The door into Levin’s swung open, and Peter looked in that direction. John Saunders was there, his arm in a sling, still looking like a street person who’d been sleeping rough for the past week than anything else—a street person with a busted arm.
John was scanning the room and quickly saw the boys in the back corner. He said something to the waitress as he walked over to where they were sitting, pulled out a chair and sat.
“You OK?” Parrish asked.
John grunted, looking at Peter and saying nothing.
Peter squirmed. Parrish saw it and said, “Don’t worry. John’s a little rough around the edges. He can be an asshole at times, but mostly he’s OK. You’ll get used to him, even though he doesn’t really belong in polite company.”
“Hey! I’m right here,” John growled.
Parrish smiled. “You must be OK. You’ve still got your winning personality going.”
John frowned at him, and Parrish looked him in the eye and said, “Don’t you have something to say to Peter? He’s worried—you being a cop and all and him on the streets.”
“Well, he should be worried. He’s an escaped… an escaped…” A word to describe what Peter was failed him, and Parrish interrupted anyway.
“John…” He said it almost menacingly, and John took a quick glance at him, then turned back to Peter, his eyes a little softer. “OK, I guess he’s right, Peter. Thank you. If you hadn’t yelled out, I might have been nicked a little worse.”
“JOHN!” Parrish said, exasperation ringing in his voice. “Come on!”
John rolled his eyes, then said “OK, you probably saved my life. Thanks for that.”
Parrish settled back in his chair. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now that you’re being polite, I’ll tell you how else you’re going to thank him. You’re going to invite him to live with us.”
That brought movement from both the others at the table. Peter’s eyes popped wide open, and his mouth did, too. Before he could speak, though, John beat him to the punch, voicing his emotions with some animation. “Hey! Who suddenly put you in charge here? I thanked him. That’s plenty!”
“John, John, John.” Parrish was shaking his head. Then he turned to Peter. “John is an asshole most of the time but usually does the right thing in the end, especially if it’s pointed out to him forcefully enough. I live with him—not because he asked me to, but because I put up with him. He’s my dad’s younger brother, my uncle. Dad got killed. My mother died when I was young. No other relatives other than John. When my dad died, I was on the streets for a while. But the CPS caught up with me. So there I was, nine years old and ready to to into the foster care system. They hadn’t found out about John. I told them he was my uncle, but I didn’t know him because my dad didn’t have anything to do with him—called him a grouch and uncivilized—and didn’t even have him in his address book. The CPS people looked him up, discovered he was a cop, brought me to his place at night and more or less dropped me on him. He wasn’t happy about it. Were you, John?”
John grimaced, then saw Parrish watching him and said, almost reluctantly, “You’re OK.”
“So I moved in. John is a confirmed bachelor, probably because no woman in her right mind would have anything to do with him. But we get along OK. Stay out of each other’s way—most of the time. Sometimes, I help him out. Like today. I was bait.”
“I didn’t think it would get rough,” John said, excusing his actions. “They were waiting for us. I thought we were setting them up, but they were setting us up.”
“And without Peter here, they’d probably have succeeded. So you’re going to display your immense gratitude and invite him to live with us.”
“It isn’t that easy.” John looked back and forth between the two boys. “The courts and CPS have to get involved. And we don’t have room for him anyway.”
“You’ve got an emergency foster license, John. You had to get it to take me in, even though we were related, so you could get support money to pay for me. So Peter can stay with us legally. He’ll sleep with me. Hey, you owe him!”
Peter hadn’t said a word during this. Now, he sat up straighter and said to Parrish, “If he doesn’t want me there, that’s fine. I’m doing OK on the streets. I didn’t ask for this. Thanks for trying to help, but I’m OK on my own.”
He made to stand up, but Parrish put a hand on his arm and held him in place, at the same time looking at John and saying, “John…” with a rising, irritated inflection in his voice.
John had something of a deer-in-the-headlights look but then focused on Peter and saw the boy’s expression. It was hard and a bit disdainful. John saw that and, to everyone’s surprise, smiled.
“Hey, I remember better now. You’re this feisty little shit, aren’t you? Well, maybe I can stand to have you around. I hate those little wimpy boys whose asses you have to wipe and tears you have to dry. I’ll bet you don’t cry a lot, do you?”
Peter frowned, then looked at Parrish. “He is an asshole, isn’t he?”
John laughed.
««« »»»
They had dinner together that night at John’s apartment, now John and Parrish and Peter’s apartment. It wasn’t very large, just a living room, a kitchen big enough for a table where meals were taken, two bedrooms and a bath. Peter was surprised when he saw Parrish cooking dinner. The boy was twelve! So was Peter, and he, too, could cook a little. He realized they’d both probably learned how out of necessity.
They talked over dinner.
“John does a lot of undercover work. He’s head of Narcotics, but works the street. That’s what he was doing today. Someone—or ones—is selling meth here, and it’s bad. That kid in the news a month ago? He committed suicide, and they found meth in him. That’s one of the things meth does; users have a high rate of suicide. It does other things, too. It’s really bad stuff. And John was using me to try to buy some today. He’d have caught one of the middlemen and maybe got a line on the one supplying it to street sellers.”
John took up the story. “I know they work the mall. Lots of kids there. Kids like meth. Makes ‘em even hornier than they already are, and they stay that way for a long time. They have money, too, mostly from their parents who have no idea what it’s being spent on.”
“There were three guys today,” said Peter. “One that shot you, John, and two that grabbed Parrish. How many people are involved in this?”
John shook his head. “I don’t really know.” He sounded disgusted, but with whom, Peter couldn’t tell. “We’ve caught a couple of street pushers, but all they can do is describe the guy who supplies them; the name they use is obviously a fake, and they don’t have an address. The guy tells them where they’ll meet, and it’s always somewhere different. I thought I might get that guy today. Parrish had told one of the street pushers he knew that he wanted to make a big purchase; there were some guys he knew from high school who were having a big party, and he wanted some for that; they were all going to get laid was what he told the guy. We figured maybe, since it was a big purchase with lots of cash changing hands, that the guy who supplied the street pushers might show up. Since there were three guys, the two with Parrish and the shooter…” He said this a little sarcastically, looking at Peter when he did. He was mimicking what Peter had said earlier, and the sarcasm stemmed from John making it clear he didn’t need explanations or insights from a kid on what had happened. “I think we got what we expected: that guy supplying the street pushers was there. But he was the second guy, and he took off, and the guy I shot never regained consciousness. We don’t know who he is. So today was a real bust. We only got a street punk who knows squat. We got nothing.”
“No we didn’t. We got a lot.” Parrish looked at Peter, and Peter blushed.
««« »»»
Parrish had a double bed. Both boys were typical twelve-year-olds: under five feet tall, under 100 pounds. They had no trouble at all fitting together in a double bed. For some reason, Peter felt a little shy. Parrish wasn’t shy at all. He stripped to his underwear, then said, “This is how I sleep in the summer. In the winter I wear pajamas. You can wear whatever you want. I have some pajamas you’ll fit in if you want.”
Peter was almost too busy checking out Parrish’s body to answer. But then, he realized he needed to respond. “No, underwear is fine. I have briefs. I’ve never worn boxers.”
“We’ll go pick up your clothes tomorrow, wherever they are. And we can buy you more. John doesn’t act like it, but he’s got money, and when he notifies CPS about you, they’ll get you registered and John’ll get support money for you.”
“Will they take me away?” Peter didn’t like the sound of that ‘registered’ business.
“No. John knows all the CPS people. He seems gruff and all, but he does the right thing. He’ll fight for you if he has to.”
“Really? He didn’t sound like he wanted me at all.”
“That’s just his way. He likes to put people on the defensive. You stood up to him, and that means a lot to him. Besides, I want you here. What you said earlier, I feel the same way. I want you here.”
The boys got into bed, and Parrish turned off his bedside lamp. Peter lay on his back, uncertain of what was what. He’d told Parrish he liked him. Parrish had said he liked Peter. But the boys didn’t know each other at all. So, the situation seemed uncomfortable to him.
Then Parrish said, “I’ve never slept in a bed with another boy before. But I think I’m going to like it. Is it OK if I lie next to you so our arms are touching?”
Peter grinned, and his muscles seemed to relax. This wasn’t going to be so hard after all. Parrish was just as uncertain as Peter was. Peter wriggled over so their arms were against each other, both of them lying on their backs. Peter loved how that felt, and the feelings he already had for Parrish seemed to grow.
They lay like that for a minute or two, and then Peter said, “I sleep on my side. Being on my back feels weird.”
Parrish: “Which side.”
Peter: “My right side.”
“Parrish: “Me, too. Roll over.”
Peter was on the left side of the bed. By rolling onto his right side, he was facing away from Parrish. When Parrish rolled onto his right side, he was facing Peter’s back.
Parrish smiled, a smile anyone seeing it would call self-satisfied, and then he scooted forward so his front side was against Peter’s back. Parrish’s left arm just rather naturally crossed over Peter’s body, and so, apparently without conscious thought, he was hugging Peter to him.
“Is this all right?” he asked Peter. His voice was breathier than it had been before.
“This is wonderful,” Peter said and took a deep breath, then released it in a long, contented sigh.