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on the windowsill.
    He gave me $5 when he was done, then went to the local pharmacy and told them not to sell me any razors. It was early in the morning and we sat outside the pharmacy and he placed his hand on my shoulder and said something conciliatory.
    “I hate you so much,” I said.
    When the police found me that night sleeping beneath the mailboxes in the entryway to an apartment building, I had a giant gash in my wrist. I had gone to a different pharmacy for razor blades. It was my sixth suicide attempt that year.
    “Where do your parents live?” they asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. All I knew was the location of the empty house. That was the night I fell into the Illinois juvenile system. The officers stared at me lying there, the room lit by the flashing red and blue lights filtering through the windows, like in some twisted disco.
    The hospital they took me to was on the northwest side surrounded by a field of weeds and crabgrass and a tall fence, a place for abandoned children called Henry Horner Children’s Adolescent Center. It’s been closed down for years but it was the kind of place you’d never end up in if you had someone advocating for you. There were no towels, no soap, no doors on the washroom stalls. The inmates punched the air and spread shit in long brown streaks across the walls.

    The year on the streets had drained me. I’d followed a man into a hotel room and sat at a plastic table snorting lines of coke while a john with a black mustache and blond wig wearing a nurse’s dress sucked off two or three homeless men at a time. I’d hitchhiked to California with my best friend and spent three days in the Las Vegas detention center. I slept with strangers, ate out of garbage bins, panhandled for change. I got in cars every time a driver opened a door. I’d become too adept at moving around. It was good for me to stay in one place for three months with locked exits and a bed.
    The hospital was filthy but there was heat, televisions bolted near the ceiling in the day room, a pool table. The children were doped up on Thorazine and Haldol and walked around like zombies. The point of the pills was to keep the children manageable but I was so subdued when admitted they didn’t bother. I made friends with Jay, who had burned down a church, and Malcolm, who had unsuccessfully tried to kill his stepfather. I hung out with French Fry, who was tall and good looking with thick black hair, but three fourths of his body was covered in mottled red scars from lighting himself on fire. We played cards throughout the day and smuggled in pot, which we hid inside the foam roof panels. At lunch we smacked butter patties onto the ceiling and they turned rancid so they stopped giving us butter. When Malcolm was placed in restraints I slid a magazine below the door so he would have something to read. I was reprimanded and locked in timeout, a small room with a thin mat and a window on the hallway for staff to look in.
    When a bag of thirty ice-cream cups was discovered in one of the freezers the janitor asked who it belonged to. “That’s Carol’s,” I said, referring to a nurse who had problems with her weight. I was put in timeout again.
    One night, staff was lecturing us on our bad attitudes and one of them said, “You act like you’re in hell.” And French Fry stood screaming. “You want to see hell, motherfucker? I’ve seen hell!”
    Shortly after my phone call with Sean Sturgeon I head to Alameda County Courthouse. I take a rush-hour train to Oakland surrounded by all the other morning people with places to be.
    It’s the beginning of Hans Reiser’s trial and I’ve been gathering information on the case, unsure whether Hans will be at the periphery or center of my true crime book. Hans met Nina in 1998 when he visited a bridal office in St. Petersburg, Russia. His company was doing well and he had hired several Russian programmers to help with the next generation of the file system he’d