Page 1 of Rat Park
CHAPTER ONE
Dominic was used to the noise—the parties had been going on every few nights for a couple of years now. Dominic had thought one of the first ones had been for his sixth birthday, but it turned out Mom had just forgotten.
He almost liked the vibration of the music in his chest now. The way the voices and laughter from downstairs would melt together into a buzz. Dominic imagined it was a bunch of animals around a watering hole, like inThe Lion King, and when the music got really loud and hurt his ears, he’d singHakuna Matatato himself, under the covers where it was warm and safe.
It’d be nice to have no worries for the rest of his days.
Sometimes, in school, things got too quiet and Dominic would kick one of the kids under the table to start a fight. Most people were used to him now, but some would cry out and tattle, and Dominic would be sent out to do his work with all the naughty children and the dummies who couldn’t keep up. He liked it better there. It was noisy and a little messy and at least Dominic wasn’t the dumbest boy in the room for once.
As used to the jungle noises of the night as he was, Dominic had learnt to tellgoodnoise frombadnoise. Good noise was music and vibration and laughter and even loud talking, but then there wasshouting. Shouting was a bad noise.
Dominic slipped out of bed. He put his slippers on and draped a blanket over his back like Batman because there wasn’t any heating in the Batcave. Mom had given him lots of blankets though, so it was okay. Sometimes in winter when it got really, really cold, he could see his own breath, and he pretended he was a dragon that’d be able to breathe fire in just a second to warm himself up.
The voices coming from downstairs lost their blurry edges as Dominic opened his bedroom door. He couldn’t pretend they were animals now. Only people sounded like that.
He tiptoed towards the stairs and went down them carefully. He knew exactly where to step to keep the wood from creaking. Dominic and the house had an understanding; they kept one another’s secrets, each never ratting the other out.
Dominic could see a bunch of people in the living room downstairs. There were two on the couch and probably more in the kitchen, but the centre stage was taken by two men, red-faced and pointing at each other. Like most of Mom’s friends, both of them were skinny. They looked like deflated balloons, their skin kind of saggy and purpling a little under their eyes. They were screaming bad words at each other, but Dominic couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. The pounding of his own heart was too loud.
“Will you two fucking stop?” Dominic’s mom entered stage-left, a bottle in her hand. Her blonde hair was thin, but Dominic had watched her make it fluffy earlier that day with the blow dryer. Sometimes she let him help her, but she’d been in a hurry today. The blue eyeshadow she’d put on was already a little smudged; it made her look waxy, her white skin a mask.
“Shut your fucking mouth, Erin, this ain’t got nothing to do with you,” one of the guys said without even looking at her.
“Seeing as this ismyhouse,” Dominic’s mom started, but the guy turned to her then, eyes all weird and glassy, wet-looking with anger, and grabbed her by the arm. Dominic’s heart did a strange, scared squeeze in his chest. He jumped up from where he’d been crouching on a step, almost tripping over his Batman cape.
“Hey!” Dominic shouted. All the characters on the stage froze and looked at him, surprised into breaking the scene. “Don’t touch her!” he ordered, trying to put his meanest face on even as his pulse beat quickly around his body.
“Nickie!” his mom said to Dominic, sounding exasperated, and pulled her arm away from the guy. Some of the yellow liquid in her bottle sloshed to the ground, but she didn’t seem to notice. “What did I tell you about leaving your room?”
Dominic scowled and didn’t say anything. There weren’t a lot of rules in the house, but not leaving his bed at night was the biggest one.
“Come on. Up to—”
“Now, come on, Erin. The kid’s just doing his duty as the man of the house. Aren’t you, kid?” the man who hadn’t grabbed his mom said.
“Yeah,” Dominic said, because hewasthe man of the house, and it would be lame to admit he’d just wanted to get some sleep so he could maybe not be told off tomorrow at school for being too tired to do the work.
“Come down here for a sec, kid. Join the party.”
“Jay—” Dominic’s mom started, but Jay waved her away. She sighed, shaking her head, before going back to the kitchen. Just like that, the fight was defused, distracted by Dominic’s presence.
Dominic stood on the stairs. Jay was still looking at him. His smile was wide, but his eyes were a little scary, a bright blue that seemed to have a light of their own. He looked like a robot in loose-fitting human skin.
After a moment, Dominic walked down the stairs slowly. The blanket, still around his shoulders, trailed after him. It smelled even worse on the bottom floor, the air turning white with smoke. Jay sat down on one of the couches clustered around the blank TV, and he patted the cushion between him and the couch arm. Dominic sat down slowly. He looked up at Jay, who was still smiling at him.
“I’ve always thought curiosity is one of the best skills to have. Curiosity killed the cat, so better satisfy it before it gets you!” Jay winked.
Dominic nodded, even though he had no idea what Jay was saying.
“I’m a bit of a scientist, you know. You gotta be curious to be a scientist.”
“A scientist? You gotta lab or something?” Dominic asked.
Jay threw his head back in a loud laugh at the question. Dominic barely blinked. Adults were like that a lot of the time. You never really knew how they were going to react, so it was better to be ready for anything.
“Yeah, I gotta lab, kind of,” Jay finally said when he’d calmed down. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Eight,” Dominic replied. Jay’s eyebrows went up a little.
