We were standing outside my apartment building—a dirty three-story brick building with trash on the front steps. “I’m home.”
“Now what?”
“I don’t know. I walk in there and try to figure out where my life goes from here.”
“What about me?” Lindsey asked.
“What about you?”
“Well, we did this funeral thing together, right?”
“Yeah. Well, you stole my wallet first, and then we did the funeral thing.”
“I know. But I didn’t know your mom had just died. Besides, it wasn’t personal.”
“It seemed pretty personal at the time.”
“I can explain, but maybe not now. Now I want you to tell me that we can be friends. We had a bad start, but it’s getting better, right?”
“It’s hard for me to think about anything getting better,” I said. And I almost turned and began to go up those trashy steps. But, despite all the weirdness, I knew that Lindsey was some kind of lifeline for me.
“Yeah, if you want to be my friend, I’d like that,” I said.
Lindsey smiled then. It was a great smile. “Hold out your hand.”
I held out my hand, and she wrote something on it. An email address.
“I have to go to the library if I want to check emails.”
“Okay.” She flipped my hand over and wrote a phone number on it. “You got a phone?”
“I have my mom’s cell phone. It’s really old. Guess it’s mine now.”
“Call me?”
I tried smiling back, but it was like my face wasn’t working. I started up the steps, then turned and said, “Thanks. Thanks, Lindsey.”
Chapter Five
I spent the next day alone in the apartment. I kept thinking my mom was going to walk in the door and everything would be okay, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I was in a dark and lonely place. I found my mom’s old cell phone and plugged it in so the battery wouldn’t go dead. It seemed to take an enormous amount of energy to do just that, to plug the damn thing in the wall. I copied Lindsey’s phone number onto three different pieces of paper. I placed one on the kitchen table and one on the table by my bed, and I put one in my wallet.
But I didn’t call her.
I slept a lot. The more I slept, the more tired I felt.
And then the buzzer rang. I looked out and could see it was Emma, and she had a guy with her. I hit the door buzzer to let them in. What else could I do?
“Hi, Josh. How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m okay, I guess.”
“Your uncle here?”
“He’s out.”
“Okay. This is Darren,” she said, nodding to the guy beside her.
“Hi, Josh,” he said. “Good to meet you. Sorry about your loss.” Darren looked to be about thirty. He had longish hair and seemed to be a nice guy.
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Darren runs a group home over on Cumberland,” Emma said. “You know much about group homes?”
I shook my head no.
“It’s not like the old days,” Darren said. “Ours is small. Right now we only have four other kids there. We think you’ll fit in.”
I looked at Emma. I’d never really trusted her, but she’d always been straight with my mom and me, always tried to help out, even when my mom pushed her away. I think she knew there was no uncle in the picture, but she didn’t come right out and say it.
“I gotta do this?” I asked her.
“Josh, you’re sixteen. We can’t let you stay here by yourself. Maybe in a year or two you’ll be okay on your own. But for now, you need to let us help you.”
Darren handed me a card. “This is the address. It’s not that far from here. We’d like it if you could walk over later today. On your own. Just come check us out. I’ll introduce you to the other guys. I’m not gonna say we’re like one big happy family. In fact, we are one weird little family or maybe not family at all. But we’re in it together. I live there too. This is my life. This is what I do. Just give us a chance.”
I looked at Emma. “What about this apartment? What happens to my mom’s stuff?”
“For now,” she said, “nothing. Everything will be here. We’ll continue to pay the rent until things settle down. You can come back here to visit in the days, if you like.”
Darren was playing cheerleader. He smiled and gave me two thumbs-up. Then they turned to go. “Hope to see you later today,” Darren said.
That afternoon I left the apartment for the first time since the funeral service. The sunlight was brighter—too bright. The street sounds seemed louder. Everything felt different—unfamiliar, like I’d never even been here before.
I walked to Cumberland Street and found the house—just a nondescript suburban house on a quiet dead-end street. I rang the doorbell, and a fat kid came to the door. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Josh,” I said.
“You selling something?”
“No. I’m here to see Darren.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh shit,” he said and then yelled, “Darren, the new kid is here.”
Darren bounded to the door with a big grin on his face. He shook my hand, and the fat kid wandered off inside. “That’s Kyle,” he said. “We’re working on his social skills. C’mon in.”
The first thing that struck me about the house was that everything was completely ordinary. There was a living room with a tv, a kitchen and a few small bedrooms. “Don’t blame me for the home decorating,” Darren said. “It was like this when I got here. Do you think you can handle it?”
“Handle what?”
“Think you can live in a place like this?”
I shrugged.
“Josh,” Darren said, “you’ve had a big loss. If I was in your shoes, I’d be a mess. I never lost a parent. We just want to give you a place that is safe and give you a chance to recover. Aside from Kyle, you’ll have three other kids to share the house with. And me. I’m supposedly in charge.” He opened a door to one of the bedrooms. “You’ll bunk in here with Noah.”
Noah was lying on one of the two beds in the room. He had dark hair, wore glasses and was reading a book. He looked up at me and nodded and said, “Like the guy with the ark. Only I don’t have any animals. We’re not allowed to have pets.”
I nodded uncertainly.
“Welcome aboard,” he said. “But I might as well tell you outright. I fart a lot, so you’ll have to get used to it.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said. I set my backpack down on the empty bed and let Darren lead me downstairs to what he called the family room.
“Noah had the crap beat out of him by his father on a regular basis. It’s not the farts you need to worry about. He wakes up screaming sometimes. Think you’ll be all right with that?”
“I dunno. I guess so. What should I do when that happens?”
Darren smiled at me. “Do what you’d want someone else to do if you woke up screaming. You’ll figure it out.”
There were two guys in the family room about my age. Darren nodded to them. “Connor and Brian, this is Josh.”
Connor looked me over. I could tell he was one of those kids who liked to size a person up and stick a label on them. He held up his hand and said, “Welcome, loser number five,” as if he was a host on some game show. “Can we have a round of applause for Josh.” This didn’t seem funny to me at all. The other kid, Brian, didn’t say anything. He had some kind of handheld video game that he went on playing.
Darren led me back into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Here’s the heart of this place. What’s here is yours as much as everyone else’s. We all gotta share, and I hope you’ll chip in with some chores. For now, that’s it. Make yourself at home. What would you like to do first?”
What I wanted to do was get out of there and go back home, but I was playing it cool. “Okay if I just go for a walk?”
“Absolutely. Dinner’s at five. Connor’s making macaroni with chunks o
f hot dogs cut up in it. It’s his specialty.”
“I wouldn’t want to miss that,” I said.
As I walked out of there, I felt a new wave of sadness sweep over me. The loss of my mom was still sinking in. We’d never been much of a family. But it was my life as I knew it. I loved her, and in her own way she loved me. I would never get that back. I’d never get her back. If I’d thought I could run, I would have. But I didn’t have any place to run to.
Chapter Six
The girl. All I could think about was calling Lindsey.
I found my way to a park and sat on a bench. Pigeons flew down and started marching around in front of me. I guess they thought I was going to feed them, but I had nothing. I took out my wallet. The five-dollar bill was still there. So was the faded picture of my mom. For a split second, I was ready to burst into tears. But I pushed that back. Instead, I unfolded the little scrap of paper with Lindsey’s phone number on it.
I punched in the numbers on my mom’s old cell phone. It rang. What was I going to say to her?
“Hello?”
“Lindsey?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Josh.”
“Josh. This is weird. No one actually calls me to talk on my cell.”
“I don’t think I can text from this phone.”
“That’s okay. It’s good to hear from you. How are you doing?”
“I’m hanging in there,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. I’m bored out of my gourd.”
“Can we do something together?” I couldn’t believe I was asking her this. I wasn’t even sure I trusted this girl. Maybe she was playing some freaking game by being nice to me.
“Sure. Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m not far from where we met.”
“Okay. I’ll come meet you there. Same corner where I first saw you. I’m leaving the house now.” And she hung up.
I almost didn’t recognize her when I saw her twenty minutes later. She had on an old flannel shirt and dirty ripped jeans and men’s work boots. Her hair was kind of stringy, and she was wearing a Boston Red Sox ballcap.
She walked up to me and gave me a hug. I think I pulled back a little, remembering what happened the last time. But I tried to relax. Her body felt good against me.
“How do you like the way I look?”
“I don’t know. You look okay, but I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“It’s all part of the game.”
“What game?” I asked.
“Look around. Can you tell which people on the street are tourists?”
I looked around. “No. How could I tell?”
“Check it out,” she said. “That guy there with the Disneyland T-shirt and the expensive backpack. And his wife in the sunglasses. Tourists for sure.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Watch.”
So I watched as she walked toward them and said something. They stopped. She talked for a bit, and then it looked like maybe she was about to cry.
That’s when the woman opened her purse and took out a wallet. I was freaking out, thinking Lindsey was about to grab it and run. But it wasn’t like that. The man stood there frowning, but the wife handed over a bill. Lindsey must have kept talking, because then the woman handed over a second bill. And a third. Lindsey bent over and kissed her hand and then turned, looked straight at me and flashed the money.
When she came back, she grabbed my arm and ushered me down a side street, a big grin on her face. “Like taking candy from a baby. Look. Twenty bucks.”
“What did you say to them?”
“I told them I was living on the street and was sick of it. I wanted to go home and needed money for bus fare.”
“But that was a total scam.”
“Totally.” She was smiling. I guess I was frowning.
“Josh. Lighten up. I’ll admit it wasn’t my most creative moment, but I can do better.”
“No. It’s not that. It’s just that you lied and cheated those people out of their money.”
“Relax, preacher boy. It’s just a game. I’m not hurting anyone. Think of it like acting. I’m a good actor, right?”
“You’re a good scam artist.”
“I don’t like that term,” she said and looked hurt. Then angry. “Hey, do you want to hang out with me, or should I just go home and leave you alone?”
I hung my head. No, I didn’t want to be alone. And I could see I had pissed her off.
“This is who I am,” she said. “So get over it.”
I tried a fake smile.
“That’s better. Now let’s go get a coffee and something to eat. My treat.”
Chapter Seven
At the coffee shop, we sat by the window. Lindsey bought us each a fancy coffee drink. It tasted like nothing I’d ever had before. “Cappuccino,” she said. “My favorite.”
“What if that tourist couple came in and saw you sitting here with me, drinking cappuccino?”
Lindsey shrugged. “Hey, homeless people need to live a little once in a while, I’d tell them.”
“How come you didn’t just ask me for money the other day? Why did you steal my wallet?”
“Well, you looked like an easy target at first, and I was gonna do the sob-story routine, but I realized I wasn’t dressed for it. And then, as I was talking to you, I thought you were kind of cute. So I gave you a hug.”
“And then stole my wallet.”
“I call it lifting. I lifted your wallet. I guess I got carried away, and I wanted to see if I could get away with it.”
I looked down at my cappuccino. I was thinking that this girl was trouble. Why was I hanging out with her?
“I see that look on your face,” she said.
“Why do you do it?”
“I told you. It’s a game. It’s a challenge. I try out new techniques. New angles. I like the buzz I get from doing it.”
“What if you get caught? What if you get in trouble with the police?”
“I haven’t so far. Besides, it’s all part of the challenge. The trick is to get away with it.”
“I suppose you like to shoplift too?”
Lindsey laughed. “I used to. But that was too easy. If I got caught, I could always talk my way out of it. But enough about me. What about you? Tell me what you do for fun.” But as soon as she said it, a curious look came over her face. I think she realized, knowing what I had been through, that I wasn’t having much fun these days.
I told her about the group home, about Darren and about the four guys I had met.
“I guess there’s not much fun there,” she said. “How are you gonna live in a place like that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
And then she surprised me again, this girl who liked to rip people off and scam anyone and do anything she thought she could get away with. She said, “What can I do to help?”
I swallowed my drink and thought about it. Aside from being here with Lindsey, I had to admit to myself, I really didn’t have anything good in my life. And I did like being with her. “Be my friend,” I finally said.
“Girlfriend?” she asked, shocking me.
“Maybe.”
She smiled again. “I don’t seem to have much luck with guys. Or maybe, to put it another way, they don’t have much luck with me.”
I almost laughed. I was imagining the kind of games she could play with a guy. How could you ever know if she was sincere or just role playing? “I guess they get pissed off when you steal their wallets.”
“Shush,” she said. “No. Usually, I just lose interest when I realize how shallow they are. And they all seem to be shallow. Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Shallow. Superficial. Trivial. Small-minded. One-dimensional.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t even know. Maybe I’m like all the rest. But I’ve spent most of my life just trying to
hold my mom and me together. It was mostly about survival and working the system—the social workers—so that my mom wouldn’t go to jail and I wouldn’t be sent away. I didn’t have any time to be shallow. Or trivial.”
“When you say work the system, what do you mean?”
“You know, say what the social workers wanted to hear. Tell them my mom had no problems, that everything was okay, that she wasn’t spending welfare money on drugs. You know?”
“No, I don’t know. But it sounds like you had to lie to them.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“So in your own way, you are not that different from me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You learned to be a scam artist of sorts. You had to be creative. You had to lie. You had to play the game, and you learned to play it well.”
“I never thought of it as a game. It was serious.”
“Okay, but now I see another side of you. I can work with that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can teach you things. We can do some stuff together. Take it up to the next level.”
I didn’t know what she meant or how to respond, so I just kept my mouth shut, sat there and stared at her.
Chapter Eight
Lindsey made me promise to meet her back at the coffee shop the next day at one in the afternoon. “I’m going to have on a different outfit. So I want you to dress up. Wear something nice. Something formal, if you have it.” She kissed me on the cheek when she left.
I headed back to the group home with a weird mix of emotions sweeping through me. The loss of my mom. The new living situation. This girl, who I really liked but might never know if she was telling me the truth or just being a good actor. And why had she told me to wear something nice, something formal?
On my way back to the group home, I noticed all the graffiti on an overpass and more nearby on a school wall. Most prominent was Yo-Yo. I’d seen it before, but now there was a connection. Lindsey’s brother Caleb was doing this—tagging in big bold letters, in some really difficult locations. What the hell did he do? Use ladders, hang over the side by a rope? I wondered why on earth anyone would take chances just to scrawl his nickname on a bridge or wall. But then, I guessed Caleb and Lindsey had grown up in one crazy little family.
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