Free Gypsy Davey by Chris Lynch Page B

somebody else, got an urge to reach out and grab a quick piece of feel now and then. Long as they didn’t squeeze too hard or too long.
    Davey minded, but he learned to live with it. Learning to live with it. That was what he seemed to be learning best. Lois taught him, the way she taught everything, by accident. Joanne taught him. And Joanne’s friends—who she oncecalled “The Lions,” but now dismissed as “The Dogs,” even as she failed to quit them—taught him. Phil, alpha male, king of the lions, lead dog, Joanne’s thing , bigger than the rest, so that was how everything was decided, Phil was an educator.
    So if big old Phil was smoking a little dope one day and feeling a little generous and decided to blow dumb old skinny Gypsy Davey a little shotgun just for a hoot and to relax the boy, then who was there to say that wasn’t okay? Because even though he sat still as a floorboard and hardly said a croak, he gave off a tenseness that made Phil squirm.
    â€œThere you go, sonny,” Phil said from behind a glassy-eyed grin. “Now recline, and stop bein’ so tight all the time.”
    So who was there to say that it wasn’t okay?
    Not Davey, who breathed the smoke in deep, held it as long as he could like he’d seen everyone else do, then coughed a wheezy, painful cough for five minutes.
    Not Joanne, who lifted her head off the step for a few seconds, looked at the hunched and heaving back of her little brother with some concern, then let her heavy head drop again. She slapped his back weakly from her repose.
    So who was there to say it wasn’t okay?
    So what if Davey’s head started snapping at every movement on the street, every passing car, every skinny cat, every wad of spit that flew over from the crowd behind him, like he was watching a tennis match at five thousand RPMs. And sowhat if he was starting to list to one side a little? Who wasn’t, right? Joanne reached out and straightened him up and gave his back a reassuring rub to calm him until the next helpless tilt when she did it again. He turned his great cow eyes to her, lost, begging—still without speaking—for her to right not just his posture, but the world around his head.
    â€œStop that,” she said, “stop looking at me, Davey.” She pushed his face away, turning it back out toward the street. It was the kind of thing that at first gave her a shudder, a scared-little-girl crackling of the heart, to watch what she watched happen to Davey. But it was the kind of thing she would get used to fairly quickly at this point, if he only wouldn’t look at her too much. She felt, like she felt for herself, that this all would be better for the kid anyway. She was too tired to feel it any other way. She took a toke, and she felt it more.
    So who was there to say that it wasn’t okay?
    Walking home, Joanne played a hunch that wasn’t exactly a guess. “You hungry, Davey?”
    He panted, as if he’d been holding his breath and could now let go. “Oh Jo, I’m so hungry I’m gonna eat my clothes if I don’t get something.”
    She laughed at him loud enough to make him smile. “Then why didn’t you say something?”
    â€œI didn’t know. Didn’t know if I was supposed to be hungry, or not. I was afraid of sounding like a dip.”
    Still laughing and shaking her head, Joanne roughly grabbed him by the collar and manhandled him through the glass doors of DoDo’s Roast Beef. She loved roughing him up because he’d gotten so tall that she had to stand on tiptoe to do it. And because Davey let her do it.
    DoDo’s stayed open every night till three a.m., and that was when they did most of their business. At that time of night, their pizza rolls, onion rings, and gristly red meat swimming in sauce were like milk and cookies to the kind of people who were out scaring up food. Those were the same people who were