the burn don't work and the buzz don't help; ryan sohmers

It took Javi a little over two weeks to run into Ryan Sohmers again, and while the summer had warmed up in preparation for a final pre-autumn heatwave, his own situation had cooled considerably. In the absence of any contact from Lanny, he had settled into the familiar routines of a new home and new school. There were six other kids at Joe’s place (which, it transpired, was officially called the Horizons Home for Children) of varying ages from seven to twelve, two girls and four boys. Joe was the only all-round staffer but two other adults came by in part-time shifts during the day. Javi was the oldest by two years and, he’d quickly pegged, the one with the most questionable background. He’d probed Katie, the nicest of the three adults, about it one afternoon.

“We used to have older kids here, the harder to place ones,” she had admitted after some light needling. “Joe changed up and started getting younger ones about five years ago.”

This wasn’t an unfamiliar story. A lot of foster carers took older kids on with good intentions and then changed directions when after years of seeing what the system did to children the longer they were left in it. Javi also hadn’t forgotten the way Joe had reacted to seeing Lanny’s car on his first night here.

“So how come he took me?” He’d wondered, watching Katie carefully.

“Oh, you know.” Katie shrugged, deliberately vague. “There was a lot of, um, discussion about it, and they promised us you were a good egg.”

Translation: Joe had said no until the Child Services promised him a lot of money.

None of the adults at Horizons seemed to have much appetite for discipline, so the too-small house was loud and chaotic most of the time. A lot like school.

School was… ugh, school. It had been a long time since Javi had attended school full-time, and it was exactly how he remembered it: full of bellowing teenagers and screaming teachers. He had done okay in the first week, but they’d obviously been giving him a newbie’s pass because he had already landed three detentions in his second week. For dumb stuff, too! Like, who cared if he set fire to his pencil with a Bunsen burner? He put it out right away, and it was his pencil. The chemistry teacher shouldn’t have been droning on while there was a Bunsen burner around.

In spite of this, Javi was trying. His teachers had loaded him up with homework to make up for starting the year late and he had spent several days just trying to find a quiet spot to have a crack at it. There was nowhere quiet at school or Horizons (and Javi wasn’t keen to develop a rep for being a nerd anyway) so he had branched out across Atroe. His quest to find a homework spot had also been a convenient excuse to spend his after-school hours roaming the city, keeping a sharp eye out for a particular police officer. All of this would be so much easier if he was Spiderman. He could listen in on police radios to find Sohmers and get his math done on top of a building or whatever.

On Thursday of week one, Javi had no luck with his cop side quest but had found a sweet spot for homework. Not too far out from school was a section of town with a straight road which ran downhill, where most of the stores were boarded up or had been replaced with pawn shops and casinos. At the bottom of the hill was the semi-deconstructed remains of an old restaurant, complete with a small parking lot riddled with cracks and potholes. At some point some developer had bought the dilapidated property and started tearing it down, but had had to stop for whatever reason. Now the restaurant was missing a wall, some windows and part of its roof, but was otherwise reasonably stable, especially since it still had scaffolding erected around it. A few tables and chairs remained along with other debris. Javi had found that the tables made ideal locations to crack on with school work, since it was reasonably quiet (aside from the usual city noises) and nobody bothered him there. There was also a shortcut through some alleyways that went almost directly from school to the back of the former restaurant.

It was Friday, week two. Out late from school having served his dumbass detention time, Javi was faced with a free weekend of side-questing if he could knock out some of his homework tonight. He hit his usual route through the back alleys and had clambered through the hole in the wall. He was about to swing his backpack under one of the tables when something caught his eye through the windowless eye socket of the building. Further up the road, with his back to Javi, a uniformed police officer was speaking with a guy outside a casino. Javi squinted. The officer had the right build, height and hair colour. Could it be?

Hitching his bag back in place over one shoulder, Javi climbed out through the hole where the window should be and started up the street. The closer he got, the brighter the flame of hope burned until it was billowing into a roaring fire. He stepped up from behind and to the side so that he was next to Sohmers, giving him a bit of berth. Javi knew well enough not to sneak up on a cop.

“Yo Ryan! What’s happenin’, man?” He held a fist up in an open invitation for a bump on the side. “You arrestin’ this guy? Yo,” he glanced around, realising properly for the first time that it was just the three of them there. “Where’s your cop girlfriend, bro?”

"...and you can't do that, you understand?" Ryan was in the middle of delivering an even-toned response to the other, holding the man's gaze with fixed, dark brown eyes and an expression of patience that was perhaps a little wearied.

The other man, shorter than the officer, with a tangled mess of thin, wispy gray and red hair, nodded. But he didn't hold the cop's gaze long, and instead shuffled his arms across one another in front of his chest while wrinkling his nose as if trying to rid himself of a tickle. "I wasn't hurt nobody."

"I know." Ryan had repeated this phrase several times by now, each time delivering those two words with an inflection of belief, despite how very tiring this circular discussion was going. "But you were bothering them, Daniel. Or else they wouldn't have called me out here, right?"

The shorter man, standing in a slight hunch, looked past Mr. Sohmers as he spotted the kid heading their way. Catching the shift in attention, Ryan paused the speech he'd been ready to try from a different angle, and began to turn. To his surprise, a familiar face met his seeking eyes. He'd only seen it once, but for a man with the kind of laser focus and sharp memory Ryan possessed, there was no mistaking who this audacious young kid was.

The teen from the bay.

Had an adult offered him a fist bump, following the kind of encounter they'd had last week, Ryan wouldn't have been so inclined to reciprocate. Even as it was, there were immediate red flags springing up in his mind as the balled-fingered hand hovered before him in invitation. Was this boy taunting him? Was Lanny hiding somewhere nearby, snickering? Or was he just testing the waters? The hesitation lasted half a second before Ryan reached out to bump knuckles with the teen, though his expression was one of blatant surprise.

"Javier." He answered back at length, now knowing the kid's full name. He didn't have the boy's entire story, but being on good terms with many of the city's social workers had gotten the officer caught up on the most pertinent of details. A troubled teen with ties to an outside gang, and a sketchy school record, for starts.

Ryan looked past the boy, briefly scanning the street behind him. Seeing no broncos in sight, Javier was back on his radar as he shifted a foot, tilting his stance so that he could easily see Daniel and Javier both, "No, no one's being arrested." The look of surprise had gone, and something more curious to its place. And as much as Ryan wanted to pinch his brows into a mild frown at the kid's latter question, he maintained his cool with a deflecting query of his own, and one dark brow inched upwards, "Daniel and I are just having a chat. What brings you over this way?"

It didn’t escape Javi that he had only told Ryan his nickname before, and the name the cop sounded out slowly was his full name. That told him one thing: the officer had done some digging on him. Where that fact might have soured another person (especially one who, like Javi, got in trouble a lot), it gave this wayward teenager a little lift. Ryan hadn’t forgotten about him after they’d parted ways last time. He’d cared enough to go out and nose about a bit, which was more than Javi ever expected of an adult. It also helped that the cop accepted his fist bump.

Ryan turned a little towards him and looked over Javi’s shoulder at the street behind. Not missing the brief gesture, Javi glanced backwards, hoping a bronco hadn’t turned the corner or something. It would be awkward to explain why he had stopped to chat to a cop, especially he cop he had held up at the bay that night, especially especially after he promised Lanny he’d lie low. There was nothing suspicious behind him that he could see, so he hitched his bag a little higher and turned back, mirroring Ryan’s body language so the three of them stood in a triangle on the sidewalk. He briefly saluted Daniel when the latter was introduced.

“I’m doing my homework.” He answered honestly. “Well, I was about to do my homework. Actually…” Javi swung his bag around the front and wedged it on the ground between his legs, zipping it open at the top. He started to rifle through, occasionally pulling out crumpled and often torn bits of paper, unfurling them, frowning, and then tossing them back in his bag. “I got this dumb history assignment, about like…” He paused his rifling for a moment and clicked his tongue, trying to remember what Mr Davis had said. Unfortunately, while Mr Davis had been teaching his lesson that morning, there had been a bird building a nest in a tree outside the window right next to Javi. “There was this, um… like super chill war, where there weren’t nobody fighting. Except maybe the Russians.” He plucked the paper he’d been looking for out of his bag and stood back up again, showing it to Ryan. “And I gotta talk to someone who remembers it.”

The paper, if Ryan cared to examine it, was tightly crumpled where Javi had balled it up earlier and had a tear along the top. It bore the school’s name and logo on letter headed paper – the worst school in the area. The paper was mostly blank lines where students were expected to write their answer in, but the task was spelled out in blank ink: Oral History Assignment: Find a member of your family who remembers the Cold War. Ask them what it was like to live in the US during the Cold War and record their memories below. At the top of the paper, Javi had scribbled the letters JE in pencil.

Javi’s face was expectant, his unasked question clear.

the burn don't work and the buzz don't help; ryan sohmers (Alleys)

~Officer Sohmers~

the burn don't work and the buzz don't help;