Overview
His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16.
Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked. Then he started to draw and paint and showed himself to have a quick wit and a rolling, seething, murderous hatred for his stepfather.
When Torey Hayden first met fifteen-year-old Kevin, he was barricaded under a table, desperately afraid of everything around him. He had not spoken for eight years. When at last she penetrated his silence, she discovered a violent past and a dreadful secret that a cold bureaucracy had simply filed away. It took all of Torey Hayden's devotion to rescue this "lost case," but with gentle, patient love, she made the miracle happen.