made it twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours without a wink. They went about their daily tasks, and at night they tried to read sci-fi novels or play video games or do what little they could to work on their certifications—but one by one they began to fall asleep. Except Joey. Joey had made it for almost four days without so much as a nap and soon felt like he was wearing a humongous costume, like a furry mascot stomping around an imaginary playland. He’d gotten so tired that he no longer could feel anything, including being tired, and in the middle of his woodworking class one afternoon he just started laughing uncontrollably and walked out by way of the fire escape and no one stopped him.
The city was alive with things that were not there. Trees had eyes and cars had smiles and the sidewalk was a river of ash. He told himself that he was merely heading home, but of course he had no home, so in fact what he did was wander until dusk, seeking the next levels of his game. When he found a loose retaining wall behind a flower shop and, just below it, a fresh pallet of cinder blocks, he knew he’d found the next level.
He carried the cinder blocks, two at a time, a few streets away to an overpass above the interstate. On the sidewalk he began accumulating the blocks like a kid amassing snowballs. Each move was accompanied by little buzzes and beeps.
—For some reason I decided I hated minivans, Joey said. Minivans became the game.
—Minivans?
—I can’t explain it, really. When I was growing up there used to be vans and suddenly there were minivans instead. I don’t know. I established a point system based on the color of the van. Remember, I hadn’t slept in days.
Joey stood up on the railing, sixteen feet over the interstate, and listened to cars whipping past straight below him, fifty-five, sixty-five miles per hour. And he began dropping cinder blocks on them.
—But only on minivans, he said. As if there was a logic to it.