"Maybe," Frankie said. "Blood doesn't make somebody family, Sam. Showing up does."
Ms. Alvarez knelt down so she was eye level with Sam, and her professional calm softened into something human. "He can't take you, Sam. Not like that. The law is on your side, and so are we. If he comes back, you tell me, or Dot, or Frankie. That's the deal."
Sam nodded. His hands were shaking a little. Frankie put a big, scarred hand on the kid's shoulder and kept it there until the shaking stopped.
Later, after Ms. Alvarez and Officer Tran had gone, and Dot had arrived with coffee and a plate of sandwiches nobody needed but everybody ate, Frankie found Sam out back by the dumpster, sitting on an overturned bucket, staring at nothing.
"Hey," Frankie said, and sat down on the other bucket. It creaked under him. "You okay?"
Sam shrugged. "He wanted my check."
"Yeah," Frankie said. "He did."
"Am I —" Sam picked at the label on his water bottle. "Am I worth that much?"
Frankie looked at him for a long moment. "Sam," he said, "nobody gets to collect you. You're a person, not a paycheck. You hear me?"
Sam nodded. "Yeah."
"Good." Frankie stood up and held out a hand. "Come on. That brake line won't bleed itself, and Saturday's coming."
Chapter 13
School
The school smelled like floor wax and somebody else's lunch.
Sam stood in the front office of Oakland High with his new backpack on one shoulder and his hands shoved deep in the pockets of the jacket Dot had bought him — dark blue, plain, no holes — and tried to look like a kid who did this every day. Mrs. Park, the counselor, slid a schedule across the counter with a smile that had seen a thousand first days.
"English, math, history, science, lunch, shop," she said. "Shop's in the annex. Mr. Delgado will love you. And Sam — if you need anything, my door's open. I mean that."
Sam nodded. "Thank you, ma'am."
He walked the halls with his schedule folded in his fist, and every locker he passed seemed to have somebody leaning on it who already knew everybody. The shame came first, hot and familiar: the new kid, the kid who'd been living in shelters, the kid who didn't know where the bathrooms were. Then, right behind it, the pride, quieter but stubborn: he was here. He had a schedule. He had a jacket without holes and a backpack with actual notebooks in it. Nobody could take that off a form.
First period was math. Ms. Delgado was small and sharp-eyed, with gray hair in a bun and chalk on her sleeve, and she took one look at Sam's hands — grease under the nails, a callus on his thumb — and said, "You work with your hands."
"Yes, ma'am. Engines."
"Good," she said. "Math is an engine. You just have to learn which part does what." She handed him a worksheet — fractions, the kind of thing he'd been dodging for a year — and when the other kids bent over their desks, she came and stood beside his and said, quiet, "One piece at a time. Same as anything."
At lunch, Sam sat alone for about four minutes. Then a kid with a buzz cut and a backpack covered in band stickers dropped onto the bench across from him and said, "You're the new guy. I'm Marcus. You forgot your lunch, didn't you?"
Sam looked at the empty table in front of him. Dot had packed him a lunch — he'd left it on the counter at home, because his head had been too full to remember. "Yeah," he admitted.
Marcus slid half his sandwich across the table without a big deal of it. "My mom packs too much anyway. She thinks I'm still growing. I am, but not that fast." He grinned. "You ride?"
"Not yet," Sam said. "But I work on bikes."
"Cool," Marcus said, like it was the most normal thing in the world. "My uncle has a dirt bike that won't start. Maybe you could look at it sometime."