with a slam, only to find his bed, with its mud-brown wool blanket, and the box of tissues, and his schoolbooks on their shelf. And then he saw it in the comer, near the head of the bed; a glass jar with a bouquet of daffodils, their bright funnels frilled at their tops.
He sat on the floor near the jar and rubbed one of the flowers velvet heads between his fingers, and in that moment his sadness was so great, so overpowering, that he wanted to tear at himself, to rip the scar from the back of his hand, to shred himself into bits as he had done to Luke's flowers.
But why had he done such a thing to Brother Luke? It wasn't as if Luke was the only one who was kind to him when he wasn't being made to punish him, Brother David always praised him and told him how quick he was, and even Brother Peter regularly brought him books from the library in town to read and discussed them with him afterward, listening to his opinions as if he were a real person-but not only had Luke never beaten him, he had made efforts to reassure him, to express his allegiance with him.
The previous Sunday, he was to recite aloud the pre-supper prayer, and as he stood at the foot of Father Gabriel's table, he was sud-denly seized by an impulse to misbehave, to grab a handful of the cubed potatoes from the dish before him and fling them around the room. He could already feel the scrape in his throat from the screaming he would do, the singe of the belt as it slapped across his back, the darkness he would sink into, the giddy bright of day he would wake to. He watched his arm lift itself from his side, watched his fingers open, petal-like, and float toward the bowl. And just then he had raised his head and had seen Brother Luke, who gave him a wink, so solemn and brief, like a camera's shutter-click, that he was at first unaware he had seen anything at all. And then Luke winked at him again, and for some reason this calmed him, and he came back to himself, and said his lines and sat down, and dinner passed without incident.
And now there were these flowers. But before he could think about what they might mean, the door opened, and there was Brother Peter, and he stood, waiting in that terrible moment that