“Okay. But if you get stranded like that again, without a place to sleep, call the hotline. They’ll find you something.” Tony sighed, looking around the room at the young kids sprawled in chairs and on the battered couch. His heart ached for all of them. “Maybe you should let your brother teach you to wrestle after all. A little self-protection might be good. Save you from worse bruises.”
“Wrestling’s not much use when they punch you in the head,” Carter said.
“Or when there’s three of them,” Cody added.
“Dammit,” Tony said. “This has to stop. I mean, who in here has been beat up badly enough to leave major bruises?” He raised his own hand and looked around the room with a quirked eyebrow. Carter laughed and raised both arms. With Carter’s approval on the question, almost all the boys, and two of the four girls on the couch, raised their hands.
“If I found someone,” Tony said, “to teach us self-defense moves, would you guys come to a class?”
“Seems futile,” Carter drawled. “You fight back, you get beat worse. Most of us have learned that.”
“Maybe not. Maybe if we knew how to fight back effectively, we could avoid some pain. And then… there are times when they don’t just want to rough you up, you know. Some of those guys are crazy. I have a friend who had his ribs broken and got a punctured lung. He almost died.” Marty, unable to hide his light, even in high school. Tony’s throat tightened. “ I want to find a way for us to be safer.”
“Sure, Mr. H,” Carter said. “You find us a ninja, willing to turn us all into little black belts.”
“If I find someone willing to teach us,” Tony repeated, “will you come? Guys, girls, enbies, everyone. You should all know something about keeping safe.”
“I guess,” Cody muttered. “If the guy’s willing to teach a bunch of queers.”
“Anyone I find had better be.”
Carter shrugged, “Maybe I’d be there, and maybe I wouldn’t.” Tony took that for approval.
When his tutoring time ended, he hung around for a while chatting with the kids. By the time he started picking up the books, the group had thinned out. Two boys used the pool table, Justin was sleeping on the couch, and a couple of boys sat on the floor in the corner by the door. One of them stood as Tony headed past.
“Mr. H,” he said. “Did you mean it about the self-defense classes?”
“Yes, of course. I know a couple of people I can ask.”
“That’s good,” the boy said. “That would be good.”
“Are you okay, David?”
“I’m fine.” The boy’s gaze strayed to his friend, who was sitting against the wall with his head turned away. Tony lowered his bag and squatted down.
“How about you, Pete?” he asked.
For a moment the boy didn’t respond. Then he turned toward Tony. “I’m just peachy,” he said, glaring at Tony through an eye almost swollen shut. “Go away.”
Tony worked hard to give no visible reaction to the swelling and bruising on the boy’s face. “Uh huh,” he said after a moment. “I can see how fine you are.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“No double vision, nausea, dizziness, tunnel vision?”
“Nah.”
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Tony asked as calmly as he could.
“Just bruises.” Pete rubbed his hands up and down his arms, covered by a jean jacket despite the heat of the day.
Tony looked the boy over. He sat hunched, but not with the kind of stiffness that suggested broken ribs. His color was okay, although the faint patina of dirt on his skin suggested he wasn’t washing often. Tony suspected some of the boys who came into the teen center were living on the streets, and probably working them. Pete was one of those.
“Other kids, or a trick?” he asked.
Pete colored and didn’t answer. David waited for a moment then said, “It was a trick. Fancy guy in a fancy car. Some of them like it rough, and you can’t always tell.”
“Do you need a doctor?” Tony asked gently. “If you’re bleeding or something, you should get seen. I’ll cover it.”
“Nah, I’m okay,” Pete muttered. “I blew him and he smacked me around a bit. No big.”
Tony bit his lip. He wanted to say the kid should report it, get the guy arrested for assault. He knew that was a fantasy. It would never happen. “Well, at least warn the other guys about him,” he suggested helplessly. “No reason to give the bastard a chance to do it again with a friend of yours. And here.” He pulled out his wallet and extracted forty dollars. “Get a lightweight shirt if you want to cover those bruises, so you don’t die of heatstroke in that jacket. And… and some ibuprofen and an ice pack, huh?” Except the kid probably didn’t have a refrigerator to chill an ice pack. Shit. “Or a bag of ice. Whatever you need. And if you feel worse you see a doctor, all right? Call me if you need me to pay for it.”
Pete looked at him from his one good eye for a second, then reached out stiffly to take the money. “Okay, Mr. H. Thanks.”
Tony picked up his bag and headed out to his nice safe apartment with his paying job and his good friends and his wonderful closeted boyfriend. While this gay kid would head back out onto the street. Something had to change.
§ § § §
Mac stared at Tony pacing agitatedly around the living room and tried to come up with a diplomatic way to say no. He’d come home from a long futile day of questioning and canvassing that’d brought him no closer to his killer, to find Tony launched on another crusade.
Tony was an idealist. It was one of the things Mac liked about him, that he wanted to make the world a better place. But Mac had almost ten more years of living in the real world, seeing the dark side of people. That experience gave him a more realistic picture of what could actually be done.
The summer holidays had given Tony a chance to volunteer for some of his favorite causes. The Habitat for Humanity builds were good, although the Jesus-tinge to the rhetoric made Mac a little leery. Still, Tony went two or three times a week and no one gave him problems. And the sun and exercise were doing no harm at all to his body.
Mac had even volunteered a couple of times, when days off coincided with a build day. Tony had been lying when he tried to entice Mac by claiming the job site was full of cute guys in jeans and tool belts, but Mac had still enjoyed working with the wide array of volunteers. There was real satisfaction in building something that would shelter a family. And Tony in jeans and a tool belt made other eye candy unnecessary.
The teen center made Mac nervous in a different way. Tony was right— there was a real need for mentors for gay youth, guys who could say, “Look at me, I survived being a gay teen and I’m doing fine, and you can too.” Mac just was not going to be one of those guys. And he’d worried all along that somehow, as Tony got involved with the kids, he’d want to drag Mac into it. Tony had said no, he’d promised not to, and now here it was.
“You don’t have to tell them you’re gay,” Tony said. “I won’t even look at you while you’re there. I just need you to teach these guys how to keep themselves safe.”