Scam (2 page)

Lindsey must have noticed me getting antsy, because first she touched my leg and then she took my hand and held it. Who was this nut job of a girl anyway? But then I closed my eyes as the minister droned on, and all I could think about was the fact that I was glad I was not alone.

I don’t remember much else about the service. There was no coffin. My mom
had been cremated. The minister spoke about Jesus and about resurrection and about how my mom’s spirit was there in the church but that she had also “gone home.” If my mom had been here, really here, she would have hated it all. As the service was coming to a close, people stood up and sang another song from the hymn book. I had been fighting my emotions through the whole thing, but suddenly I found myself crying.

We sat there, Lindsey and me, while everyone else was standing. She put her arm around me. And I cried. I hadn’t cried in a long time. Not even when I had found my mom dead in her bed. But now I let it out.

I sobbed, and my body shook. And Lindsey held on to me and didn’t let go.

People nodded to us as they left the church. The minister came over and said something that was supposed to be
comforting, I guess, but I wasn’t really listening to the words.

As we got up to go, the social worker came up and introduced herself to Lindsey.

“You gonna be okay?” she asked me. “Do you want me to come over and be with you?”

“No,” I said. “My uncle is coming in from out of town to stay with me for a few days.”

“That’s good,” Emma said. “I was afraid you were all alone. I’ll be over to sort things out with you in a couple of days, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. I had no uncle—not one that would ever come over to help out anyway.

As we walked away from the church, the world seemed different to me. I don’t know how to explain it. Just different. Unreal, I guess.

“Josh, are you going be all right?” Lindsey asked. I think she asked me three times before I heard her.

“I don’t know,” I finally answered. “I’ve been worrying about my mom for so long. That’s what I did. Every day. And I tried to help. And sometimes it seemed like things were going to be okay. But now she’s gone.”

Lindsey looked at me and touched my face. “It’s not your fault.”

“Yeah, I think it is. I should have taken better care of her.”

“I’m so sorry. You must have really loved her.”

I took a deep breath. My head was still filled with fog. That damn church service didn’t do me much good. It certainly didn’t do my mother any good. And then there was this girl beside me. Who was she? Why was she walking with me? I took a deep breath. I tried to focus on something.
I was afraid to think about returning to that crappy apartment alone. I was afraid of what my life was going to be like tonight and tomorrow and the day after that. I was afraid, and I was alone in the world. All I knew right now was that I wanted this crazy girl, this Lindsey, to stay beside me, to keep talking.

“What about
your
parents?” I asked. “Tell me about them.”

“My mom and dad are the world’s most invisible parents. In some ways, they are every teenager’s dream. My dad works about sixty hours a week, and my mom has all this social stuff on the go. They are probably okay people. They’re just hardly ever home. There’s food in the fridge. They even gave my brother and me a credit card we can use for clothes and stuff. They trust us. Which, believe me, is totally nuts.”

“You have a brother?”

“Yeah. Caleb. He was raised by video games and YouTube videos.”

“Is he like you?”

“You mean, is he a thief?”

“No. I don’t know. What is he like?”

“Well, he has his problems.”

“Like what?” Suddenly I was interested in other people’s problems. Anything to get my mind off my own.

“Well, he gets depressed easily. But he’s also very insecure. So he acts out. He does things to try to impress people. He thinks if he can draw attention to himself, people will like him.”

“Like what?”

“Well, in the last year he has started to think he’s a great graffiti artist. He goes by the name Yo-Yo.”

“Yo-Yo?”

“I think it has to do with the depression thing. He says that he gets down, but he always bounces back. Yo-Yo.”

“I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that name. Big puffy letters in the weirdest places.” “That’s my brother. If he can get at it, he’ll try to tag it.”

“But why?”

Lindsey threw up her hands. “You’d have to ask Caleb. Caleb the Conqueror, he used to call himself when he was in his superhero phase. He’s been caught more than once. He’s not that careful. But, like he says, he always bounces back. That’s the Yo-Yo for you.”

We were standing outside my apartment building—a dirty three-story brick building with trash on the front steps. “I’m home.”

“Now what?”

“I don’t know. I walk in there and try to figure out where my life goes from here.”

“What about me?” Lindsey asked.

“What about you?”

“Well, we did this funeral thing together, right?”

“Yeah. Well, you stole my wallet first, and then we did the funeral thing.”

“I know. But I didn’t know your mom had just died. Besides, it wasn’t personal.”

“It seemed pretty personal at the time.”

“I can explain, but maybe not now. Now I want you to tell me that we can be friends. We had a bad start, but it’s getting better, right?”

“It’s hard for me to think about anything getting better,” I said. And I almost turned and began to go up those trashy steps. But, despite all the weirdness, I knew that Lindsey was some kind of lifeline for me.

“Yeah, if you want to be my friend, I’d like that,” I said.

Lindsey smiled then. It was a great smile. “Hold out your hand.”

I held out my hand, and she wrote something on it. An email address.

“I have to go to the library if I want to check emails.”

“Okay.” She flipped my hand over and wrote a phone number on it. “You got a phone?”

“I have my mom’s cell phone. It’s really old. Guess it’s mine now.”

“Call me?”

I tried smiling back, but it was like my face wasn’t working. I started up the steps, then turned and said, “Thanks. Thanks, Lindsey.”

Chapter Five

I spent the next day alone in the apartment. I kept thinking my mom was going to walk in the door and everything would be okay, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I was in a dark and lonely place. I found my mom’s old cell phone and plugged it in so the battery wouldn’t go dead. It seemed to take an enormous amount of energy to do just that, to plug
the damn thing in the wall. I copied Lindsey’s phone number onto three different pieces of paper. I placed one on the kitchen table and one on the table by my bed, and I put one in my wallet.

But I didn’t call her.

I slept a lot. The more I slept, the more tired I felt.

And then the buzzer rang. I looked out and could see it was Emma, and she had a guy with her. I hit the door buzzer to let them in. What else could I do?

“Hi, Josh. How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m okay, I guess.”

“Your uncle here?”

“He’s out.”

“Okay. This is Darren,” she said, nodding to the guy beside her.

“Hi, Josh,” he said. “Good to meet you. Sorry about your loss.” Darren looked to be about thirty. He had longish hair and seemed to be a nice guy.

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Darren runs a group home over on Cumberland,” Emma said. “You know much about group homes?”

I shook my head no.

“It’s not like the old days,” Darren said. “Ours is small. Right now we only have four other kids there. We think you’ll fit in.”

I looked at Emma. I’d never really trusted her, but she’d always been straight with my mom and me, always tried to help out, even when my mom pushed her away. I think she knew there was no uncle in the picture, but she didn’t come right out and say it.

“I gotta do this?” I asked her.

“Josh, you’re sixteen. We can’t let you stay here by yourself. Maybe in a year or two you’ll be okay on your own. But for now, you need to let us help you.”

Darren handed me a card. “This is the address. It’s not that far from here.
We’d like it if you could walk over later today. On your own. Just come check us out. I’ll introduce you to the other guys. I’m not gonna say we’re like one big happy family. In fact, we are one weird little family or maybe not family at all. But we’re in it together. I live there too. This is my life. This is what I do. Just give us a chance.”

I looked at Emma. “What about this apartment? What happens to my mom’s stuff?”

“For now,” she said, “nothing. Everything will be here. We’ll continue to pay the rent until things settle down. You can come back here to visit in the days, if you like.”

Darren was playing cheerleader. He smiled and gave me two thumbs-up. Then they turned to go. “Hope to see you later today,” Darren said.

That afternoon I left the apartment for the first time since the funeral service. The sunlight was brighter—too bright. The street sounds seemed louder. Everything felt different—unfamiliar, like I’d never even been here before.

I walked to Cumberland Street and found the house—just a nondescript suburban house on a quiet dead-end street. I rang the doorbell, and a fat kid came to the door. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Josh,” I said.

“You selling something?”

“No. I’m here to see Darren.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh shit,” he said and then yelled, “Darren, the new kid is here.”

Darren bounded to the door with a big grin on his face. He shook my hand, and the fat kid wandered off inside. “That’s Kyle,” he said. “We’re working on his social skills. C’mon in.”

The first thing that struck me about the house was that everything was completely ordinary. There was a living room with a tv, a kitchen and a few small bedrooms. “Don’t blame me for the home decorating,” Darren said. “It was like this when I got here. Do you think you can handle it?”

“Handle what?”

“Think you can live in a place like this?”

I shrugged.

“Josh,” Darren said, “you’ve had a big loss. If I was in your shoes, I’d be a mess. I never lost a parent. We just want to give you a place that is safe and give you a chance to recover. Aside from Kyle, you’ll have three other kids to share the house with. And me. I’m supposedly in charge.” He opened a door to one of the bedrooms. “You’ll bunk in here with Noah.”

Noah was lying on one of the two beds in the room. He had dark hair, wore glasses and was reading a book. He looked up at me and nodded and said, “Like the guy with the ark. Only I don’t have any animals. We’re not allowed to have pets.”

I nodded uncertainly.

“Welcome aboard,” he said. “But I might as well tell you outright. I fart a lot, so you’ll have to get used to it.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said. I set my backpack down on the empty bed and let Darren lead me downstairs to what he called the family room.

“Noah had the crap beat out of him by his father on a regular basis. It’s not the farts you need to worry about. He wakes up screaming sometimes. Think you’ll be all right with that?”

“I dunno. I guess so. What should I do when that happens?”

Darren smiled at me. “Do what you’d want someone else to do if you woke up screaming. You’ll figure it out.”

There were two guys in the family room about my age. Darren nodded to them. “Connor and Brian, this is Josh.”

Connor looked me over. I could tell he was one of those kids who liked to size a person up and stick a label on them. He held up his hand and said, “Welcome, loser number five,” as if he was a host on some game show. “Can we have a round of applause for Josh.” This didn’t seem funny to me at all. The other kid, Brian, didn’t say anything. He had some kind of handheld video game that he went on playing.

Darren led me back into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Here’s the heart of this place. What’s here is yours as much as everyone else’s. We all gotta share, and I hope you’ll chip in with
some chores. For now, that’s it. Make yourself at home. What would you like to do first?”

What I wanted to do was get out of there and go back home, but I was playing it cool. “Okay if I just go for a walk?”

“Absolutely. Dinner’s at five. Connor’s making macaroni with chunks of hot dogs cut up in it. It’s his specialty.”

“I wouldn’t want to miss that,” I said.

As I walked out of there, I felt a new wave of sadness sweep over me. The loss of my mom was still sinking in. We’d never been much of a family. But it was my life as I knew it. I loved her, and in her own way she loved me. I would never get that back. I’d never get her back. If I’d thought I could run, I would have. But I didn’t have any place to run to.

Chapter Six

The girl. All I could think about was calling Lindsey.

I found my way to a park and sat on a bench. Pigeons flew down and started marching around in front of me. I guess they thought I was going to feed them, but I had nothing. I took out my wallet. The five-dollar bill was still there. So was the faded picture of my mom.
For a split second, I was ready to burst into tears. But I pushed that back. Instead, I unfolded the little scrap of paper with Lindsey’s phone number on it.

I punched in the numbers on my mom’s old cell phone. It rang. What was I going to say to her?

“Hello?”

“Lindsey?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“Josh.”

“Josh. This is weird. No one actually calls me to talk on my cell.”

“I don’t think I can text from this phone.”

“That’s okay. It’s good to hear from you. How are you doing?”

“I’m hanging in there,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’m bored out of my gourd.”

“Can we do something together?” I couldn’t believe I was asking her this.
I wasn’t even sure I trusted this girl. Maybe she was playing some freaking game by being nice to me.

“Sure. Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m not far from where we met.”

“Okay. I’ll come meet you there. Same corner where I first saw you. I’m leaving the house now.” And she hung up.