By Any Other Name (3 page)

The expression on the new kid’s face was one Andrew had seen before; it was almost apologetic, like the boy was embarrassed to be there. It had been clear what he was from the first moment Andrew laid eyes on him: trailer park kid. “Trash,” as his parents liked to call “those people.”

Andrew was an observer and a mastermind. He could make anyone do his bidding, and the other kids, even the older ones in the school, knew it. It wasn’t so much that Andrew was better than the others; he was just richer than most of them. A lot richer. Money could buy you anything, or so he had learned at the mature age of thirteen.

The new kid, Skye, who mumbled his name in front of Andrew’s math class, intrigued him somehow. He didn’t know what it was about the boy that held his interest for more than a few moments, but when the other kids made fun of his name, Skye Walker, Andrew felt enraged. It was the stupidest name he had ever heard, but it was actually quite cool too. So when he heard the other boys trying to pick on Skye in the cafeteria, he went and coolly told them to back off.

The strange awe in Skye’s eyes as he looked shyly at Andrew melted his reservations. Someone needed to make sure this kid was safe. Naturally, the fact that Andrew’s parents were appalled at dinner when he told them about his new friend didn’t hurt. The Becketts didn’t socialize with trailer trash, his father said. “What will the women in the book club think?” his mother wondered.

It got even more fun when the boys became friends for real. Until then, Andrew had never had a friend who liked him for who he was. Everyone liked him for what he could afford, buy, bribe. No, Skye wasn’t like that. When he shyly asked Andrew why he didn’t really have a name everyone called him but many names instead, Andrew had to confess that he didn’t know. The next day, Skye declared Andrew needed a name, and that name was Dru, with a
u
instead of
ew
. Nobody had ever cared enough to insist on giving Andrew a name before. Not a name for just himself, anyway. Andrew was his father’s name too.

For some reason, Skye’s family had decided that Rowan Falls was the place for them, the one where they’d stay longer than a few months. A year and a half after the Walker family arrived in Dru’s hometown, the boys set up a campsite in the vast backyard of the Beckett family’s house. They had found a nice spot in the back of the garden, and that was where they put up their tent.

Dru’s parents allowed this as long as they didn’t come into the house more often than absolutely needed. The boys were still served breakfast and dinner in the kitchen while Dru’s parents and their occasional guests ate in the dining room, but that was about it. Not that they minded. They were living the best summer of their lives. Skye’s family didn’t care much. It was easier for them to do their thing—his dad was trying to get sober once again, and his mom was trying to find another job, which seemed to be a full-time job in itself for an uneducated woman, so having one less teenager to care for suited them just fine.

When the boys were sixteen, in the first hit-and-run in the history of Rowan Falls, Skye’s mother was killed while walking home from her first day at a new job.

Dru did all he could, which was basically just staying by Skye’s side when he was needed. Supporting his friend in his pain seemed like a good idea, and the nights they slept together in Dru’s bed after Skye sneaked in through the window were kind of nice. Dru had known by then that he was gay, but he was still scared. He couldn’t even come out to Skye even though they shared everything else. This was something Dru
couldn’t
come clean about. Seeing rejection in the brown depths of his best friend’s eyes would surely have killed Dru.

From the moment Mary Walker was laid to rest at the Rowan Falls cemetery, her husband began to lose his grip on the world. Ken began to drink more and more, not giving a damn about anything, least of all his son, who was just as alone now. Or maybe not—after all, Skye did have Dru to lean on. Even though Dru had never thought Skye’s parents had been happy together or that there had been love between them, he could picture the loss of a life partner doing something like that to a man.

It took Ken about a year to end it all. Dru and Skye thought the man went and killed himself or got himself killed, but if he had, he managed to do so without ever being found. Everything but his wallet was still at the trailer the day Skye got home to find his father missing. For a few days he thought it was okay; Dru was staying with him, and the boys weren’t too worried. But when days turned into a week and then another one, the school and social services got interested in the situation.

It was then that the boys got really scared. There were conversations that they overheard at school, the principal and some social workers talking about putting Skye in foster care if there wasn’t a family member to take him in. Skye was only a year and a half from turning eighteen; surely there was someone? They decided to let Skye be under the guard of the local social workers until they concluded their research. While they didn’t find Ken Walker, they did find a distant uncle, unrelated by blood.

Walter Davies was the widower of Skye’s biological great-aunt Emily. Not that Skye had ever met the woman, but Walter had been the only relative anyone could find. He had married Emily, a woman twenty years his senior, a few years before she passed away from a brain aneurysm while exercising or something like that. After being told about the unfortunate situation, Uncle Walter had driven into town and scooped Skye up and taken him away to somewhere in Montana, where he lived.

That was the last time Dru had seen his best friend, despite the fact that they had sworn to stay in touch.

“Babe, the food is here,” Thom said from behind the couch, making Dru snap out of his thoughts. Just in time before he could get teary eyed over the exact details of the last time he had seen Skye.

“Okay… thanks,” Dru said and got up with shaky legs just to burrow himself under Thom’s arm for a moment before walking into the kitchen to eat.

They ate in silence, and Dru noticed that Thom had cleaned up his almost-baking.

“Sorry about the muffins,” he said, and Thom smiled a bit. The smile was sad, and he could understand why.

“Don’t worry about it,” Thom said, and his smile turned a bit sneaky. “The next time you’ll bake twice as many.”

Dru chuckled at that while digging into his meal and felt better for a while. That was, until there was the distinct sound of the fax machine from upstairs.

“I’ll go get it, eat the rest,” Thom said firmly, and somehow Dru managed to do as he was told.

When Thom came back with a pile of papers, he placed them facedown on the island. “How do you want to do this?” he asked, and Dru released a breath he had been holding since he had seen the papers.

“Let’s clean these up and get the coffee and go to the living room,” he said, and Thom nodded.

In five minutes—which seemed to be both the longest and shortest in Dru’s life—they were sitting on the couch again. Their knees were touching, and Thom was holding the papers.

“So…,” he started, and Dru closed his eyes for a moment to think.

“How about… you read them and tell me what they say? So I can hear it from you and….”

“Okay, I can do that. Though there’s one that’s handwritten and addressed to you. So you have to read that, I won’t look at it. But the rest of this I can read,” Thom said and extracted the letter before putting it under the other sheets in his hands.

Thom took a look at the documents and sighed. “Okay… so…,” he started before taking a sip of his coffee. He could probably distance himself from this using his professional skills of reading all sorts of papers from police reports and autopsy records, or so Dru thought.

“The uncle, Walt, took him to his house in Montana and pretty much immediately drugged him. He then kept Skye drugged and chained to a wall in a spare bedroom. He did get food, but he was left alone during the days when Walt went to work. The… the sexual abuse came later, and by then he had somehow managed to make Skye think it was the only option the kid had….” Thom seemed to block out Dru’s reactions to what he was reading, probably to be able to continue.

“They moved around a lot, but since Skye didn’t really have anywhere to run to, he was convinced by Walt that he was better off with where he was, ‘safe and fed’. When Skye began to grow up, Walt became more interested in… in hurting him. In the last house, he kept Skye in the basement.” Thom sighed a little bit. Skye had also been chained to a wall, gagged so that he couldn’t scream for help. Not that he would have, in the end.

“It says here that Skye was nearly catatonic when they found him after Walt fell off the scaffolding. There were signs of malnutrition, beatings, and rape, and it seemed like he had been in the basement for months because his eyes couldn’t deal with sunlight at all.”

There were other things in the paper, things Thom didn’t want to read to Dru, that much was obvious. When the older man looked at Dru questioningly after the few details, something seemed to break within him. “Stop, stop,” Dru begged, tears streaming down his face. This had been Skye’s reality for
years
? Being treated worse than an animal? How the hell was he even alive?

“He spent two years at Haven,” Thom pressed on but skipped over the more morbid stuff, “where they made sure he got therapy and was treated for all the physical abuse. It says here that he’s on two kinds of medications and that routines help him a lot. He has his schedules, and he’d like that to continue if possible. And there’s this note from the doc in which he says that Skye isn’t dangerous in any way, but he’s never been out in the world as an adult on his own and lacks a lot of skills other people his age have. There are also some things like getting scared or having panic attacks and so on, but all he really needs is a stable environment where he feels safe. The doc seems quite positive that Skye would be able to recover as completely as one can if just given the chance.”

He then held out the sheet with the handwritten note and put the rest on the coffee table, picking up his nearly-too-cold coffee. Thom sipped his caffeine while waiting for Dru to be done with the reading.

Dru took the paper and willed his hands not to shake.

Dear Dru,

I know this is not what you expected. You probably didn’t expect to hear from me ever again. I’m sorry, if I could have stayed away from your life I would have. But I want to get better, to be independent again. To be human again, Dru.

I don’t have any money left, I can’t get a job without an education, and I never went to school after Rowan Falls. I literally don’t have anyone, and when they pressed on, yours was the only name I could come up with.

I’m sorry for all the pain Al caused with the call. I understand if you don’t want anything to do with me, but he made me do this.

Skye

Without having noticed, Dru had been tracing the scar on his knee through the hole in his jeans—the scar he had gotten their last summer while hiking in the forests in Rowan Falls. The forests were only about fifty miles from where he and Thom now lived, but they could have been on the other side of the world for all Dru cared. He pulled his hand away from his skin and glanced at Thom, who averted his eyes from his knee almost in time, but Dru still noticed the action and the almost pained look in his lover’s eyes.

He had no idea what to do. To bring someone from his past here, someone who had left him—even though Dru kept telling himself over and over again that it had been unintentional. Skye hadn’t
left
him, he had been
taken
from him, and he hadn’t been able to stay in touch. The hell Skye had been through…. No, Dru needed to get over his hurt feelings.

“What do you think our options are?” Dru asked Thom, not showing him the letter for some reason he couldn’t quite understand.

“Well… we could give him money. I mean, we could because we have it,” Thom said, and he was right. Dru had inherited money from his grandparents, and Thom had a job that paid more than well. Naturally Dru was making money with his business as well. “That would enable him to live in a halfway house or somewhere until he’s back on his feet. We don’t know how long that might take, and it seems like the key is to have him in a secure environment where he can relax and trust people around him. So that doesn’t seem like such a good idea,” Thom said.