“Who wants to make sure the fire is properly put out?” he asked, looking around at the sleepy, fire-brightened faces as everyone stood up.
Marston stood up too, reaching down to help Kell to his feet, glad when Kell stayed close and didn’t move away.
“We’ll do it,” he said. “Kell and I will.”
The smile from Kell blazed like star shine against a dark night sky.
Marston, unreasonably pleased, and at the same time, in a quandary as to what the hell he was doing, stood there with Kell as they waved everybody off and said goodnight. The responding goodnights echoed in the chill breeze that skirted through the tops of the pine trees, a musicalshhh shhhsound drifting down to them, encircling them.
“Do we have to put it out right away?” asked Kell, and now his whole body was alongside Marston’s, but he didn’t move away.
“No,” said Marston. “We could sit and just watch the coals die down a bit first. How about that?”
He settled down cross-legged on the ground and patted the sand-strewn dirt next to him. Maybe he’d patted that dirt too close to his own body, but Kell plunked himself down exactly there, cross-legged, like Marston was. Their shoulders touched, and their thighs brushed, their knees knocked, and the night settled all around them, a pairing of two.
Marston reached for a pair of sticks that had gotten collected but not used to make s’mores. He handed one to Kell, then pointed it at the coals.
“Give it a poke and a stir,” he said. “And watch the sparks fly.”
Kell eagerly complied, and perhaps the memories of sleep-away camp of days gone by were rising to the surface because his expression in the dark gold and deep orange-blue of the settling embers was soft, the gaze in his eyes the soft green of faraway thoughts.
“Penny for ‘em,” Marston said in the way his dad used to say when he was mellowed by drink, before the hardcore anger inside of him would rise to the surface.
His dad would sit in his ratty recliner, the TV on low, a silence falling amidst his endless prattle about this and that fact, a smart brain melted by whiskey, Marston had always thought, and he’d pause and say,Penny for ‘em, as if he might, this time, be truly interested in what Marston had to say.
Marston would fall for it, as he did over and over, before realizing that the question was not for his benefit at all, but simply something his dad liked the sound of in his own ears.
But this time, he wanted to let Kell tell him what was on his mind. But then, maybe it was his own imagination that Kell hadn’t had anyone else to talk to since he left home? Maybe Kell didn’t need Marston to listen, but then Kell slumped a little against Marston’s shoulder, as if the burden of his own thoughts had been too much to bear all this long while.
“I miss my mom,” Kell said, somewhat unexpectedly. “She didn’t do anything when my dad was so mean, but when I’d go away to camp, she always made a big deal out of it. She would sew a tag with my name on it, my full name, on the inside of every stitch of clothing. And she always sent me care packages, like I might be starving, full of peanut butter cups, ‘cause she knew they were my favorite—”
He broke off from this tale, a picture window into his past that Marston felt utterly absorbed by. The idea of sleep-away camp, being in a family rich enough to afford that year after year, not to mention a mother who cared enough, who was attentive enough to send her son his favorite candy was like a dream from a movie full of laughter and love.
Except Kell had left that family some years back, it seemed, and Marston still didn’t know why.
“Why’d you leave home?” he asked, but Kell shook his head, poking at the low-burning logs.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Maybe later.”
“Sure.” Marston nodded, and gave the logs a good shove, sending the long slender one, its middle nearly burned in two, spilling into the coals below, and now all of the fire was nearly level, the coals winking dark blood red and deep gold blue in a rippling effect that made him feel a little dizzy.
“Did you leave home?” asked Kell. “When you were a kid?”
Startled, perhaps beyond his ability to answer, Marston straightened up.
Kell straightened up as well, going stiff as if he sensed that Marston was about to get angry and lash out. That wasn’t the response Marston had wanted or expected at all, so he relaxed his shoulders, and put his effort into using his stick to move the coals around, darkening them even further.
“I went into foster care when I was ten,” Marston said. “That was years ago, so I guess I never really had a family.”
“Oh,” said Kell, the simple word full of such dismay that it touched Marston’s heart. Nobody ever wanted to hear his story, and yet here was this kid—scratch that—this young man, perhaps too young to see the hard side of the world, giving Marston his sympathy with both hands. “That’s shitty. It sounds shitty.”
“Yeah,” said Marston, not wanting to share any more than he had. It was all bad anyway. Like something out ofOliver Twist, except not as well told. “Some families suck and that’s all there is to it.”
“Mine sucks,” said Kell, a bit of force in his voice. “It didn’t always, but then it did.”
The pain of family was all Marston had ever known, but having the joy of a family and reaching in and finding it so painful that you had to leave had to be worse by miles. He’d never thought to meet someone who knew what it felt like to not really have a family, who had bits of his soul ripped out, the result an aching wound that nobody else could see but that infected you all the way through.
“That sounds rough,” said Marston, meaning it more, understanding it more than perhaps he ever thought he could. “You didn’t deserve that.”
