Chapter 13 — THE NIGHT HE RAN

Nick told me about the window in November, in Alma Delfín's kitchen, with a bowl of soup in front of him that he ate about a third of.

He went out the laundry room at Larkfield House at 4:40 in the morning on the twenty-third of March, which he knows because the clock on the dryer said it.

He took: the phone, a charger, two pairs of socks, a school jumper, and eleven dollars.

He did not take the jacket. That is why he went back in July.

He walked to Cadmus Falls because it is nineteen miles and he did not know where else to go, and it took him two days, and he slept the first night in a culvert under Route 12.

He was in the shelter system for nine days in April and then he left that too.

I asked him why.

He said, "They have to report you."

"Report you to who?"

"To the county. And then the county calls the placement." He was looking at the soup. "And then you go back."

"Nick, if you'd told them what was in your complaint—"

"I did tell them." He said it without any heat at all. "That's what a complaint is. I told them in March. On the form. And they wrote it down and then they said it didn't happen."

And then he said the sentence that I gave to Odalys Pinto the next morning and that she used, verbatim, in her report:

"If they say it didn't happen once, saying it again is just how they find you."

He was thirteen.

He had worked out, unassisted, behind a bakery, the exact structural reason that children in that situation stop reporting — which is a thing that people with doctorates write papers about — and he had worked it out because it had been done to him.

Seven months.

He ate from the back of Ivorson's, where they put the day-old out at six. He filled a bottle at the tap in Wexler Park. He washed in the sink at the library because the library does not ask anybody for anything, and he read there in the winter because it is warm and because nobody moves you on.

He went to that alcove behind the bakery every night because of the wall the ovens are on.

And on the twenty-second of October at eleven at night he heard a child crying in a parking structure and he had every reason on earth to keep walking.