by Darlene Ryan
Not exactly “I’m your friend,” but close enough. I shoved my hands in the front pocket of my hoodie. “Not really,” I said.
For a second her mouth moved without any sound coming out. Then she said, “Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true.” I looked around her office. “Hannah, you were really nice to me when I was here, but that doesn’t make us friends. You run Pax House, and I stayed here because I had nowhere else to go.”
Silence. I waited to see if Hannah would say something, because I’d already said what I had to say.
She exhaled softly. “I care about you, Maddie,” she said at last. “If you came back here, we could work things out, you could go to school, you could make—”
Work things out meant go home to my mother and Evan. I’d told Hannah I couldn’t do that, but she just didn’t want to believe me.
“Stop!” I stood up, both hands in the air over my head. “I get that you think I should go home, go back to school. What you don’t get is it’s my choice and my life.”
“So you’re going to live on the street forever?”
“No!”
“Then what are you going to do?” Her face was flushed.
How was I supposed to answer that? Tell her about Q’s plan to win big at poker? This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I knew getting mad just made things worse. When I dug in, so did Hannah, but she was the adult here. Wasn’t she supposed to be reasonable? Wasn’t she supposed to listen? “I have friends,” I said.
“Friends who are eating out of the garbage.”
“It’s not garbage,” I snapped. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She got up and stepped in front of me with her hands on her hips. “I know what happens to people out here, Maddie,” she said, her voice sharp with anger. “People start using, or they slide down into a bottle, and then they end up doing things they never would have done otherwise. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”
“It’s not going to happen to me.”
Hannah shook her head. “Everybody says that, Maddie. You think most of the people that come through here weren’t like you once?”
“Stop doing this!” I shouted, holding up one hand. “Stop trying to scare me! And stop trying to make me into you!”
I ran out of the office, cut through the kitchen and pushed through the heavy metal door to the outside. I stood there breathing hard, rubbing the back of my head with one hand.
Jayson was watching me. “You okay?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Hannah’s a good person,” he said.
Great, not him too. Why couldn’t the do-gooders go work on someone else’s life? I gave a halfhearted nod because I didn’t want to get into it with Jayson.
“You doin’ okay, Maddie?” he asked. “Really?” I could see concern in his chocolate-brown eyes. “You got somewhere to sleep that’s safe?”
I gave him a small smile. “Yeah, I do. Honest.”
“Good.” He smiled back. Then he fished in his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. He held it out to me. “Do me a favor?” he said. “Keep an eye out for this kid. Runaway. Parents are going crazy.”
I unfolded the page to look at the picture. The blood drained from my face, and for a second the world swirled around me. My breath stuck in my chest.
It was Leo.
I would have given it away; Jayson would have known right away from the look on my face except that somehow, just at that exact second, some smart-ass guys came down the sidewalk talking loudly, pushing each other, showing off. He turned his attention to them, folding his arms and somehow looking even bigger than usual. By the time the guys had gone by and Jayson looked at me again, I’d remembered how to breathe.
I folded the paper into a small square and stuffed it in my back pocket. Then I looked at him with what I hoped was a normal expression on my face. “What did he run away from?” I asked.
Jayson shook his head. “Nothing, far as I know. Swear to God, the parents are frantic. How often does that happen around here?” He glanced up the street where the boys had gone back to shoving each other and talking trash.
“Nobody runs away without a reason,” I said.
“Doesn’t mean it was a good reason.” He stretched one arm behind his head and then the other. “You didn’t see these people. Mother looks like she’s about to cry all the time. Father’s going on about two hours of sleep. They’re nice people, Maddie.”
I thought about Leo insisting he could never go home. I thought about the way he cringed whenever anyone other than Dylan got close to him. Nice people? I wasn’t so sure.
“I gotta go,” I said to Jayson.
“Stay safe,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, you too.”
I could feel the folded piece of paper in my pocket. It seemed to get heavier with each step I took. When I got home, I stopped on the sidewalk and pulled it out. Leo looked serious in the picture, but it was him, with longer and what looked to be darker hair. His parents were offering a reward. A big one. That had to mean they cared about him, didn’t it? Then I thought about Leo telling me he was bad. If they cared about him, if they loved him so much, why did he think that about himself?
I folded the paper as small as I could and put it back in my pocket. Then I went upstairs.
I didn’t tell Q about Leo’s family looking for him. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. But I kept the piece of paper. I told him about seeing Hannah when I’d been scavenging and how I’d gone to talk to her because I didn’t want her asking around about me.
We’d never talked much about our lives before. Q knew I’d stayed at Pax House, and he knew I’d left home because of Evan. I knew even less about him, and it didn’t matter anyway.
Getting through the day was a lot easier with Leo around. We needed more food, and I was always afraid Q was going to come home and say John Goddard thought we were using too much water, but having Leo just to help with Dylan was worth it.
And he was smart. He seemed to remember everything he read. We’d carry home stacks of books from the library and, more than once, I woke up in the middle of the night to find Leo, wrapped in a blanket, reading on the bathroom floor.
Sometimes he didn’t want to sleep. He had nightmares a lot worse than Dylan’s. He’d move in his sleep like he was running from something, and at the same time he’d try to curl into a tiny ball. He made sounds like an animal caught in a trap—pained moans that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I’d crawl over and sit beside him in the dark until he jerked awake, wet with sweat. Then I’d hold his hand until he stopped shaking, and lots of times we’d fall asleep like that. I learned pretty fast not to try to put my arms around him or touch him before he was awake. That made him freak.
Like Q, Leo was watching all the time, but when we were all together and he was playing with Dylan, he almost seemed like a normal kid. Or at least as normal as our family was ever going to get.
“Leo should go to school,” I said to Q. We were sitting on the floor by the window. He was working with the cards and a different poker book. Dylan and Leo were building some kind of house for Fred.
“You know we can’t do that,” Q said, setting down the hand of cards he’d just dealt himself. “Schools ask a lot of questions.”
“Couldn’t we…fake it?” I asked.
He didn’t say a thing. He just looked at me like my brain had fallen out and rolled across the floor.
I slumped back against a box. “Okay, so we can’t fake it,” I said. “There has to be a way. He’s smart, Q.”
Q reached over and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “So are you. You teach him.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, there’s a good idea.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “People teach their own kids all the time. You can do it. Give me a list of what you need and I’ll get it for you.”
“How exactly are you going to do that?�
�� I asked.
“Goddard,” he said. “You really want to know any more than that?”
I pressed both hands to my face. “No,” I muttered through my fingers.
I made a list for Q—notebooks, pencils, a math textbook, a calculator, a math set, plus crayons and colored paper for Dylan—and a couple of days later, he came home with it all in a paper shopping bag. The next Saturday he got up early.
“I have to work today,” was all he said. He came back dirtier than I’d ever seen him. That was how it always was with Goddard. He always got the best of any deal.
Q played poker pretty much whenever he got the chance. As far as I could tell, he was winning more than he was losing, but I couldn’t be sure. The bags of change seemed to come pretty regularly—thirty dollars, sometimes forty. Mostly he played with the guys he worked with, but sometimes he went out for what he called higher-stakes games.
I always pretended to be asleep when he came in, but I could tell by the way he moved if it had been a good night or not. If it was, he was cocky, even as he was creeping around the room. If it wasn’t, he kind of crawled in and rolled up in his blanket away from me.
He read the poker book over and over, dealing cards and mumbling to himself. “What are you doing?” I asked him one night while I sorted through our food stash trying to figure out what we were going to have for breakfast.
“I’m trying to learn how to figure the odds so I know when to bet,” he said.
“Don’t you just bet when you have the best cards?” I asked as I shook a box of Oatios, trying to figure out how much was left inside.
He set the open book on the floor and stretched his legs out across the painted wood. “I wish it was that simple.” His hair was smushed flat on one side from where he’d been leaning his head on his hand as he read.
“I think I’d rather collect bottles,” I said. I stepped over him and scooped up Dylan. “Bath time,” I whispered against his neck, scrambling my fingers up the back of his head to make him laugh.
When I came out of the bathroom, Q was bent over the book again, cards spread out in front of him. He picked up his pencil and scribbled something on a piece of paper next to the cards on the floor. Leo had moved closer and was watching.
Q studied the paper and then looked at the cards again. He shook his head, set the pencil down and scratched his chin. “I’m missing something,” he said. “I wish I knew what the hell it is.”
Leo was looking at the paper, even though for him it was upside down. “Your outs are wrong,” he said softly, more like he was talking to himself.
Q looked surprised. “What do you mean, they’re wrong?”
Leo pointed to the cards. “A flush is better than a straight, right?”
Q nodded. “A flush beats a straight, yeah.”
Leo pushed the piece of paper toward Q. “Your outs are wrong,” he said again.
“How do you figure that?” Q asked.
“Those two cards are yours?” Leo asked. There was an ace and a jack in front of Q.
“Yeah.”
“Those other three are the…?”
“Flop,” Q said. He pushed the cards closer to Leo, a ten and a king—both hearts—and a five of spades.
Leo looked at Q. “So if the next card is a queen, you have a straight, and if it’s an ace, you have two the same.”
Q tapped the deck with a finger. “Assuming no one is holding a queen, there are four to be had and three aces—since I have one. Four and three make seven, so I have seven outs. Seven chances to make my hand and win.”
Leo shook his head. “No. Really all you have is five. If the queen or the ace is a heart, then there will be three hearts showing and there’s a good chance someone else will—”
“—be able to make a flush, which would beat my straight,”
Q finished. He took a deep breath and blew it out. “How did you figure that out? I’ve been doing it wrong for weeks.”
Leo shrugged. “It’s just math.”
Q picked up the poker book and started flipping through the pages. He stopped near the front and held out the book to Leo, pointing to the middle of the left-hand page. “Do you understand that?” he asked.
Leo leaned over and started reading. After a minute he looked up at Q. “It’s pretty simple.”
Q turned to grin at me and then bent his head over the book with Leo. I could feel the energy coming off Q in waves, while in my stomach, something cold twisted itself into a knot.
fifteen
The next night, Q started teaching Leo poker. Or maybe it was Leo teaching Q, I wasn’t so sure. They were at it when I left with Lucy and were still spreading cards on the floor when I came back. At least Dylan was asleep, and judging by the mess in the bathroom, he’d had a bath.
I stepped into the middle of the cards on purpose so they’d have to stop. “Jeez, Maddie, what are you doing?” Q said.
“I’m trying to put the food away,” I said. “You could help.”
Leo reached for one of the bags, but I handed it to Q instead. “You should go get cleaned up and brush your teeth,” I said to Leo. I saw him look at Q, who gave a slight nod.
Leo went into the bathroom and shut the door. When I heard the water running, I hit Q on the head with a loaf of French bread. (It was in a plastic bag.)
“Ow!” he said, looking at me wide-eyed.
I bent to put the bags of ice in the cooler. “Oh c’mon, that was bread. There’s no way it hurt,” I said over my shoulder.
He rubbed his hair just above his left ear. “What did you hit me for? What did I do?”
I glanced at the bathroom door. “Leo’s a kid,” I whispered. “You really think he should be playing cards?”
Q reached out to touch me, but I was pissed, so I took a step backward. “He’s not playing cards, Maddie. I’m playing cards. All Leo’s doing is teaching me how to figure the odds so I know when to bet and when not to.” He put his free hand flat on his chest. “The only one playing is me, I swear.” He waited a minute, and then he wiggled his eyebrows all spazzy at me.
I stared over his shoulder and tried to keep the scowl on my face. “That’s not working.”
“Are you sure? Because I think I just saw your lips try to smile.” He took a step toward me.
“The inside of my cheek was itchy,” I said.
He took another couple of steps toward me so there was maybe just a hand-width of space between us. “I don’t think that was an itch,” he said. “I think that was a smile.”
“Wasn’t,” I mumbled. I was still staring at a spot on the wall over his shoulder, so I didn’t see the kiss coming. His mouth was warm on mine. One hand was in my hair, and the other slid down my back.
“I’m lucky, Maddie,” he whispered, his breath soft on my skin. “I’ve been lucky since the day I met you. Once I figure out when to bet and when to fold, there’s nothing to stop us. We’re gonna get out of here.”
I looked up at his face. It seemed like there was something in his eyes, an intensity that for a moment reminded me of the minister at the Holy Rollers shelter the night Q and I met. Then it was gone. It had to be some trick of the streetlight coming through the window, because that preacher and Q were nothing alike.
Every night for the next week, Leo and Q worked with the cards and the book. Each day Q seemed a tiny bit more frustrated. I wasn’t sure if Leo could see it, but I could. Q was always yanking his hand back through his hair, and the muscles in his jaw and neck looked like tight knots under his skin.
Sunday we went to the soup line for lunch. We were low on food. We’d been to the bag-lunch line both days at St. Paul’s, and I’d used the last of the quarters to buy milk for Leo and Dylan.
We had granola, apples and carrots for supper. I pretended that I wasn’t very hungry so there’d be enough of the cereal for Dylan and Leo to have for breakfast.
Q pulled me out into the hallway after we ate. “Do you have any money?” he asked.
“If I
had money, do you think we would have been eating wrinkled apples and rubber carrots for supper?” I said.
There was a long pause. “You always keep something hidden in case there’s an emergency,” he said finally.
I didn’t know he knew that.
“What’s the emergency?”
His eyes slid off my face. “There’s a game tonight.”
“No,” I said. I turned around to go back inside.
Q grabbed my wrist. “Maddie, I need to practice.”
I wrenched my arm free. “So practice with Leo.”
“It’s not the same as being in a game.”
I had to jam my hands into my pockets because I was suddenly afraid that if I didn’t, I would punch him. “So practice with those dip wads you work with. I don’t have any money, and if I did, it would be for an emergency, and poker is not an emergency.”
I went back inside, and after a minute Q came in too. I thought he’d be more pissed, but he wasn’t. I was glad because the thing was, I’d lied. I did have money—twenty dollars, underneath the sole in my left boot. The part I didn’t lie about was that it was for an emergency, and Q playing poker wasn’t an emergency.
He smiled at me and started building a castle with Dylan and Leo—or maybe it was a condo for Fred. After I’d cleaned up a little, I kicked off my boots and lay on my stomach on the floor, watching them. I would have listened to the iPod, but it needed to be charged and I didn’t have a charger. I hadn’t understood the words, but I’d liked the French music.
When it was time for a bath, Dylan didn’t want to go, even though I’d seen him yawn more than once.
“Now,” I told him after he’d whined and stalled. “There isn’t going to be any hot water if you don’t move it. You’ll be in the bathtub with icicles hanging from your ears.”
I was pretty sure John Goddard had done something to the water heater. The water wasn’t as hot as it had been, and lots of nights there was none at all. We’d started having baths every second day because nobody wanted to get in a tub of cold water.