Page 45 of String Boys

“Did you see him?” Seth asked. “Kid my age? Straight hair, bangs? Big brown eyes?”

The guy nodded. “Sweet smile? Yeah. I called the cops about ten minutes ago. He walked outside and that group of hooligans, they just surrounded him. I said it looked like assault, and then they just grabbed him and disappeared. The kid was hollering for help and the damned cops haven’t gotten here, and—”

“Kelly Cruz,” Seth told him, crying, not caring. “Tell the cops his name is Kelly Cruz and he’s a good boy and—oh God!”

“Seth!” his father was calling him as he ran, but Seth couldn’t think about that now, because Kelly,hisKelly, with the laughing brown eyes and the dimples in the corners of his cheeks, who could talk about blowjobs while he was drawing a picture of their friend that looked like an angel—he was out there… in the night. By the shitty vacant field with the terrible things that Seth didn’t want touching his skin.

Seth ran straight to the vacant stores, and it wasn’t that he didn’t hear the ruckus inside—it was that he didn’t care.

“The cops are coming! The cops are coming!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, not caring if it was true or not, just caring that whatever was going on stopped. He crashed through the boarded-up front door, surprised when it opened without a problem, and arrived just in time to watch the last of the gang disappear out the back door of the empty, vacant 7-Eleven.

“Kelly!” he called, his eyes adjusting to the total darkness. He pulled out his phone and fumbled, not finding the flashlight function because his fingers were shaking too hard. Instead he just used the light from it to look around, and that’s how he saw him.

Lying on a filthy mattress in the corner, on his side. His pants down around his ankles. Blood on his backside. His face buried in the piss-sodden flocking spilling from the split seams while he sobbed.

“Oh… oh God. Baby.”

Seth crouched down next to him, ignoring the filth, the smell of pee, the smell of shit.

“Go away,” Kelly rasped, and Seth was crying too hard to take exception.

He wouldn’t want Kelly to see him like this either, but he couldn’t leave.

“Baby,” he said instead, sinking to his knees. “C’mere.”

“Don’t let them see,” Kelly begged. “My mommy and daddy… don’t let them see….”

His voice rasped weakly, broken, and Seth would see the choke marks against his skin in his nightmares for years.

But he couldn’t see them now.

He could just see his bright, beautiful boy, still alive. Still breathing. Bruised and broken, but still good.

“C’mere,” Seth whispered again, pulling him into his arms.

“Don’t go nowhere just yet,” Kelly said. “Next week, okay? But not now.”

And Seth broke down and sobbed, holding his boy in his arms, not escaping, not going anywhere else but here, because he’d never forgive himself if he left Kelly now.

SETH DIDN’Tremember the call to his dad, but it must have been pretty bad, because there were ambulances and fire trucks and cop cars pulling up by the time his father crashed through the door to the vacant store, Xavier Cruz at his heels.

Seth had pulled up Kelly’s pants by then, because Kelly had begged him to.

“Don’t want them to see,” he rasped. “Can’t see. Dirty.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Seth told him. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re not dirty.”

“Don’t touch me. Dirty.”

But Seth ignored him, settling Kelly into his arms, cradling him like he used to cradle Agnes when she was too tiny to even smile.

Their fathers burst through the door, and Seth just held him tighter and cried.

Xavier squatted by them. “Oh,mijo. My boy. What did they do to you?”

“Daddy….” Kelly’s voice broke, and Seth was crying so hard by then he didn’t remember anything else until the ambulance got there and they pried Kelly out of his arms. Seth tried to get in the back of the ambulance, but his own father stopped him.

“We’ll go in the morning,” his dad said, looking at Xavier, who was sitting by his son. “We’ll be there in the morning,” he said more clearly. “Call us if you need anything.”