Page 13 of String Boys

“Ouch! Mama!”

“Into your room. Kelly, you can sleep at Seth’s this week. Xavier, you go get him his stuff.”

“Linda?” Xavier asked, shocked.

“Oh yes. He’s not going to school. We’ll get his assignments. He’s going to stay home with me for two weeks. He’s going to take care of his sisters and help me with the groceries and go to work with you—”

“Go to work with me?” Xavier asked, still sounding surprised.

“Oh yes. You won’t let a woman walk alone in your parking lot, Javi. There are people in that neighborhood who have done all the drugs and all the drinking and Matty is going to see them up close and personal. He’s going to see what his life is going to be like if he has no job skills and no schooling. All he has to do is keep going like he’s going. And then he’s going to dedicate his life to leaving boys like this Castor Durant in his rearview mirror!”

“Mom! It’s just a little—”

Linda gave a vicious yank on his ear. “It’s just a little nothing. I amnotletting you go down this path, Mateo Cruz. I amnotletting you throw your life away because of someone named Castor Durant. What in the hell kind of name is that anyway?”

“It’s a white boy name,” Kelly whispered, but so loud that Seth saw even Xavier smirk.

“A mean boy,” Seth corrected, and Kelly nodded.

“Not all white boys are mean,” Kelly conceded. “But this one is bad.”

“I’ll go get your clothes,” Xavier said to Kelly. “Seth, do you think this will be okay with your father?”

Seth swallowed. “Dad… Dad’ll just be proud you trust him,” he said, and Xavier stopped short.

“Do you trust him?”

Seth nodded—not automatically, but thinking. “He really wants me not to be afraid,” he said.

Xavier’s mouth pulled up, like he’d smile if everything else wasn’t in such chaos. “Good. Did you come up here to tell us about Kelly?”

“Nobody hits Kelly,” Seth said, angry about it all over again.

“No, son. You’re right there. I’ll be back.”

When he came back, he had Kelly’s violin, because Kelly was still a string boy, and Seth’s heart squeezed a little in his chest. “You can practice with me,” he said proudly.

Kelly shook his head and took the violin from his dad carefully, allowing Seth to grab the suitcase full of clothes his father had brought out to the living room.

“I’m not good like you,” he said. “I don’t want you to laugh.”

“I’d never laugh at you, Kelly. I promise.”

But Kelly just shrugged. Matty was still yelling at his mother, and Xavier was in the girls’ room, calming them down. It was time to go.

Together they trudged downstairs, but Seth was a little happy.

Kelly was still one of his favorite people, even if he was younger and hadn’t started growing yet. Still, for a week, he and his dad got to give Kelly’s family back a little of what they’d given him.

He was still angry at Matty, and worried that his parents wouldn’t fix what had gone wrong once Seth had started going to the other school, but those other things made him happy, and he’d hold them close to his heart.

Like Seth thought, his dad was so excited about giving back to the Cruz family a little that he went out of his way to be nice. He gave Kelly a key to the apartment so he could go there after school while he was waiting for Seth’s bus to drop him off, and made sure to stock the kitchen with lots of snacks—potato chips and soda—so it was almost like a birthday.

Kelly had never turned down potato chips or pizza bites. So Seth would get home and Kelly would be on the couch, doing his homework in front of the television, a plate of pizza bites on the coffee table next to him. Sometimes he wasn’t even doing his homework—he was just sketching what was on TV, and Seth had taken to pinning his drawings to his bedroom wall, because Kelly was just so good at drawing little cartoons that were as happy and as bouncy as he was.

Sethreallyliked having someone there when he got home from school.

For the next two weeks, unless Kelly’s dad was taking him to soccer, Seth got to pretend that’s the way it always was.