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to overlook it? Why do you do it? Are you just out of your mind?" Her face was turning purple with rage.
    Nick saw she was losing control a split second before she raised her hand to him. He was quick as he caught her wrist.
    "Don't ever hit me again," he said, growling from deep within his throat.
    Their arms trembled for a moment, Nick pitting his new-found strength against his mother. Suddenly she broke his grip and, flinging Daley aside, rushed from the room crying.
    "Oh, Nick." Daley sank to the floor. He rolled a comic in his hands, then threw it across the room.
    "Don't 'Oh, Nick' me. I don't owe her nothing."
    "You wanna get sent sway?”
    "She can't do that. She's bluffing. Don't worry about it.” He scooped a Superman comic from the floor and flipped through the pages. Daley did not have to know how relieved he was. "She can't do anything to me. No one can."
    #

    "No one can," Nick mumbled into his crisp white hospital pillowcase as he squirmed on the bed, remembering that day. His fists were balled, his fingers growing numb. He flung one arm over his eyes. He had been so brave that day. But before that confrontation and during all the years of his childhood he had not been able to defend himself against injustice. There had been so many times when his mother deliberately hurt him one way or another.
    He would not think about it. He would not dredge up the old, rotten, sick memories. He would not allow himself to remember that evening Mary Ringer...that evening she… And he was only five, how could she have despised him even then, how could she...?
    Five years old. Daley was barely three and Daley lived in shadow. He hovered in corners and hid beneath tables, sucking his thumb, dragging behind him a worn baby blanket covered with faded orange giraffes and yellow ducks. If Daley heard his mother and her various boyfriends fighting and yelling, he disappeared into the shadows to suck his thumb. He rarely laughed and he never smiled. He demanded little care or attention. Daley was too young to demand anything from life.
    Nick, however, was coming of age, and much too soon. He noticed everything, even things he could not understand. Things like his mother being nice to strange men who came to stay the night and who were gone before morning. Things like bloody sanitary napkins left open and drying on the floor in the bathroom until, with other litter, they were swept into a pile and finally discarded. Things like loneliness and hunger, for a touch, a hug, a genuine smile turned his way.
    It was not a happy time for either child, but for Nick it was worse because he knew things were not as they should be. Somewhere in the back of his young mind were the images he saw on TV, images that were different from his home and family. On TV he saw clean, neat homes where the mom and dad spoke in low, soothing voices to their children. No one screamed or broke dishes or slapped in fury. Some images flickering on the screen were violent, but they were the violence of the streets, where gangs fought, policemen shot criminals, and sheriffs in white hats got outlaws. The violence was far away from the pretty houses. He came to realize, instinctively, that his own world with its dirt and clutter and utter chaos was all wrong. It was a place where grown-ups drank beer and cursed, a place where strangers followed his mother to the bedroom.
    Nick did not like seeing these things. He began to pout and sulk more often. He cried when he was not being punished, and his melancholy deepened.
    Mrs. Ringer’s constant criticism sank into him like insidious poison that shriveled whatever was good and golden about him. He believed every word his mother said. If he was called a cry baby, well then that was what he was. If he was shouted at and pushed aside, then he must be in the way. If he was called ugly, then surely his own mother should know what she was talking about because, after all, she knew him well.
    When Nick was five years old,