Demon describes Tommy Waddles’s hard-luck path through foster care—parents dead, a distant grandmother, and a life in state custody. At Creaky Farm, Tommy copes by drawing endless skeletons after Creaky’s insults, while the boys endure pre-dawn bus rides with older students and constant fights. Demon clings to this routine as the only normal left.

At school, Maggot becomes Demon’s lifeline, smuggling his clothes, notebooks, and valuables out of the house while Stoner lies low. School offers Demon a fragile refuge from the filth and hostility awaiting him back at the farm.

Weekend haying confirms the grind: Creaky’s ancient baler keeps failing, prompting curses while Fast Forward does the real fixing. Demon and Tommy struggle to haul and stack the square bales; Swap-Out causes chaos on the stacks. The day ends with no shower thanks to the upstairs bottleneck and a foul downstairs tub, sharpening Demon’s resentment at his mother’s complaints about rehab “hell.”

That night, Fast Forward hosts the promised Hillbilly Squadron party in his room: candy, a candlelit circle, and cigarettes. He assigns secret names—Tommy becomes “Bones,” Swap-Out “Wild Man,” and Demon “Diamond,” praised as hard, bright, and desired. Fast Forward admires Demon’s superhero drawings, jokes about girls, and boasts of sexual exploits, boosting his mystique with fearless locker-room tales.

Laughter turns woozy when the cookies prove “special,” and Fast Forward unveils a hat of mixed pills: a pharm party. Demon swallows an unknown tablet and sinks into a warm high beside his “brothers,” reflecting that, at age ten, drugs arrived not as a choice but as the only comfort in a world where adults had abandoned their posts—and an older boy tried to make them feel safe.