Page 16 of String Boys

And soft. And pillowy.

Seth stared at Kelly for the rest of the bus ride, trying to fit this new Kelly into his mind and wishing he didn’t have to.

This was Matty’s kid brother. Seth’s life would be… incomplete if he wasn’t there, all hours of the day, insinuating himself into Seth’s blood.

He couldn’t be seeing Kelly any different than he had since they were little kids, could he? Kelly. Who still talked the ears off a chipmunk if you let him. Who could prattle on about his English teacher and how she looked old but she was going to go out and start a revolution single-handedly if it killed her, and about the young math teacher who had just had her third kid and looked like death all the time, and how Kelly was going to ask his mom if she could make poor Mrs. Hennessy some hot chocolate for Christmas because that woman needed a mommy like nobody else and his mommy was the best.

Kelly.

Who sat in Seth’s living room and listened to Seth play and drew random pictures and smiled just at the sound of scales.

Seth must have made a sound or something—something different about his breathing, maybe—because Kelly’s eyes flew open, sparkling brown, lively, and definitely not stupid.

“What?” Kelly asked, wiping a self-conscious hand across his lips, looking for drool. “I totally got spit all over you, right?” He made to pull away, and for a moment, Seth’s arms tightened.

No. Kelly was warm in his arms, and again, hissmellheated Seth’s blood.

Kelly stopped for a moment, and a little red-bronze crescent appeared on his cheekbones. “Keeping me warm?” he whispered.

Seth gaped at him, unable to find a good reason for holding him so close. The moment suspended there, as the two of them stared at each other, breathless, until Kelly suddenly bounded up. “Hey, that’s our stop!”

“Sorry, kid,” the bus driver responded. “I’ll let you off on the next block.”

“Dammit,” Kelly muttered. “It’s raining outside.”

“I’m sorry,” Seth whispered, feeling stupid about being caught completely unawares. “I’m sorry. I just… zoned out—”

Kelly met his eyes and shook his head, reminding Seth so much of Kelly’s father that Seth’s tongue stopped trying to apologize. “I know what happened,” Kelly told him, his voice surprisingly mild.

And then he winked.

Seth swallowed and stood, waiting for the bus to come to a stop.

They got out just as the rain kicked in harder, and the two of them hustled to the nearest shelter. This stop used to open up into a small strip mall, little storefronts close together with alleyways between them and overhangs. The stores had all closed down, and the windows had been broken and boarded up and broken and boarded up and broken again. It wasn’t a safe place, no—they had to dodge needles and condoms and trash to get to the place between the buildings where the overhang offered shelter. The good news was, the back opened up to a small field. If they could cross that field, they’d be in the back porch of the first fourplex of their block, and they’d be safe.

But for the moment, they’d walked to the back of the tiny alleyway and were looking out from the overhang, waiting for the rain to stop pounding as if it was trying to drill a hole in their heads.

“Sorry about the bus stop,” Seth muttered. “This place is pretty gross.”

Kelly nodded. “Yeah. Matty says Castor Durant hangs out in the old laundromat—but not when it’s raining. The roof’s no good. It floods.”

Seth grunted. They’d all kept an ear to the ground for Castor Durant. He was back in the high school Matty had been headed for before he got his grades up. The rumors about that kid were unsettling—he’d been suspended once for hitting a teacher with a balled-up roll of tape. The only reason he hadn’t been expelled was that she hadn’tseenhim do it, but everybody knew.

And what he did to students unwary enough to fall in his sway was worse.

“So we’re lucky it’s raining?” Seth wrinkled his nose, and Kelly laughed at him. They’d both grown, but where Seth probably had two or so more inches to go, Kelly had stopped about two inches from where Seth was now. He was going to be five-six, maybe five-seven, for the rest of his life, and his childhood plumpness had washed away, leaving him slender and tightly built. But his small size never seemed to stop him. He always stared up at the world with that same laughing-eyed joy that Seth saw now.

Seth stared back at him, just as entranced as he had been on the bus, but now it was worse, somehow.

Kelly was biting his lip, his eyes wise.

“You just saw it, didn’t you?” he asked, his dimples popping out.

“Saw what?” Seth asked, helpless. He wanted to touch Kelly’s cheeks, feel the little dent in skin.

“Saw my face and thought, ‘Oh, it’sKelly,’ and not ‘Oh, it’s Matty’s little brother.’”

Seth shook his head. “You’ve always been Kelly,” he replied with confidence. And then, shaken. “What’s different?”