maybe they did, though Thomas had never heard of them and didn’t
understand what they were, but then a lot of things he didn’t understand
were important. He knew what eyes were, of course. He knew a cue was a
stick you hit balls with because they had a pool table right there in
the wreck room, near where he and Derek were sitting, though nobody used
it much. He figured it would be a bad thing, real bad, if you stuck
yourself in the eye with a cue, but this Mary said eye cues were good
and she had a big one for a Down’s kid.
“I’m a high-end moron,” she said, real happy with herself, you could
tell.
Thomas didn’t know what a moron was, but he couldn’t see a high-end to
Mary anywhere, she was fat and mostly droopy all over.
“You’re probably a moron, too, Thomas, but you ain’t high-end like me.
I’m almost normal, and you ain’t as close to normal as me.” All this
only confused Thomas.
It confused Derek even more, you could tell, and in his thick and
sometimes hard to understand voice, Derek said, “Me? No moron.”
He shook his head.
“Cowboy.” He smiled.
“Cowboy.” Mary laughed at him.
“You ain’t no cowboy or ever going to be. What you are is you’re an
imbecile.” They had to ask her to say it a few times before they got
it, but even then they didn’t really get it. They could say it but
didn’t know what it was any more than they knew what one of these eye
cues looked like.
“You’ve got your normal people,” Mary said,
“then morons under them, then imbeciles, whore dumber than morons, and
then you got idiots, whore dumber than even imbeciles. Me, I’m a
high-end moron, and I ain’t going to be here forever, I’m going to be
good, behave, work hard to be normal, and someday go back to the halfway
house.”
“Halfway where?” Derek asked, which was what Thomas wondered too.
Mary laughed at him.
“Halfway to being normal, which is more than you’ll ever be, you poor
damn imbecile.” This time Derek realized she was looking down on him,
making fun, and he tried not to cry, but he did. He got red in the face
and cried, and Mary grinned sort of wild, she was all puffed up,
excited, like she’d won some big prize. She’d said a bad word-damn-and
should be ashamed, but she wasn’t, you could tell. She said the other
word again, which Thomas now saw was a bad word, too,
“imbecile,” and she kept saying it, until poor Derek got up and ran, and
even then she shout it after him.
Thomas went back to their room, looking for Derek, but Derek was in the
closet with the door shut, bawling. Some of the aides came, and they
talked to Derek real nice, but he didn’t want to come out of the closet.
They had to talk to him a long time to get him to come out of there, but
even then couldn’t stop him from crying, and so after a while they had
to Give him Something. Once in a while when you were sick, like with
the flu, the aides asked you to Take Something, which meant pill of one
shape or another, one color or another, big or little But when they had
to Give You Something, it always was a needle, which was a bad thing.
They never had to Give Something to Thomas because he was always good.
But sometimes Derek wasn’t nice as he was, got to feeling so bad about
himself that he couldn’t stop crying, and sometimes he hit himself, just
hit himself in the face, until he broke himself open and got blood on
himself, and even then he wouldn’t stop, so they had to give Him
Something For His Own Good. Derek never hit anyone else, he was nice,
but For His Own Good he sometimes had to be made to relax or sometimes
even made to sleep, which was what happened the day Mary the high-end
moron called him an imbecile.
After Derek was made to sleep, one of the aides sat beside Thomas at the
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