“You’re always asking us to play this game, and you even gave Max a hard time about hiding under the slide!”
“Shut up, Dom.”
“Make me.”
“Guys,” Conor sharply snapped. “Stop fighting.”
That was all they did, Jem and Dominic. They fought like cats and dogs and it was exhausting listening to it all the freaking time.
Glancing around, Conor scanned their surroundings. “Look how big this yard is,” he said. “It’s so easy to find a place to hide.”
“You better not find Max so fast,” Dominic said as he slowly stood up, dusting the leaves off his pants, “or we’ll never play this stupid game ever again.”
“Now you know Max doesn’t hide all that well,” Conor said.
“Yeah, and you’ll find him and he’ll whine like always.”
“Don’t know why we always involve him,” Jem muttered under his breath. “Dom’s right. All he does is whine.”
“He doesn’t mean to whine,” Conor retorted, defending Max. “He just talks without thinking.”
Jem smirked, though his face was paler than usual. “He should stop thinking then.”
Dom shrugged. “I caught the teacher talking to him, asking him if he needed help with work. Said she wondered if he was like audist or something like that.”
“Autistic,” Conor corrected, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, that.”
“What is that?” Jem asked.
Before Dominic could explain, Conor cut in. “Who cares?”
Conor didn’t want to admit to them he didn’t like talking about Max. It made his chest feel funny. Truth was, he invited Max into their circle all those months ago because he felt bad for him. Being the smallest in class, he got picked on ruthlessly. It also didn’t help he wore the same kind of clothes, sometimes smelled funny, and that his mom had a bad reputation. Conor knew town gossip – he’d heard his mom talk endlessly about the goings on to her friends. His mom did that a lot – talked about people – and he didn’t really like it because she could be really mean. She’d said Max’s mom was the “town whore”, and Conor knew what a whore was (another thing he’d learned just from eavesdropping).
So, he sort of pitied Max and brought him into his fold because it made him sleep a little better knowing he wasn’t getting picked on. Max tried to do a lot to please Conor. He was probably afraid of being outcast again. Maybe one day Max would fatten up or grow taller. Maybe he’d finally learn to stand up for himself. In the meantime, Conor would let him hang around them and hopefully Jem and Dom would eventually leave him be.
Steering the conversation away from Max, Conor said, “Miss Hadfield talks a lot, but she’s looking real good in those skirts lately.”
The boys laughed as they followed behind Conor, moving in the direction of the bushes.
“You should be looking at the girls in class and not the teacher, Conor,” Dom joked. “You’ll never have a chance with Miss Hadfield.”
“Not now,” Conor laughed. “But one day I might.”
Max wasn’t behind the bushes along the house.
Like Conor had predicted, he was probably hiding behind the rusted car.
“I’m getting hungry,” Jem complained.
“I earned a tenner raking my neighbour’s yard the last few mornings,” Dom said.
“We’ll get some hot chips for lunch?”
“Hell yeah.”
Not paying them mind, Conor waded into the long grass and rounded the derelict red car on the lawn. It’d been stripped and abandoned, just the metal rotted shell of it left behind. Ducking his head inside, Conor scanned the car, feeling a pleasant spike shoot through him.
Grinning, he looked at Jem and Dom over his shoulder, “He isn’t here.”
“You’ve checked everywhere obvious.”
“Yeah.”
Jem looked down at his feet as Dom’s mouth fell open. “Where is he then?”
“I don’t know, but it looks like our boy is finally playing the game.”
Chapter Six
Thames
When Locke slid back into the car, he didn’t look surprised to find Conor in the backseat. He swiftly backed out of Charlotte’s driveway, glancing at Thames in the rear view with a blank expression.
“Are we playing Hide and Seek, Thames? Like the good old days.”
Thames sat relaxed in the back, looking out the window at Charlotte’s home. It was an impressive looking suburban house. The gardens were manicured, the grass done, the leaves of the tree in the centre of the front yard changing colours and flaking off the branches into a pretty yellow and orange pile.
Parked down the street so it was just in view, he had sat in the SUV and stared