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With the water bottle, he cleaned the wound again.
    “Why didn’t you teach me
this
?” Jazz managed to ask. “Something useful?”
    “Never had the chance,” Billy said with real regret. “I was planning on starting this stuff soon, but then I got taken away from you.” He paused for a moment. “This is probably gonna hurt like hell, by the by.”
    And then, without another word, he drove the hooked needle into Jazz’s thigh. Earlier, Jazz’d imagined the pain as fiery threads; now he saw just how impoverished his imagination had been.
This
was fire. This was white-hot cables of sheer agony unspooling from the wound site, racing up and down his leg, filling even his lungs with pain.
    Billy flipped his wrist, spinning the hook under the skin, popping it out on the other side of the cut. Jazz screamed.
    Hardly taking his eyes off the suturing before him, Billy used his free hand to find and then shove Jazz’s belt at him. Jazz took it and stuck it between his teeth, biting down in groaning torment. Against his own will, he sat up partially and thrashed, trying to escape the awful bite of Billy’s needle, but his father simply sat on Jazz’s lower leg, holding him in place.
    “Rest your damn head on the floor!” Billy snapped. “If you pass out, I don’t want you splittin’ your skull open. I ain’t got the equipment for that.”
    Somehow, through the endless stabbing at and in his thigh, he understood and managed to lie back.
    “It’s for your own good,” Billy said with casual kindness as he executed the sutures quickly, with no regard for thepain. He made six individual sutures, each one knotted neatly and precisely, the knots pulled to one side. “So it won’t irritate the injury,” Billy explained.
    When it was over, Jazz lay exhausted on the floor, his forehead shiny with sweat, his body soaked in it. He was wrung out, spent, drained even of thought.
    “That’ll hold you, keep the blood loss down,” Billy said. “I used a simple interrupted suture. There’s gonna be infection, so this way they can just pop one of ’em to drain it. Soon as I’m clear of this place and somewhere safe, I’m calling an ambulance for you, boy.”
    “Look who’s bucking for Father of the Year,” Jazz whispered.
    Billy chuckled. “You know what most parents don’t get, Jasper?”
    “Enlighten me.”
    “Most parents, they’re all—what do you call it—narcissists. Is that the right word? I think it is. Parents get all focused on themselves, and then they see their little babies start walkin’ and talkin’, and since they kinda look like them and sound like them, they start thinkin’ of those little babies as extensions of themselves. And so they do everything in the world for them, Jasper. Everything.” Here, Billy rocked back on his heels, pensive. “And then somethin’ funny happens. Those babies grow up to be kids and teenagers and grown-ups in their own right. And they stop bein’ little extensions of the parents, but the parents can’t let go of that. They can’t deal with it, because it’s like a part of their body—like a leg or anarm—just up and decided to act on its own. So everything the kids do, everything, is a betrayal. It’s a mark of ingratitude, Jasper. That’s how those parents see it.”
    Billy began wrapping a clean bandage around Jazz’s leg.
    “But not Dear Old Dad, Jasper. No way, no how. I ain’t like that. Father of the Year? Maybe not. But a damn sight better than most.”
    “You’re crazier than the shrinks say if you believe that crap,” Jazz managed. “You’ve spent your whole life trying to turn me into you.”
    Billy pursed his lips and regarded Jazz with a look that was pure wounded puppy. Jazz wouldn’t countenance it; sociopaths didn’t have real emotions.
    Still. If anyone could hurt Billy, it would be his son, right?
    “Now, that hurts, Jasper. It hurts like, well, like a bullet. Truly. I ain’t never treated you as nothin’ but your own