Free Robin and Ruby by K. M. Soehnlein Page A

school came. It was a big deal in Greenlawn: a local kid in an accident, in a coma, dead at age ten. “Coma Boy,” that’s what they used to whisper about Jackson in the halls of Greenlawn High. Robin was Coma Boy’s Brother.
    Remembering this, his heart races. His throat goes dry. The idea of Jackson’s birthday looming tomorrow dredges up pain from deep inside, not the pain of grief or loss but the pain of blame, of responsibility. He was there when it happened, the accident that started everything. They were fighting on the playground slide, Robin and Ruby and Larry and Jackson, a confusing scuffle that ended with Jackson tumbling to the pavement and landing on his head.
    He says, “It’s like I was some other person.” George reaches over and ruffles the back of Robin’s hair, rubs his neck, grips the tendons.
    Robin breathes into the force, banishing the image of Jackson’s fall, as he always eventually does. “I’m sorry you had to see that. With Peter.”
    George allows himself a smile. “I’m glad I did.”
    Robin sees admiration on George’s face, and there’s more to it than just George’s loathing of Peter. It’s like yesterday at the restaurant, George smiling while Robin opened that wine bottle on the floor. It’s a little bit dangerous, being appreciated for being wild, for the ways you break the rules. With a start, Robin realizes how far they’ve come from their early days of talking current events in study hall and riding the subway to Grandma Lincoln’s. Nor is George’s reaction here some methodical, unemotional response, like after Robin first came out to him. He’s changed; they’ve changed each other. Peter is back there somewhere, turning into the past, and George is right here at his side, as he’s been all along.
    Robin realizes he needs to say something more. “Hey, I’m sorry for before, when you came back from your date? You were feeling bad, and I tried to make a joke. And then I tricked you into bringing me to that club.”
    George nods, and Robin can see him taking this in. Then he seems to get an idea, and a faint smile appears at the corners of his mouth. “How about this: I take you for a ride, without telling you where we’re going.”
    Robin laughs. “Should I be worried?”
    “Just a little,” George says, and now he really seems amused. He says, “It’ll be a good distraction. For both of us.”
     
    George drives them to the Schuylkill River, to an unlit stretch of city park wedged between the riverbank and a row of gloomy warehouses. Tonight, the full moon, so bright it looks blue, casts a glow on the water that shatters the liquid surface into a black-and-white checkerboard. On the far shore, tiny pairs of headlights whoosh along an elevated section of the Schuylkill Expressway.
    They walk toward the river down a slope covered in trampled grass, but Robin stops before they get too far. “Where are we?”
    “Well,” George says. “Have you ever heard of Judy Garland Park?”
    Robin laughs nervously. “Judy Garland wouldn’t last a minute here.”
    “Yeah, but you know the expression, a friend of Dorothy ?”
    Now Robin gets it, and as his eyes adjust he can see that, yes, there are men standing at intervals along the riverside fence going north toward the Walnut Street overpass, and figures moving around the perimeter, toward some railroad tracks that snake from one of the warehouses into a dark thicket of trees. A freight train sits like a monster waiting in the dark, silently watching them.
    He’s been to the cruising grounds in Central Park, a series of overgrown trails called the Ramble. Once he even backed himself up against a tree trunk while an older guy, who looked like a father of three from Spanish Harlem, with flecks of gray in his mustache, sucked his dick; but Robin got nervous quickly and zipped up before it went very far. But that was in the daylight.
    “Come on,” George says, and leads him down to the fence. Robin wonders how