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Theo made a noise that could have meant anything.
“So, make him want to talk to you,” Jem said with a shrug.
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Theo muttered.
“I’m serious.” Jem laughed at whatever he saw on their faces. “People aren’t that complicated. Figure out what he wants. Or what he’s afraid of. And use it to make him talk to you.”
“Like what?” Auggie asked.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Theo said, “but the problem is, we don’t know anything about Merlin except that he split up with his wife and went after a much younger—and, from what I’ve seen of her, a shallow and vicious—woman.”
“There you go.” Jem rolled his eyes when neither of them spoke. “He’s, what, fortysomething? He’s starting to get a dad bod. His glory days in high school or college or whenever are behind him. His life’s a dud. So, he shakes everything up. Tries to party like he’s twenty instead of forty. Hooks up with a girl half his age. That’s everything you need to know.”
“What am I supposed to offer him? A young sex worker?”
“Do you have one?”
The question hung in the air until Auggie realized it was serious. “Uh, no.”
“Guys like that, they want money, they want youth, they want status. Whatever the high school version of cool is, they want that. And they’re afraid of losing it, of being left behind, of facing the fact that they’re old.” Jem sat back and spread his hands. “This one is easy.”
“I appreciate—”
“Holy shit,” Auggie said.
Jem cocked an eyebrow. Theo moved his hand around his mug. The ceramic was printed with the words STILL GAY.
Auggie grinned. “I think I’ve got it.”
20
The trailer park was located on the outskirts of Wahredua. The city peeled back slowly, sad little frame houses giving way to undeveloped land, the occasional ag field—soy, so much soy this year, Theo noted, and he wondered what his father and Jacob had decided to put in. Then a sign that said DIXIELAND PRIVATE COMMUNITY and, below it, A FAMILY FRIENDLY PARK.
“You see it, right?” Auggie asked.
“Yes, Auggie.”
“It’s not just me.”
“It’s not just you.”
“I know you don’t want to hear me say California,” Auggie said. “But can you feel me thinking it? As an innocent, vulnerable little brown Latino boy being taken against my will to Dixieland?”
“You’re driving.”
“Under duress.”
“There’s a firehouse back that way,” Theo said, “and they’re a Safe Space. You know what that means?”
Auggie rolled his eyes.
“You can surrender a child there, no questions asked.”
Another big, dramatic roll of his eyes before Auggie pulled up his t-shirt to chew on the collar, turning to study the trailer park again.
It had the look—perhaps the name was proof—of something that had outlived its time. The asphalt roads were worn away, eroded in places until they drove over rutted dirt; a hundred yards later, they would hit a buckled patch, or a pothole, or a skin of gravel that had been dumped in a half-hearted attempt to fill in the pavement.
The trailers themselves didn’t look any better. They passed a white trailer with one aluminum wall bowed out, and it made Theo think of canned goods, the kind of bloat that told you the food had spoiled. Another trailer, a pink that might have been delicately beautiful under the algae covering it, stared at them with window-eyes made crazy by broken miniblinds. They rolled past a doublewide with its skirting scrolled back, and something darted through the shadows before Theo’s brain caught up and said, Raccoon. A Coke machine, the old-fashioned kind with the opener built in, sat on the side of the road. On the next street, a little girl with vacant eyes walked a fat old tabby on a leash, only the cat had stopped to sit and was attacking its balls with its tongue.
