Page 72 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
He stares back.
“Why are you in my room?” I ask, the anxiety in my voice making me hate myself a little.
Because suddenly he isn’t just a boy.
He’s a boy alone in my room with the door shut, and all the old warnings start rattling loose in the back of my mind. Every awful thing my mother let happen. Every man who stood too close. Every look that meant something bad was coming.
My eyes flick instinctively toward the call button by the wall.
I only get one step.
He crosses the room before I can hit it, fast enough to make my breath catch, his hand closing around mine.
The contact freezes both of us.
For a second all I can hear is our breathing.
“Stop,” he whispers.
His voice is lower now. Not soft exactly, but desperate enough to sand some of the sharpness off.
“They’ll find me eventually. Just… give me a minute away from them.”
Up close, he looks younger than he did from across the room. Frail in that hard, wiry way some boys get when they’ve grown too fast and eaten too little. His shirt is untucked. His clothes look used, like they’ve belonged to too many hands before landing on him.
A St. Augustine boy.
I know it before he says anything. You can always tell. Not by how they look exactly, but by the way they carry themselves. Too watchful. Too quick to bolt. Too ready for a fight.
“You’re supposed to be with your Warden,” I whisper.
“The Warden can go to hell,” he scoffs, finally letting my hand go. He glances toward the door like he can still hear the adults outside hunting for him. “Trust me, they won’t leave this preppy hell without me.”
A laugh slips out of me before I can stop it.
“Preppy?” I repeat, shaking my head.
The word sounds ridiculous in a place like this, with its overpainted walls, donation-bin furniture and adults who smile too hard when visitors are around.
“Most of us would have ended up at St. Augustine,” I say, glancing down at Rose still moving across my sheets. “We just weren’t caught.”
That lands between us differently than I expect.
He goes still again, but this time not because he’s scared. Because he’s listening. Really listening.
He lets out a breath through his nose, leaning back against the door for a second like he is trying to decide whether to bolt again or stay where he is.
“Well,” he says at last, his voice still rough from running, though less jagged now, “I didn’t have a chance.”
Something in the way he says it lands heavier than the words themselves. Not dramatic. Just matter-of-fact, like he’s talking about weather instead of a whole life that went one direction while mine managed to slip another way by luck, timing, or adults looking the other way.
His eyes move around the room then, taking in the empty second bed, the uneven posters on the wall, the stack of books by my pillow, the little cardboard box I use as a bedside table.
“Nice room,” he says.
The sarcasm is faint, almost absent. He means it more as observation than insult, which somehow makes it sadder.
Before I can answer, he pushes away from the door and takes a few steps toward my bed, clearly intending to throw himself down onto it like boys always seem to do, like they never think about what might already be there.
