It was intentional, meant to draw his uncle away from me. It worked, the man glaring down at Kite now. This wasn't better.
I witnessed Kite transforming into a broken excuse for a boy. His eyes were down, his posture nervous. I knew in my heart that this was the source of Kite's tears.
This man was to blame.
Grunting, Nick put a giant hand on Kite's pointy shoulder. “Come on. It's time to go.” With a final look at me—so intense it gave my goosebumps—Nick guided Kite down the hill.
Peeking back, my new friend's eyes glistened in the looming night. They were warning me to run. Those black pupils were dull, defeated. Kite was used to whatever was about to happen to him.
The details were lost on me. The core of this encounter wasn't.
Studying how Kite's uncle held him close, how he stroked his grubby fingers over the boy's arm and neck, I grasped that this was wrong. Really wrong.
Suddenly, I wanted to protect Kite. He was someone I hardly knew, but he'd tucked himself into the hole left by my little brother. Kite needed to be saved in a way I couldn't have managed for Daniel.
Even if I didn't know the method yet...
I would find a way to rescue Kite.
****
As time wore on, and my determination to run into Kite at the playground continued, a number of things became clear. For one, he went from a rabid animal eager to bite, to a sweet, shy boy who was amazed to have a friend.
On my end, as days became weeks became months, I realized my father would not be coming to retrieve me anytime soon.
Or ever.
Whenever I asked Gram about him, she would make a face and change the topic. My sadness over the changes in my world, they faded with Kite at my side. He was strangely funny, and when he was far away from his uncle, he opened like a flower. It was delightful.
It was tragic.
For my tenth birthday, Gram set up a water sprinkler in the yard. In the hot sun, we ran around screaming, hopped up on Italian ice and our own young blood. The long days were wonderful. They helped both of us forget our demons.
The difference was that at night, Kite's demon came back for him.
I knew what hate was, now. Young as I was, this feeling was real. The man who stole my friend away was destroying everything good about him.
The contrast between Kite's joy when he was with me and his shaking, buckling fear when Uncle Nick appeared... it was stark.
I didn't believe in wishes, but I still caught myself silently begging every shooting star that fell that summer.
Save my friend. Please.
There was never any answer.
It was a memorable season, we did all the things that boys should do. Even broken kids like us could enjoy fireflies and ghost stories. Kite was especially fond of an imaginary game that he introduced me to.
In it, we called ourselves the Jackals, pretending to be members of a secret task force that fought bad guys and saved the world.
The closer we became, the more my destructive anger grew. There was a seething monster in me. It looked at Uncle Nick and wondered how someone like him could be allowed to live, when my little brother had not.
And so, as our first year passed and we became taller, more spindly-legged versions of ourselves, the rage in me also matured. Kite's terror when he knew he had to be alone with his uncle... it was tangible. It never faded, no matter how he aged.
One night, I followed him home. It wasn't planned, I just felt myself moving through the dark woods, stalking them back to Nick's tiny little shed of a house. Kite said very little, but his uncle grunted things just out of my range.
Slipping under the windowsill, I crouched and waited.
Kite's sobs were bad.
His screams would haunt me.
I was only ten, and at the time, sex was an elusive and odd beast. I knew of it, the way all kids do. I didn't need details to know that what was going on inside that house was horrific.
Years of this. This was what had shattered my friend so deeply.
He was crying, I heard his uncle scolding him; shuddered at the scratchy, awful groans.
Unable to take it any longer, I ran off into the humid night and didn't look back.
What innocence I had left was disintegrating. This was a morbid secret Kite had never shared with me. Maybe he'd had no words for it. More likely, he was scared.
I was scared, too.
But of all my emotions that jangled in my skull as I fled through the trees, one bloomed brightest.
Pure hate.
- Chapter 38 -
Kite
15 Years Earlier
––––––––
“I don't want to talk about it.” Though I said it with as much force as I could muster, Jacob didn't even have the courtesy to blink. “Why are you bringing it up at all?”
He was sitting beside me on a fence, his skin tan and muddy from our constant time spent outdoors. Amazingly, I still managed to be pale.
It was the best summer I'd ever had. Jacob had become a fixture in my life like no one else. He'd refrained from asking about my uncle for over a year. Never poked into my life.
Until today.