Kowalski was lying.

In Drummond, lying wasn’t a sin; it was an art form. Guys in for more than a six-month vacation got to where they could tell when the shit was being shoveled. There was some natural talent nobody could see through. The retard Dylan had been in psych with was too stupid to know whether he was lying or not. Herman, a big Swede kid, dragged off the family farm for raping a ten-year-old girl-nobody could tell when Herman was lying. He’d learned it young, like a second language. Herman probably dreamed in lies.

Kowalski was an amateur.

“There’s no job,” Dylan said bluntly. “You screwed the pooch didn’t you?” Mostly he didn’t call people on their lies. What would be the point? He wasn’t sure why he’d done it this time. Maybe because Kowalski was so fucking full of himself. Whatever the reason, the instant it came out of his mouth Dylan knew he’d joined old Kowalski in the pooch-screwing department.

Kowalski hadn’t come to Drummond to bid his favorite psycho boy good-bye; he’d come to do something or not do it. Dylan’s mouth had just decided Kowalski to do it.

“We’ve gotten nowhere with your… amnesia,” the doctor said. He leaned back and the frayed cuff of his trouser rode up over his sock exposing a white, nearly hairless calf. “Given that our time is limited, we’re going to have to take a more aggressive tack.”

The last time Kowalski had taken an aggressive tack, about a zillion volts of electricity had been pumped through Dylan’s head. Talk about amnesia. After that, he’d had a hell of a time remembering his own name, let alone what happened when he was eleven.

Rich had put a stop to it. Dylan was just a kid; his brother wasn’t all that much older. Vondra Werner was still driving him. The Saturday after Kowalski strapped Dylan down and fried his brains, Rich came to see him like he did every Saturday.

Not wanting to be a pussy, Dylan tried to suck it up, not let his brother see what a mess he was. He thought he was pulling it off until Rich started yelling, “What did you do to my brother? What the fuck have you done to my brother?”

Draco said it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Dylan sitting flopped over the table, limp as a noodle, drooling and babbling, and Rich standing on his chair doing the avenging angel thing. After that Rich got his adopted mom, Sara, to lean on real doctors, and one leaned on a senator, or judge, or cop, or somebody, and Kowalski had backed down.

Until now.

“There’s a new experimental drug we’ve been having some success with,” Kowalski said. “It’s called lysergic acid diethylamide.” He paused as if to let the momentous cutting edge of his intellect crash into Dylan’s consciousness.

Dylan had dropped acid three or four times, once with his algebra teacher, Phil Maris. They’d lain on the floor of the math lab after lights out and watched formulas take wing and mate. The first couple times it made the pictures in his head of the things he built more vivid. The last time, though, numbers came alive-not in a good way, but like people were alive-with emotions, likes and dislikes. Dylan hated the rational world of mathematics infected with the stuff of humanity. After that he’d stuck pretty much to dope.

When a new kid, Purvis Something, was moved permanently to psych after dropping a hit of Window Pane, Dylan swore it off completely. His brain was nothing to fuck with. People learned that the hard way.

“Ell-ess-dee,” Kowalski said, playing Timothy Leary’s best pal.

“Cool,” Dylan said and again thought of Draco: You get, you share. If he got a chance, he’d score a few hits for pocket money.

“You seem to be looking forward to it. We shall see… ” the doctor said with more than a hint of malice. “I have cleared the remainder of the afternoon.”

Explaining that the drug had been formulated in a lab at the National Institute for Mental Health to be used for experimental purposes, Kowalski took a vial from his briefcase. There was no label on the glass container. Inside was a square of blue paper with a slight discoloration in the middle. Dylan had been medicated, overmedicated, and eternally messed with; he knew the rituals of medical protocol from the inside. Kowalski was bullshitting him. The hit had been bought on the street. It could be cut with anything-speed, Drano-whatever the cook thought would give more bang and save him a buck.

Kowalski hated him. Dylan read the certainty of it in the set of his mouth, the aggressive jut of the bearded jaw, as he plugged in a tape recorder and arranged the microphone on his desk.

Dylan was unimpressed. Most people hated him. Regular people would have to be crazy not to hate him. He slid down on the couch another six inches, his long legs, strong from ice hockey and Drummond’s stone stairways, taking up more room than Kowalski liked.

“Sit up,” the doctor ordered peevishly.

Dylan didn’t move. His idiot stare grew more vacuous.

Dr. Kowalski flipped the tape recorder on and held out the blue square of contaminated paper.

Dylan’s last acid trip hadn’t been all that great, but it hadn’t freaked him out. And though he remembered the look in Purvis Whatshisname’s eyes after he’d dropped and hit the wall-like something had reached in through his nose with red-hot tongs and tried to pull out his soul-he’d never been particularly scared of the stuff. Most of the guys did it, and, other than Purv, who was determined to go nuts one way or another, nobody seemed too busted up by it.

He was scared now, though, that was for damn sure. All gloved-up like he was handling nuclear waste, Kowalski was poking the blue square of paper at him on the end of a pair of tweezers he’d probably used to pull his nose hairs out that morning.

Street shit. Even that didn’t put the fear into him. It was Kowalski’s eyes. The doctor looked crazy, bug-shit, a kind of hungry, desperate crazy. The monkey on his back-the addiction, the need, the lust, the whatever-had been working the doctor over.

For half a second Dylan thought of refusing the acid, of getting up and running out. He was bigger than the doctor. Kowalski couldn’t stop him.

He couldn’t stop Kowalski. Doctors were gods at Drummond. They did what they wanted with the kids, whatever they wanted. Dylan pinched the paper from the tweezers and popped it in his mouth. What the hell? It had to be better than electroshock.

He dry-swallowed, smiled slowly, and said, “Thanks, Doc. The warden know you’re my drug dealer now?”

Kowalski sat down on the edge of his chair, hitched it a couple of inches closer to the couch, and leaned forward.

The doctor was out; the man on the chair was not a psychiatrist or a medical professional. He was scarcely even a man. He was a big fat zero waiting for something to come make him count, fill up the hole.

Welcome to monster world, Doc.

“You are going to fucking remember,” Kowalski said, the obscenity jarring not only because it was the first time Dylan had heard him use anything stronger than “heck” or “darn” but because the word was uttered with the same smooth, pseudocaring voice Kowalski used when he was shrinking kids in front of visitors.

“You are going to fucking remember every whack,” he said, then leaned back and waited.

“Eighty-one,” Dylan said.

“Is the LSD taking effect?” Kowalski checked his watch, as if he genuinely thought he could time street-drug reactions.

“Forty, done. Father, forty-one,” Dylan said to remind Kowalski of the Lizzy Borden poem.

“It’s starting,” the doctor said.

What a stupid fuck. Dylan could say or do anything he damn well pleased, and the fool would write it off to the acid. “Your beard’s on fire.”

“Ahh,” said Kowalski with satisfaction.

“You ever drop acid, Doc?”

“I… I have taken it experimentally.”