The Last Chance Texaco Read Online Free Page B

an inch thick. Then she placed it on the counter and twisted it into a big pretzel, like the kind you'd buy at a movie theater if they weren't so damn expensive.
     
    "Now you try," she said.
     
    I sighed and reached for a hunk of dough. I rolled it into a two-foot rope between my palms, but it immediately shrank back to about half that size.
     
    "You have to be tough," Mrs. Morgan said. "Make it go where you want it to go. If you force it hard enough, it'll stay."
     
    I tried it again, forcing it this time, and it sort of worked.
     
    "Now twist it," Mrs. Morgan said. It was almost a command. What was she, the Kindle Home drill sergeant?
     
    I twisted it. Of course, it didn't stay in the right shape.
     
    "Press it down," Mrs. Morgan said, starting in on her next pretzel. "Be firm with it."
     
    We kept rolling and twisting, and I got better. While we worked, Mrs. Morgan went over the house rules. I won't bore you with them all. Basically, they were divided into two categories. There were the Rules and Regulations, which were all the picky little things you had to do or not do, like weekly chores and not smoking in the house. If you broke these rules, you got points, which were totaled up at the end of the week. The more points you had, the fewer privileges you got the following week--privileges like being allowed to watch television or go to a football game. If you did something especially good, or if you did extra chores, you could also earn tokens, which you could exchange for money or use to buy down your point total.
     
    Then there were what Mrs. Morgan called the Mortal Sins. These were the really important rules, like no weapons or drugs or sex and no sneaking out of the house at night. Break these rules, she said, and you could get kicked out of Kindle Home. She didn't say where kids went when they got kicked out of the house, but she didn't need to. I already knew.
     
    "Any questions?" Mrs. Morgan said when she was done.
     
    "Yeah," I said. "Now do we bake them?" Just as she'd finished going over the rules, we'd also finished rolling out all the dough and twisting it into pretzels.
     
    "No," Mrs. Morgan said. "We boil them first and then glaze them with egg whites. Then we bake them. But I meant questions about the rules."
     
    "Oh." I felt stupid. "No."
     
    She turned toward the stove, where she already had a big pot of water boiling.
     
    It was only then that I realized I'd forgotten about being hungry and wanting a shower. I'd never made pretzels before, and it was really kind of interesting.
     
    "Okay," Mrs. Morgan said. "Hand me the first pretzel."
     
    I gave her one. The adults at Kindle Home were all pretty different, I had decided. But none of them seemed too bad.
     
    That's what I was thinking then. Of course, that was before I met Emil.
     
    • • •
     
    That afternoon, I was alone in my bedroom reading when someone knocked on the door. I'd long since learned that counselors got suspicious whenever they saw a kid doing anything really unusual, like reading a novel, so I slipped the book under my bedspread.
     
    "Yeah?" I said.
     
    Mrs. Morgan opened the door. "Time for your session with Emil," she said.
     
    Every group home has a house therapist--someone who meets with all the kids once a week in individual sessions. Just so you know, in a group home, a therapist is different from a counselor. A therapist is the person you sit with in some room and talk to about your feelings. But "counselor" is the name for the people who handle the day-to-day operations of the group home--the cooking, the night spot checks, the wrestling to the floor of some pencil-wielding kid in the middle of a meltdown. Why they're called counselors I don't know, because they don't do any actual counseling. Maybe it's like a summer-camp counselor.
     
    Anyway, Emil was Kindle Home's house therapist, and I was supposed to have my first session with him that afternoon.
     
    "Sure," I said to Mrs. Morgan.
     
    The old