Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
He drifted closer to it, then stopped; as fragile as it was, he felt like he shouldn’t get too close, as if he’d crush it with his weight just by standing too near. “Did you make that, too...?”
“No.” Murmured, drawing closer as the whisper of Rian’s worn leather sandals grew louder, bringing him into closer proximity. “Chris did. It’s what he was working on this afternoon, before he left.”
That made Damon take a second look.
Fuck.
This kid was fucking talented, and he was wasting it on...what?
What the hell was he running away from, that he’d lied to both Rian and Damon?
Where was he going, when he claimed he was with both of them?
“It’s good,” he said thickly, because he couldn’t get those questions out just yet. “He’s good.”
“He is,” Rian agreed, drifting to Damon’s side. He had a way of moving that made his every step seem like a slow, quiet wave rolling to shore, with the way his gracefully loose clothing drifted behind him like a train; like a trail of dissolving magic in his wake. He stopped next to Damon, his eyes lidding as he looked down at the wisteria sculpture. “Wisteria symbolizes long life and health, to some. Or to others...victory against struggle. I wonder why he chose it.”
“Sometimes a chair is just a chair,” Damon said.
But he wondered that, too.
The silence held between them for several moments, laden and waiting—until Rian asked, almost too low to hear, raw-edged and broken, “What are we going to do?”
That we should have made Damon bristle more.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If we confront him, he’s probably gonna go to his parents, and that’s exactly what Walden doesn’t want, isn’t it?”
“It’s the why of that that I can’t accept.” Rian’s mouth creased. “How can he say that? How can he just go along with that, aiding these ghastly people in forgetting their own children? Treating them like nuisances and burdens?”
“What do you want him to do?” Damon asked. “Force them all to go to family counseling? Sit all of them down and teach them a good lesson? They’d pull their children out, and Albin would collapse.”
“Maybe it deserves to collapse!” Rian flared, bright spots of red bringing color to his ghost-pale face; the glints in his eyes were the same color as the golden spangles of light spilling down from above. “If this place didn’t exist, maybe they wouldn’t feel so comfortable shunting their sons off out of sight!”
“If this place didn’t exist,” Damon pointed out softly, “they’d just neglect them at home. At least here, we can try to do better by them. Try to give them...”
“Structure?” Rian flung at him, as if the word was some kind of curse.
“Family,” Damon finished.
Rian just looked at him with his eyes hot, his jaw tight—before he turned away sharply, reaching out to smooth his fingertips against the edges of the wax paper under the wisteria sculpture, making it crinkle and crackle as if snapping out the sound of his feelings.
“That still doesn’t tell us what to do about Chris,” he said. “We have to do something.”
“Do we?” Damon frowned, folding his arms over his chest. “What if we’re overreacting? Chris is fucking sixteen, Falwell. He’s gonna do what sixteen-year-olds do. Skip practice. Duck out on teachers. Lie about it.”
“We have a responsibility to be sure that’s all it is, don’t we?”
“We do,” Damon agreed. “But we also have a responsibility not to—”
He didn’t know how to fucking explain it.
How having people hovering, always assuming that if you hadn’t done something wrong already, you would just because that’s who you were...
That could fuck you up just as much for getting shit for the things you actually did.
And sometimes it didn’t matter people’s good intentions when they just flailed around thinking they needed to fix things that didn’t need to be fixed just because it made them feel like they were doing something.
“Look,” he tried again. “Right now I think the best thing we can do is keep an eye on Chris. There are ways we can do it without making him feel like he’s in trouble for something. And if it looks like he needs help, we can do something more direct.”
“Or,” Rian said dryly, “we could ask him why he’s lying to us. I really prefer to confront lies with direct questions, Mr. Louis.”
Goddammit. That Mr. Louis got him gritting his teeth again. “Maybe if we were dealing with an adult or our own kids, yeah. But we’re Chris’s teachers. We overstep our bounds, and it makes a big mess. Lawsuit type of mess. Especially with the kind of parents we’re dealing with.”
“You think I care about money when a child’s safety is involved?”
“I think you’re the kind of person who doesn’t have to care about money,” Damon spat back without thinking. “Like you don’t have to give a shit about the consequences of whatever wild shit idea gets into your head, because you’ll be fine no matter what the fallout is to anyone else.”