I’ll leave you.
Sam doesn’t take anything on his way out.
That’s his secret failure.
He doesn’t break into houses because he enjoys stealing. He stalks vacant windows and tricks locks and sleeps in stolen beds because he just wants to be home.
Sam puts half a city’s distance between him and that house. He’d like to outrun the angry words cutting their displeasure into his back too, but those are harder to shake. And as if the night needs to get worse, the sky joins in the contest of Who Can Make Sammy Lou Cry The Most and rolls in fat clouds to pour on his shoulders.
Sam gets soaked as the temperature plummets and the world forgets it’s on the cusp of summer. No, let’s have a winter rerun. Won’t that be fun?
He ends up at a playground near the beachfront and climbs a kiddie-sized rope ladder to huddle under a plastic roof. It keeps most of the rain off. He wraps his arms over his head and shivers violently enough to rattle his teeth and send spasms of pain through his bruised chest.
He should be in a house right now, warm and dry.
He should not be envisioning Avery driving a thousand kilometres away.
Avery will go back to his shifty friends’ house. Probably? No, no he will. Stop panicking. Stop sitting here feeling sick about not knowing if Avery’s in the rain or stealing a car or curled on someone’s battered sofa. It was a stupid threat. He could never just go.
Sam rests his cheek on his scrunched-up knees and maybe he dozes or maybe he just crouches there in a chilled daze until the showers stop and dawn traces fingers through the sky. It’ll be a nice day – Saturday, right? That means homes will be full of people spending lazy mornings amongst their quilts, with promises of coffee and honeyed crumpets and a stroll on the beach. At least that’s what he pretends normal people do.
Sam’s shirt clings to his skin like a damp hug and it’s an effort to uncurl himself and plan his next move. He tries to order his thoughts as he flexes his dead fingers. He could:
(1) find a new house
(2) steal clothes
(3) get food, because when did he even eat last?
(4) go find Avery and please please please make him understand he can’t really be alone.
He’s a mess, is Avery Lou, and Sam’s the only one who knows him. Who cares. But looking for him will mean facing that he beat someone up so Avery wouldn’t lose his job and Avery hates violence and Sam should be in jail already and and and—
Sam holds his head. His thoughts spin, dizzying. He feels genuinely ill right now. His nose won’t stop running.
OK, focus. There is another option:
(5) go back to Aunt Karen’s house. She might be in a good mood. It’s been a year since he ran away, and seeing Sam all ill and pathetic might melt her cold heart and she’ll take him back.
Or she’ll call the police.
Who is he kidding? This is Aunt Karen. If she sees him, she’ll go straight to the phone.
So Sam picks the brave option: avoid everyone and find a new house. Which means walking the sodden streets as the sun rises and his nose impersonates a waterfall and his head fills with cotton wool. It’s hard enough to think let alone figure out which houses are empty. Stealing houses is an art. You don’t just blunder into the first one that looks quiet. He should have this part perfected, but this morning he feels so off.
He looks for the dead giveaways: overflowing mailboxes; front lawns with tipped-over bins that have clearly been there for a while; uncut grass; overgrown flowerbeds; empty driveways; drawn curtains; spiderwebs clawing across doors; and that slick quietness that coats an empty house and whispers it’s OK to enter. The stillness is the hardest to explain, but he can feel it.
Except right now all he feels are aching bones – bruises and fevers.
He needs to get off the streets and lie down.
He tries two houses.
For the first, the back door is disagreeable to his makeshift lock picks, since, thanks to Avery, he’s still using paperclips – but he finds fresh milk in the fridge and the garage still smells of car fumes.
The second house is definitely a victim of longer-term abandonment. But a sticky note on the fridge reads ‘BUY PRESENT FOR PARTY ON SATURDAY’ in purple glitter pen. He can’t risk staying here.
He could find a payphone and call Avery. Maybe they’ll just agree to forget how Avery thinks he doesn’t need Sam because it’s not true and it stings and—
Embarrassingly, he thinks he might cry, so he forces himself to walk further, faster, his feet tapping out screw my life with every step. At least his clothes dry in the warm midday sun. Positives, right?
He sneezes then and has to sit down in the gutter because he thinks he just dislocated a rib.
Wow, he’s so healthy.
A car trundles past while he waits for the dizzy spell to pass and, as his eyes follow it, he finds himself looking across the road at a house the colour of butter and sunflowers and summer days. It has a tired picket fence and rose bushes that resemble an angry jungle and the front lawn is full of kids’ toys and bikes and an upturned wading pool. The letterbox overflows with junk mail and the open-air carport is empty.
Promising.
Sam checks the street.
Quiet.
He peels himself out of the gutter and strolls into the yard like it’s the most natural thing in the world to break into a house in the middle of the day.
He listens at the doors but it’s silent. Peering through the curtains shows a very lived-in house – he’s never seen so much washing piled on a sofa – but no sign of life. Well, the day can’t get any worse, so he picks the lock with a vague sense of desperation.
Please be empty, please please please.
The lock pops and Sam shuts the door and leans heavily on it, thinking of finding flu meds. He’s in a laundry with an industrial-sized washing machine and yet more clothes spilling from baskets. He picks his way to the doorframe and into a sprawling living area. It’s an open-plan room, with support poles instead of walls. The kitchen, dining area, and lounge are tangled together and swamped with a tornado of toys and clothes, books and chairs, Monopoly pieces and pencil cases, a broken science project and far too many left shoes. A sewing table sits near the front windows, bright fabric spilled on to the floor and boxes of lace and bobbins tumbled together.
‘Not at all overwhelming,’ Sam whispers, surveying macaroni crafts plastered over the fridge.
He has to blink a few times just to figure out where to focus. He has no idea how to tell if this sort of house is inhabited. Check for fresh food?
The fridge is empty except for a dubious-looking Tupperware container and a toy train.