‘After this, I’m taking you to a youth detention facility and we’ll move through your case from there.’
‘Avery—’
‘Yes, I’ll look after Avery.’
no no no don’t touch him
‘But I need to see him again.’ Sam’s voice is panicked.
Evans doesn’t notice. Or care. ‘You will eventually. For now you need constant supervision and completion of your mental health assessment.’
Sam digs fingers into his hair. He’s ripping apart. ‘I need air,’ he whispers. Then louder, ‘I need the window down. I’m going to … I’m going to be sick.’
This gets Evans’s attention fast. He pulls up at a red traffic light and twists in his seat to where Sam hunches in the back. Sam must look white enough that Evans flips the lock off in the front so Sam’s window can zoom down.
Sam unbuckles his belt and puts his whole head out.
‘Sit back down,’ Evans commands. ‘Put your belt on and—’
But Sam’s already climbing out of the window.
Evans gives a startled exclamation and whips off his own seatbelt, but Sam’s been running away for years and he knows how to be fast and light and unexpected.
He hits the road in a crouch and then springs forward. Pain instantly explodes through his guts, but he ignores it, running down the row of growling cars waiting for the lights to go green.
Evans yells at his back.
Horns blare.
Sam runs.
‘You can’t afford to do this!’ Evan shouts.
Sam tucks his head and swerves amongst cars. His shoes hit the sidewalk. He’s through an alley and climbing a fence and across someone’s backyard before the pain slices, white and blinding, through his stomach. He buckles to his knees in the grass and grabs his stomach.
Get up. Keep running. You have to get out of here.
Sobs rip from his throat and he picks himself up, pushes on, climbs another fence, and falls flat on his face in stones and weeds. When he gets up this time, his shirt sticks to his side. Blood blooms across the white like spilt paint.
He’s good at running away. Come on, he’s good at this, he can still do it.
He loses himself in backyards and old roads and he walks and walks until his stomach can’t take it any more and he throws up. It’s like ripping stitches. It’s like the knife going in again and again. He throws his tie away.
Keep walking.
His legs know the destination even before his mind does.
Walk, Sammy, just walk.
They said they would help.
But they lied, of course they lied, no one wants to help Sammy Lou, the boy with fists full of cut glass and violent desperation.
The sun bathes the world in dusky blues and pinks. It hits the sprawling butter-yellow house and turns it into glittering gold – the only gold Sam couldn’t quite properly steal. His muscles throb and his ribs splinter and all the hope left in him bleeds out.
He slumps into the gutter in front of the house.
And sits.
Just like old times, when he had a mouthful of apologies but none seemed good enough.
It’s late enough that everyone will be home. Jeremy is probably cooking – it’s his night, isn’t it? – and Jack will be loitering uselessly about the kitchen because as much as they deny it, those two stick together.
Toby is probably drawing on a wall.
Grady is reading and bossing everyone around.
Dash will be jumping on the trampoline in the backyard with the neighbour kids, mud on their knees, while they practise speaking Elven.
Moxie is
Moxie is
Moxie is
Moxie hates him.
His brain shuts down, because thinking of her just spills him into reams of fabric and buttons and knotted threads while she laughs at him and snatches the needle away to do it herself. While they whisper for hours about everything and nothing and he learns her deepest fears and her best days and memorises every fleck of colour in her eyes.
Sam rests his face on his knees. He is an empty boy and when people see what he truly is, they hate it.
This house will never be his.
A rattling van pulls into the driveway and the engine shuts off with a crunch. A breeze brushes through the gnarly rosebushes and chills Sam’s neck. It tastes of cooler days and the end of summer.
It had to end.
Boots hit the footpath behind him.
He keeps his face pressed in his knees.
‘Sam.’
The voice is softness and sorrow.
Mr De Lainey drops down into the gutter beside Sam. He doesn’t touch him. Sam tips his head sideways, just a little, to see Mr De Lainey’s sawdust-covered work trousers and cement-splattered boots. He doesn’t look at his face. Can’t look. He never wanted those disappointed eyes on him.
Why did Sam come back?
‘You’re bleeding.’
‘It’s fine,’ Sam whispers into his knees, arms still wrapping himself into a tight ball. ‘It’s not bad.’ It hurts like his skin has been peeled off and stitched on inside out. But it doesn’t hurt as much as being in front of the De Lainey house again.
‘You’re lying.’
Sam shrinks into himself a little further.
But Mr De Lainey’s voice isn’t angry. He stated a fact and now he stretches out his dusty legs on the road, like he’s ready to sit for a good long while.
‘I know you’re looking for something, Sam,’ he says. ‘I know you found it here. And I want you to have it, you hear me, son? I want more than anything for you to have this.’
‘This,’ Sam repeats into his arms. ‘A family.’ His voice dries in his throat. ‘A home. I really want a … h-h-home.’
‘But you can’t steal it.’
‘I know,’ Sam whispers. I know I know I know.
‘You have to build it.’
Sam peels his face away from his legs, his lashes wet and heavy. He meets Mr De Lainey’s eyes, ready for that crushing wave of disappointment.
But the gaze before him is just sad and tired. Dirt stains Mr De Lainey’s face, proof that he knows how to build what he wants.
‘And I’m going to help you build it.’ His voice is quiet, calm as summer. ‘It’ll be slow and we’ll have to go backwards to set some things straight. You can’t build a house in the sky, Sam, you have to have two feet on the ground. No more hiding and running. You need help, real help. And I can be here for you, every minute.’