Where the Boys Are by Richard Labonté

Author:Richard Labonté
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Where the Boys are
ISBN: Where_the_Boys_Are
Publisher: Cleis Press Start
Published: 2007-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

JUNIPER HOUSE

Alana Noel Voth

for TJL

When I started my job at Juniper House everyone was happy, my parents, all the weirdos at AA, as if going to work every day should provide a person with this incredible happiness.

Juniper House was an institution for autistic kids. I cleaned rooms. The kids at Juniper would blow anyone’s mind with their messes. They liked to disassemble stuff and often pulled their beds apart: blankets, sheets, and then the mattress. One kid dug a hole through his box spring, deep enough to accommodate his arm, and then stuffed food inside so it became a weird minefield of springs, stuffing and pancakes. Other kids arranged the furniture in their rooms into straight lines. The bathroom was another story. Lots of kids missed the toilet entirely, and one boy, Devon, created a display on the wall with his own shit I’d call nothing less than artistic. I stood there flabbergasted, not by the smell but by what I saw: a defined, sophisticated face. I hated cleaning it up, like I was ruining it or something, this tiny gorgeous underappreciated flex of genius.

The landscape around Juniper House was like an oasis on the edge of downtown: maple trees, wildflowers, and grass. In some ways, the landscape made me think of home. The building itself was masonry, just a building. Once in a while, I took one of the kids for a walk outside. Louie, a redhead, counted backward from one million. Lily with the shining black hair spoke Russian to daisies. Then there was Robbie, who quizzed me on math equations but never waited for my answers. Anyway, I didn’t know the square root of five hundred-and-eighty-five.

The kids at Juniper weren’t “high functioning,” so they couldn’t be allowed in school with other people’s normal kids or even in the general public. Some had disappointed their families: I knew because some of them never had visitors. When I was in rehab, I didn’t want visitors. When Mom showed up, I refused to see her. I wasn’t sure whether these kids minded not having visitors. Once I overheard a nurse tell another nurse: “Parents need time to mourn the loss of the child they didn’t have.” Then I heard Mom in my head all over again crying as she came down a row of jail cells to bail me out.

One kid, Bruce, hadn’t had a visitor the whole time I’d worked at Juniper House. Last Tuesday, I was in Bruce’s room to clean it. I made the bed, then emptied the trash, which was when I noticed a suspicious but silky nest of hair tucked in with the snotty tissues. Was Bruce pulling hair out of his own head? Should I report this to the nurse’s station? From a few feet away, I couldn’t see any bald spots on Bruce’s head and so decided to keep his secret. In the bathroom, I started on the toilet. That’s when I heard him say, “Hi.”

I stepped from the bathroom. The TV was on.

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