Page 78 of String Boys

“Good. I have my train ticket all ready, and I’m set for time out of school.” Seth hugged him super tight. “I know it’s just for your graduation and dinner, but I’m so happy to be going home for you.”

“I’ll be happier when I know where I’m going to school next year,” Kelly said glumly. He’d been accepted by all sorts of state colleges, but Matty wasn’t making enough to keep the apartment without help, and Isela wouldn’t get a job. She kept saying she had to be home with her baby, butKellyspent more time taking care of baby Chloe than Isela did. Isela dropped her off at least four times a week to go have a church meeting or something with her girlfriends.

Kelly’s mom—who had been looking forward to workingoutsidethe house and actually doing the books for the restaurantinthe restaurant and seeing other people besides her family once in a while—actually cried last Saturday. Kelly was all set to take the girls to a movie, leave their mom and dad alone, and boom! There’s Isela with Chloe, who was dressed the same way she’d been dressed two days ago, but stinkier, and with diaper rash that Kelly could see from across the room.

Kelly had taken the baby, told his mom that he and the girls would go play with her at the gym—it had water games and those pipes that made rain and stuff—and gone to change her and put on some ointment.

The girls had been disappointed, but even Agnes had told him that Mom needed a frickin’ break.

Agnes had also told him that Isela was the worst mother since Grendel’s mother, because apparently his baby sister was also a genius and gettingBeowulfin the fifth grade. Kelly could have been jealous that his sisters were such geniuses, but they seemed to think he walked on water and Matty was the suck, so he could forgive them for being way smarter than he was and getting twin 4.0s or the “you’re so smart you’re smarter than the teacher” awards in grade school.

Kelly liked baby Chloe, but he’d noticed, and so had his mom and dad, that she seemed, well,needierthan his sisters had. When Lily and Lulu were born, Matty and Kelly had spent as much time as they could holding the girls. They’d gotten home and vied for the one who’d been awake or not nursing. When they’d started playing, they always had a Matty or a Kelly to lie on the floor with them and show them the bright colors or the squeaky sound. Agnes had a Matty and a Kelly and a Sethanda Lulu and a Lily to play with.

There’d been times when Agnes had been like, “No, fuck off, go away!” His parents said they’d never seen a baby roll into a corner before so she could coo at the wall, but it was probably just too many people up in her grill watching her being cute and all.

But not Chloe.

Chloe needed someone—anyone—all the time. She cried if they so much as set the car seat down.

She cried like she was used to crying, because nobody heard her.

Kelly wanted to live with Seth—they’d been waiting, waiting to see if they could be grown-ups together. Waiting to see if they could make love in their own apartment, free from watching eyes and fear of discovery and the stomach-cramping terror that a policeman would knock on their door the minute Seth arrived at his dad’s apartment and ask Seth what he’d been doing two nights after Kelly had been attacked.

Not even Kelly wanted to know the answer to that question.

He hadn’t asked either.

Two things going on at that crime scene.

But he couldn’t think about that, couldn’t think about if the pretty policeman who’d barely survived his own hell had been wrong, and the only thing that had been going on had been Seth getting blood on his hands.

But he still wanted them to be together.

That didn’t mean he didn’t worry about his mom, dealing without him, or the girls, who wouldn’t have Kelly to help with their homework so they could keep being super geniuses, or Chloe, whose father seemed to have forgotten how to make babies happy and whose mother had probably never known.

He tried hard not to burden Seth with this, but Seth wouldn’t let him be quiet about family. He asked about the girls, made him show pictures, and even cooed over the baby. Here, in his arms, as Seth searched through his phone and talked about how he wished Lily and Lulu could come visit, and asked if he could send Agnes her own stuffies from Amara’s seemingly inexhaustible supply, it hit Kelly hard that even though Seth hadn’t lived downstairs for almost two years, his family was still Seth’s.

Seth didn’t talk about why he didn’t go upstairs often and visit, even when he was home, and Kelly didn’t talk about why Seth couldn’t go home that often.

When Castor Durant’s name came up, it came up in context with Kelly’s assault, and not with Seth showing up with choke marks around his neck and an eye the color of blood and the pathetic body found in a field with the head almost cut off.

As Kelly grew older, assumed the responsibilities of his sisters, of his niece, acutely aware of how his brother had failed his family and determined not to do the same thing, he realized that loving his dreamy boy could be the ultimate of foolish recklessness.

He was planning to move in with amurderer.

But every time that word hit his brain, his brain zigged and zagged the other way.

Nothisboy. NothisSeth. It wasn’t murder if it was self-defense, was it? Seth hadn’t walked away from whatever had happened unscathed. He’d been held down, beaten, just like Kelly had.

Two things going on at that crime scene.

And more than that.

Kelly found he possessed a singular selfishness about Seth.

Didn’t Kelly get anything that washis?

This boy, thisyoung man, took care of him. In almost two years of cuddling, kissing, walks on the beach—yes, they had made it to the beach—Seth had only touched him intimatelyonce, because Kelly had initiated it and invited it and was comfortable.