The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 5: The Boy on the Flyer

Owen Pruitt found me at lunch, which I hadn’t expected.

I was in the stairwell again, working through a carton of milk and a bag of pretzels from the vending machine, when he came down the steps two at a time and stopped three feet short of me, like I was something that might go off.

“He says okay,” Owen said.

“Who does?”

“Marcus. After the assembly. Behind the field house.” He kept his eyes on the wall behind my head. “He said you could talk, and that’s all. You said nobody gets hurt.”

“I did.”

“So that’s what I’m telling you.” He swallowed. “Don’t say anything about the pharmacy. I’m not doing it again. I just needed something for my little sister, and the guy at the counter wouldn’t...” He stopped himself, shook his head, and left.

I sat there with a pretzel halfway to my mouth. Whatever he’d taken, it hadn’t been for himself.

I added that to the pile of things I wasn’t proud of.

The school library was a long room with bad carpet and six computers that took a full minute to wake up. The librarian, a woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, looked at me over them the way you look at a student who’s never once come in voluntarily.

“Research,” I said.

“Mm-hm. Sign the sheet.”

I signed it R. Delgado in a handwriting that wasn’t mine and sat down at the machine in the corner. For a minute I just looked at the empty search bar. I didn’t want to type it. It felt like opening a door I couldn’t close.

I typed Theo Hale Buffalo.

The first result was a news article. The photo was the same one from the flyer, same gap in the teeth, same stubborn cowlick, only here it had a black border and somebody had written a headline underneath. Missing Boy, 11, Found in Cazenovia Creek.

I read it twice. It was short, the way those pieces are. Theodore Hale, a sixth grader. Last seen around four in the afternoon on a Tuesday in October, near the old rail trestle behind Ridgeway Park. His family had reported him missing at eight. Searchers had found him three days later, a quarter mile downstream. The creek had been high from rain. Police said there was no sign of foul play.

I scrolled down. There was a paragraph near the bottom that I read a third time.

Investigators spoke with several juveniles who had been at the park that afternoon. One told police he had seen the boy earlier in the day but not near the water. None were able to say how Theo came to be at the trestle alone.

Not near the water.

Something in the back of my skull went cold and still. The puddle came up again, and I let it, because I’d figured out by now that fighting it only made it hurt more. The library went soft around the edges.

And there it was.

A cold afternoon. Brown leaves. Rian, fifteen, on the rail trestle with two friends whose faces I couldn’t place, passing one cigarette between the three of them because they thought it made them look older. A smaller kid coming along the tracks behind them, running to catch up. Hey. Hey, wait up.

Go home, Theo.

That was Rian’s voice. Not mean. Just tired of being followed. A small, bored sentence a kid says a thousand times.

I surfaced with my fingers locked around the edge of the desk.

“You all right, hon?” the librarian said, from somewhere far off.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just a headache.”

It was true. It felt like somebody had driven a nail in behind my eye.

The memory hadn’t gotten any further than that. It stopped there, cut off clean, and I knew without being told that the rest of it was in there somewhere behind a wall Rian had spent two years building. But I had enough. I knew Theo had been on the trestle. I knew Rian had been with him. And I knew the paragraph in the article wasn’t about some stranger.

One told police he had seen the boy earlier in the day but not near the water.

Rian had looked at a detective and lied. He’d said the boy was never near the trestle.

I leaned back and let out a long breath.

All morning I’d been building a version of this where Hale was a mean rich kid and Rian was the unlucky poor one and my job was to even the odds. I’d felt faintly righteous about it. Standing up for somebody. The Intercessor had said the fight wasn’t the point, and I’d taken that to mean something about technique.

It wasn’t about technique. Hale hadn’t been picking on Rian because Rian was poor. Hale had been picking on him for two years because some part of him knew. He couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t make anyone listen. So he’d found the one thing he could do with the knowledge, which was make the boy who’d walked away pay for it, one locker slam at a time.

That didn’t make it right. But it put something different underneath it.

The assembly was in the gym, and it was a memorial.

I could tell from the doorway. They’d hung a banner across the far wall, REMEMBERING THEO, in the school colors, with a blown-up version of the photograph on an easel. Somebody had put a ring of folding chairs in front of the stage and filled them with teachers. The students sat in the bleachers by grade, and I found a spot at the end of the juniors, high up, where I could see everything.

Principal Ames, a man with a voice built for announcements, said the things principals say. Two years. A bright light. A community. The sixth graders had made a quilt. A girl read a poem, her voice shaking. A teacher said that Theo had loved baseball and drawing, in that order.

Then Ames cleared his throat and said, “Theo’s brother, Marcus, has asked to say a few words.”

The gym went quiet in a way that felt like an exhale.

Hale walked up the center aisle in his navy jacket. He didn’t look at anyone. He climbed the three steps to the microphone, set both hands on the podium, and opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

It went on for a long time. Long enough that the girl next to me shifted. Long enough that somebody at the back coughed. Hale stood there with his knuckles white on the wood and his eyes fixed on a place in the middle of the floor, and I watched his jaw work, like he was trying to chew through the first word.

Then he turned and walked off, past the principal and the easel, through the side door, and let it bang.

A murmur went through the bleachers. Ames, red-faced, said something about giving the family space.

I sat very still.

Because just before he’d turned, for half a second, his eyes had come up off the floor and gone straight across the gym, up the bleachers, over four hundred heads, and landed on mine. And I’d known right then, in my stomach, in Rian’s stomach, that he’d picked me out of the crowd before he ever opened his mouth.

He hadn’t looked angry.

He’d looked like a kid asking for help and not knowing it.