They Cage the Animals at Night

Jennings is separated from Gene at the police station, and Gene is dragged away crying. Jennings is brought to a new children’s home late at night. He is awoken by a bully punching him in the stomach and the face. Jennings fights him until a woman breaks it up. In the bathroom, the bully asks who the toughest child is, and Jennings responds that he does not know because he has not met everyone. The bully says it is himself and introduces himself as Ronny. He shakes Jennings’ hand, to Jennings’ surprise.

The playroom looks identical to the playroom in every other home, with a door leading out to a courtyard fenced in with barbed wire. Ronny invites Jennings outside. The other children avoid them, and Jennings feels what it is like to be a bully, though he does not want to be. Ronny, who ran away from a home in Texas and spent time in jail, tells Jennings the rules of the place.

Jennings finds his number on his bed, number 47. He finds a younger boy named Kevin crying in his bed. It is his first home. Jennings consoles him and tells him the same advice that Mark had given him at the Home of the Angels: just wait, eat, sleep, and remember your number. Most of all, do not spend all your time thinking about going home. In the playroom, Jennings finds the boy with the number just before Kevin’s and tells him to make sure Kevin is behind him. Jennings considers it paying it forward for how Mark took care of him.

Kevin sticks to Jennings’ side over the next several days. Jennings, wanting to take care of him, tells Kevin that it is a rule that he has to play with a different child every day. He explains that he cannot make only one friend because that friend will leave one day. He knows Kevin will be there for life, and he must make it on his own.

One night, Jennings unexpectedly wets the bed. Mrs. Abbott strikes him in the head, and he follows her to a room carrying his sheets. She has him strip naked and stand on a table with the urine-soaked sheet over him in the dark. He stays there until morning, freezing cold, until all the children come in and find him. Mrs. Abbott humiliates him, leaving him naked in front of them for wetting the bed. She makes him put his hands on his head to expose his genitals to everyone.

Later, another woman tells him to get down while the rest are at lunch. He puts on his clothes, packs his things, walks into the courtyard, and climbs over the fence and the barbed wire. He finds he is near the zoo, so he walks there and sneaks in at night once again, concealed in the bushes.

The next day, he eats a bag of popcorn that a child drops on the ground and hides in the bushes again for the night. He thanks Doggie for being his friend and for helping him get this far in life. When it begins to snow, Jennings sneaks back out. He sees the bridge that was near Mr. Frazier’s house and tells Doggie that they will go to see Martha. On the way he gets caught by a policeman, Officer Daily, near a cemetery.

At the station, they know his name and another policeman tells him he is a juvenile delinquent and is going to jail. Officer Daily takes him to a white building and tells him he is going to hate it, but he is instead greeted by a kind blonde woman, the policeman’s wife. The officer was teasing him, and he is not going to jail after all.