Page 5 of The Dearly Departed

It was early morning still—sometime around seven o’clock—and the world had barely begun to wake up. But we needed to find somewhere to go and fast before someone spotted three teenagers roaming the streets and not in school. At sixteen, it would be easy enough for me to pass for an eighteen-year-old high school graduate, but I couldn’t do jack about Shawn’s baby face or the fact that Ike didn’t look any older than thirteen … because he wasn’t.

No, there would be too many questions. We needed to find shelter, we needed to sleep, and we needed to hide.

They did as I’d said, collecting the few things we'd taken from the house. Then they huddled behind me, waiting for the word to move.

That was how it always went. The two of them constantly looked to me for permission, assurance, or whatever the hell was necessary in any given moment. Shit, sometimes, it seemed like they couldn't breathe without me reminding them that they needed air to survive.

I watched the sidewalks and the street. I kept an eye on the shop across the road, waited for the world around us to grow quiet and for the owner who'd almost called the cops to divert his attention to something else. Then I waved my hand, signaling Shawn and Ike to walk ahead of me. I could keep my eyes on everything, but I needed them to keep theirs down and not make anyone overly suspicious of the three kids walking around in the early light of dawn.

Then we made our way down the sidewalk. I held my head high and faced forward while moving my gaze from side to side, scoping the area out in search of a good place for us to take cover.

We could find a payphone, I thought, peering down an alley. Give Dad a call.

A snicker was quick to rumble from my throat as my lip curled in a sneer.

Call Dad. Sure, like the dick had ever given a shit about us before. Why the hell would he start now? Did I seriously think I could lay some sob story on him about the beatings, the hunger, and the late-night bedroom visits the three of us had suffered through most of our lives? Did I think he’d listen now when he never gave a shit to listen before?

Besides, how the hell would I even reach him if I wanted to? Gerald Crowley found you, not the other way around. He’d made that perfectly clear from the beginning.

“Bram,” Ike whined after we’d been walking for twenty, thirty minutes.

“Shh,” I hissed.

“I’m tired,” he complained, ignoring my insistence that he stay quiet.

“We’re all tired,” Shawn said, reaching out to smack Ike on the side of his head.

“Knock it off,” I snapped at my best friend. Then I turned my eyes back on Ike. “And you, shut up. We have to keep walking.”

Ike sighed but hung his head, gripped the straps of the backpack, and kept moving. Shawn, on the other hand, fell back a few steps to walk in time with me.

“We have to sleep, dude,” he said, keeping his voice low. “We can’t keep walking forever.”

“I didn’t say we were walking forever,” I muttered.

“Okay, so what’s the plan then?”

“You know the plan.”

“Yeah, the plan was to get the hell out of that house, grab some food, and find a place to crash for the night. But we’ve been going for, like, two hours, man. The sun’s already up. We need to lay low.”

The idea was to get as far from where we’d come from as we possibly could. The farther we were, the less likely they’d find us—hell, if they cared to find us at all. But Shawn was right. We had to sleep. Being exhausted wouldn’t help us to think clearly, and we were gonna need our wits about us if we were going to survive on the streets—or wherever we happened to end up.

Anywhere was better than being in the system.

And it wasn’t that every house we’d been placed in was bad. Not all of them got off on hurting the unsuspecting kids put in their care. But there was no telling who we could trust and who we couldn’t. Sometimes, just the expectation of things going wrong was enough to fuck it all up, even in the nicest of families, and honestly, those were the ones that hurt the most. Those were the ones that made us feel like we were the problem when they gave us up for being too much, too difficult, and never stopping to understand why that might be.

We continued to walk for another few blocks, crossed a couple of main roads, and kept on walking until the streets grew quieter and the houses grew a bit farther apart. We weren’t too far from the city we’d come from, yet we were far enough that I no longer felt the need to watch my back every step of the way.

Isaac was dragging his feet. Shawn had yawned at least six times in the last ten minutes. And although I hated to admit it, my legs were growing heavier with every step.

“Here,” I told them, ducking into a bus stop shelter to sit and figure out what to do next.

Ike and Shawn followed, both of them dropping onto the bench on either side of me.

“We’re not staying here,” I warned them before they could make themselves too comfortable.

But despite what I said, I knew they would. That was part of the issue.