He Told The Police My Mother Robbed Him While He Sat Paralyzed So I Walked Into His Restaurant And Put The Bottle On His Table

My name is Toby Mercer and I was thirteen years old when I walked into a restaurant with a baby on my hip and told a man in a wheelchair that his own son had been putting something in him for a year and a half. I had my brother and my sister with me because there was nowhere to leave them. I had a paper bag with one bottle in it. I had worked out on the bus that I would get about forty seconds before somebody took me by the arm and walked me back out onto the street, and I had spent two nights deciding what to spend those forty seconds on. This is all of it, chapter by chapter, from a foot that moved to forty-two empty chairs in a courtroom.