{Pete}

There was an email from the school board in Pete's inbox early Monday morning with the subject line RE: CIARAN DOUGLAS. Pete read it with the laptop perched on his knees on the couch in the basement. His books were in boxes stacked in the corner, and this tattered couch from his first apartment was his new home office.

He shut the laptop without bothering to respond, shaken. Three weeks ago, Cary's father would have handled this missive from the superintendent of schools with brutal finality—now it was Pete's turn. Unbidden, Conall Douglas' last words returned to his mind: Violence is Ciaran's language. The only way he can be reached is through his skin. If you plan to have him in your home, you can learn that the hard way.

He breathed out, spreading his hands open on the smooth shell of the laptop. What is your way? He asked silently. I can't simply overlook this—and I am not that man. How can Cary be reached?

He packed the laptop away and dug out some books for work, then carried it all upstairs, feeling burdened by more than just his computer bag.

Cary was slouched at the table nursing a cup of coffee. Jon had his head in the fridge. "Dad, is there any orange juice?" he asked.

"I don't know, son," Pete said. He set his bag down on a kitchen chair, trying not to look directly at Cary. "I need to speak with you, Cary."

Jon's face appeared around the door of the fridge, a worried wrinkle in his forehead. Cary slid Pete a sideways look. His face looked heavy and dull.

"Alone?" Jon said.

Pete hesitated. "No, I think it affects you both. The school is requesting that Cary transfer to King George for the remainder of the semester."

"That's a school for, like, for young offenders," Jon burst out.

Cary ducked his head, weaving his fingers together around the mug. He didn't say anything.

"The school administration have asked for a meeting to discuss it. Cary, they want me to go in lieu of your guardian."

"Dad, you have to tell them to keep Cary at Eastglen—"

"No meeting." Cary said in a flat voice. "I'll go to King George."

There was a short silence.

"What?" Jon said. "Cary—no. Dad, you have to tell them ..."

"I'm my own guardian," Cary said. His eyebrows were drawn down low, and his eyes touched Pete's for a second, flat and expressionless. "I'm going to King George." He got up from the table and went to his room.

Pete saw Jon's face crack with devastation. "Dad," Jon said pleadingly.

"King George has smaller classes and closer adult supervision," Pete said. "It makes sense that they want Cary there."

"That's my only friend." Jon's voice broke. "You could have at least tried."

///

It was a very quiet van ride after Pete dropped the girls off at the local elementary school. Jon and Cary looked out their separate windows until they pulled up in the Eastglen parking lot.

"Don't do anything stupid," Jon said, shooting Cary a look as he got out of the van.

"I won't."

Jon nodded and went up the sidewalk without saying a word to Pete. Cary reached across to pull Jon's door shut, glancing at Pete when he sighed.

King George was across town in an industrial area, a small high school with barred windows and barbed wire strung along the top of the chain link fence. It wasn't, technically, a school for young offenders, but Pete guessed it had more than its fair share.

"Did they send you my file?" Cary asked.

Pete glanced at him in the mirror. Cary had his arms crossed and the side of his face was set and hard as he looked out the window.

"Not exactly," Pete said. "I'm not sure they can. But the superintendent was ... fairly explicit in making her case."

"I told you." Cary's ears were bright red and the flush spread down his neck. "I said there were good reasons. I'm not ..." he struggled a minute, his hands balling under his elbows. "I'm what he says I am. He never had to make shit up to bend his belt over me. I earned it."

"I know," Pete said. "You told me. He was going to lose it on someone, and you made sure it was you. You made sure in some really terrible ways." He shook his head. "You left a trail of hurt kids and angry parents and teachers every place you went, and now King George is pretty much the only school that will take you."

Cary's arms were crossed so tightly that his shoulders were up around his ears. "You don't even know half of it," he muttered.

"All I need to know is this," Pete said. "Is that who you want to be? That kid with a hair-trigger temper who breaks faces?"

Cary's lips skinned back from his teeth. "You can't make me say sorry to you. He had to break me before I would say it, and you don't have the guts."

Pete felt his own hair-trigger temper implode, the street around them snapping into vivid detail. He pressed the heels of his hands against the steering wheel, holding steady. "That's a hell of a thing to say to me this morning." His voice came out soft and light. He touched Cary's eyes in the mirror, then pulled into a parking space. "Get out."

Cary stuck his jaw out, not moving.

Pete unbuckled his seatbelt and threw his own door open. "We are not having this conversation in a tiny van while I try and drive." He came around the side of the van and pulled Cary's door open. "Get out."

Cary came out with his head down and his fists up, pulled tightly against his chest. Pete stepped back to be just out of reach of his swing. They were in the parking lot of a mini-mall and a tiny Chinese restaurant with morning traffic swishing by.

"I'm not going to make you say sorry to me," Pete said. "I am asking you to decide—right now, for this day. Who are you going to be? You want to be a little Conall Douglas today?"

Cary had his head cocked to Pete's voice, coiled like a boxer, and it cost Pete some effort to keep his hands in his pockets and his body open.

"I just am what I am," Cary said in a thick voice.

"No. Wrong." Pete lifted his chin, catching his breath, anticipating the hit. "You choose. We all choose. Who are you going to be today?"

Cary made a ragged noise. "Fuck you. You don't know me. The shit I did—that's nothing compared to what he did to me."

"So? You want to put that on me? Go on then." Pete clasped his hands behind his back, leaning in. Cary dropped back a step, uncertainty waving over his face. "Punch it out, son." Pete held his eyes, the muscles across his chest and stomach tensing.

Cary scrubbed his hands over his face. He shivered once, hard, like it was 50 below instead of a balmy plus 15. "I'm not your son." His voice was dry as sand.

Pete relaxed, letting his hands fall to his sides. "I know you're not," he said quietly. "My son is dead. Look at you. You get today and tomorrow and months and years, God willing, of life ahead of you. And you can sit at my table, and live under my roof, and your ears can hear me when I say I love you."

Cary crossed his arms, his face tight and his lips quivering.

Pete swallowed. "I don't know where Judah's spirit is right now, but his body is cold in the ground, a 14-hour drive from here. His ears can't hear me say anything. So if you ... throw this chance away, when I'm just offering it to you, a free gift—you will absolutely break my heart, Cary."

Cary had gone still, watching Pete from under his eyebrows.

Pete pressed his hands deep into his pockets, his throat aching with that opened between them. "I know you're Conall Douglas' son, and that's about all you know right now. I know I should keep you at a distance because you can hurt me if I care about you. But I can't. I feel for you as if you are a son of mine. Not as if you were Judah or Jon. I see what you are. And I love you."

Cary's face caved in and he turned away quickly, thrusting out his hand as if he could shove those words away. "Don't ... say that to me, Mr. White."

Pete shrugged, looking at the pale blue sky above the van, translucent and fragile as a robin's egg. "Won't make it not true."

Cary clasped his hands on the back of his neck, ducking his head in the shelter of his arms. "You shouldn't ... waste any time on me." His voice was frayed. "I can't be good like you and Jon. You should have left me where you found me."

"I couldn't." Pete's voice was soft against the sound of morning traffic, but Cary twisted to the side like he had struck him.

Pete remembered the look Cary had given him the night he came in the shelter door, how the boy couldn't make his mouth hard because his lip was puffy and split, but his fists closed and the skin on his knuckles was all broken. He remembered how when he took Cary's hand to thread his arm into a pair of Jon's pyjamas, his fingers found the cuts inside Cary's wrist, cuts that crossed out the blue veins in his arm all the way to the crease in his elbow. How that ended his ability to stay distant. Right then, a little shard of love had gotten stuck down deep inside him to take root and grow.

He sighed and closed his eyes, feeling the sun warm his scalp at the back, where his hair was thinner. "Anything else you want to say while we're out here? You might as well put it on me and have a good day at your new school." He opened his eyes and found Cary looking at him, darkness and something like despair shadowing his face like the wings of a bird.

Cary turned aside, opened the door to the van, and climbed back in.

{Cary}

Cary kept his eyes forward and his hands closed on his knees while Pete drove. The thing Pete had said to him seemed to press against his chest, hot as the man's hand in his dream from the night before. I know what you are. I love you. A shiver went through him, and he drew a slow breath and let it out again. That word hadn't meant anything in his parents' house except that he was going to hurt for it later. He closed his eyes, not breathing, seeing Pete standing there in the sunshine saying to put it on him. Pete was the last person who should have to cover for Cary's worthless skin.

He made himself speak. "Sorry." The word came out sounding awkward and flat. He exhaled and tried to tear open enough to sound like he actually cared. "Sorry I said those things like you were him. You were supposed to hurt me back. Not just take it."

"So I gathered," Pete said wryly.

He didn't have anything more he could safely say. Pete's words were hot inside him now, warming the icy cavity of his chest. He was afraid of what would happen if his heart started to beat. There was going to be blood everywhere.

"I want you to talk to the counsellor about what to do when you feel angry."

Cary felt Pete looking at him and kept his eyes forward. "I can keep it to myself."

Pete made a soft noise. "I like your skin in one piece, Cary."

All the hairs on his arms stood up like those words brushed by on the breeze. "What am I supposed to do?" He tried to keep his voice even, like Pete wasn't undoing him just being an arm's length away and being who he was. If Conall was the most dangerous man Cary knew, Pete was a close second.

"Talk it out. Put in onto paper. Sweat it out doing sports. I don't know what's going to work for you, except I know I get angry too, and unless you want to end up going off like a bomb it's better to figure out how to blow off a little steam every day. If you need to come yell at me some more, I'm okay with that."

Cary turned his face out the window. "No."

"Better me than someone who'll hurt you back or get you expelled."

Cary thought of all the things he could never tell Pete and stayed silent.

///

Inside the main doors of the school, Pete hesitated, looking up and down the hallway. Conall would have known exactly where to go. The last time Cary had been here, Conall had swept him down the hall, simmering with anger, and Cary had been too frozen to feel relieved when he had dropped him off in the office and was gone.

"It's this way," Cary said, taking the right-hand corridor without looking at Pete.

Class had already begun—there was a low murmur from students and teachers coming from behind the closed doors. Cary glanced right and left through the narrow windows in the doors, checking who was in the mix this week. He couldn't afford any trouble as long as he was living under Pete's roof.

The principal was a blunt-faced older man who looked like his athletic career had ended with a blown-out knee. He still wore a limp. He stood to shake Pete's hand when the secretary showed them into his office, and gave Cary a once over that said he would have preferred to stand him against the wall for a pat down.

Cary's throat tightened, and whatever he had been feeling before shrank to the size of a pin and blinked out of existence. He sat because Pete sat, the sound of their talking barely audible under the white noise of his own panic. He breathed shallowly, gripping his knees with his hands. It was stupid to have a panic attack now, when there was nothing to be afraid of except some old guy who'd never done anything to him except give him a look. There had been a time when he could have sat here with a fresh set of bruises under his shirt and the belt that striped him around his father's waist in the other chair, and felt nothing at all.

He recalled the way the memory of the basement had swallowed him at his mother's house and wondered whether he might be losing his mind.

Pete stood, so Cary stood, and then Pete was moving to the door. Cary was in such a hurry to get out of the room that he crowded against Pete's back, tripping over his own feet. He grabbed hold of a fistful of Pete's shirt to steady himself, and the clean laundry and Old Spice smell of Pete unwound his panic a little.

At the reception desk, the secretary handed him a schedule and briskly recited the school rules. Pete didn't leave. Cary was aware of him just on the edge of his vision while he made himself take slow, normal breaths.

When they were in the hall, Pete asked, "Are you all right?"

Cary nodded, keeping his face turned aside.

Pete's body was relaxed, and his hands were open. Cary let out his breath and smoothed his hands over his jeans.

"Cary?"

Cary slid him a sideways look.

"All I expect from you here is for you to show up for class and hold your temper. Better than I did this morning."

Cary snorted softly. If that was Pete White losing his shit, he didn't know what to think.

"Do you think you can do that for me?"

Cary bent his head. "Yes." He swallowed the sir that his own father used to make him say because he knew Pete hated being called that. He meant his yes with every fucked-up part of his being, and he didn't need to say more to tell Pete that.

Pete took his wallet out of his jeans. "Do you need some money for lunch?"

"No," Cary said automatically.

Pete glanced at him. Cary met his eyes for a second, his lips pressed closed on the truth. He was hungry now under his nausea, and it was going to be a long day without lunch.

"Okay, here's 10," Pete said as if Cary had spoken. He handed him a bill. "That's for food, not smokes."

Cary folded the bill into his pocket without looking at Pete. In moments like these, he hated his parents for dumping him on the Whites, who barely had enough as it was. Also, he thought Pete was an idiot to think he wasn't going to buy at least one smoke with his tenner.

Pete reached out and put his hand on Cary's shoulder, one light touch. "Have a good day. See you at supper." Cary drew in a breath as Pete passed out the doors, like the peace Pete held could be tasted in the air. He had built his reputation one trashed classroom and one broken nose at a time, and now he needed to unmake it all at once and have a good day. If that were even possible. He was about to find out or die trying.