The Pinballs: Chapters 1–7

The twins had meant to take him into town and tell the authorities, but they had kept putting it off.

He was sent to the foster home “until such time as his real identity can be established or permanent adoptive parents located.”

He was mean to everybody in the family, but especially to Carlie. He resented everything she did.

Once he had hit her so hard when she wouldn’t tell him where she’d been that she had gotten a concussion. Even with a concussion she had struggled up and hit him with a double boiler.

Carlie was to stay at the foster home “until the home situation stabilizes.”
“Stabilizes!” Carlie had said to the social worker in charge of her case. “What does that mean?”
“It means until your mother and your stepfather work out their problems.”

Harvey’s casts were as white as snow. He wished he had thought to forge some names on them.

The twins had always liked anything that came in pairs—Doublemint-gum commercials brought them hobbling—and Dawn in their matching dresses looked like twins even though they weren’t.

Harvey felt a twinge in his right leg. It was the worst of the breaks. The bone had gone through the skin.

“The earring was in the bathroom,” Thomas J said, still smiling. “It was by the basin.”

“Only the people that give money for vaccines, they want to give for heart diseases and polio, stuff their kids might get. Nobody worries about us.”

Because of his broken legs Harvey got the bottom bunk. He eased himself down on the mattress and looked up at the springs.

Harvey was still looking at him, waiting. Abruptly Thomas J climbed up the ladder to his bed.

She had gone to Virginia to live in a commune with nineteen other people and find herself by getting back to nature.

Harvey had crouched on the stairs, peering around the corner from time to time at the twisted angry faces. Their faces looked gnarled enough to put on a cathedral.

Harvey and me and Thomas J are just like pinballs. Somebody put in a dime and punched a button and out we came, ready or not, and settled in the same groove.

His father would rave some more about how easy Harvey had it, and then he would pull some bills from his pocket.

“I’m not saying what I’m describing,” Harvey said in a superior manner.

“If I live I’ll be the most shifted around juvenile in the world.”

And you know how Dr. Welby and all those TV doctors make incisions! The incisions are that long—fourteen, fifteen inches maybe.

I even went to Majorette Clinic. Cost my mom fifteen dollars, and then I come to find out that you couldn’t even try out if you didn’t have good grades. And what does good grades have to do with twirling a baton—tell me that?