The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,29

in a textbook. A packed bowl—rainbow-striped glass—sat on the facing page, and without looking up, Chaquille passed it over along with a lighter. Jem took the bowl, lit it, and took a long hit. When he exhaled, he started coughing and almost threw up, but then, by inches started feeling better. He passed the bowl back.

“Check-out service,” Jem asked, his voice like gravel.

“Something like that,” Chaquille said.

“God,” Jem said, scrubbing his face, the head rush coming on like a train. “God.”

“Yep,” Chaquille said.

Jem leaned against the brick wall. The sun still made his head throb, but at least the morning was cool, the air smelling wet and clean, like new leaves. He checked his phone and saw that it was a little after nine, Monday morning.

“I don’t think I said this,” Chaquille said, ashing the bowl, “but I was really sorry to hear about Benny.”

“Yeah,” Jem said. “Me too.”

“What’s going on with you?”

Jem gave himself the once-over: the Super Mario t-shirt was stained with something he didn’t recognize, but other than that, he was passable. “Just the same old shit,” Jem said. “Different day.”

“You need somewhere to stay,” Chaquille said, shrugging, “you know you can crash here. For a few days, anyway.”

“Thanks.”

Chaquille just shrugged. He was already repacking the bowl.

Jem found his bike, the weed buoying him up like he was floating now, the headache shrinking, and made his way to the closest McDonald’s. Over a McGriddle, a hash brown, and a coffee, he replayed as much of last night as he could remember: finding Ammon in the car, watching Tean and the detective touch each other, talk, the defensive lines of Tean’s body relaxing, his posture opening up to the bigger man, until at the end Ammon said something that went through Tean like lightning, even if Tean wouldn’t admit it. What had Ammon said? No fucking clue, Jem thought as he doused his hash brown with ketchup. And why did he have that kind of effect on Tean, no matter how badly he treated him? No fucking clue about that either.

But another part of Jem’s brain was trying to track everything that had happened since he had met Tean in October. Tean was helping him learn how to read. Tean had helped him get his Social Security card and number. Tean talked—at length, whenever he saw the slightest opening—about GED programs, about community college and trade schools, about university. Tean said crazy things like 401k and Roth IRA and dental PPO. His latest mania was an apartment. So maybe that was it. Jem had assumed that, by lying to Tean when they first met, he had burned a bridge, ruining his chance to be anything more than friends. But maybe Tean’s hang-up was really about HMOs and credit scores. Ammon had all that stuff, after all.

Before Jem had finished thinking about it, he was driving out to Tooele. The town sat in the valley on the western side of the Oquirrh Mountains, so Jem rode west, following I-80, passing the Great Salt Lake to the north, the water black and dimpled with sunlight, and the Oquirrh Mountains to the south. Ahead of him, the ground was flat, covered in scrubby brush that was all the same browns and dusty greens. Where nothing grew, the bare earth was pale, the color of bone when the sun hit at the right angle.

After a childhood of bouncing from foster home to foster home, Jem had ended up in Tooele with a woman named LouElla. In some ways, that had been a good thing: he had met Benny there, who had become a real brother to him; he had met the Jenkins, a lovely, older couple who had let their ranch be a refuge for LouElla’s neglected foster children; he had become, if only in embryo, the person he was today. The scar on his back, where LouElla had lashed him with the RCA antenna. The scar on his arm, where Antony, the poor dog she kept chained up in the basement, had taken a piece of him. Here was where he had finally stood up for someone—for Benny—shoving LouElla when she continued to try to hit him. And, of course, that was how Jem had ended up in Decker Lake Youth Center, where he’d spent the remaining years until he turned eighteen.

He didn’t need directions; he remembered the way to the 1970s split-level that sat at the edge of the foothills. It had a timber-and-stucco design, a boxy upper floor that