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Theo could get some seriously stormy eyebrows going when he tried, it turned out.
“And second, Trailer Park Daddy is, like, a thing now, and you and I are going to lean into it.”
“No, thank you.”
“Theo, come on. You’ve already got those red shorts. And I bet if we got you a wifebeater and a beer, one of those lawn chairs, and we let you sit out by the creek. You could scratch your balls. Oh, God, we need a trucker hat, but a good one that says ’merica or God’s Gift to Women or something like that.”
“How about some music?” Theo said.
Laughing, Auggie fought him off from the radio, and Theo let him win. It was nice to see a hint of amusement behind Theo’s beard. Only a hint, but still.
“It’s going to be ok,” Auggie said. “We tried something, and it didn’t work out. We’ll try again.”
“Christ, Auggie, I don’t know if it’s going to work out. We can’t live in Emery and John-Henry’s basement forever. Jem and Tean can’t have sleepovers at our house for the rest of their lives.”
“To be fair, I think Jem would actually love sleepovers for the rest of his life.”
“This is such a fucking mess. Someone is trying to kill us, and we have no fucking idea why, let alone who they are or how to stop them.”
Auggie drove another hundred yards, the tires whispering between them. Then he said, “That’s not entirely true. We know that whoever came after us last night, they’re trying to stop us because we’re looking into Shaniyah’s and Leon’s disappearances. We don’t know the rest of the details, not yet, but we know this all started when Shaniyah disappeared, and somehow, it’s connected to Leon’s disappearance as well.”
Theo nodded. It looked like he was trying to hold back, but then the words burst out of him. “I just—I just can’t do this, Auggie. It’s hard enough at school. I watch these kids show up, day after day, and they’re children, they’re practically infants, and they’re so full of life, wanting to grow and have happy, healthy, fulfilling lives. And some of them will. And others, they drag themselves into the classroom, and they don’t have clean clothes, and they haven’t bathed, and if they don’t get the free breakfast at school, they haven’t eaten since lunch the day before. Some of them, you can see it in their eyes, the mixture of fear and this intense desire for someone to love them and keep them safe.”
“Hey—” Auggie tried.
“And then there are the ones who have learned to put up this hard shell, to protect themselves, and they’re so angry because they’re so scared. It’s bad enough to see that every day. It’s bad enough to know that for an hour at a time, I’m responsible for them, and nothing—absolutely fucking nothing—I do can make up for the shit they go through when they walk out of my classroom. But this? Elise Purdue was practically a nothing, a nonentity. She didn’t even know the last time she texted her son, and she couldn’t be bothered to worry about what happened to him or where he’d gone. That might be worse than Merlin, and that’s really saying something considering he was busy trying to live out a teenage fantasy of his own, and getting Leon out of his way was part of making sure the fantasy could last a little longer. For fuck’s sake, Auggie, he sat there and told us he knew about Dalton and Leon, and he didn’t do anything because it was easier not to, easier to keep pretending he could have some stupid second chance at being a kid. Shaniyah’s aunt and uncle would rather lie about where she was than look bad in public, never mind that their niece, whom they were responsible for, was lying dead in a basement, and some motherfucker had put tape over her mouth. Even Keelan, that little shit. I mean, he has no parental supervision, and he’s going to go through life thinking fucking is the answer to every emotional problem. Jesus fucking Christ. I love Lana, and I’m grateful for her every day, but I look around, and I want to know what the fuck is wrong with this world.”
They were rolling up to a stoplight, and the sound of the Focus changed as they slowed. In the intersection, a man wearing a purple t-shirt that said MARVIN’S MINISTRY was shaking a Big Gulp cup as he approached each car at the light.
“I’m sorry,” Theo said, voice subdued now. “I know you want kids, and I know we—we’ve talked about this, and I know there are a lot of happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids.”
“Do you feel guilty about Lana?” Auggie was surprised by his own question, which had come out of the dark storm inside his head, out of a place he couldn’t point to, much less name. Even more surprised by his tone, by the evenness of it, the steadiness, the sureness. Because inside, everything was windblown, but that voice sounded like a rock.
Theo put his hand up like he might scratch his beard, but then he didn’t. The light changed. They started forward again. When Theo spoke, it was so low, wound tight with bitterness, that Auggie could barely hear him over the sound of the car. “I was driving, wasn’t I?”
Auggie blinked his eyes to clear away the tears, and he focused on pulling in deep breaths, drawing the air deep, breathing into his belly. Pilates. He thought, in one of those Pilates classes, they had done this.
As they drove, the city reassembled itself: pole-barns, a chicken coop made out of asbestos siding, a donkey tied to a clothesline and pissing in the mud, and then the Citgo, a Dollar General, a shopping cart jammed sideways in a corral. Each item, Auggie tried to capture whole, to hold it in his head, to leave no room for anything else.
Maybe because he wasn’t thinking about anything—or trying not to, anyway—was why his brain finally had a chance to catch up with what he’d heard.
“Theo?”
When Auggie risked a look, Theo had his eyes closed, his head back. His color was bad, and his breathing shallow, and Auggie wondered, again, how long Theo could keep doing this. Not only the sleepless nights. But carrying everything. For everyone. Forever.
“I’m sorry,” Theo said, the words thick, “but I need a minute.”
Auggie weighed his options. Then he said, “What if he wasn’t talking about Dalton?”
Ten seconds passed. “What?”
“Well, think about it. He kept saying ‘that kiddie-diddler,’ and obviously, we both assumed he meant Dalton because, well, gross. But isn’t that kind of strange? I mean, Merlin said he told Leon to stay away from that guy, and he said he tried to warn Leon about what that guy really wanted.”
“He said the guy was older, twenty or thirty years older. That sounds like Dalton.”
“But—this is going to sound stupid, so don’t judge me—wouldn’t he have called Dalton by his name? I mean, I’m not saying Merlin was father of the year. I don’t think he knew who Leon’s teachers were. But Wahredua isn’t a big town, and if Leon got involved with someone here, especially someone from school, it feels like—well, it feels like Merlin would know who it was. Even if he just called him ‘that theater teacher’ or something like that.” Silence. Auggie could feel his heartbeat in his face. “Never mind, that was stupid—”
But Theo sat up, his eyes opened. They were that soft, watercolor blue that Auggie had fallen in love with the first day Theo had walked into class. Ok, maybe not the first day. Not exactly the first day. Because Theo had been such a hardass about his no phones in the classroom rule. But even then, even when Auggie had been pissed off, he’d been struck by the color. A gentle blue, he thought now. And in his whole life, Theo had been given so little space to be gentle.
