Gypsy Davey by Chris Lynch

Author:Chris Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster BFYR

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Joanne was tired. A very tired fifteen. Where she used to flop with her friends, just like her friends, leaning back on her elbows on the steps killer cool like she wasn’t lazy, just too mean and pubescent pretty to care, now she lay flat out, wasted. Stretching herself across the middle step of Celeste’s porch, she didn’t care about people stepping over her, didn’t care about sunburn, didn’t care if somebody, maybe Phil or maybe 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 once called “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.

“There 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 so what 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.

“Stop 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

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