hellkitty

“What’s this?” Max blinked sullenly at the oatmeal-colored paper and the battered plastic box the counselor shoved in front of him. He was pretty sure whatever it was, he wasn’t going to like it. Why should he? It was Juvenile Detention, and nothing was fun about it.

“Art therapy,” the counselor said, voice as unenthusiastic and bland as the paper in front of him.

Great. More therapy. Just what he needed: more people trying to get in his head, figure him out. Why didn’t they understand that there was nothing to figure out? He told them the truth, he told them why he stole, every time he got caught. He might have been a thief, but he wasn’t a liar, after all.

He just stared at the paper, and up at the counselor.

“You’re supposed to draw,” the counselor said, impatiently, as though counting the seconds of their ‘session’. She rattled the plastic box, snapping it open, revealing a few worn, random colors of crayon. Crayons? Fucking crayons? Really? What did they think he was, a damn kid?

She seemed to figure out what he was thinking--maybe she wasn’t half bad at that part of her job. “It’s so you can’t make weapons out of them," she explained, blandly, as bland as the rounded collar on her button-down shirt.

He scowled. Right. Way to show a little trust, you know? What kind of hardened criminal thug did they think you were when they wouldn’t trust you with a damn pencil? He picked up one of the crayons, a sort of acid green, rolling it in his fingers, feeling the scrapes on his knuckles stretch and ache.

Some of the crayons looked chewed on. It would figure. A few more weeks in here and he’d be chewing Crayolas too, probably.

That was the most depressing thought he’d had since they grabbed him as he ran.Though that had been less depressed than ‘oh shit’. Only thing they could pin on him for sure was ‘resisting arrest’ but that had been enough for a three month stay at the Resort.

“Draw what?” Looking at the colors in the box, apparently the theme would be psychedelic puke. Max wasn’t smart, but he was smart enough to figure that if he didn’t draw something, it would somehow end up in his PermaFile as some new level of bureaucratic sin.They had records. You couldn't fight records.

The counselor tapped the edge of the paper, meaningfully, encouragingly--or at least as encouragingly as she could muster. “A picture of yourself.”

“Of myself.” What? He looked down at the colors, reading them off: Atomic Orange. Cerise, Inchworm, Wisteria. Unmellow Yellow. "What am I supposed to use for skin color?"

She sighed impatiently. "Just pick one," she said. Like it didn't matter.

Maybe it didn't, but Max had been in the system long enough to know that anything could be read into, held against him. For all he knew, using Neon Carrot for skin tone was some sign of moral...whatever they called it. Turpentine. Derpitude. Whatever.

"Look...Max." That little hesitation that told him that once again she'd forgotten his name. He didn't blame her: she had twenty appointments a day and after a while all the shaved-headed juvies probably ran together, distinguishable only by the color codes of their institution-issued shirts. "Here's an important lesson if you ever want to live outside." That old threat, that they'd be in the system so long that it would be familiar, and the real world, the outside, strange and frightening and impossible to adapt to. He didn't buy it. "You have to learn to make do with what you have in life."

He wanted to retort that he'd done a pretty good job so far managing not to learn anything: school had been a waste for him: science classes without labs, studying 'nature' in pictures in their textbooks, because nothing grew in LA. And English classes, parts of speech as though knowing the difference between an adverb and an adjective was as good as knowing when the path to the dumpsters was unguarded or exactly which roofs would hold your weight. He wanted to, but just as he opened his mouth to say something, it struck him that she probably meant it, she'd probably learned that lesson, too hard, too many times, herself, having to make do with the shitty hand life had dealt her.

She probably wanted to be here about as much as Max did, which was a sum total of not at all. She probably looked at all the kids coming through juvie, had seen too many of them run through the system again and again, a little harder, a little meaner, each time, to have kept any faith in what she was supposed to be doing. If she’d ever believed in it at all. If she’d ever even had a choice in this job.