Page 39

Walt was walking with him now. That was his name.

He’d held up a hand to pause Hollis in the middle of his explanation and demanded they exchange names because he “wasn’t going to stand around wearing stranger clothes, listening to stranger problems,” unless he had something to call him.

He was extremely rude about Hollis’s situation, but he was listening to it. He seemed to care.

Hollis couldn’t blame him for that anyway. Whatever Walt had going on was so much more traumatizing than being briefly accused of an assault he didn’t commit and “suspended from school for a few days” that Hollis was almost humiliated to even be talking about it.

But Walt just gazed up at him and grimaced. Listened.

He had brown eyes, a strange thing for someone so blond.