Devil House(63)

For Alex, the notion of feeling proud about one’s station, however high or low, seemed alien. Some foster homes are good, and some are awful, and most are better than group placements except for the ones that are much, much worse; and some group placements are preferable to hospital units, though occasionally there’s a therapist who hasn’t yet given up hope, and who tries to help, and in so doing almost makes it worth living behind a locked door with no shoes on for a month surrounded by strangers who all think their problems are bigger than yours. A few nights in a shuttered porn store with some friends had been nice. But he’d harbored no illusions about it. He hoped to stay in town somehow; he’d heard that several people he knew from before had jobs at a car wash, and he thought he could maybe do that long enough to save up some money.

Derrick and Seth both knew that the loss of the store meant uncertain days ahead for Alex. Nobody knew what to say to make it better.

“Hey, man,” Derrick said.

“Hey,” Alex said back. “It was nice.”

“There’s probably not a big hurry, though.”

“I just have my bag.”

“I feel like all of us leaving together is a bad idea,” Derrick said. It was still very early in the morning, but people would be out and about soon enough. Seth was used to being the first person asked to leave; he grabbed his backpack from its place inside one of the chalk outlines on the floor.

“All right. I might wait until tonight,” Alex said.

“You going back to San Jose?”

“Maybe.” Alex knew telling people you had no actual plans made them feel sad. He was exhausted; his only real hope was to find someplace to rest after staying awake all night redecorating the store with his old friends from another life, from school.

“This sucks dick,” said Seth.

“It’s just how it is,” Derrick said; the sound of his own voice in his ears, saying those words, made the adult world ahead of him seem cold and ugly.

“I bet if you come to school one of the counselors can think of something,” Seth suggested, knowing from personal experience how useless the counselors at school were but having nothing better to offer.

Alex wanted to let them off the hook, and he didn’t want them to see him if he started getting loose, as usually happened when he didn’t sleep. “Maybe I’ll see you at school,” he said.

Derrick and Seth took the cue. “Probably doesn’t matter if you lock up when you leave,” Derrick said, heading for the back door.

Alex laughed and said: “All right.”

For the last time, now with a heavy heart, Seth followed his friend out through the back.

THE WAYWARD SCHOLAR

“School called,” Maria Healey said to Seth when he got home that afternoon, earlier than he’d been home in the afternoon in several months.

“I went to school!” Seth protested loudly, as if he’d already been arguing about the question for several minutes.

“I know,” said his mother, slowly, carefully, trying to look her son in the eyes. “They called because you fell asleep in class again. You’re not in trouble. They are worried.”

“I’m fine!” Seth said.

Maria took a deep breath.

“I’m worried, too,” she said. “I don’t know where you go at night. By myself, I can’t really do anything about it. You’re too big now for me. If you won’t take care of yourself, I—”

“Mom, I’m fine,” said Seth, wholly exhausted and in need of sleep, responding to the emotion in his mother’s voice like a sponge soaking up water until it can hold no more, feeling some of what she felt: changes just up ahead, the end of something.

“Well, I hope so,” she said, wishing she had something stronger than hope on hand, knowing better than to look too hard for whatever that stronger thing might be.

FOREIGN INFLUENCE

He looks for signs of construction as he’s landing this time. From the air, sites look like something out of a Lego kit—uniform geometric spaces identical to one another in shape if not always in size, interrupted occasionally by yellow cranes in their wet clay pits, the search like a scavenger hunt whose rewards are great but as yet intangible, and then the plane gets cleared for landing, at which point he takes note of the occasional swimming pool. The presence of people who can afford swimming pools is a great sign, he thinks—people who’ll spend their money on luxuries won’t hesitate to buy an improved property in a developing neighborhood. He takes a confident attitude toward the future prospects he intends to finalize on this visit; he’s done his research. The Bay Area is on the move. All property appreciates over time. Real estate, held long enough, is immune to cycles of boom and bust. Progress is real. It’s the chances you don’t take that you’ll remember.

But the cashier’s check for “earnest money” that’s in his briefcase in the overhead rack keeps interrupting his reverie. You can’t get that money back; once you hand it over, it’s gone. If anything goes wrong down the line, it’s a sunken cost. And Buckler, as they’d put it in the churches near the property he intends to buy, is stepping out in faith. Back home, he’s walked through plenty of properties, and he talks a good game: but he’s an amateur. It nags at him. He knows that once he turns that crucial first property around it will be easy; he has friends who say it’s like taking candy from a baby.