Love by the Slice (Valentine’s Sweethearts)

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

WHILE GREG HELD down the pizzeria on Thursday, he kept an eye out for Rowan. No luck.

When a bunch of middle schoolers came in to get sodas and play the ancient video game machine, Greg said, “Hey, do you guys know a kid named Rowan?”

One of them said, “Why?”

Greg said, “Oh, so you do.”

Why he might want to know if they knew Rowan hadn’t occurred to Greg as a possible response, although now that he thought about it, it made sense that they might be protective of their friend. On the other hand, he wasn’t about to say, “Well, you see, a friend thinks Rowan is starving.”

One of them said, “Yeah, you can smell him from a mile away!” and another said, “I’m not surprised you know him. Only surprised you got close enough to ask his name.”

Point of information: Rowan was a boy. Also, good call that Greg had deflected their question. He said, “Well, he left something, so tell him to come back.”

What had Rowan left here? Maybe his self-respect and dignity? Although Greg had tried to give those back. Shelly certainly had.

That nasty remark about him smelling bad, though…? Greg hadn’t noticed anything. Given the overall smells of a wood-fired pizza kitchen, maybe he couldn’t. There was always the homey scent of wood smoke, of course, but also the continuous aroma of tomato sauce, plus the spices of the meatballs and the pepperoni, not to mention the onions. The kid could have rolled in potpourri for all he knew.

If he had noticed, he also might have assumed the kid was dumpster-diving. Which he had. So…

Greg gave the boys their pizza, but he said, “Don’t be rude to him. You don’t know what he has going on.”

One of them said, “He doesn’t have friends going on, that’s for sure.”

“All the more reason not to be rude.” Greg glowered at them. “Bring him next time and maybe you get a discount.”

He registered the wheels turning in the kids’ heads, so he added, “What’s he ever done to you?”

“Well, nothing. He doesn’t talk to anyone.” One of the kids wrinkled his nose. “Look, why do you care?”

Greg said, “Because when someone’s getting treated the way you guys are treating him, a decent person is supposed to care.”

All four boys stayed silent as they ate. Good. They ought to feel uncomfortable.

Greg texted Shelly. “Turns out Rowan is the school pariah.”

She might not see that anytime soon because of her class schedule, so he added, “But I asked the middle schoolers to tell him to come.”

Rowan was about the age when you had to sit a boy down and say, “This is deodorant, and you need to use it every day. These are socks, and you need to change them every day.” Could it be more? A while back, Greg had heard about some people having a weird body odor because of a medical problem, but he couldn’t remember what they were supposed to do. Go to a doctor, probably. Shelly couldn’t make the kid go to a doctor, could she?

It was an hour until Shelly replied, “Yeah, I figured. When will he come back?”

It hadn’t occurred to Greg until this moment that if the boys came back with their Rowan-coupon expecting a discount, it wouldn’t happen unless Greg was the one behind the counter. But Greg wasn’t on every day. In fact, he wouldn’t be on for a few days now.

He texted, “That might be a problem.”

“We’re going to have to tell Ezra and Lacey what’s going on. We can figure this out.” That came pretty quickly, followed by, “Did you get a sense of why he’s a pariah?”

Greg texted, “They said he smells bad and won’t talk to anyone.”

Dead silence from his phone.

Greg assembled and cooked three pizzas by the time Shelly replied again. “We need to help him.”

Wasn’t that the goal all along?

She chased that with, “We should find out what grade he’s in and ask the school to do a wellness check, and then we should see if we can help. Maybe get him better clothes. Maybe access to a laundromat. I hope they don’t remove him from the home.”

Greg replied, “Why would they?”

“An underfed kid who’s not getting clean clothes and can’t take a shower?” Then a pause. “You’re right, they’d probably leave him there. Social services isn’t the best.”

That sounded bitter, so he replied, “And here you said social services didn’t get the respect it should get.”

She shot back, “Not always that much to respect.” Followed a second later by, “Sorry. It’s just a sore subject. They’re underfunded and overworked. Anyhow, we should figure something out for him.”

Greg took an order over the phone, then added it to the stack of orders coming in online. This wouldn’t be a terribly busy night, but they’d sell out the Loveless One Hundred. The rush and ebb of work gave him time to think.

Shelly had leaped right to assuming Rowan didn’t have clean clothes or access to a shower. Could that be true? Could kids be homeless? It made sense, but probably it was just a thing that would work itself out over time.

She texted him, “I’m going to alert the school for a wellness check now, before we talk to him.”

The school would fix it. Or maybe Rowan’s family just needed their washing machine replaced. But the school should have resources and stuff. It would be fine.

She texted an hour later. “I wish we knew where he lived.”

That would be a massive breech of privacy, right? To go track down the kid’s family and show up at their door? “What would you do?”

“Make sure the family’s all right. Figure out what’s wrong.”

And then, “No one ever did that for us.”

Greg replied, “No one?”

Based on how Ezra described their childhood, Greg found that hard to believe. Ezra said some days there hadn’t been food at all.

Shelly replied, “No one who did anything about it. We got gift baskets from time to time, but nothing to get us out of there.”

Shelly was aiming straight for the worst case scenario here: wholesale neglect and starvation, as opposed to maybe a mischievous kid who forgot to change his socks. The school would ring the doorbell, and it would turn out Rowan didn’t know you were supposed to use two laundry detergent pods for a full load.

It wasn’t really their problem to solve, in other words. But he’d help Shelly because she seemed so driven.

And, anyhow, it was keeping her talking. They hadn’t texted this much in the past couple of years, so if they could help a kid and he could get her closer to him, well, those were two good things that could happen.