making adjustments

"Well, you liking your room?" Benny sighed wondering what to ask his cousin Fergie. He imagined her still four and breaking her mother's cigarettes in half so she couldn't smoke them. She was quite a prissy little thing then. She liked to dance to music, and poise for the camera. But now she looked as all the life were sucked out of her. Perhaps that thing in her stomach was getting the best of her.

"Its OK." She was so quiet, as if her personality was completely gone. Nothing there, but a shell of a girl he once carried on his shoulders at the local fair.

"You haven't said much..much about this, this Trevor." Benny finally got up the nerve to say his name and not his other alias, the bicycle bandit.

Fergie shrugged pursing her lips as she played with breakfast. She looked up at him sleepily as if there was nothig to say.

"Are you afraid of him?" Benny didn't know what was going on. He'd listen to his mother's facts about how it happened. But his mother made it sound as mysterious as finding a free coupon at the grocery store.

"No." She winced hard, making it sound funny. She bit into a strawberry then as if she would not say more.

"OK, we could visit him. You know, so he knows, what you've decided." Benny sipped his coffee.

"What does it matter?" She was so solemn.

"Look, it would do us good to see what kind of person he is. Keith would feel better about it." Benny knew Keith wanted to be here saying all this, but he was afraid Fergie would shut down completely if he were around. She wasn't exactly happy to be here, or so Keith thought.

"He's not a psycho." Fergie wouldn't look at him though. "Its all he knows, OK? He's been doing this, for a long time." She sounded as if he might be a professional at stealing. If it hadn't been for the guns and shooting up the trash cans in the school playground, after hours, it sounded as if he might be still out there doing this. "He never had a home."

She told him that he'd stayed in her room for weeks without anyone knowing. A little smile cracked her sad face. Benny smiled to as if it must have been an adventure of some kind.

"I just thought he'd come back, you know." Tears emerged then. "I thought he loved me. He said he did." She bit her bottom lip.

"Look, we aren't going to keep you from seeing Trevor." Benny told her. Keith had already made arrangements at the Juvenile center. They were going down to meet Trevor.