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  “That’s good, ’cause I might do the man thing and roll over and pass out.”

  “Bastard.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Larx did roll over—but then he busied himself with his boxers and a T-shirt, and Aaron found his so he could do the same. They resettled in bed, shivering because Larx always turned the thermostat down too far, and Larx cuddled up against his chest.

  And Aaron and his big mouth couldn’t let things rest.

  “Larx?”

  “Mm?”

  “Olivia….”

  Larx sighed. “I’ll push a little more tomorrow,” he said quietly. “But I can’t promise…. If she doesn’t start eating, I can take her to the hospital. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “She ate tonight,” Aaron told him. “I had to remind her about the baby.”

  “Good.” Larx’s troubled sigh echoed through their darkened bedroom. Aaron hadn’t brought any of his stuff in here—he’d liked Larx’s old rock band posters and the color scheme. His own bedroom had been navy and tan, which wasn’t a bad combo, and Aaron sort of missed the picture of his kids, but other than that, Larx just added so much color to his life.

  The knowledge that Larx’s things were around them comforted him right now.

  “Her… her mom let them down so bad,” Larx whispered after a moment of just their breaths. “I… I don’t know if that’s what’s got her so knotted up now, or if….” He grunted. “I’m going to just start googling the fuck out of depression. Let’s see what I can turn over.”

  “Can you consult the school counselor?” Aaron prodded gently.

  As expected, Larx resisted. “I’ll look stuff up,” he said. “We’re not… spill-our-guts-on-authority-figures people, you know?”

  “No, I had no idea.”

  “I can hear your eyes rolling in the dark, you know.”

  “Understatement, I has it. What would you tell a kid with the kind of symptoms your daughter has?”

  Larx whined. “I’d tell her to go see a professional, but that’s not necessarily—”

  “Really, Larx?”

  “And you’ve seen a counselor how many times in your life, oh great widower and father of three?”

  Aaron made a noncommittal sound in his throat.

  “That would be man-speak for not once. Don’t think I don’t know cop statistics,” Larx accused.

  “Did you google those too?” Aaron asked, uncomfortable in the extreme. Yes. It was common knowledge in the profession that cops would self-diagnose themselves right into eating their own guns—but Aaron felt a protective surge that didn’t want Larx to worry.

  “It’s a very handy tool.”

  “I should have made you go see someone after that thing in the school,” Aaron admitted—guilt speaking, of course. “You don’t just get shot and have it be okay.”

  “Did you?” Larx asked, referring to an incident years ago, before they’d begun seeing each other.

  “Augh! You’re insufferable!”

  Larx growled, and then, like it sometimes did, the fight just bled out of him. “Neither of us are good at it,” he said softly. “Depending on others for help. But… but you’re also right. About needing to get Olivia to see someone. I mean… you and me, we had to be self-reliant. We grew up thinking men didn’t see shrinks and we could deal with our own shit. But that’s not how we raised our kids. It’s just….”

  Aaron stroked the hair back from his temple, seeing a few strands of silver glint in the moonlight from the window. “I get it. Finding words. I… I didn’t have any myself.”

  Larx sighed, living up to his promise and beginning to fall asleep. “We’ll move her into your house next weekend,” he mumbled. “Let’s see if she can perk up a little in the meantime.”

  He was asleep that soon, and Aaron shortly after—but they both knew this wasn’t over.

  It was just not something they could fix, even after some great sex and conversation.

  SNOW FLURRIES

  “SHE JUST showed up?”

  “Yes, Yoshi.”

  “Just, on your doorstep. ‘Hey, Dad, all my problems are here but six months early!’”

  “Yes, Yoshi. Just like that.”

  “Like, no warning?”

  Larx dragged his hands through his hair and concentrated on the lunch Aaron had packed for him. Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat with mandarin oranges and chips. It wasn’t leftovers, which Larx actually preferred, but it was a lunch, made for him before he flew out the door, complete with a bottle of water to remind Larx to hydrate.

  Yoshi Nakamoto, Larx’s best friend and reluctant vice-principal, had bought him a soda at the machine out of pure pity.

  Yoshi loved Larx too.

  And right now Yoshi’s bird’s nest of fine black hair and his chia-goatee were looking damned well-groomed compared to the mess Larx was making of himself.

  “No warning.” Larx grimaced. “Well, in retrospect there was some warning. Remember when Delilah died?”

  “Your old cat?” See—as sarcastic as Yoshi was, some people would expect him to blow off the ancient Siamese goddess that had held Olivia together when Larx and his girls had first moved to the tiny fleaspeck of Colton after Larx’s hellific divorce.

  But not Yoshi—Yoshi had loved that cat too, and the drop in his voice showed it.

  “Yeah. When she passed away before Thanksgiving, Olivia got upset—”

  “Well, she’d had the cat for, what? Seven, eight years?”

  “Something like that.” Larx closed his eyes, hearing again that hysterical, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard pitch Olivia had hit when Larx had told her over the phone. “But… I mean, grief, yeah. We all were sad. But Olivia didn’t sound right. And she sounded strained over Thanksgiving—which is when she said she got pregnant, and you know? No details. ‘Dad, I went out and did someone stupid and now I’m pregnant.’ And it’s not like a father in the picture is necessary. But… but Olivia is more responsible than that. I didn’t push her over Christmas because….” He let out a fractured sigh.

  “Hard to know,” Yoshi said wisely. “You’re not judging, but a helper with a baby would be damned….” Yoshi waved his hands wildly.

  “Helpful,” Larx supplied, rolling his eyes.

  “Well, yes. Because right now her helpers are you and Aaron, Grandpa, and I’m not giving you bullshit about getting old. I’m giving you bullshit about almost having your kids out of the house and being able to have sex at will!”

  “God, Yoshi—anybody could hear us!” Larx ducked his head like a naughty schoolboy.

  “Oh right!” Yoshi’s turn to roll his eyes. “It’s the middle of fifth period. Not even the teachers are awake right now. Most of them dropped off right after that one suck-up in the middle of the classroom who couldn’t stay awake after lunch.”

  Larx chuckled. “Yeah, sure. So nobody can hear us. Look—I can raise another kid if I have to. But I don’t want Olivia to have to live with that. I… I don’t even know what she must be thinking right now, given how her mother treated her and her sister.”

  Larx had gotten pulled out of his old classroom in Sacramento because he’d come out to a troubled student as bi, hoping it would give the student faith. Instead, Larx had been put on leave, and his wife had kicked him out of the house. As Larx’s leave had progressed, he’d realized during his visitations that Alicia had been neglecting their children, taking her own prejudice out on their kids. Larx had gotten custody and fled into the hills, to a small town where nobody would have heard of him and his girls could start fresh.

  They’d survived—they’d thrived—but now, with Olivia’s presence in her room all weekend, crying, not eating, all of it, bearing down on his shoulders, he wondered how much of what his daughters endured had been festering away in their hearts, waiting for something like this to set it off.

  “Well, maybe it’s not your job to know what she’s thinking,” Yoshi said, pursing his lips. “Maybe it’s your job to g
et her to someone else who can know what she’s thinking.”

  Larx groaned and tilted his head back. “Heard that song all weekend, Yoshi. Believe me, I’m working on it.” He sighed. “Now about calling those kids in….”

  “I so much like your personal problems better.” Yoshi sulked. “Do we have to cold-call random students to our offices?”

  “Yes, Yoshi—when we know they’re having trouble with the law, I think that falls within our purview. Besides, Candace’s grades have dropped damned dramatically. Something’s up. If I hadn’t been tipped off by Aaron, I was definitely tipped off by her referral. Hang tight—let’s see what she has to say for herself.”

  Yoshi grunted. “Let me talk to her. I actually had her last year. She was timid and shy, and you will scare her.”

  Larx tilted his head. “Are you saying you’re snuggly?” No. Yoshi was about as snuggly as a porcupine.

  “I’m saying I have Hello Kitty stickers in my drawer, asshole, and those are like the secret to teenage girls everywhere.”

  “Sexist.”

  “Shut up. Besides—you had the misspent youth. That kid with the pothead brother will trust you way more than he’ll trust me. I have square written all over me.”

  Larx let out a laugh. “That I can agree with. Okay—let’s go get a student runner, and we can do our jobs!”

  Yoshi shook his head in disgust. “Seriously? This is in our job description? I’ve seen the movies, Larx. We’re supposed to be faceless bureaucrats who tell the good hardworking teachers they can’t take the poor minority kids to the tech fair.”

  Yoshi routinely brought bagels to his AP class in the morning and let the word get out so he was feeding half the school—often the half with parents too proud to ask for free lunch.

  “Well, Yosh, if that’s our job description, we should both get fired. Now scoot! The somnolence of fifth period only lasts so long.”

  “Good word, Larx. You almost sounded like a grown-up.”

  “Fuck off and get out of my office.”

  Yoshi flipped him off on the way out the door.

  Fifteen minutes later, Larx was sitting on his desk while one of the sweetest kids he’d ever met was curled up in the visitor’s chair, arms wrapped around his shins, big brown eyes open and alert in an elfin sort of face.

  He was gazing at Larx with a sort of worship.

  “So, the sheriff—”

  “Sheriff George,” Larx prompted.

  “He said he came by, and he just wanted you to make sure I was okay.”

  “Well, yeah, Jaime. Your brother—”

  “Berto,” Jaime supplied, the same way Larx had.

  Larx winked at him. “Berto, he had a pretty big prescription for anxiety medication—”

  “His pot,” Jaime said without blinking. “He grows it in the back. He’s got a permit.”

  “Yeah. He had a giant prescription for stash, and you’re a minor, and he didn’t want to get Berto in trouble because you guys seem to be good kids, but I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  Jaime grinned. “In Sacramento they just would have arrested us both, legal or not—you know that, right?”

  Larx grimaced. “Well, yeah, some places. It’s the you being a minor thing, Jaime—”

  “I don’t do that shit, erm, stuff, Mr. Larkin. I tried it once, ’cause Berto seemed to do so much better, but I didn’t like it at all.”

  Okay then. “Good,” Larx told him. “Good. Keep it like that—seriously. If you need it, you need it, but if you don’t, you can buy yourself a whole lot of trouble using it.”

  Jaime shrugged. “Looks like I bought myself a whole lot of trouble as it was.”

  Ah… an opening. “Were you the one who called the police?”

  The kid looked supremely uncomfortable for someone with his feet on his chair under his ass. “Look, Berto lights up, and I go outside so I don’t get dizzy. Berto set up a little shed with a space heater for me, and I do homework and shit. He says he’s going to learn how to make brownies and stuff—we can’t afford the dispensary, but, you know….” He grimaced.

  “Not saying a word. But edibles can be really powerful. Anyway—so you’re outside in the shed and….”

  “And I hear… well, it sounds….” Jaime grimaced again. “It sounds like a horror movie, where the heroine is running away from someone and she doesn’t want him to catch her, and then he does and….”

  Larx frowned, trying to put the kid’s discomfort together with the story.

  And then felt like a fool when he did just that.

  “He hit her?”

  Jaime nodded unhappily. “I didn’t see it—and I don’t know the people there very well. There’s two grown-up men and two kids, and I’m not sure which kid—I went running out and saw two people heading toward Candace’s house, one a big guy with his hand over the girl’s arm. The girl was quiet with the guy, but I could swear before that she was screaming. So I wait until they’re out of sight and then I run in the house, and me and Berto have a long, uh, discussion over whether or not to call the cops, and I’m like, ‘What the hell’s the prescription for if it doesn’t get you a free pass to call the cops when a girl’s getting hurt,’ and he groaned and said ‘Go ahead’ while he tried to clear out the smell. The house was freezing before the cops got there, I’ll tell you that, and it was still damned strong. But the sheriff seemed like a good guy—I mean, he made sure I wasn’t using and then….”

  Jaime had gotten animated during the central part of the story, but now his face fell.

  “I still don’t know what happened to the girl. I should have… I don’t know. Run into the snow, I guess?”

  Larx smiled his best, sweetest smile. This kid weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, and at fifteen years of age was still about five feet four inches tall.

  “Going into the woods to deal with a domestic dispute is not the way to go, Jaime. I’m damned grateful you didn’t. But I have to ask you—why doesn’t your brother medicate in the shed?”

  Jaime shifted uncomfortably again. “He, uh… he got beat up. Really bad. In Sacramento. And he… he still has nightmares. But he wanted to move up here—and his friends, uh… didn’t want him to.”

  Larx rubbed the back of his neck. “Jaime, I used to work in your old district. Did you know that?”

  Jaime sent him a quick glance, then looked away. “No, sir. I didn’t.”

  “Your brother got jumped out of his gang so he could get you out of a shitty neighborhood, didn’t he?”

  Jaime nodded and pulled his knees tighter. “I was so scared,” he confessed painfully. “I thought it would all be shitty white people. And there’s a lot of white people, but so far, everyone’s been really nice. But Berto—he… he still has nightmares, you know? And I had to… had to call about this girl, because if he’s still having nightmares, I hate to think what’s going on with her, but… but….” He bit his lip.

  “But you’re a little guy, and you were probably wearing those tennis shoes anyway, weren’t you?”

  Jaime shrugged. “Snow. Nobody tells you about this shit.”

  “What’s your brother do for work?” he asked kindly.

  “He’s, like, labor—he works for all the shops. He’s their loader/unloader. Some guy with a pottery shop who makes these weird sculptures gives him a ride to work every day.”

  Larx rubbed the back of his neck a little harder. “Tane?” he asked, shaking his head. “Tane Pavelle?”

  “Yeah! He’s really intense, but he seems okay. I think he’s related to my science teacher.”

  “He’s her brother,” Larx said, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. He was also Yoshi’s boyfriend, although they were scrupulous about nobody in the town knowing. Yoshi had come out that fall just as spectacularly as Larx had, but Tane was not nearly as comfortable in the spotlight as Aaron. Yoshi had quoted him as saying he didn’t want those fucking people to know a damned thing about him—and apparently that meant Yoshi too. “He’s in
good company. Tane is intense, but he’s also a good guy.”

  Jaime smiled guilelessly. “That’s good. I mean, I trusted Berto—he’s older, and our folks moved back when he was twenty and left us here. But after….” He shuddered. “He almost died. So it’s good to know he’s got a friend.”

  Oh, this kid. This kid was why Larx taught in that district for so long. Because most of those students in the “big scary districts” that caught every bad news story ever were a lot like this kid. Bright, willing to hope, willing to work so damned hard with just a little approval.

  Larx couldn’t look at his feet in his ripped-up sneakers anymore. He let out a sigh and scowled. “Jaime, my, uh”—boyfriend’s kid—“How’s this. I know a few guys who might have some old waffle stompers for you. Let me take your size down and see if we can’t keep your toes on before April, okay?”

  Jaime smiled, embarrassed and relieved. “That would be so exciting. You have no idea how excited I would be about not freezing my feet off. I’d absolutely love to not freeze my, uh, feet off for the rest of the winter. Did you say April?”

  Larx grimaced. “Well, usually by the end of March, but sometimes mid-April. Sweaters. I think between Aar… uhm, my friend’s kid and I—”

  “Aaron? Deputy George?” Jaime’s bright eyes didn’t waver.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re dating, right? ’Cause I got here and all the kids were, like, ‘Our principal’s gay and he’s dating the deputy sheriff but you gotta be cool about it ’cause he’s, like, a hero.’ And I was, like, ‘Hey, I got a cousin who’s gay, and if I could make the whole world leave him alone by saying he’s a hero, I would, so this guy’s got no worries from me.’”

  Larx scrubbed at his face and tried not to lay his head in his arms and laugh until he couldn’t breathe. “So, uh, glad you approve. Anyway, my boyfriend’s kid is about to throw out a whole bunch of stuff he outgrew last year. Give me a day or two and I’ll see if you—”

  “And Berto?” Jaime asked hesitantly. “He’s bigger than me—more like Deputy George’s size. But he’s working in tennis shoes, and he’s dropped shit, erm, stuff on his toes, and we spent all our money moving here over Christmas.” For the first time, he looked dispirited. “There’s no place I could work here. I had a job at the animal shelter cleaning cat boxes—didn’t pay much, ’cause I didn’t have a work permit, but it paid something. I’ll be sixteen in April, but….” He shrugged. “No place to work here. All the places, they’re family run. I’m afraid to even go into the pizza place or the burger place, you know?”