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went out of their way to make life hard for him. It was the same for all the kids who were different. It will always be the same, she thinks, as she sips from her orange juice. It’s warmer than she would have liked, but the taste still makes her smile.
    She finishes her drink, then moves over to a large box full of cardboard-wrapped fluorescent tubes jammed tightly. She takes two out, one for this floor, the other for the ground floor. While she replaces the first blown tube, she remembers how Martin’s disability changed her own life. Growing up with him, she had the idea that she wanted to become a nurse. She wanted to be able to help people.
    She had spent the last three years of her life, until six months ago, at nursing school. It was difficult to decide exactly which path she wanted to follow, whether to work in a hospital, in a retirement home, or whether to help those who were mentally challenged like Martin and Joe. There were plenty of options, but she never got the chance. Martin died, and that made wanting to help people harder to do. There were too many diseases out there, too many viruses. You could live life the best you could, do the right things, make the right decisions, and still be struck down by something you were born with that had been biding its time. There were simply too many ways to die, and she didn’t want to see that happen to people she knew she would become attached to.
    The other factor was her father. Two years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which quickly led to him losing his job. Since then the disease has advanced. He can’t work, and his weekly benefit payments aren’t enough to cover the medical bills. She didn’t have the luxury of completing her studies. Her family needed her, not only to help look after her father, but to help them survive. She had to earn money. She had to help them get through this. She couldn’t afford to keep studying.
    Her father had a friend who was a full-time maintenance worker at the police station, a friend who was getting older and needed an assistant who would one day replace him. Sally took that job, and now, six months later, she even has his desk and view.
    She catches the elevator down to the ground floor; the entire trip down she thinks about Joe, and she thinks about what she can do to make his life better.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The police station is ten stories of nothing-going-on, made from concrete block and bad taste. My office is small, perhaps the smallest in the whole damn building. Still, it’s mine, I share it with nobody, and that’s the most important thing.
    I dump my briefcase on the bench, walk to the window and look out to the city beyond. Hot out there. Warm in here. Warm and stuffy. This is great weather not to be working in. Women walk the streets wearing skirts and tops made from nearly nothing. On a good day, from up here, you can see right down their tops. On a really good day, you can see nipple. By the end of the day, all these women are hidden away. They’re scared they might be the next victim plastered across the news. The nighttime air has a charged feeling of fear, and it isn’t going to change anytime soon. They do what they can to pretend nothing bad can ever happen to them.
    I turn from the window and undo the top button of my overalls. My office consists of a bench that stretches the length of the room—about thirteen feet—along the samewall as the window. The other half of the furniture is a chair. Stacked around the office are paint tins and plenty of rags, brooms, and cleaning solvents, which sometimes give me a headache. There are buckets and mops, tools, cables, spare shelving, spare parts, spare lots of things. The office is well lit because it gets the sun most of the day, which is just as well, because fewer than half of the four fluorescent lights in the ceiling actually work. I keep forgetting to get Sally to replace them, and when I do remember, I’m afraid to ask her. I’m sure