Sketches

PUFFIN CANADA

SKETCHES

ERIC WALTERS
is the highly acclaimed and bestselling author of over forty novels for children and young adults. His novels have won the Silver Birch Award three times and the Red Maple Award twice, as well as numerous other prizes, including the White Pine, Snow Willow, Tiny Torgi, Ruth Schwartz and IODE Violet Downey Book Awards, and have received honours from the Canadian Library Association Book Awards, The Children's Book Centre and UNESCO's international award for Literature in Service of Tolerance.

To find out more about Eric and his novels or to arrange for him to speak at your school, visit his website at
www.ericwalters.net
.

Also by Eric Walters from Penguin Canada

The Bully Boys

The Hydrofoil Mystery Trapped in Ice

Camp X

Royal Ransom

Run

Camp 30

Elixir

Shattered

Camp X: Fool's Gold

The Pole

SKETCHES

ERIC WALTERS

PUFFIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Puffin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2007 Published in this edition, 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

Copyright © Eric Walters, 2007

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

L
IBRARY AND
A
RCHIVES
C
ANADA
C
ATALOGUING IN
P
UBLICATION

Walters, Eric, 1957–

Sketches / Eric Walters.

ISBN 978-0-14-331254-3

I. Title.

PS8595.A598S55 2008   jC813'.54   C2008-901222-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-14-331254-3

ISBN-10: 0-14-331254-5

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see
www.penguin.ca/corporatesales
or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I GREW UP
in Toronto in a single-parent family in an area just by the stockyards. It was a rough and tumble sort of neighbourhood populated by so many people experiencing life issues that were overwhelming—so overwhelming that many people just didn't make it. Instead they were crushed. They fell by the wayside, disappeared into the cracks, went to jail, became addicted to drugs and alcohol, died, or simply gave up or faded away to live a life so much less than what could have been—
should
have been. Many of them were good, decent people. All they needed was a hand to pull them up, somebody to believe in them, to offer a few words of encouragement, or a few dollars that would have made all the difference. Nobody was there.

Sketches
is a work of fiction based on a real place— Sketch. I made up the people in this book, but I didn't make up the situations. Those are real. Thank goodness there are places like Sketch where they realize that homeless people are
people
, street kids are
kids
, disadvantaged youths are
youths
. I don't see Sketch so much as a building as an outreached hand. My special thanks to Rudy Ruttimann, Phyllis Novak, and the rest of the staff of Sketch for doing what they do to make the world a better place and for offering me their hands to help make this book work.

A NOTE ABOUT THE COVER

THE COVER
for this book was created as part of a photo contest operated by Sketch, the real art drop-in centre on which this book is based. Young people involved with the centre were sent out into their world with cameras and asked to capture images that represented parts of the city known to them but basically unknown to those who work, walk, and live in the city. Of the many wonderful pictures that were taken, this photo was chosen.

SKETCHES

CHAPTER ONE

“
EXCUSE ME
,”
I said as the woman walked up. She was middle-aged and well dressed in a sort of business outfit. I took a deep breath. “I have to get home and, I feel so stupid, but somehow I lost my money for the subway . . . it must have fallen out of my pocket . . . and I was wondering if maybe you could spare some change . . . I don't need much.”

She stopped walking and stood in front of me, listening. Stopping was a good sign. Listening was a better sign.

“I already have a dollar so I only need another eighty-five cents.”

She looked hesitant, like she wasn't sure she should believe me but didn't want to risk
not
believing me.

“And I know my mother is going to be so worried if I'm not home soon,” I added, trying to sound desperate and genuine at the same time.

The woman looked like she was old enough to maybe have a daughter my age.

“And if I got
another quarter
, I could even call home to let my mother know what happened and why I'm late, because I'm
never
late . . . I've
never
done anything this stupid before, and I feel so bad begging for money and she worries so much and—”

“That's all right. I understand. Here you go,” the woman said as she reached into one of the pockets of her jacket and pulled out a dollar and a quarter.

“Thank you so much!” I beamed. “You're such a nice lady. I'll just call my mother right now and let her know!”

The woman flashed a big smile back and then walked away into the subway station and disappeared down the stairs. I stuffed the change in my pocket.

“You really are quite the little actor.”

I turned around. It was my friend Brent. “Thank you,” I said, and gave a little bow from the waist.

“How much have you got so far, Dana?” Brent asked.

“That makes eleven dollars,” I said, thinking about the money I'd already collected and stuffed in my pocket.

“That's not bad,” he said. “Ashley said she's got about five bucks.”

Ashley was another of my friends—actually, she and Brent and I were more than just friends, we were sort of a street family. Ashley wasn't far away. She was working one of the other two entrances to the subway.

“How about you?” I asked.

“Less than two bucks.”

“Is that all?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Chicks always get more money.”

“Yeah, right, it's really a girls' world, isn't it?” I said sarcastically.

“People just feel sorry for a girl out here begging for money. With me, they're sometimes afraid.”

I could understand that. Brent was a big guy, tall, with broad shoulders. He looked like a football player, and when he put on his “mean” face he looked like somebody you wouldn't want to mess with. I knew that he was really a gentle guy who wouldn't hurt anybody . . . at least, not anybody who didn't try to hurt him or me or Ashley first. I'd already seen him jump in once when a guy started hassling Ashley. Brent threatened to tear his head off, and the guy took off pretty quick.

“Couldn't you just scare them into giving you money?” I asked.

“Doesn't work. Pity works better than fear, and you look pretty pathetic.”

“Thanks . . . I guess. But if it's just a girl thing, then how come Ashley hasn't got more money?” I asked.

“She's not as believable as you.”

“What does that mean?”

“You really look like you
did
lose your money, you know, like if somebody gave you a buck you really
would get on the subway and go back to your house in the suburbs,” he explained.

“That's
not
going to happen,” I snapped.

“Yeah, but you just
look
like that. I guess that's because you haven't been on the streets very long.” Brent sounded tired when he said that.

It certainly seemed like a long time to me. It was just over three weeks since I'd run away from home, but it felt like three months, or three years, or even three lifetimes ago. In some ways it wasn't even like I'd run away at all. I'd just got on a bus, thinking I needed to kill some time—I didn't want to get home before my mother did, not if my stepfather was going to be there. And that bus led me to another, which led to another, and then to the subway, and four hours later, there I was—in the city, and thirty miles from home. At that point it was way past my curfew and I didn't think I could retrace the steps to get home even if I'd wanted to.

Of course all I had to do was make a phone call and my mother would have come down and got me. Or told my stepfather to come and pick me up. But I wasn't calling anybody. Every time I passed a phone booth I knew I
could
call, but I didn't.

The first night on my own was scary. I stayed awake for most of it, drifted off for a while in a booth at an allnight doughnut shop, and finally fell asleep in a corner of the bus station, hidden behind some lockers. Nobody noticed me there. It was like I was invisible.
Unfortunately, my backpack wasn't invisible. When I woke up it was gone, along with all my schoolbooks, a drama assignment due the next day, and my favourite sweater. Well, I sure as hell wasn't sweating the school stuff at that point, but the sweater would have come in handy. Thank God I'd kept my wallet in my pocket. I used my bank card to take out some money—forty bucks—and got some breakfast. If I'd known that they were going to cut off my bank card I would have taken out as much money as possible. I just didn't see it coming. That was so much like
him
—controlling, interfering, taking what wasn't his. He probably figured they could force me back home if they cut off the money—
my
money—the money I'd earned babysitting. There was almost six hundred bucks in there and I couldn't get it. What right did they have to do that?

What they didn't know was that when I found out the next day that the card had been suspended, I'd actually been trying to take out money to get a taxi home. I was scared and I just wanted to go home. But cutting off my card made me get angry, and that anger kept me away.

That was the day I ran into Brent and Ashley. Ashley was begging for money, using the same story we were using today. Maybe Brent didn't think she was believable, but she sounded pretty convincing to me. Even
I
gave her a dollar—hey, she was that good! Or maybe I was just afraid not to—she was also pretty scary looking.