The Heart is Deceitful above All Things by J. T. LeRoy

says while reaching into her bag for the small bottle of Clorox bleach. ‘My father is rich and educated, a preacher.’ She pours the bleach onto some McDonald’s napkins, then rubs it on the ketchup stain on my T-shirt. ‘Not trash,’she says, then wipes my face and hers with more bleach until it stings. ‘You gotta look and smell clean.’
    Sometimes we go into the ladies’ room. I go into the stall with her. We pull down our pants and our underwear. I hold two clumps of toilet paper. She pours the bleach onto them, soaking them. I hand one to her. ‘Folks can smell sin on ya,’ she whispers. Our hands holding the bleach-soaked tissue disappear between our legs. She covers her mouth with her free hand and cries into it.
    â€˜Are you paying attention?’ The woman holds the dolls on her lap. ‘This isn’t the little boy’s fault . . . see?’ She picks them up again, the thing going in and out of the hole in the little boy’s behind. ‘Ow ow ow,’ she says in a high-pitched voice. ‘Bad man, bad man,’ she says in a low, growly voice. ‘Repeat after me,’ she says, and scoots closer. The dolls slam together faster. ‘It’s not . . . c’mon, say it, you want cartoon privileges back?’
    I said nothing last time I visited with her and the dolls, so I hadn’t been allowed to watch TV or go to the game room in two days. I stayed in my room and reread the same books. I didn’t mind not seeing the other kids. Some are bald and bloated, their lips peeling like fingernail paint. Some are in wheelchairs or on crutches, with tubes that wheel around with them. One boy has to be hit on the back all the time. He coughs all night when he isn’t crying. I especially don’t mind not seeing their parents. They come with shopping bags filled with goodies. They don’t like to unpack them in front of me inthe day room. ‘Let’s go to your room, honey,’ they say, glancing at me. They usually have to talk loud, because as soon as I see them coming I raise the sound on the TV until a nurse comes running in and takes the remote away from me.
    â€˜It’s not . . .’ I whisper.
    â€˜What? Yes, good, you spoke. See, it’s easy . . .’ She bounces the dolls on the rug. ‘It’s not the little boy’s fault,’ she repeats. I stare at them jumping up and down across the alphabet, held together by the man doll’s thing. ‘The little boy’s fault,’ I mumble.
    â€˜Great. See, that was easy . . . now you can watch cartoons after dinner. You’re getting better.’ She leans over and pats my head. ‘Time to go.’ She gets up, wiping rug fuzz from her beige pants. She carries the dolls to the drum bin and drops them in. ‘Let’s go.’ She holds open the door that has a cartoon poster of laughing children on the outside. I walk past the box of dolls; it looks like a massacre grave pit, some naked, some dressed, and on top lie the boy and man. The man stares up at me with his arms around the boy. I can tell by the blond boy’s face that the man is still inside him. I reach down to pull them apart. ‘No, no,’ she shouts, ‘leave the toys.’ She walks toward me. ‘We’ve got to get you back upstairs for dinner. You can play more tomorrow.’ She pushes the lid down, and it seals with a slam.
    Some children disappear. They’re kept in their rooms, wrapped in tentaclelike tubes, and suddenly their roomsare empty, just the fluorescent light beaming down on the military-made bed, all cards stripped from the walls, all balloons that were tied to the bed gone. Some kids leave with their parents. They take their balloons and stuffed animals in big shopping bags, and the nurses hug them good-bye. But I tricked them all; they never discovered what I’d done to my fuckin’ fosters. I kept my mouth shut the way Sarah taught