HIDING - every scar has a story

33. Trade you.

*Here's what you need to know lovelies. We're going down in the dark with Cary and then we're coming back up into the light. Get Kleenexes and your cat and snuggle and read on...*

{Cary}

The shelter had an eight AM wake up call, one of its least popular features. Cary dragged himself down to breakfast and nursed a cup of coffee, feeling like shit. Leonard joined him with his bowl of porridge and bright quarters of orange.

"Morning," he said cheerfully.

The fierce girl with the laugh was with him. Cary shot her a frown. She looked different with no eyeliner and her dyed and fried hair pulled back in an elastic. She huddled in her baggy sweater like it was what passed for a hug in her world.

"Cary, this is Karmin." Leonard said.

Cary nodded and didn't bother looking at either of them again. She was giggling at Leonard before breakfast was over. Cary endured it in silence because he didn't want to move. He was thinking about sneaking back into the boys' dorm to crash.

He spent the morning buried in an armchair in the shelter lounge with his drawing book and pencils. He lost track of time. Leonard came for him with a fresh dose of Tylenol exactly four hours since the pills he'd had at breakfast. Cary didn't have the heart to tell him they barely took the edge off.

"It's lunch," Leonard said. He sat on the arm of the chair next to Cary, leaning over his shoulder. "Hey, did you draw that?"

"Yeah." Cary flipped the book closed on the picture of his mother and Liam curled together on the bed. He had finished it.

"You're really good. I bet people would pay you to draw for them."

"Huh." The last thing Cary wanted to do was spend time with people doing their drawings.

He was starving. They were the first two in the line for lunch. The rest of the kids trickled in from the bus stop, or the smoke pit, or the ravine out back. Karmin came to sit next to Leonard again. Her lipstick looked like the slash of a wound on her face.

"Hey Leonard." She ignored Cary. Her eyes darted around the room at the other kids in line.

The guys she'd been with the day before set their trays down at the table around them. Cary held still in his jacket, keeping his stone face blank and hard like he would give as good as he got if it came to that.

Leonard chatted and joked but the guys' laughter felt more like they were laughing at him than with him. Karmin snugged her chair so close to Cary that her arm touched him. Cary ate quickly, got up and left.

///

He was in the smoke pit when Karmin came out the doors, flicking her hair back, her mouth sneering. "Oh my god what an asshole." She stopped next to him with her hip cocked. "Not you. Can I have a drag?"

He looked at her from under his eyebrows. She rolled her eyes. "I'm sorry, but if I don't get a cigarette I'm going to tear someone's face off, know what I mean?"

He passed her the smoke he'd half finished. "Keep that." He didn't want it back with the red crap from her lips on it. He lit another one.

"Thanks. Nice to finally meet someone decent in this shithole. For a while there I thought Down Low was the last nice guy in the world."

Cary frowned at her. Whatever she was angling to get from him, he didn't have anything except that smoke.

"Not much of a talker, are you?" she remarked, after five minutes of smoking in silence.