"Come to my house tonight," I said, and he was sitting up now, hugging his knees to his chest. I knew that look on his face, I'd felt that emotion. He felt like no one got it, no one understood. Maybe he felt like he deserved what he got.

He looked up at me, his eyes large and darkly shadowed, and he swallowed hard.

"Okay," he said, "okay,"

We walked slowly to my house, and the light was leaving the sky. We didn't talk. What was there to say?

Was I thinking that I didn't want him to see my run down shack of a house? Sort of. I couldn't help that kind of thought. I knew what kind of house and car and clothes a surgeon's money could buy. It wasn't really my fault that I was poor, or his fault that he was rich, but I still didn't want him to see the peeling paint and the weed yard and our crappy furniture, our crappy everything.

I worried what he would think of my shack but he didn't seem to even notice it. He was somewhere else, probably thinking of his dad and running away and maybe his dead mom, who knew? It was enough that it was warm inside and there was a roof over his head. It was better than sitting on some bus traveling across the country waiting for the money to run out.

"Want something to eat?" I said, digging through the cabinets for our pot that I made macaroni and cheese in. Tracker and I weren't that great in the cooking department. It was mostly macaroni and cheese, oodles of noodles, fast food sometimes, sandwiches, spaghetti.

He shook his head no, and stared at the T.V. I noticed how really skinny he was, how his clothes hung on him. I knew that being so constantly in this state of adrenaline crashing could take your appetite away. When I lived with my alcoholic parents and they were passing out after these fights, their words slurred, cops calling me because they were taken in on DUI's, I was never hungry either.

I stirred my macaroni and cheese and saw the sky darken from dark purple to black. I watched Craig watch T.V., watched him curl up on the couch and pull the afghan over himself. He kicked off his sneakers and curled into himself.

I sat down on the couch with him and stared at the T.V. as I ate my bowl of mac and cheese. When I was done I set the empty bowl on the coffee table. Craig might have been sleeping, his breathing had evened out and was deep and slow. He leaned against me and I could feel his warmth. I liked that feeling of him leaning against me, and I didn't want to move for fear of disturbing him.

Tracker was staying out late and I was glad. I didn't want to explain Craig's presence. I didn't want to deal with Tracker's half amused, half irritated stares. I just wanted to sit here in the dark room in the glow of the T.V. and feel his body against mine.

His deep and slow breathing was starting to hypnotize me, and I felt pulled into this lull, the T.V. flattening out my brain waves. I could relax. I could let all the tenseness go. I wanted to touch Craig's soft hair, his smooth pale skin, I wanted to do these things but I just sat there, feeling his head against my arm.

I was starting to feel sleepy myself and was almost drifting off, the voices on the T.V. beginning to be the voices of characters in my half waking dreams, and then Craig jerked awake, sat up so suddenly that I was jolted wide awake, too. He gasped and looked around like he had no idea where he was.

"Hey," I said softly, and recognition was coming into his eyes.

"You okay?" I said, although I knew he wasn't. I couldn't get the image of all those bruises out of my head. I wondered how long that had been going on. Was this new? Or had it been happening for years? What did that do to his sense of himself, his self worth, self esteem? How much of every day for him was an act of trying to be normal, trying to appear happy?

"Yeah," he said, taking a shaky breath, "I just, I don't know, forgot where I was,"