New Boy
Tales from Seelie High #3
by Aubrey Fredrickson
Copyright 2015 by Aubrey Fredrickson
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Table of Contents
Story
New Boy
Bonus Material
Interviews about Dylan
This Side of the Door – Chelsea Lloyd
Information
About the Author
About Tales from Seelie High
Connect with the Author
Discover other titles by Aubrey Fredrickson
New Boy
October 9, 2014
Dylan sat slumped in the backseat, staring out at the endless trees that flashed by as they raced down the road. Trees. To Dylan, a tree was a domesticated thing that had been pruned and fertilized into submission in someone’s front yard. He had never seen trees like this, so overgrown and wild. They reminded him of the dark forests in fairytales that lulled children off the safe path and toward the witch’s cottage.
In the driver’s seat, Callie—she insisted on being called by her first name, as if that somehow made them friends—was talking. She never quit talking, although he had quit listening about fifty miles ago. Either she hadn’t noticed when he stopped responding, or she didn’t care. Maybe she couldn’t help herself. Maybe it was some kind of disease. Or phobia. That was it, he decided. She was afraid of silence.
He turned up the volume on his iPod, trying to drown out her voice, but in a lull between songs, he heard the cheerful, “We’re almost there. Are you ready to see your new home?”
Home. His stomach clenched at the word and he turned up the volume even louder. The heavy beat of the next song on his playlist overwhelmed Callie’s voice, finally erasing her from his immediate world. He wished that he could go on raising the volume until it drown out not only the sound of his social worker’s voice, but also the sight of the feral trees, the vibration of the car, and finally the existence of the house they were racing toward. Because that’s all it would be to him—a house. Not a home.
Whatever Callie might say, he knew by now how it worked. The place where you slept and ate and did your homework was a house. Your home was something else entirely. He had lived in a lot of houses, but he could not remember ever being home. Home was the place where they wouldn’t send you away. Home was forever. Whatever else the house he was racing toward was, Dylan knew that it would not be his home.
But at least it was a nice house. Two stories, a porch out front, and a large picture window in the living room that looked out onto a properly domesticated tree. Conor and Vivian looked nice enough, too. They were younger than he had expected. Conor was maybe thirty-five and Vivian looked a few years younger than her husband—barely old enough to pass for Dylan’s parents.
He sat on a couch next to Callie, across the room from where Conor was sitting stiffly on the very edge of a recliner. Dylan was good at reading adults. Conor was uncertain about this arrangement and worried about his wife. Vivian was eager, but also anxious. She fluttered around the room, straightening pillows and asking—again—if anyone would like a glass of lemonade.
“I’d love one,” Callie said. “Dylan?” she asked, giving him a pointed look.
“Um…Sure,” he said, even though he had had a soda in the car and wasn’t thirsty. He was looking at the pictures on the wall. Conor and Vivian on their wedding day, posing in front of their house, lounging on a two-person hammock. “Do you have kids?” he asked.
Conor started and glanced nervously after his wife, who had fluttered down a hall to the kitchen. “No…” Conor said slowly. He looked up at a Callie briefly before continuing, “No, we don’t have any children of our own.”
The words sank like a stone in water.
They told Dylan nearly everything he needed to know about his new foster parents. They told him that he shouldn’t get too comfortable in this nice, childless house.
People became foster parents for a lot of reasons and Dylan had learned to recognize them early on. Conor and Vivian, he guessed, had resorted to foster care after they had given up trying to have a baby of their own. It was likely that they had tried to adopt as well and had gotten tired of waiting for a baby. So, they had decided to become foster parents.
The entire story unrolled in Dylan’s mind, full of hope and sadness and a terrible, aching want. They wanted a child who could fill the empty space in their home, the shadow of the baby they would never have.
But Dylan could not do that for them. He was fifteen years old and the space they were trying to fill was much, much too small for him.
He would be back in the city by Christmas.
“Oh,” he said and turned away to stare out the window.
Callie started talking—probably trying to fill the silence again. She commented on how beautiful New Elphame was and how nice it was to get out of the city. Dylan, who longed for the noise and press of crowded rooms, couldn’t agree.
He was just wondering if he could slip his earphones on without anyone noticing, when he saw movement in the branches of the tree out front. There was something there, behind the leaves, and it was much too large to be a bird. He glanced at Conor and Callie, but they were busy chatting and hadn’t noticed. Nonchalantly rising to his feet, Dylan moved over to the window and peered up into the dark green leaves.
A face stared back at him. The round, freckled face of a girl with frizzy blond hair. She saw him looking at her and raised a finger to her lips. Then she winked one large green eye and slipped back deeper into the tree, out of his sight.
He turned back around, wondering if he should tell Conor that there was a girl in his tree, as Vivian reappeared. She fluttered over to him and handed him a glass of lemonade, looking up into his face with a hungry expression that he had never seen in an adult before. She reminded him of some of the kids he had met on his journey through the various foster homes of the city—desperate for something they couldn’t quite define and terrified that they were never going to find it.
Dylan had never had a room to himself before. He dropped his duffle bag in the middle of the hardwood floor and looked around. It was like looking at a picture in a magazine. The double bed was sitting on top of a shaggy green rug, which matched the bedding as well as the lamp that sat on the desk. There were two book shelves filled with books. He wandered over to peer at the titles and saw that they were mostly classics—the kind of books teachers assigned in school.
There was a large flat screen TV on one wall and he noticed some kind of game system and a DVD player on the stand beneath it. A couple of brown bean bag chairs matched some pillows on the bed and a painting of a tree on the wall. There was an open laptop on the desk.
Someone had spent a lot of time getting this room just right.
It was nice—nicer than any room Dylan had ever slept in—but it wasn’t a teenager’s room. It was what happened when an adult, who didn’t know anything about teenagers, tried too hard to decorate a room for kid they had never met.
It was too big, too clean, and too empty. Yesterday he would have said he’d give anything for a room of his own—not to mention a TV and a computer—but now that he had all of it, he wished there were someone else here to help fill up all the empty space.
“Do you like it?” Vivian asked. She stood in the doorway, fiddling with her wedding ring, twisting it around and around her finger. Connor stood just behind her. Something about the way he hovered over his wife’s shoulder struck Dylan as protective, as
if he were afraid that Dylan might hurt her.
“Yeah,” Dylan said. Then, because she seemed to want more, he added, “It’s great.”
“Well, we’ll leave you to settle in then,” Connor said after a moment. He gently pulled his wife away from the door. Dylan could hear them speaking softly as they made their way back downstairs, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
He stood there for a moment, missing the loudness of his last foster home, where he had been the oldest of six children and there was always some little kid pestering him about something. It had been annoying sometimes, but mostly he hadn’t minded. He liked little kids—liked the way didn’t care who you were or what was wrong with you as long as you were willing to pay attention to them. Sometimes he had complained that they never left him alone, but deep down he knew that it was better that way.
When he was alone, he could hear the other place.
A car engine revved into life outside and he crossed to the window, looking down to watch Callie’s white sedan pulling out of the driveway. As her car vanished around a corner, he thought about her incessant talking and for the first time wondered if she knew. She’d only been his case worker for a couple of weeks, but it was probably there in his file somewhere—the reports from his fourth grade principle; notes from not one, but three, psychologists; documentation explaining why so many foster