Do Not Pass Go by Kirkpatrick Hill

said, staring into the murky coffee in the cup. An ugly place, full of guards, and there was this terrible woman at the desk who’d looked at her in a certain way when she signed in. She’d had to say Dad’s name out loud when the guard asked who she was visiting, and she couldn’t. She’d whispered it, ashamed for everyone to hear his name. And Dad, Dad had looked awful.
    â€œHe’s in a prison uniform, Deet. Just like everybody else there.”
    Deet had a vision of Dad in a striped suit, like the comic books, but the picture was so impossible that it melted away as soon as it had come.
    â€œI told him what the lawyer said, that he’d be in to visit him in a day or two to let him know what was going on. Dad’s worried about you.”
    â€œMe?”
    â€œHe thinks you’ll have a hard time of it at school.”
    Deet, of course, was worried about that too, so he couldn’t think of anything to say.
    â€œAnd he thinks you’ll be ashamed of him,” Deet’s mom said.
    The tears jumped into his eyes. He
had
felt ashamed. It was true. He stared at the table and bit his lip until the pain made him forget about crying. He still couldn’t look at her, but he said, “I’ll never be ashamed of him.”

EIGHT

    On Monday, Dad’s arrest was in the police column.
    Deet had imagined seeing it there so many times that he’d taken the edge off of it, but it still made him sick to actually see Dad’s name there, to read the cold details. Drugs. It sounded so sleazy, so sordid.
    He could imagine everyone in the town reading it. Grandma and Grandpa. The guys at work. Parents, asking their kids, “Don’t you have a boy in your class named Aafedt?”
    The day after that, Deet went back to school. He didn’t take the bus. He asked Mom to drive him because he didn’t think he could stand to feel the eyes on the back of his neck.
    They’d once had a hermit crab that changed its shell for a bigger one when it grew out of the old one.Deet and the girls had carefully selected two new, bigger shells for the crab to choose from, and then they waited and waited for the crab to change houses. When the crab had finally crawled out of the old shell, it was shockingly naked, pink and soft. There was nothing to protect it. Deet felt like that crab without a shell, exposed and vulnerable.
    Every car they passed, every person on the street, looked like an enemy, someone who would turn against Dad, against them. The respectable people, the thoughtless people, who wouldn’t ask questions, how and why and what sort of person Dad was. They’d just condemn him. A dark town they were living in, full of hard people. Deet wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. He wished they could all move away, somewhere else, and never see this town again.
    Every house they passed with brightly lit windows made him more bitter. No one in these houses had any worries, they were all happy. They were all free, without a care in the world. And Dad was locked up, like a rabid dog, or something worse.
    Deet told the girls not to talk about Dad in school.Deet wasn’t worried about Jam, but P. J. was likely to blab anything to anyone. He felt bad giving them that warning, because he knew that by doing so he’d given them the idea that there was something to be ashamed of.
    It was very hard to get out of the car and walk into the school. It was like a grade-school nightmare, like when you were playing Red Rover or something and you were afraid no one would choose you. Or maybe they’d turn and say,
Get out, we don’t want to play with you.
What did he care about any of these kids, anyway? What did he care what they thought?
    Mom threw him a look of understanding when he got out of the car, but she didn’t say anything. It occurred to him that one of the good things about her was that she never said anything stupid, never said anything like,
You’ll