“Why are you looking for Ghost?”
Tobias jolted. “What? I mean, he’s my friend, and he’s in trouble, so...”
“I mean why are you looking for Ghost.” Sullivan didn’t sound angry so much as curious, but his eyes were eagle-sharp on Tobias’s face. “Why couldn’t you pay me like everyone else does and go home and do your homework like a normal college student whose best friend is a missing prostitute?”
“Ha-ha.” Tobias chewed on his lip. “You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“Maybe. But right now I’m thinking that you have something underhanded going on, so stupid is probably an improvement.”
His stomach was tight now for a whole other reason. “I told you, I’m not in love with him, and I’m not some jealous boyfriend. He doesn’t owe me money or anything.”
“Then what is it?”
God, this was hard to say. “You know how I said yesterday that I have some abandonment issues? Ghost abandons people.” Instantly he shook his head and clarified, “That’s unfair. I mean that he takes off. It’s not abandonment. Still, there’s only so much of it I can take.” Hushed, like a confession, he added, “I don’t think I can take much more. It’s one thing if he ran because he’s in trouble, but...”
“But it’s something else if he took off because he doesn’t give a shit.”
Tobias dragged a hand over his mouth, suddenly tired. “Yeah. And this search...it’s so many things at once. If he did drop me, I don’t want to be someone who stays put where I get left, if that makes sense. I need to see for myself. So I’ll know if I should—should get over it or not.”
“Why haven’t you kicked him loose already? This is all...” Sullivan pursed his lips, searching for words, maybe. “It seems very effortful.”
Tobias hesitated. “You remember I said I’d been in a residential treatment facility?”
“Yeah.”
“I was... Everything in my life was sort of crushing me. Up until then, I’d had this idea that if I could just make it through high school, things would be different. I’d be different. And then one day my guidance counselor made me fill out this little card about what my eventual career field was going to be and I realized I was going to have to write medicine, and I couldn’t. It was too much. It was the whole rest of my life smothering me and I didn’t see a way out and I—I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
Quietly, Sullivan asked, “But you hurt yourself?”
“Yeah.” He paused, wondering why it was so easy to tell Sullivan what was so difficult to tell anyone else, and decided it had something to do with the nature of casual. He didn’t need to impress Sullivan, didn’t need to wonder about how it would affect things. He could say whatever he wanted. There was power in that. “The next day I was in Woodbury.”
“Where Ghost comes in.”
“Yeah.” Tobias tilted his head back against the seat. “My parents picked it because it was classified as a behavioral treatment place as much as a mental health one. I guess they figured it would look better if we could say that I’d just gone to too many parties as a teenager instead of that I’d had a nervous breakdown and spent some time on depression meds. I knew within hours that I’d been stupid to let them put me in there. I don’t know what I’d pictured, but the guys there were... I was in way over my head. I was...”
Not to put too fine a point on it, he’d been terrified.
“Out of your depth?” Sullivan asked.
“Completely. I didn’t know how to talk to anyone, and most of them hated me before I ever opened my mouth. You can probably guess why.”
“My youngest sister was fourteen before she got nice jeans that weren’t hand-me-downs five years out of style. I remember her crying about it she was so happy. Yeah, I can guess why.”
“I didn’t look down on them, truly,” Tobias said softly. “We weren’t spoiled, growing up, or at least I didn’t think so then. My parents are really careful about that. They don’t want entitled kids. But there are degrees to having and not having, and spoiled or not, I still had more. Within a week of my first letter home, Mirlande had brought me a bunch of clothes she’d gotten from Goodwill, and I gave her my watch to take with her, but it was too late. You can change your clothes, but it’s a lot harder to talk in a way that doesn’t show how much private school you’ve had. They knew I had things they didn’t, and it’s hard not to hate someone who rubs it in your face, even if he doesn’t mean to.”
“They kicked the shit out of you, huh?” Sullivan asked.
“A few times. Gibson—this big, skinhead guy—he was the worst. A constant onslaught. If it wasn’t punches, it was words, and looks, and threats, and I’m—” He gave Sullivan a small smile. “You might’ve noticed I’m not very good at fighting. I don’t like hurting people.”
“And Ghost? He felt sorry for you?”
“Ghost doesn’t feel sorry for people. He’s not built that way.” Back then Ghost had been skinny and pale and delicate with a loveliness that hinted at innocence. Tobias might’ve believed that lie himself if his first glimpse of Ghost hadn’t been one of the younger boy grinning, his gaze empty and feral, the blade in his hand sparking the reflected light from the caged fluorescents overhead. Ghost hadn’t done much, just hovered in the doorway and told some rambling story about a kid who’d died in a car wreck—nonsense completely unrelated to the spectacle of Tobias lying on his belly in the center of the now-still ring of boys. The
