You Can Run (2 page)

“I had to meet with someone at the youth center.” The way he said it, it came out casual, as if it were no big deal. But then he turned away slightly so that he wasn't looking at me anymore, and I noticed a little twitch at the corner of his mouth. He gets that when something is bothering him.

“Is everything okay, Nick?”

“Sure.” There it was, that twitch again. “I just had to see a counselor, that's all. Mr. Jarvis is here with me. He's talking to someone inside. I'm just waiting for him.” Ed Jarvis was Nick's youth worker. Nick smiled, but it came off looking forced. “Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “Come and say hi.”

I turned to look at Morgan and Billy. Nick turned too.

“Bring your friends along,” he said.

Morgan shook her head. “Billy's going to collapse if he doesn't eat something in the next two minutes,” she said. I glanced at Billy. He didn't look like hunger was going to get the better of him anytime soon. He'd brought some snacks with him to the library and had spent at least half of his time there eating them. Morgan knew that perfectly well. As usual, she had commented on the vast quantities of food he was able to consume without gaining any weight. “We'll be at the Buddha,” she said. “You can catch up with us there.”

The Buddha was a vegan restaurant we went to a lot, mainly because Billy refused to eat anything that came from animals. Actually, in a funny way, it was thanks to Billy and his vegan-ness that I had met Nick.

I gave Morgan a grateful look and let Nick pull me across the street toward the knot of kids on the sidewalk.

The first thing I noticed was the piercings. Almost every kid had something pierced—an eyebrow (or two), a nose, an earlobe (or two) as well as miscellaneous other parts of the ear, a lip (or two), a tongue, a belly button. A lot of them had wild hair—dyed, spiked, dreaded. When Nick said, “Hey, everybody, this is Robyn,” I felt like an alien who had just stepped out of a spaceship. The kids—especially the girls—stared at my J. Crew jeans. They took note of my own modest piercings—one in each earlobe—and the small gold hoops hanging from each one, another gift from my father. Some of them gave me a curt nod of acknowledgment. Some gave me a hard look and then dismissed me. Not one of them said hello. I had never felt less welcome in my life, but Nick didn't seem to notice. He tugged my hand again and pulled me down onto the sidewalk. I felt squeamish, but I eased myself down beside him. He turned to the girl he'd had his arm around.

“Hey, Beej,” he said. “This is Robyn.”

Beej, I found out later, was short for B. J., but Nick said he didn't know what the initials stood for.Apparently, she didn't like to say. Beej was a small, thin girl with five piercings in one ear, six in the other, and one in her left eyebrow. Her short hair was jet black, but I saw auburn at the roots. I smiled at her. She didn't smile back.

“Remember I told you about meeting Robyn at the animal shelter?” Nick said.

Beej said, yeah, she remembered. She stared at me as if she'd already made up her mind that she didn't like me and wanted to make sure I knew it. As she gave me the evil eye, one of the guys standing nearby called to Nick.

“Be right back,” Nick said. He got up and went over to the guy.

Beej was holding a stack of photographs. When I tried to sneak a peek, she shuffled them together and slipped them into an envelope. Somewhere on the street someone whistled. Beej turned her head to check out where the sound had come from. I turned too, and saw a dog walker with six big dogs, all straining at their leashes, waiting for a light to change at the corner.

I glanced at Nick to see if he had noticed. Nick is crazy about dogs. But he was deep in conversation with a kid with a shaved head. Then I turned to Beej, who pointedly looked away from me. I sighed and looked around some more, as if I were new in town and the cityscape was fresh and fascinating instead of the same old office towers, stores, cars, and buses. I spotted someone I thought I recognized from school, a surly loner named Kenny, scarfing down a hotdog across the street. When he finished it, he crumpled the napkin it had been wrapped in and threw it into the street. What a pig. If Morgan had seen what he'd done, she would have marched across the street, picked up the napkin, shoved it into his hand, and informed him, in case he didn't know, that littering was against the law.

I began to wish that Morgan and Billy had come with me after all. I glanced at Beej again. She was tucking her pictures into a battered old backpack. She gave me a sharp look, as if by merely turning in her direction I was invading her personal space. I was relieved when Nick finally came back and dropped down onto the sidewalk beside us.

“I told Robyn that you were showing me your pictures,” he said to Beej. “I bet she'd like to see them.”

And I bet Beej would rather have stuck a red-hot needle in her own eye than show them to me,
I thought. Sure enough, instead of taking her pictures out again, she zipped her backpack and asked Nick for the time.When he told her, she said, “I gotta go. I'll see you around, Nick, okay?” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, looking at me as she did it. I pretended that I didn't care. She got up, folded the blanket she'd been sitting on, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and walked away. A couple of other kids drifted away at the same time. I wanted to leave too. I didn't feel comfortable there, not even with Nick beside me, holding my hand.

Then someone said, “Robyn?”

I looked up toward a surprised-sounding voice and saw Ed Jarvis, a stocky man with a brush cut. His deep voice, gruff attitude, and stiff way of walking reminded me of a drill sergeant. He looked at my hand in Nick's. Then he glanced around, as if he were wondering where I had come from.

“Good to see you again, Robyn,” he said. He took another look at my hand in Nick's. Nick must have noticed, too, because he squeezed my hand tighter and stared at Mr. Jarvis as if he were daring him to say something about it. “I've been meaning to call your father,” Mr. Jarvis said. “He gave me some baseball tickets last week. I took some of the kids. They had a terrific time.” Like a lot of people, Mr. Jarvis knew my dad. I told him I'd deliver the message. Then he said, “Time to go, Nick,” and backed off a few paces.

Nick gave him a sour look, which told me that something was wrong. Nick usually got along well with Mr. Jarvis. He got up and helped me to my feet.

“How come you had to see a counselor?” I said. “Is everything okay?”

His eyes shifted away from me again. For a moment, his face went rigid, as if he were angry about something.

“It was just an appointment,” he said. “It's not important.” He pulled me close to him. “Three more weeks,” he said. He didn't have to explain what he meant. I had been marking days off my calendar too. In three more weeks, Nick's time at Somerset would be up and he could go to live with his aunt.

“Actually,” I said, “it's two weeks and six days. But who's counting, right?”

“I am,” Nick said. “It's two weeks and six days until I get out of Somerset. But it's exactly three weeks until your birthday.”

I stared at him. “How did you. . . .?”

He grinned. “You'd be surprised what you can find out if you know who to ask,” he said. “You know what I'm going to do on your birthday?” His eyes sparkled. “I'm going to take you out. First we're going to have dinner together somewhere nice. Then we're going to go to a movie. Unless you want to do something else— maybe go to a concert, if anyone good's in town.”

“A movie would be fine,” I said.

“Then,” Nick said, “I'm going to make sure you get home safely instead of having to leave you at a bus stop somewhere.” Nick was allowed out of Somerset only with permission, never at night, and always with a strict curfew and restrictions on where he could go. A worried look flashed across his face. “Any chance you're going to be staying with your dad on your birthday?” Nick got along okay with my father. My mother, who is divorced from my father and with whom I live most of the time, made him nervous.

“Nick,” Mr. Jarvis said, pointing at his watch. “Tick-tock.”

He bent down a little and kissed me on the cheek. “Three weeks,” he said. “It's gonna be great.”

I watched him walk away with Mr. Jarvis, and I wondered again about his appointment. Still, if he was going to be leaving Somerset on schedule, everything was probably okay.

 

. . .

I don't remember walking from where Nick had left me to the Buddha. I was still thinking about him, still feeling his lips on my cheek. I spotted Billy first. He was sitting opposite Morgan, with a puppyish look on his face. I was beginning to think that he had developed more than friendly feelings for Morgan over the summer. She had been away at her family's cabin while he had been working in the city at a camp for young activists. Had her absence made his heart grow fonder? But as soon as I got inside, I knew I was wrong. They were arguing— well, actually, Morgan was giving Billy a hard time. Billy was his usual calm self.

As Morgan squished over to make room for me, she said, “I'm glad you're here. Now we can talk about something that someone actually cares about.”

“What's going on?” I said.

“I was just wondering. . . .” Billy began.

“No way,” Morgan said. “I don't even want to hear her name. I told you yesterday that I didn't care. You've managed to make it through today without mentioning her. Let's keep it that way, okay Billy? Besides, Robyn isn't interested in her either.”

“Interested in who?” I said.

“Trisha Carnegie,” Billy said.

Morgan scowled. “Didn't I just say that I didn't want to hear her name? Didn't I tell you that she was the last person we want to talk about, or even think about?”

“Maybe she's the last thing you want to think about,” Billy said. “But Robyn's interested, aren't you, Robyn?”

“I guess,” I said. Actually, I wasn't interested in Trisha. But I didn't want to hurt Billy's feelings. Morgan, however, took a typical Morgan approach. She jabbed me in the ribs.

“Tell him,” she said.

“Tell him what?”

“Tell him that you don't care about Trisha Carnegie.”

“Well. . . .” I began.

“See?” Morgan said. “Robyn doesn't care. I don't care. So can we please talk about something else?”

“You're putting words in Robyn's mouth,” Billy protested. “Robyn is a sensitive person. She cares about the people around her.”

Morgan gave him an irritated look. “I'm someone around her,” she said. “You're someone around her. But Trisha Carnegie? Trisha Carnegie is not around her.”

“Around her?” I said. “Hello? Am I invisible all of a sudden?”

“Besides,” Morgan said, “Trisha is so weird.”

She wasn't the only person with that opinion. Everyone thought that Trisha was weird. She dressed funny—plaid skirts with knee socks and cardigans; capri pants and bowling shirt combinations; shirtwaist dresses vintage 1955, paired with blazers. Some people could pull off a look like that. Not Trisha. Her crazy clothes only reinforced the weird way she acted. She had a row of safety pins stuck into one ear and a big metal stud stuck in the other—a look that was as retro as her wardrobe. Half the time, she wore twelve-hole steel-toed boots, the rest of the time, ballet slippers. She always carried a genuine Dolce & Gabbana backpack, though, because, by the way, trash-dressing Trisha was a rich girl. And always, always around her neck was a chain from which hung a gold ring—her father's wedding band— and a little leather pouch containing a chunk of crystal.

Trisha wasn't a friend of mine. I don't think she was anyone's friend. She didn't hang out with any group that I knew of. She barely talked in class. Sure, she had to do presentations like the rest of us, but she always picked out-there topics. Last year, in Western Civilization Up to the Fifteenth Century, she did a show-and-tell on the history of torture. Her poetry presentation in English was on—who else?—Sylvia Plath. In World Issues, she enlightened us all about the globalization of disease, including a gruesomely detailed account of the progress of the Ebola Virus through the human body. Very dark— that was Trisha.

Kids who had gone to elementary school with Trisha swore that she hadn't always been so weird. One kid I knew even insisted that she had been perfectly normal up until she was twelve years old. That was when she had completely freaked out. Apparently, she had never freaked back in again. The story I had heard went like this: Trisha and her father had gone on a camping trip together. It had been a real wilderness trip. They canoed their way through the backcountry, just the two of them, miles from civilization. Then one night when they were sitting around a campfire, her father had a heart attack. Trisha wanted to help him. But she was twelve years old and out in the wilds. What could she do? Someone said her father had taken a cell phone on the trip, but Trisha couldn't get a signal. Someone else said that Trisha had tried to get her father into the canoe. Her plan: to travel back however many miles to where they had started. Maybe she would get lucky along the way. Maybe she would come across another camper. Maybe she would hit the jackpot and run into a doctor who was out camping with his family.

But Trisha's father was in no shape to walk, and she was too small to carry him. She dragged him a little way, but she couldn't get him into the canoe.

He died.

Someone said he died while Trisha was signaling SOS into the darkness with a flashlight. Someone else said he died with Trisha screaming for help into an empty night on an island who knows how far from another living soul. Everyone who told the story said that Trisha had screamed herself silent by morning, when a canoe with two teenage boys in it happened by. Trisha got their attention by throwing rocks at them from the shore. But by then it was too late for the boys to do anything but tell her to stay calm while they went and got somebody. Somebody to take the body out. From what I'd heard, Trisha had been in serious therapy after that. Some people said she still was.