Chapter 3 — THE BOY WITH THE BRUISE

He would not eat while I was standing.

I found that out by trying. I stood up to get a glass of water and he stopped, mid-reach, and put both hands back in his lap.

So I sat down, and I stayed sat down, and I did not move for forty minutes.

Here is what I learned about Nick Vasquez in those forty minutes, in the order it came out, which was not the order I asked for.

He would not take anything from my hand. If I put it on the table and moved my hand away, he would take it.

He ate the bread first, not the spaghetti. He ate three rolls before he touched the pasta, and I understood later that bread is what you can put in a pocket.

He kept his back to the wall.

He asked, twice, whether the doors were locked.

When Sergio, the manager, walked past behind him, he stopped chewing until Sergio had gone by.

And when I asked him where he was staying, he said "around," and when I asked him where he had been before "around," he looked at the tablecloth for about eight seconds and then said:

"I'd rather not."

I did not push it. I want credit for exactly one thing in this chapter and it is that I did not push it.

Thomas pushed it later, in the car, when it was just us, and Nick told him, and Thomas told me three days after that, and by then it was different.

What I did instead was ask him about the night before.

He told it flat. No adjectives. A boy who has told difficult things to adults before and been disbelieved learns to strip everything decorative out, because decoration is what they use to call you a liar.

He had been sleeping behind Ivorson's Bakery on Fourth, in the alcove by the flour bins, which is dry and warm from the ovens on the other side of the wall.

At about eleven he heard someone crying in the parking structure across the alley.

He said he almost did not go.

He said — and this is verbatim, I wrote it down in the car afterward — "I've heard people crying in there before. Usually it's grown-ups and they don't want you."

But it was a kid's voice.

So he went in, and on the second level he found a man in a suit holding a boy against a concrete pillar by the front of his school uniform.

"What did you do?"

"I said hey."

"That's it?"

"That's what you say," Nick said. "You say hey and then they look at you and then they've stopped."

It did not work.

The man told him to walk away.

Nick said no.

He said no to a forty-seven-year-old man in a parking garage at eleven at night, and I have asked myself every day since what I would have done at thirteen, and the honest answer is that I would have walked away, and so would nearly everybody.

The first punch put him on the floor.

The second one is what was on his face in Bellamy's.

Then the garage attendant came up the ramp with a torch because of the noise, and my husband let go of our son and walked to his car.