The man growled and approached the child with heavy steps. He reached out to pick the boy off the floor. Vincent's eyes went wide and he shrieked in fear when his uncle grabbed his sweatshirt, causing the man to freeze and stare as the boy cowered, pressing himself against the wall. Walter was quiet. Slowly, he crouched down and took his hand away from the blue cloth. Rubbing his hands together, he uncomfortably waited for the boy to calm down. "I'm not going to hurt you, you know."
Vincent sniffed and gazed at his uncle with large, watery eyes.
"There." An unsure hand patted down the boy's untamed hair, and, when it was withdrawn, Walter sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the speechless child. "Now then." Walter cleared his throat and looked at the wall. "You can try again and sleep on the right side of the bed, not the left. You have school tomorrow, so you need to sleep."
The red eyes continued to stare at the man, and they lifted when Walter stood up.
"Uncle."
Walter's body went rigid at the soft voice and he gazed at the child that timidly played with the pouch on his sweatshirt. It was the first time he had heard the boy speak, and now that he thought about it…he didn't know the boy's name. Walter waited for a while, but Vincent didn't speak again. "What is it?"
"I…" The boy looked at his shoes and was quiet.
The man scowled and crossed his arms impatiently. "Out with it, and then off to bed."
"I'm…I'm h..hungry, Uncle. I didn't eat breakfast or lunch and I haven't had anything for dinner yet."
The scowling features became blank and empty. "Oh." Walter's eyes wandered the room as his mind refused to work. "I have to feed you…"
It was his forth piece of bread and he was cramming it into his mouth as if it was his first. Walter watched from the side of the room, having set a loaf of bread on the table with the mismatched chairs. He waited for the boy to slow down, but he didn't seem like he wanted to.
"If you keep on eating like that you're going to throw it all back up again and I'm not the one who's gonna clean up the mess, got it?" He frowned at the timid apology and the nibbling that began afterward. Walter crossed his arms and closed his eyes, suddenly tired. "Boy." Vincent looked at him, still nibbling on his bread like a mouse. "What's your name?" The boy swallowed, then hesitated.
"I'm…my name's…" He was quiet for a moment. Then big globs of tears began to fall on the piece of bread in his hands. Walter watched.
"Stop crying, boy, and answer me." He growled.
"But…but…" Vincent put his bread down carefully as his face twitched, fighting back a sob. He slowly crossed his arms and shakily rested his head in them, blinking away tears as he whimpered. "But…don't laugh at me."
"What?" The man's blue eyes narrowed as he saw the thin shoulder quiver with silent sobs. "I told you to stop that."
"They…" Gasping out the word, Vincent buried his face into his arms, squishing down his runny nose on his sleeve. "The kids all laughed at me and called me names because….because…I have a weird name…and…..cause…I'm…so…ugly…they..they…they called me…a.. and said mean things to me…and wouldn't play with me…and…I…I don't wanna go to school anymore….I don't like it there. They're mean to me…and the teacher doesn't…doesn't do anything."
"I told you to stop that, you whiney brat." Walter hissed, looming over the boy that was shivering and hiccupping now. "Do you think I care if they play with you? School is for learning, not for fun. Who gives a shit what those brats say or think? They're useless, stupid brats, just like you. Ignore them. Now stop crying and eat your food."
"I'm…I'm not hungry…anymore." Vincent gasped, rubbing his reddened face on his sleeve to get rid of the snot and tears. His uncle cringed in disgust and grabbed the lengthy black hair to make the boy sit up. Vincent gasped in pain but instantly stiffened in terror.
"Good. Now take a shower and get to sleep. Since you cry and snot up everything, you'll have to sleep on the couch. Got it? And you make your own food if you want to have anything to eat, or else you can starve. Now get moving." The boy's chest jerked with breaths he could not take.
"Uncle." He whispered. "I don't know where the shower is."
Walter let go of his nephew and stepped towards the open door. "All you have to do is ask. I don't bite… much."
Vincent blinked as a drop of rain hit him near the eye and then rolled into his eyelashes. He shook himself sharply, his head bent as he kept his hands shoved into the depths of his pockets. It was still pouring, raining cats and dogs as they say, when the teen jumped over a large puddle in the school's back parking lot. The headlights of cars shone around him, illuminating individual drops of rain for fractions of a second before they fell out of the light and hit the wet asphalt. He moved up the stairs and reached the campus, immediately making his way to the line of picnic tables with the wood covering over them. Rain fell in torrents from the flat roof, spattering loudly on the concrete. The boy stopped, though, and let the rain beat against his hood as his eyes ran over the collection of teenagers using up most of the space.
Vincent turned in a circle, scanning the campus to find a dry place to sit. He didn't find one.
With a few blinks, he changed his direction and headed for the Art Building to find refuge in his first period class. The door was locked, so he knocked on it and waited under a ledge. No one else was there so he debated with himself whether or not he should just sit against the wall or go inside if someone opened the door. A female teacher poked her head out of the door and saw the soaking teen. She pursed her lips without recognizing him. His face was obscured by the hood that had been stretched by his tugging on it in its wet condition.
"You're a little wet. I'll see if I have a towel you can dry off with. It'd be dangerous if the floor got wet…" She muttered before disappearing. Vincent waited a few minutes and she came back. "Here." She handed him two paint stained towels and then propped open the door and retreated inside.
Pushing back his hood, the boy dried off his face and then tried to soak up the water from his pants by sponging them with a towel. He peeled off his sweatshirt and wiped down his arms and neck. Afterwards, he sponged the black sweatshirt for a while and carried it into the building, along with the wet towels. He gave the towels back to the teacher who gawked at him, stunned when she recognized who he was. She stuttered when he spoke, lifting up his sweatshirt.
"Can I hang this somewhere?"
"U…um…" Her head swiveled about, searching for 'somewhere'. She pointed to an empty rack that was usually used for storing wet paintings. "There. Use that."
Vincent draped his sweatshirt over the rack and went into the next room, rubbing his cold arms to get them to warm a little. His teacher was in her office so she didn't see him cross the room and sit down in his usual obscure table in the corner. He cross his arms over the table and rested his head in them, hiding his face as he closed his eyes.
Little Vincent slept on the mat that he set in front of the shelves with the odd trinkets. Walter had found an answer to the bed problem by buying the boy a small futon. He gave the boy a pillow and a blanket and let him chose where he wanted to sleep, but reminded the child that he was still allowed to sleep in the bed if he slept on the right side.
Getting up in the morning wasn't hard for the boy, but he struggled a little with finishing everything he needed to do before going to school; such as brushing his teeth and hair and getting dressed and making breakfast and lunch and making sure he had his homework…and he had a hard time coming up with creative things to eat. He had bread with butter for breakfast and bread with butter and sugar for lunch. Eventually his uncle bought peanut butter and plum preserves along with a small toaster. At night, the boy usually ate some fruit along with his sandwich, eating a few frozen strawberries as if they were some highly treasured dessert.
School didn't improve, and as a result the boy, who had already been behind his peers grade wise because of his isolated homeschooling that had involved more lessons in mu
sic than anything else, began to perform poorly in school. He told his uncle that he did not understand the lessons and the man would tell him that it was the boy's fault for not listening or the teacher's fault for being a stupid, incompetent bastard. Walter wasn't a teacher, as he pointed out, so he couldn't help the young Vincent with homework or studying. The boy just assumed that he was stupid because he did listen during class and the other children didn't have any trouble understanding Mr. Olson.
"Why can't you answer this problem?" Mr. Olson demanded, gasping in exasperation as he pointed at the whiteboard. "We went over this last week." The other children were laughing as the boy looked the teacher in the eye and apologized.
"I'm sorry Mr. Olson. I'm just stupid." The class let out a roar of laughter, howling and banging on their desks as they giggled and spoke to one another. The teacher ordered their silence and then chastised Vincent for trying to act like the class clown, always riling up the other students.
"If you cracked less jokes and worked harder, you'd be able to do these problems in your sleep."
Quietly, the boy sat down and stared at the numbers on the board with an empty expression. It was an alien language to him, and he had no hopes of decoding it.
Since he had begun attending the elementary school in April, summer came quickly and soon the boy was without a 'daycare'. He mostly stayed at home alone, too scared to wander about the streets. He didn't want to get hit by a car or stolen by a smelly, mumbling homeless man. The boy mainly read books or doodled on paper, drawing the black hand dozens of times until he thought that he could create the hand's identical twin on paper without using the original as a model. He didn't show his uncle because he was afraid the man would get angry, since he was 'wasting paper and good lead'.
One night, Walter stood by the door with an unlit cigarette in his mouth as his eyes watched the boy that was reading a book under the table. He cocked his head thoughtfully. "You'll ruin your eyes if you read there."
The boy flinched and looked at him. "But…I can see fine under here. It's not dark."
The entire area where the boy was laying was cast in a dark shadow. The cigarette wobbled in the man's mouth. "Put the book away. Book worms are useless. You're coming with me tonight, so get some shoes on."
The man watched his nephew loosely as he stood with a few other men, checking to see how the other youths that tagged along with their fathers (sometimes), would interact with the nervous little boy. Vincent was the youngest and the smallest in the group, and he stood rigidly near a brick wall as the boys made a circle around him, commenting on his red eyes.
"Whoa man, check it out. Red eyes!" "Like a freaken demon or freaken Satan!" They chuckled, but then smiled at the youth. "I think it's awesome. How fuckin' scared would punks be if you had red eyes?" "I wish I had red eyes." "It's cool, little dude."
"Really?" Vincent said, trembling a little as he clung to the end of his sweatshirt. His eyes were large with hope and he grinned awkwardly, still in a state of disbelief. "They're…they're not weird?"
The boys laughed. "Hell yeah they're weird! They're freakish, but that's why they're totally awesome!" They chuckled together darkly, passing each other amused looks as the little boy fidgeted with a big dopey grin on his face. "Yeah. It's time." "It's time, alright." The boys spoke amongst one another and then looked at Vincent whose grin was beginning to fail.
"What time? What do you mean?" He asked curiously, squeezing his sweatshirt as the boys smiled at him. They suddenly looked like a pack of hungry wolves, and he cowered into the wall when they laughed.
"Time to get the kid with the red eyes!" They all lunged at him at once, and the boy ducked with a shriek and slipped away. He searched for his uncle and found that the men were watching him, amused.
"Uncle! Uncle! Help!"
The man scowled and waved the boy away as the child danced anxiously on his feet before fleeing from the older boys again. "Go play. It builds character."
"But they aren't trying to play!" Gasped out the child as he narrowly dodged a wild grab. "They're trying to kill me!"
Walter's mouth twitched with humor while the other men laughed, even the chasing boys chimed in. "No. It's all fun. They'll only bruise and maybe bloody you up a bit, but that'll make you stronger."
The boy shrieked again and dashed away from the boys, this time getting caught. They tackled him, smushing the little boy until he wriggled loose. He had abandoned his sweatshirt, so it was left on the grimy asphalt as the group ran after him again. Desperate, Vincent spun about, searching for a way to escape. He saw the brick wall and a fire escape protruding from it.
With a burst of speed, the boy ran towards the wall and then up the bricks until he began to lose momentum, then he dug his fingers and the tips of his shoes into the crevices and scaled the rest of the wall. The pursuing boys stopped and stared along with the men. Vincent went up nine or so vertical feet and then grasped the side of the bottom of the fire escape and then pulled himself up and quickly climbed over the barred railing. The boy peered through the bars, panting and shaking with adrenalin. He smiled a little when he saw that the boys had stopped chasing him, and looked at his uncle who stood, surrounded by the gawking men.
Walter's face was unreadable. Then he drew on the cigarette in his mouth and puffed out a cloud of smoke as he spoke. "Can you get down?"
Vincent started and went on his tippy toes and then back on the balls of his feet as he thought. He climbed over the railing and looked down at the concrete below. The men began to chuckle as they saw that the boy was stuck, but they choked on their amusement when Vincent suddenly leaped off of the fire escape and landed on the ground in a crouch. He got up and scurried over to his uncle's side and smiled up at him nervously. "Yeah. I could get down."
One of the men whistled while, in amongst the group of boys, his son echoed the whistle and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black, leather jacket. "Now that's an interesting little fella. What's his name?" The man asked Walter who had to shake himself from a daze.
"Hm." He looked down at the boy, trying to remember what his name was. The man chewed on his cigarette. "Why don't you tell him?"
The boy straightened up and smiled at the man who grinned back. "I'm Vincent. My whole name is Vincentimir Max Ramos, but don't laugh."
The men paused and then passed smirks to the boy's uncle who scowled at them. The boys were the first to speak.
"Max? That's a cool name!" "Yo, Max! Little dude! Show us how you climbed up that wall!" "He was like freaken Spider Man." "He's a monkey. Way better than a stupid comic book hero." "Yeah! Max, climb the wall again!"
Puffing up with pride and joy, the boy ran to the others and laughed at what they said and climbed the wall half a dozen times, just to please them.
He had made his first set of friends.
"Wake up."
Uncle. I need to sleep for a little while. I tired.
"Hey. Wake up, Vincent."
Vincent? Uncle always calls me either boy or Vincentimir. The boy left sleep gradually and groggily lifted his head to meet the green eyed teen. He blinked at Rodriguez for a while, disoriented after his dream. His eyes swiveled about the room, finding a few stares directed at them.
"Why are you wearing a T-shirt? It's freezing cold today." Rodriguez put his hands on the table and leaned on them as the red eyes returned to him. Vincent left his arms crossed over the table and continued to slouch.
"My sweat shirt is in the other art room, drying out. It got soaked in the rain, so it's useless." He looked around the classroom again and saw that the students were getting new pieces of paper and supplies for their next project. Damn. He had slept through the instructions.
Rodriguez seemed to be able to read the other teen's thoughts, and he straightened his back and crossed his arms, also looking at the class. "Christmas stuff. You can do whatever you want."
Vincent's head moved back to his arms. "I don't feel like drawing a fat man in a red suit."
"Draw a lady bug with the rest of your cult and let me sleep."
The football quarterback cocked a brow and almost laughed. "Cult? You say such…rubbish, you know that? Now get up and go get a piece of paper and a pencil and draw a candy cane or something. You need to get the participation points for working in class."
"I don't like candy canes." Came a grumble. "I hate Christmas."
"Then draw the Grinch and his dog stealing Christmas."
Vincent was quiet for a while, then he stiffly got up and stretched his back so that it crackled a bit. Walking to the side of the room, the boy snatched up a piece of paper and a pencil and returned to his seat, only noticing that Rodriguez had gone with him and gotten his own piece of paper and pencil when the teen sat down at his table. Vincent stared at him dully. "What the hell do you think you're doing, fat rich boy…"
"I'm not fat, little grubby runt."
"Fatass."
"Anorexic person."
"Fatass."
"Grinch."
"Fatass."
Rodriguez growled, losing his humor as he shot Vincent a halfhearted glare. "Stop calling me that. People don't like to be called mean names."
The red eyes dropped to the paper as the pencil marked it, ruining the perfect white sheet. "I know. I say it because I don't really mean it."
Rodriguez stopped what he was doing and watched Vincent work. He felt a little sad now, and he didn't understand why. Looking at the teen, he saw how the boy was too thin and recalled how he had said that he hated Christmas. It wasn't really fair now. The fat ass remark was absurd while Rodriguez's remarks had been…believable...almost truthful. His face fell to his own paper and he struggled to gain the inspiration to draw something.
"Draw a lady bug with a Santa hat. No one else is going to think of drawing that."
Rodriguez smiled after glancing at Vincent, and then paused when he caught sight of the boy's paper. His eyes narrowed a little and he shifted uncomfortably. "What…what in God's Holy name is that?"
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