The Boy Who Steals Houses

by C. G. Drews

  Sam doesn’t even think.

  He shoves away from the hatstands and flings himself over low buckets of flowers separating shoppers from the road. Cars stream forward. Sam’s shoes hit the road. He left his beating heart back on the footpath, because right now he moves silently, airless, his fingers reaching out to snatch the hem of a small T-shirt and pull a kid into his arms. He twists so his back is to the oncoming car.

  Moxie stumbles on to the road, her face stricken, legs stretching to cover the short distance.

  ‘Moxie,’ Sam says.

  Just a whisper. Just a breath.

  It’s all happened so fast. No chance to think.

  He throws Toby into her arms, which seems to take for ever and yet no time at all.

  A horn blasts.

  Undone shoelaces twist around Sam’s ankles.

  He takes a breath.

  The car hits.

  He folds in on himself, a rag doll, all loose arms and stuffing spilling on to the road.

  For a second the pain is bright and white hot, the road sheering the skin off his arms and the soft tenderness of his cheek. Then the world stammers to an abrupt halt. It doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t care.

  He just needs to know if the little De Lainey boy is OK.

  Car doors slam. Voices rise in panicked flurry. Blood, hot and thick and metallic, coats Sam’s arms.

  He pushes himself up.

  ‘Wait, kid! Don’t move. Let me call an ambulance—’

  The driver is sobbing. Someone has a phone out, frantically dialling.

  ‘No.’ Sam tastes hot bitumen, salty blood. He scrambles to his feet. ‘No, I’m fine.’ His T-shirt sticks to his hip, his skin raw as skinned fish.

  He looks for Moxie.

  She sits in the gutter, Toby clutched to her chest, as her father pulls them both into his arms. Their backs are to Sam. Their father’s shoulders shake. But there’s not a scratch on the little boy.

  Sam clutches at the car hood for a second.

  ‘Kid, just sit down.’

  An adult reaches out to steady Sam, but he shrinks back. ‘I’m fine.’

  Moxie looks up over her father’s shoulder. Her eyes are fierce and relieved as the aftermath of a storm.

  Sam turns away.

  He slips amongst the growing crowd and they move back – probably so he doesn’t get blood on them. As soon as he’s on the footpath again, he breaks into a run. He’s fine, he’s fine fine fine. His body screams so he just runs faster. Blood slicks down his arms. Hot tears crowd behind his eyes but he doesn’t have time. Just get away. Move. Don’t let people see. Don’t let them notice.

  He slips behind a row of shops and grabs at rough bricks to steady himself. The footpath ends here. No pedestrians. He sinks into the gutter, grabbing his stomach. The ground pulses and agony flashes in his guts.

  He puts his head between his legs and vomits.

  Tears spill next, hot and fat down his cheeks. His hand goes to his left side, where he took most of the hit. He peels it back gingerly to view red oozing road rash. His mind has completely stopped functioning so he just stares at it until the bile comes back up his throat and he pukes again.

  A shadow falls over his head.

  ‘Whoa,’ Avery says. ‘If that’s a stomach bug, stay away from me.’

  Sam closes his eyes, tasting blood and tar.

  ‘I was looking for you but some idiot just got hit by a car up there and I got distracted and—’ Avery stops. The shadow drops from Sam’s head, and he winces because the brief respite from the sun was nice, and then Avery is kneeling next to him, grabbing his arm and twisting it to show raw skinned flesh. ‘Sammy.’ His voice is high and panicked.

  ‘So,’ Sam says, his voice thick, ‘that idiot might’ve been me.’

  Avery’s fingers tighten on Sam’s wrist and he fairly explodes. ‘What the hell, Sammy? You could’ve died! Why would you even – you idiot. You c-c-could’ve died! We can’t go to hospital or the c-cops will find—’

  ‘I know!’ Sam snatches his arm back. He wants to shove Avery and his panicked flapping hands away. Sam hurts he hurts he hurts. ‘I don’t need a hospital. Shut up, OK? I’m fine.’ He presses fingers lightly to his left side again and his heart trips.

  ‘You’re lying! You’re lying.’

  Sam glances sideways at him. Avery’s hands spin as he crouches by Sam. His eyes have a frantic edge to them and no, just no, Sam hasn’t energy to tug him back from a meltdown right now.

  ‘Avery,’ he whispers, ‘it was a little kid. I just … I had to.’

  ‘You did not.’ Avery says it so forcefully Sam sinks into himself a little further. ‘You and your stupid Superman complex are going to get us killed. So just shut up.’ Avery grabs Sam’s shoulder. ‘Now c’mon. We’ll go to my friend’s place.’

  Oh, great. Avery’s friends. Shifty assholes who screw Avery around and probably run drugs and worse. They’re the reason Avery showed up to work so drunk he smashed a car.

  ‘No,’ Sam says, voice rough. ‘I don’t like them.’

  ‘What? You want to try Aunt Karen’s?’ Avery’s voice is high and sharp. ‘She’ll call the police on us. Now stop being a b-baby and—’

  Sam pushes himself out of the gutter. His skin is flame and ice all at once, his pulse a suffocating fury behind his eyes. ‘Screw you, Avery.’ His voice bounces high and low, raw as his bloodied skin. ‘You don’t understand a single freaking thing. Those people you hang out with are bad—’

  ‘We’re not exactly good!’

  ‘—and,’ Sam’s voice rises, ‘I don’t want to be around them and end up as messed up as you.’

  Avery stiffens.

  The terror in his eyes, the anxious knots, and the frantic clawing at Sam’s shirt – it all stops. His eyes go blank, guttered out. He retreats. Sam watched this happen when bullies went at him at school. When teachers sent him out of class for his annoying tics. When Aunt Karen told him just what she thought of his attitude. When their dad hit him.

  Avery just shuts down.

  Sam has never made him do that before.

  Avery rises and skitters back. ‘Fine. You don’t need me and I don’t need you.’

  ‘Avery, I didn’t mean—’

  But Avery’s turned in a flurry of spinning hands.

  And he runs.

  Great. He’s probably going to freak out and Sam won’t be there to catch him and –

  Well, fine. Fine. Anger suddenly whitens behind Sam’s eyes. Let him melt down somewhere alone and figure out what a stupid little jerk he’s being.

  Sam shoves to his feet and limps down the street. People stare, but he focuses ahead. He rounds a corner and has to lean against a wall, leaving a palmprint of blood against the bricks. He looks over his shoulder. Avery hasn’t come back. Sam didn’t realise, until that moment, that he desperately wanted Avery to come back.

  Sam sinks into a crouch and puts his head on his knees. He cries.

  Because it hurts.

  That’s the only reason.

  The boy from nowhere sits at a bus stop with empty hands and a bloodstained shirt. He flipped it inside out so at least the garish smiley face, now streaked with blood, doesn’t make him look like an extra in one of Jack De Lainey’s horror movies.

  But if he doesn’t move

  if he doesn’t breathe too deeply

  he might be OK.

  A bus arrives and he gets on behind a group of struggling shoppers who are tangled in bags of baguettes and tinned tuna. No one notices Sam. He leans his head against the window and closes his eyes. Obviously he should go steal another house. But he’s not staked anything out. It could take for ever to find one. And he hurts.

  He hurts too much to pick a lock.

  He hurts too much to rob a family.

  He h
urts too much to breathe.

  If he goes to hospital, they’ll get his name, his details, call his aunt, call the police – he can’t. If he goes back to the mechanic’s, Avery’s boss will ask questions. If he goes back to the De Laineys’—

  What is he thinking? That’s not an option. One stolen day doesn’t equal him crawling on to their doorstop looking like he ran through a cheese grater. He doesn’t even know them. They don’t know him.

  They wouldn’t want to know him.

  He puts a hand to his side and his skin feels hot and tight and ragged.

  Yet somehow, probably because the pain is screwing with his common sense, he ends up back in front of the butter-yellow house.

  He leans against their fence, hidden behind thorny rosebushes, and watches the occasional figure move behind the windows. A battered jeep sits in the driveway and the sound of the TV spills out of the open windows. Sam can’t just sneak back in. He doesn’t even have his backpack since it’s still at the mechanic’s. A small pang presses against his chest as he realises Avery might go through it without him around. Please no.

  His backpack is proof he’s just as screwed up as Avery. Worse. If you count how he hits things.

  He wonders if Moxie is back. If she recognised him. If Toby is really all right.

  He can’t just go in. Unless …

  Unless he says he’s Moxie’s friend.

  Or Jeremy’s.

  Depends on who’s asking.

  Pain and desperation eat up his sense and he slips through the front gate. He finds a tap around the side of the house and splashes water on his face. Nothing to do about the gravel burn on his cheek, but at least the first thing they see won’t be blood. He has to come up with a story. He … fell? Good one, Sam. No one will see through that.

  He shakes water out of his eyes and slowly walks up the front steps.

  It’s all in the body language, Sam realised a long time ago. You want to con someone? Be confident. Act like you’re supposed to be there, like you know what you’re doing, like your hand is supposed to be slipping down their bag, their pocket.

  So Sam walks on to the De Lainey veranda like he belongs. Like they’re expecting him. It hurts to stand straight, but he’ll do it.

  The front door is already open. He raps knuckles on the doorframe.

  A hand shoots up from the sofa and waves vaguely. ‘Come in,’ says a tired voice. ‘Unless you’re an axe murderer. Then stay out or whatever.’

  ‘Wow, Jeremy. That was convincing. No axe murderers will come in now.’

  There’s a muffled thump and yelp and a body falls off the sofa.

  Sam steps in, muscles coiled. ‘It’s Sam.’

  Jeremy’s head pops up from behind the sofa. A soft grin spreads across his face. ‘Hey, Sammy! Here for Moxie?’

  Sam comes in a little further. One step. Two. He’s committed now, isn’t he?

  ‘I just came to pick up my clothes.’ It tumbles out of his mouth in a rush and it’s a solid excuse.

  ‘Oh, right.’ Jeremy flops back down. Perfect. He can’t see Sam at all now. ‘I thought it was weird you forgot them.’

  Please don’t notice I’m still wearing your shirt.

  ‘Moxie is out,’ Jack says. He appears to be lying on the floor, eyes still on the TV. ‘Dad’s bribing her with gelato. Favouritism.’

  ‘They’ll be back soon, though,’ Jeremy adds. ‘Make yourself at home.’ He nudges Jack’s head with his foot and his whisper isn’t so subtle. ‘How did our little sister make a friend?’

  ‘Weirder things have happened.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like your face.’

  ‘Dude, you’re literally insulting your own face right now.’

  Another muffled thump and yowl.

  Sam realises they don’t know what happened to Toby. It’s been an hour, maybe two, and Moxie hasn’t returned. Maybe Toby is actually hurt? Maybe Sam thought he looked OK but what if there’s a broken little De Lainey boy in a hospital somewhere and it’s Sam’s fault because he didn’t move fast enough he didn’t help he didn’t he—

  He closes his eyes so tight they burn.

  He slips towards the staircase. He takes them two at a time and ducks behind a corner as Grady, headphones on, jerks a vacuum cleaner into a bedroom and kicks the door shut. The roar of the vacuum covers Sam snatching a nondescript black tee off the floor and then shutting himself in the bathroom. His heart rabbits so fast he can scarcely think. What the hell is he doing? He can’t just … he can’t be doing this.

  But he is.

  The De Lainey bathroom is in that strange limbo land where someone obviously just vacuumed the floor but didn’t actually tidy. Piles of dirty clothes spill out of a hamper and rows of shampoo bottles have been carefully cleaned around without disturbing them. Buckets of bath toys block the way to the sink. Sam has to stand half in a pirate ship while he peels off his shirt and sponges down his side. There’s antiseptic under the sink and he splashes it liberally on the sponge.

  He presses that to his side

  and nearly passes out.

  For a second he doesn’t know if he’ll hold in the scream. He shoves the clean T-shirt in his mouth and bites hard. When is he going to grow some freaking brains? He pulls away the antiseptic sponge and gazes blearily at the damage. He’s scraped raw from the bottom of his rib cage down past his hip. His face has a palm-sized scrape over it and his arms are flayed from elbow to wrist where he twisted to hit the road. Like the glorious idiot he is.

  In summary, half of Sammy Lou still clings to the bitumen downtown.

  He keeps the shirt shoved in his mouth, and pours antiseptic on the rest of the wounds. He closes his eyes but tears still sheet down his cheeks.

  The vacuum shuts off.

  Sam slides the fresh shirt on over his feverishly shaking body. He stuffs the bloodied sponge in the bin and then waits with sick agony for his cover to be blown.

  ‘Jack!’ Grady shouts. ‘You’re growing bacteria with all those filthy plates in your room! Clean it up. Now.’

  Jeremy’s voice drifts from downstairs, sweet and innocent. ‘Don’t be insensitive, bro. Growing bacteria is all the social life he can hold on to.’

  Something crashes followed by manic laughter.

  ‘I am so sick of both of you,’ Grady hollers.

  Please go downstairs.

  Footsteps stomp away, Grady shouting that they need to grow up.

  Sam is out of the bathroom and skidding down the hall into the office before Grady hits the last step. He clicks the office door shut.

  And he’s alone.

  Safe.

  He rests his forehead against the wood and asks himself, for the hundredth time, what is he hoping to achieve? It’ll end badly. And now his skin is red hot and feverish, like his wounds are full of crushed glass. If someone bursts in here, what would he do?

  Sink to his knees and cry.

  At least they seem to have forgotten they let him in.

  The noise downstairs suddenly escalates and Sam’s shoulders tighten. New voices clamber through the crack under the door – Moxie’s higher tone of lemon and sharp corners and their father’s deep rumble. A baby shrieks. And, above it all, Toby’s shout of, ‘AND THEY GAVE ME A B’OON.’

  Tension floods out of Sam’s bones so fast his spine turns to water.

  Toby really is fine.

  ‘—hit by a car,’ Moxie is saying.

  Voices mix and tumble.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘We went to the hospital to get him checked out—’

  ‘I GOT A B’OON.’

  ‘It’s a mad epic balloon, Toby. Hit Jeremy with it.’

  ‘—no, the baby’s fine. He was strapped in the stroller the whole time—’

 
; ‘—totally need to get him one of those kiddie leashes.’

  ‘He’s not a dog, Jack!’

  ‘And then this kid just grabbed him out the way—’

  Sam looks down at his hands. They’re shaking. He cracks open the office door to hear better.

  ‘Hey, quit hitting me with that balloon, you little terror.’

  ‘Who grabbed him—’

  ‘I don’t know. I just …’ There’s a slight lull in the stream of shouting, like everyone’s waiting for Moxie to finish. ‘I mean, I thought it was someone we knew, but it happened so fast and the kid just ran off at the end.’

  ‘He got hit by a car and then ran off?’

  ‘How hard did it hit him?’

  ‘… bleeding everywhere.’

  Voices jumble into indistinct coils again and Sam loses track.

  So Moxie hasn’t put it together yet – but she will, right? She’ll piece together the boy she saw stealing wallets, with the boy who jumped in front of a car for her brother, with the boy who appeared out of nowhere to eat their Sunday lunch.

  And then he’ll have to run again.

  He crawls on to the armchair and curls up, pain eating his heart.

  Sammy is ten and he lost Avery.

  This isn’t happening. This can’t happen.

  He gets caught up with a teacher who asks if he started the fight in the playground today, so he’s eleven minutes late to the gates. Avery isn’t waiting.

  Avery is supposed to wait.

  Sammy rips apart the school grounds looking. Playground. Sports field. The overgrown bushes behind the toilets where he hides from bullies. Trees. Bleachers. Bus shelter.

  nothing nothing nothing

  Don’t panic. Maybe he walked home alone?

  Except they’ve lived with Aunt Karen for three years and Avery’s never walked home alone. Sammy’s not even sure he could without getting lost.

  Sammy runs the whole way, tattered backpack punching his spine. He dumps it by their letterbox and runs inside. Aunt Karen’s old station wagon is in the driveway so maybe she picked Avery up?

  Aunt Karen’s making chilli beef at the stove and the air’s thick with peppers and oil – which flushes Sammy’s face with anger because Avery won’t be able to eat that – but there’s no time.