Steve Pieczenik - Runaways

Runaways

Tom Clancy

Diane Duane

Chapter

Roy Stood At The Edge Of The Square, feeling cold and alone, and looked around him with the eyes of someone who was now a stranger everywhere he went. It hadn't always been this way. But he was getting used to it

No one here spoke his language, Roy thought, but that probably was why he'd been given this job in the first place. Less chance that I might understand what they've got me carrying, he thought, only a little sourly. The idea that someone would actually send him off on a drop with a paper message was weird enough. He had studied the little flat-folded piece of paper in its plastic slip-carrier when he'd been alone on the way down here, leaning on a pole at the front end of the empty Metro car, but he hadn't been able to make anything of what he was carrying. It looked like a page ripped out of one of the old- fashioned hardcopy Michelin guides, incomprehensible enough on its own-printed in red and black, a bunch of little symbols followed by long passages in French, and a lot of numbers. It seemed mostly to have to do with restaurants, which only made matters worse for Roy, for he was hungry enough to eat a horse, which he'd abruptly discovered this morning that they actually did eat here. His stomach was going to have to wait, though. The gruff voice that always spoke to him from just out of visual pickup on the 'phone had been very definite-there was no telling exactly when the other courier was going to show up, and Roy was just going to have to wait where he was until she did.

Roy slipped the half-page in its plastic slip back into his pocket and glanced around him again. It was gray today, promising more rain. There had already been enough of it this morning, a steady depressing mizzle and mist that made the golden stone arcades around the square look grimy and tired. Like I feel, Roy thought, hunching his shoulders a little against the damp and the chill. September in Paris-it was supposed to be a pretty time. It didn't look that way at the moment. The month had been prematurely cold, and the last tatters of leaves were almost all off the trees in the square now; the bare thin branches rubbed and rattled against one another in the cold wet wind from the east.

At least there was shelter. The Parisians who had built this square and the perfectly matched six-story buildings that surrounded it were a patrician bunch, too aristocratic to want to be rained on when they went out. So the sidewalks in front of the buildings were under cover, the second floor having been built out over them, held up by wide sandstone columns. The ground floors of all the buildings in the square either had little shops in them, or were occupied by garages for the people living in the apartments above. Roy had "window-shopped" among them for a while when he first arrived earlier this afternoon, looking in at the soaps and perfumes in the perfumery, the expensive bags and cases in the suitcase shop, the extremely expensive suit and dress Worn by the two dead- white minimalist mannequins in the couturier's window. But soon enough he got bored with that and drifted down instead to take his first look into the restaurant at the corner, where people had forsaken the few little outside tables, even though there were gas heaters above them, and were all inside, in the golden warmth of the place, drinking wine and laughing.

At the time Roy had smiled a little sardonically at them and walked on by. He could hardly remember the last time he laughed for sheer pleasure... let alone at something as simple as a joke. There'd been little enough to laugh about at home, what with his mother's endless complaining about how expensive everything was, and about how his father was late with the support payment again. There was never any peace at home, no matter what Roy did to try to make things better. His mother nagged him for not eating everything on his plate, and then nagged him for putting on weight. She nagged him for not doing well enough at school, because school was very important, and then in practically the next breath she would nag him for not quitting school and going out to get a job. And she didn't seem able to hear the contradictions in what she said. Pointing them out to her only got Roy slapped, and then seriously scolded for "talking back" and "being disrespectful," and then would come floods of tears and recriminations, his mother's guilt and anger and helplessness all mixed together and dumped on him. Roy often enough felt like having a good cry about it all himself, but the odds were much too strong that in their small apartment his mother would probably catch him at it, and he wasn't going to let his parents suspect that they had been successful in driving him to that kind of reaction.

He'd borne it as long as he could, but there came one night when it all just got to be too much. For once there wasn't any triggering incident. Roy just came in from school and found his mother in the dining room, sitting at the table with her head in her hands, and Roy knew it was going to be another awful night. I can't take it anymore, some part of his brain had suddenly said to him, with terrible clarity. I just can 7. If I try to, something awful9s going to happen. Very quietly, about two in the morning, Roy had moved softly around the apartment in the dark-he didn't dare turn on a light; he was sure his mother would have sensed it somehow-and gathered up all the things he felt he absolutely couldn't live without on a long trip away. Then he wrote a brief note telling his mother not to worry, and got out of there before it got any worse.

Now-standing here in the chill dimness under the arcades, watching the last few yellow leaves blow by across the pale golden-pink gravel in the center of the square, and whirl around the base of the fountain there-Roy had to admit to himself that he had been incredibly naive. Everything had gotten worse, much worse, immediately. Within hours of walking out the door, in fact. All the friends on whom Roy would have counted to give him a place to stay while he figured out what to do next now told him that they couldn't help him out. Reggie's folks wouldn't let someone stay with them whom they knew to be a runaway. They were afraid of legal complications. He went to Mike's and Dawn's and Lalla's and Will's, but there was always some other reason he couldn't stay with them-guests in the house, friends going away, relatives coming to visit, family trouble. It didn't matter, the result was always the same. There was no room for Roy. So finally he wound up having no choice but to go to a shelter.

Paradoxically, that was when matters started to take a turn for the better-at the point when he had been most ashamed and depressed at having to seek help from total strangers. Roy stood in the shadows of the arcade, stamping his feet in the chill, thinking of the first time he had stood at the door of the little Breathing Space center in Toronto. Strangers they might have been, but they had treated him with more understanding than people he'd known much better. Food and a place to stay were immediately his, and Roy was given a password and Net access to the Breathing Space virtual environment, a "place" called Haven. The only thing they offered Roy that he didn't want to take advantage of was the opportunity to get in touch with his mother. They didn't press him on the subject. He was glad, for he'd had more than enough of her for the short term-

A sharp clatter of sound out in the square brought Roy's head up. It was just someone's two-year-old, muffled up in a brightly colored one-piece inso-slick against the raw weather, throwing a plastic bottle into the fountain. Roy watched the child's mother leave the stroller she'd been pushing, reclaim the child, scolding it in what he assumed was French, and lead it away.

He sighed. It wasn't that the woman looked like his mother, particularly. But the thought of what that little kid would be going home to now-just the very idea of a home, a place you could depend on, where there was warmth and food and a welcomes-filled Roy with a ridiculous nostalgia. He shook himself, as if the longing were something that could be shuddered away. He had other things to think about, other more important business.