Gus tells me that a round spoon isn’t going to do nothing to hurt no one, if that’s what I’ve got my mind set on, which it is.

“You’re just gonna get yourself in trouble for not giving the lady back her spoon,” he says. I can’t ever see the expression on his face, but I imagine he’s worrying about what I’m gonna do. Gus always worries.

I tell him, “If I can figure out a way to make it sharp, it’ll hurt.”

I’m banking on that lady being so soft in the head she’ll forget all about the spoon when she comes to get her bowl. I put the rest of the mush down the toilet so she don’t get angry and call us names for not finishing her food that she made. I put the empty bowl at the top of them steps and start thinking on how I’m going to make this round spoon sharp as a spear.

* * *

There ain’t much to work with in this place where they’ve got us kept. The man and the lady don’t give Gus and me no stuff. We’ve got no clothes other than the ones we’re wearing, no blankets, no pillows, no nothing. The only thing we have aside from the floor and the walls is each other and that icky toilet on the other end of the pitch-black room.

It’s only after I try to sharpen my spoon on the walls and the floor that I decide to give the toilet a go.

I don’t know a thing about toilets other than that’s where I do my business and that ours has never once been cleaned. The darkness is a blessing when it comes down to the toilet ’cause I don’t want to see the inside of it, not after all this time that we’ve been crapping in there and no one’s been cleaning it. The foul smell alone is enough to make me gag.

“Where you going?” Gus asks as I take my spoon to the toilet. Gus and I have a way of knowing what the other is doing without ever really seeing what the other is doing. That comes from living down here long enough and getting to know each other’s habits.

“You’ll see,” I tell him. Gus and I speak in whispers. I’m pretty sure the man and the lady who live upstairs aren’t home right now ’cause I heard the doors opening and closing not too long ago. I heard their loud footsteps go suddenly quiet. There’s no one up there talking now, no one screaming, no noise from the TV.

But I can’t be sure. ’Cause if they are here, I don’t want them listening in on Gus and me and knowing what I’m doing with my filched spoon. I’d get a whipping if they did—or worse. I ain’t ever tried to run away before or make myself a weapon, but common sense says that’s gotta be a worse punishment than not finishing the lady’s nasty dinner or telling her I’m cold.

I let my hands float over the toilet awhile. I feel it up for a sharp spot. But the toilet is smooth as a baby’s bottom. I almost give up, not thinking I’m going to find a spot to sharpen my spoon here. It’s all one part, except for the top of it, the lid, which I discover by accident comes off. I hoist it up in my arms. It’s heavier than I thought it’d be, all dead weight. I almost drop it.

“What’s the matter?” Gus asks, panicked over some noise I make. I think that Gus is younger than me, on account of how chicken he is, even if he is taller. But anyone can be a chicken, no matter what their age or size.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I tell him, not wanting to think what would have happened if I did drop the lid. I set it gently upside down on the floor. I tell Gus, “Don’t worry about it. Ain’t nothing the matter. Everything’s fine.”

Gus is a worrywart. I wonder if he’s always been that way or if the man and the lady have done that to him. I wonder what kind of boy Gus was before he got here. The kind who climbed trees and caught frogs and played ghosts in the graveyard at night, or the kind who read books and was afraid of the dark. We tried talking about it once, but then I got sad and wound up telling Gus I didn’t want to talk about it no more. ’Cause most of my earliest memories have that man and that lady in them, and in them, they’re doing wicked things to me, things that I don’t like.

That man and the lady saved the newspaper from when I went missing. The lady read those stories out loud to me, telling me what happened to my momma, showing me pictures of my daddy standing in front of our big, blue house, crying. She told me how the police was looking for me. But then, soon after, she rubbed it in and gloated, saying that the police weren’t looking for me no more. She told me then that I was old news and that they got away with taking a kid that wasn’t theirs.

“Stealing kids,” she said, “is the easiest thing in the world.”

I go back to investigating the toilet. I discover that that tank is full of nasty water, which I mistakenly plunge my whole arm into, right up to the elbow. I cringe and shake it dry, not knowing if it’s pee or what. Then I get down on the ground and run my fingers along the inside of that toilet tank lid.

The inside is much different than the whole rest of the toilet. It’s gritty and coarse, not the same baby’s bottom smooth. My fingers come across a jagged ridge on the inside of it, like a lip. That jagged ridge might just do the trick.

Gus is worried sick that whatever I’m planning won’t end well. I’ve tried for a long time to make him see we ain’t got no other options if we ever want to get out of this place. But that there’s the problem with Gus. He’d just as soon stay here than risk getting caught trying to leave.

I run the edge of the spoon back and forth on that ridge. I get my knuckles caught on it time and again, and feel them getting scraped up. It burns like heck, but I keep at it. It takes a long while, but eventually the ridge of the toilet tank lid begins to mangle the spoon. Not spear-sharp, but uneven, the kind that promises to get sharp the longer I work with it.

“You shouldn’t be doing that,” Gus says.

“Why not?” I ask.

“They’ll kill you.”

I run my finger along that botched edge, feeling hopeful for the first time in a long while.