Unspeakable Things(64)

“Why’d you come, anyhow?”

He lifted one shoulder and then let it drop. “Wayne said it’d be a good time.”

“You always do what Wayne says?” I felt big talking to him. Like I could push as far as I wanted. The power surprised me.

That one-shoulder shrug again. “He’s my best friend.”

I felt myself grow bigger, meaner. “He hardly ever talks to you on the bus. It looks like he and Clam are the ones that are best friends.”

Ricky blinked hard at the television.

I dove full in. “Did Clam really get attacked again?”

Ricky jerked back like I’d slapped him, and my sudden shame turned my mouth sour.

He tried to look at me, but his eyes couldn’t quite lift that high. “I guess. Most of us boys in the Hollow been chased, at least.”

The television went to commercial. The first ad was for Chiffon margarine. Mother Nature sat in a wooded glen, telling a fairy tale to a bear and a raccoon. It was normally one of my favorites, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. “What do you mean?”

He looked at me dead on this time. He resembled Albert more than ever.

“It’s gross,” he warned.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. I meant it. I’d tried mean on for size and didn’t like it at all.

He reached over to run his fingers across the paperbacks that filled the living room shelves. “Sure are a lot of books.”

I glanced around. I’d grown so used to them that I hardly noticed them anymore. “We’re a reading family.” I’d heard Dad say that to a grocery checkout lady once. She’d complimented him on how smart I was, reaching over to massage his arm.

Ricky scratched the side of his nose. “We don’t have any books in my house.”

I hadn’t ever been in a house with a library like we had, so him not owning any books didn’t surprise me one bit.

“None,” he continued. “Not even any my mom read to me when I was a kid. Or my stepmom.”

“Your parents are divorced?”

“Yup. My mom left my dad.”

I leaned in. “How’d you get her to do that?”

“Huh?”

My heartbeat had slowed. “How’d you get her to leave him?”

He looked at me like I’d just pooped from my ears. “She ran away. I was in third grade. Haven’t seen her since.”

“Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to me that a mom would leave her kids, just a dad.

He was massaging one of his Band-Aids like it would release a magic genie. “It happened the same to me as to Clam and some of the other Hollow boys. Clam was by the creek, smoking, when he was caught the first time. Teddy Milchman, too, I think. Me, I couldn’t take the yelling in my house anymore and so I ran outside to get away. Some guy grabbed me right by the entrance to the park where we found you and that kid with the nice bike yesterday.”

He ducked his eyes. “Sorry about that. We were just having some fun. We wouldn’t have hurt you.” Something played behind his eyes, and he laughed. “Not like you beat up Clam, anyhow. You got a good crack in on Wayne, too.”

I considered asking if Clam was all right but didn’t want to seem like I cared. “Who grabbed you?”

Ricky’s face went the color of paper. “The guy wore a mask. He grabbed for my pockets. I thought he was trying to rob me, but then he squeezed my johnson. I kicked him as mean as I could, but he just squeezed me harder, rubbing me up against his front. Made some growl noise, and then let me go.” Ricky scratched the back of his neck. “I wasn’t taken into a car, not like Clam both times or Teddy. They were driven somewhere and dropped off when he was done.”

I felt green and wobbly. “Did you tell the police?”

“Naw.”

“Why not?”

“You tell me,” he said, the first flash of anger I’d seen on him.

My face blazed by way of answer. I could recall Bauer’s words at the party verbatim. Naw, it’s just boy shit. They’re all trouble, those Hollow boys. Cops didn’t believe kids, not kids from that side of the tracks.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, reading my expression.

The movie came back on. We watched it for a few minutes before Ricky spoke again. “There’s another reason I came out here. Besides being Wayne’s friend, I mean.”

I flinched. We’d been getting along fine, and now he was gonna muck it up.

“I heard your dad’s a welder,” he said.

That threw me for a loop. “He was. He makes sculptures now.”

Ricky began to make a repetitive gesture with his thumbs and pointer fingers, rubbing them together as if he held a tiny crystal ball between each. “I know. I want to be a welder, though. Do you think he could teach me?”

“You came out here to see if my dad would teach you how to weld?”

“Yeah!” he sat up, more excited than I’d ever seen him. “Art welding or real welding. Anything to help me get into college.”

“Have Sephie ask him, then.” I had zero interest in explaining to Dad who Ricky was or that he’d been by our house.

“Okay, if you think it’ll help.” He was watching television again, but I could see a cape of seriousness dropping over his face. “Hey, we all know how Sephie is, but you don’t have to be that way.”