Alex In the City by BymagaJones 5/16 : Puck Paves the Way
Chapter 4: A Butting Of the Minds
Chapter 5: Puck Paves the Way
Alex wiped his hands on a dirty rag by the sink and the cans of turpentine, forcing his yawn back down his throat. All he wanted to do was go home - home! - and sit there, staring at the walls until he fell asleep. But he’d promised Momma Cass that he’d help with Black Friday dinner, and even now - especially now - promises were set in stone.
“Alex!” Alejandro, his boss, walked up to him, peeling a few bills from the wad in his hand. “Good work today. You’re getting faster.”
Alex nodded, taking the money. “Thanks.”
“How’d you like the food?”
“It was good.” Because he never had any food, Alex usually worked through lunch, but Alejandro’s wife had made a small leftover Thanksgiving meal for the workers. They’d spread it all out over three long tables, even put little burners underneath to keep the food warm. Alex didn’t recognize most of the dishes, but he’d taken a little bit of everything, and it all had been wonderful. Of course, he hadn’t had anything to eat in over a day, and when he did manage to find food, he never got to eat it while it was hot. So just having a meal not from a garbage bin or trashcan was already a plus. Having it hot too made it a winner in his book; it didn’t even matter if it were any good. Hot and fresh trumped good every time, he was learning. “Please tell your wife thank you.”
“She’d make me bring you food every day if she knew you’d take it,” Alejandro said. “Hey - did you get your place okay?”
Surprised, Alex nodded.
“Queens is a small town,” Alejandro said, wiping his own hands. “The guy who owns the building is my cousin Raul’s wife’s brother’s baby momma’s brother-in-law.”
Accustomed to the family intricacies that seemed to follow every one of Alejandro’s conversations, Alex didn’t even try to follow it.
“She’s probably gonna give me some stuff for your new place; don’t even think about refusing it, because it would hurt her feelings.”
Alex nodded. He hadn’t realized that two months earlier, when he’d started working at the chop shop, he’d not only gotten a job but evidently admission into Alejandro’s strange family. Mostly consisting of people who couldn’t get legitimate jobs for various reasons, they were all brought together with a common knowledge of the workings of various vehicles - and how to dismantle them quickly. Alex hadn’t been very fast at the beginning, but he’d watched the others and quickly improved. They got paid by their performance, so he’d had a goal to reach for when he realized he could save up for a private room.
His first week on the job, Alex met Alejandro’s wife, Zuma, who’d taken one look at him and decided that he was going to be her special project. Alex was certain that Alejandro restrained her quite a bit, but he found knitted scarves and hats in his locker from time to time, or Alejandro had an extra sandwich packed into his lunch. It never seemed too much for Alex to accept or make him uncomfortable, and for that he was thankful.
“You got the restaurant tonight?”
Alex shook his head. “Volunteering with Momma Cass.”
Snorting, Alejandro grinned. “She’s the only one who could get a restaurant to let their best dishwasher off on the day after Thanksgiving.”
Unsure of what to say and certain he wasn’t the best dishwasher by any stretch of the imagination, Alex just shrugged and continued to stare at the money in his hands. After a few awkward moments to Alex - for a man with such a huge family, Alejandro had never met an uncomfortable moment - Alejandro nodded. “Have a good weekend.”
“You too,” Alex said, heading toward the bathroom so he could hide his money.
GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE
Puck caught himself getting ready to rub his hand through his hair, a nervous tick he’d been working on remedying. “What time’s he supposed to be here?” He looked at the large clock above the doorway leading from the kitchen into the dining room.
He and Mercedes had been moved - promoted? - to kitchen detail, following the directions of a red-faced, angry man with a strong Italian accent. They’d been introduced, but Puck’s mind had been on other things at the time. He’d been trying to figure out how he and Mercedes could somehow ensure that they didn’t lose touch with their friend. Kurt - Alex - was already skittish, adamant that he was someone new who didn’t need their help. Obviously, he still had his pride. So they had to somehow figure out a way to keep Hummel in their lives without threatening his sense of freedom. They had to get him to choose to stay in touch. So far, Puck hadn’t come up with a single way to make that happen. So he’d followed the red-faced dude’s orders while furiously trying to come up with something, anything, to give them more time. The answer walked right past him, and he almost snorted at how dumb he’d become. Watching his chance start to walk out of the kitchen, Puck tossed his last peeled potato in the pot, absently wiping his hands on his apron as he jogged toward the door. “Momma Cass, do you have a second?”
GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE
Mercedes and Puck stood in the kitchen, watching the guy Momma Cass said had helped Kurt - Alex - and up until recently had been his best friend. He’d arrived early, followed by two creepy goth people, with the volunteers, but Mercedes had her doubts that he would stay after eating. This meant that they needed to talk to him before he inhaled the last of his food and disappeared.
“Maybe I should go alone,” Mercedes suggested, biting her lip. As tough as these homeless people looked and acted, they were awfully sensitive and had a thick protective shell. She didn’t judge it; she just wanted to see if she could get any information out of the kid before he bolted away from her, and she figured she was a lot less intimidating than Puck, with his swagger and badass attitude.
“Hell no,” Puck said. “I wanna hear what he has to say too.” He seemed to understand what worried her, though, because he added, “I promise that I’ll try not to be all tough and shit.”
She couldn’t help but smile at him. He’d been so awesome these last couple of days, letting her lean on him when he was just as shocked and lost as she was. Sure, he hadn’t been as close to Kurt as she had, but he’d been Puck’s teammate and fellow glee club member. He’d felt Kurt’s loss just like the rest of them and was just as amazed and disturbed and mixed up as she’d been after seeing Kurt, alive but looking like he’d barely been existing. Puck did deserve to hear what Chase had to say too.
Straightening her shoulders and pointing her girls forward - ignoring Puck’s snigger - she lead Puck over toward the table where he sat, hunched over his plate, arm protectively reaching around the tray to keep it close to him. She ignored the two goth people sitting beside him - she couldn’t even tell if they were male or female but dismissed it from her mind - and sat across from him, slowly setting down her tray so she wouldn’t scare him.
She wanted to roll her eyes at herself, wondering when she’d started thinking of them like the skittish colts she’d seen once on a documentary year before.
“Hi,” she said, seeing Puck sit beside her out of the corner of her eye. “I’m Mercedes, and this is Puck.”
The kid didn’t even lift up his head or slow down the motion of shoveling food into his mouth.
Mercedes had to fight off the urge to look at Puck; she was determined to step up and take the lead on this. “We were hoping to talk to you about K-Alex.”
The shoveling slowed, and his eyes swept across them before returning to his plate.
“He was a friend of ours… before,” she said.
He looked up at her again, his eyes glancing off hers and Puck’s before returning to his plate.
He was very pretty, angelic almost. It wasn’t a prettiness like Kurt; the blond hair curling from underneath his large dark knitted cap and the large grey eyes made him seem almost otherworldly. Small wispy hairs grew along the bottom of his face, but the scruff was also blond, so it was barely noticeable.
They sat in silence, and Mercedes thought about picking up her own fork, but she knew she really couldn’t eat anything. Not yet.
She was about to give up and had begun to turn to Puck when Chase spoke.
“I remember you.”
His words had been so unexpected that she thought maybe she’d imagined them. “What?”
“You got your purse stolen when you came up here to sing.”
“That’s right.” Mercedes looked at Puck, who shrugged, obviously just as confused as she was. “How did you know that?”
His eyes on his plate, he shrugged one shoulder. “We were across the street, watching you, and we saw Bu- someone snatch your purse.”
“Did Kurt- I mean Alex - was he the one who turned it in at the hotel?”
Chase shook his head. “I did it. He got the purse back,” Chase paused, small smile on his face before continuing, “and I turned it in for him.”
“Why didn’t he just come see us?” Mercedes asked. He had to have known that they all would have done whatever he needed to help him.
Chase shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him.” He pushed back from the table, grabbed his plate, utensils, and cup, and walked away, the two goths following him seconds later.
“I guess that’s all he had to say,” Puck said quietly.
Mercedes couldn’t seem to separate all of the feelings inside her. She was so happy to have found her boy, but everything she seemed to learn about him made him float that much further away from her. “Why didn’t he come to us?”
“What could we have done?” Puck asked. “Think about it. He was still sixteen at the time, which means that he’d have had to go back to living with that douche bag of an uncle, who has to be the reason he ran away in the first place.”
Mercedes wasn’t willing to give up. “But we could have-” she cast around in her mind for a solution.
“We couldn’t have done dick, and he knew it,” Puck said.
GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE
Alex felt his bag bump against his back as he stretched plastic over a table, waiting for another volunteer to tape it down. The way the woman leaned close to him made him uncomfortable, but he knew his body space bubble was way bigger than most. So he just held himself still while the she wielded her tape dispenser and was thankful when they finished covering all of the tables.
After that, he looked for Momma Cass for further instructions, but one of the other volunteers said that all available personnel were needed in the kitchen, so that’s where he headed next.
Walking through the doorway, his eyes immediately lit upon Mercedes, who was trying to grab a spoon that Marcel was holding out of her reach. For a moment, Alex was Kurt again, back in Lima, watching his best friend giggle and flirt with a cute boy. The clatter from a dropped pan returned him to the present, where he reminded himself that the past was the past and that he wasn’t that guy any longer. Quickly turning his back on the scene, he walked through toward the back entrance to find Momma Cass arguing with Toothless Tony who, actually, still had most of his own teeth. He was older, wizened. Living on the streets aged a person, so it was impossible to tell how old he was, but he was considered one of the old-timers, an impressive feat considering the shortened life expectancy of the homeless. But Toothless Tony was known for being a mean drunk, one who’d bash your head in if he thought you were a threat. Maybe that was why he’d lived so long, Alex thought.
Toothless Tony shoved Momma Cass hard, making her fall. Momma Cass was a formidable woman, physically and spiritually, and she’d done so much for Alex that he wasn’t about to stand there and let her be hurt.
Without a second thought, he shoved himself in front of Tony, stopping the man’s entrance into the building and barring his access to Momma Cass.
“Out of my way, Small Fry,” the man said quietly, the stench of alcohol and old sweat rippling off him like heat off a paved road.
“Leave now,” Alex said just as quietly. He’d learned quickly that yelling only drew attention, but a dead even voice and a tough body language were way more effective.
“I’ll split you open and gut you like a fish without even blinking,” Tony warned, pulling out a knife.
His weapons confiscated when he arrived, Alex didn’t have anything to fight with besides his attitude and the moves he’d learned after his years on the street. Curling his mouth into a snarl, he jutted his hand out quickly, snagging Tony’s wrist, pressing until he knew it hurt. Tony didn’t let go of the knife, but Alex didn’t expect that. Alex stepped right up into Tony’s face, eyes focused and hard. “If you’re gonna stick me, you’d better kill me, because if you don’t, I will find you one night, when you’re sleeping in some corner somewhere, and I will. Slit. Your. Throat.” He’d slowly been pushing Tony back as he spoke until Tony’s back was against the corner of the door. He punctuated the last three words by shoving Tony against the corner hard. “Leave or let’s do this.” He continued to stare at Tony until the older man’s eyes dropped slightly, and after a few more seconds, he let go with one last push.
Tony stood there for a moment, and Alex continued to stare unflinchingly into the man’s eyes. After an angry snort, Tony backed away and turned into the night.
After making sure the man was gone, Alex turned to Momma Cass, who was standing behind him. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, reaching out before stopping herself and dropping her hand. “Thanks, Alex. He took me by surprise.”
Alex nodded, burying the regret over her aborted move. He knew she had extensive martial arts training, but she’d dropped her guard. All the training and knowledge in the world couldn’t help if a person didn’t remain vigilant. Keeping up that wall had been taxing when he’d first been out on the street, but now it was secondhand. Perhaps it was still exhausting, he realized suddenly, but he’d just gotten used to it.
Pulling at the bottom of her shirt with a decisive jerk, she smiled at him. “Were you looking for me?”
“I wanted to see if I could help you with anything.”
She laughed. “I think you already took care of that.”
He smiled, absently rubbing at the strap across his chest. “Anything else?”
“Actually, if you could help in the donation room - it’s been unseasonably cold this year, and I thought we could offer blankets to people as they leave.” He turned to go, but she called him back. “I packed up some supplies for your new place, so see me before you go, and I’ll grab them from upstairs.”
“Thanks,” he said, heading to the storage room. He’d never actually been in it before and was surprised at the amount of stuff folded neatly in piles around the large room. Above each pile was a large piece of paper detailing what was below. He saw several papers listing “blankets” along the far wall and headed over when he heard a noise. Grabbing hold of his strap, he called out, “Hello?”
“You came to help?” He heard from somewhere inside the room.
“Momma Cass sent me?” He sighed inwardly at the hesitant sound of his voice.
“Great. I’m over here by the blankets against the far wall. Look for the moving pile of material.”
Alex smiled slightly and headed toward the wall. Passing a pile of sheets, he saw the back of a man as he tried to pull out a stack of blankets from the bottom of the pile. He ran closer and managed to stop the top of the stack from falling.
“Can you just hold that for a second?” The man scooched his bottom stack out a little further. “Push your pile toward the wall as I pull these out.” Between the two of them, they managed to keep the pile from falling as the man pulled out the bottom stack. Alex leaned against his pile, panting slightly.
“Dude, you came at the perfect time. I was headed for a serious collapse, and it would’ve been hell if I’d had to refold all of those blankets. I can’t fold for shit.”
As soon as he heard the first word, Alex realized he was in a room with Puck. He continued to lean against the blankets, uncertain of what to do. He wondered, a little resentfully, if this had been deliberate on Momma Cass’ part. After a few seconds, he realized that there was no way he could hide from Puck here and now, so he slowly turned around.
Only to find Puck’s back to him.
“I got the ones Momma Cass asked for, but did they really have to be on the bottom of the stack? Seriously?” Puck turned around, doing a double take when he recognized who was standing there. If there’d been a plan, he’d obviously not been a part of it.
Despite his dismay, Alex had to hold back a smile.
Then he watched, fascinated, at the play of emotions that crossed Puck’s face. Unused to examining people that closely, he didn’t recognize them all, but he was pretty sure he saw surprise, happiness, ending in what looked like dismay or fear. Those confused Alex; why would Puck be afraid of him? Even if he had seen Alex’s altercation with Toothless Tony, he wasn’t the type of person who would think that someone Alex’s size could take him on and win. Puck’s ego was too large for that.
After a lengthy pause, Alex looked around the room. “Did she need anything else?”
Puck snorted. “More blankets. What you wanna bet that they’re on the bottom of yet another pile?” He smiled. “But you’re here now, so you can save me if I get buried.”
Alex wasn’t sure what to say to that comment, so he remained silent.
Clearing his voice, Puck looked around until he pointed to a blanket pile toward the far corner. “She wanted the red ones. It looks like they’re scattered in that pile over there.”
Alex looked at the pile of green blankets in Puck’s hand.
“I guess she wants to go for a Christmas theme,” Puck explained. “People can go for the red or the green.”
“Better than the white.” Alex tilted his head toward two large piles of white blankets. They’d get dirty before they even left the shelter.
“What kind of idiots would give white blankets to a homeless shelter?”
Alex shrugged one shoulder. He tried not to think about other people’s motives.
They walked over to the pile they needed and quickly developed a routine, Puck pulling off the red blankets and Alex pulling off the unneeded ones.
“So,” Puck said conversationally, putting Alex on edge. “I hear you’re a working man now. What d’you do?”
“This and that,” Alex said.
“Here and there?” Puck smiled, making Alex smile back despite himself. After a few more seconds, Puck added. “I’m assuming that you’re not being that vague because you work at McDonalds.” He looked over Alex, making Alex want to squirm a little. “Besides, I can’t see you asking someone if they want fries with that.” He thought a moment. “This is what I think. I think that since you’re going by a different name and don’t want to be tracked by Evil Uncle, you have to work under the table so you don’t have to give out a social security number. The one thing I know you’re good at is working on cars, so I figure you’re doing something illegal with cars. Chop shop maybe?”
Alex didn’t realize he’d stopped to stare, fascinated, as Puck so easily worked out his life - or at least part of his life. He hadn’t realized he was so easy to figure out.
“Don’t look so scared,” Puck said, nodding for Alex to take the blue blanket on top of the pile. “While I’d love for you to believe I’m so brilliant that I pulled that out of my ass, I’ve actually been thinking about it since you picked up your stuff this morning. Although,” he grinned, “you can still think I’m brilliant if you want.”
Alex felt one corner of his mouth raise and realized that for once in a long time, he was curious about another person. “What are - are you going to college here?”
“I’m not cut out for college, at least not right now. That’s Mercedes. She’s going to Tisch. I’m in a band and work at Archetypes, a bookstore in Alphabet City.”
Alex nodded. It’d been so long since he’d tried to carry on a regular conversation that he was confused at how to continue it.
Fortunately, Puck didn’t really need Alex’s help. “I think the band is pretty good; we’re booking more and more gigs around the city, and we’re hoping to record our first EP in the next few months.
“I got really lucky. In fact, I’ve been coasting on the luck wave for a while now. Gotta make the most of it before it strands me on dry land.” They finally made it to the floor, and together they pushed Alex’s pile against the wall and put the red blankets on top of the green ones on the hand truck. Puck grabbed the handles and asked Alex to hold open the door before he continued. “See, I met this dude while we were up here for Nationals - ” he gave Alex a strange sidelong look but continued, “and he called after I’d graduated, wanted to know if I’d move up to join his band. Mercedes let me crash with her until one of her roommates had to leave, so now we live in a pretty decent apartment in Brooklyn with Thomas, who’s a junior at Tisch. We have three bedrooms and different schedules, so we rarely see each other. Plus, Thomas is pretty serious with his girlfriend, so he’s almost always with her.”
Alex nodded.
“You’ve just gotten more talkative, haven’t you?” Puck said wryly.
Alex almost laughed and stopped, surprised at himself. He dumbly followed Puck as they made their way to the cafeteria.
“And I gotta say that the dating pool up here has done wonders for my social life.” Puck caught Alex rolling his eyes and laughed. “I’m not saying that I was hurting or anything, but it’s nice having more choices. Look at glee; it was becoming almost incestuous how many times we switched partners.
“But now, it feels like my choices are pretty much limitless. It helps that I’m in a band.” Puck gave a small grunt as he pushed the hand truck full of blankets through a doorway. “And being bisexual has opened up a whole other set of options.”
Shocked, Alex stopped, watching Puck walk away.
Puck seemed to notice he was alone and turned to look behind him. “You coming?”
Alex nodded and scrambled to catch up. “When did you become bisexual?”
Lifting a shoulder, Puck continued pushing. “I guess I’ve always known it. It’s just that I wasn’t sure what was going on, because I’m not as attracted to men as I am to women. I mean, I can find something hot about pretty much every woman, but I’m a little more… discriminating when it comes to men. Evidently my bar is pretty high there. So I just kind of ignored the whole being attracted to men thing, because it rarely came up. And then, once I graduated… I don’t know. Maybe it was the freedom of not having to define myself in high school terms, but the rest just kind of fell into place.”
Alex knew he was looking at Puck strangely, but he felt a little lost. Puck still looked like Puck - a little more filled out now that he was older, but still Puck. But the words coming out of his mouth didn’t sound like the Puck he remembered. It was like someone had taken him, scooped out his insides, and filled him back up with another personality, a personality with maturity and an impressive command of language.
He wondered how Puck and Mercedes felt when they looked at him.
Puck laughed. “You should see your face right now.”
Blushing, Alex muttered, “Sorry.”
“I get it. You have this image of me from high school two years ago. I’ve learned that if you don’t bend through life, you’ll end up having life break you in half.” Another shrug. “Acknowledging every part of myself has made life a lot easier.” He grinned. “Besides, I get even more options at the clubs.”
“Obviously you haven’t changed that much,” Alex noted sarcastically.
Puck laughed.
“There you are! Put them up over here, and you can hand them out as people leave. One per person, okay?” Momma Cass just appeared out of nowhere, and Alex didn’t miss her quick speculative look at the two of them. Oddly enough, he didn’t mind it as much as he might have earlier.
Chapter 6: One Step Forward…
Entry with links to each chapter
Chapter 5: Puck Paves the Way
Alex wiped his hands on a dirty rag by the sink and the cans of turpentine, forcing his yawn back down his throat. All he wanted to do was go home - home! - and sit there, staring at the walls until he fell asleep. But he’d promised Momma Cass that he’d help with Black Friday dinner, and even now - especially now - promises were set in stone.
“Alex!” Alejandro, his boss, walked up to him, peeling a few bills from the wad in his hand. “Good work today. You’re getting faster.”
Alex nodded, taking the money. “Thanks.”
“How’d you like the food?”
“It was good.” Because he never had any food, Alex usually worked through lunch, but Alejandro’s wife had made a small leftover Thanksgiving meal for the workers. They’d spread it all out over three long tables, even put little burners underneath to keep the food warm. Alex didn’t recognize most of the dishes, but he’d taken a little bit of everything, and it all had been wonderful. Of course, he hadn’t had anything to eat in over a day, and when he did manage to find food, he never got to eat it while it was hot. So just having a meal not from a garbage bin or trashcan was already a plus. Having it hot too made it a winner in his book; it didn’t even matter if it were any good. Hot and fresh trumped good every time, he was learning. “Please tell your wife thank you.”
“She’d make me bring you food every day if she knew you’d take it,” Alejandro said. “Hey - did you get your place okay?”
Surprised, Alex nodded.
“Queens is a small town,” Alejandro said, wiping his own hands. “The guy who owns the building is my cousin Raul’s wife’s brother’s baby momma’s brother-in-law.”
Accustomed to the family intricacies that seemed to follow every one of Alejandro’s conversations, Alex didn’t even try to follow it.
“She’s probably gonna give me some stuff for your new place; don’t even think about refusing it, because it would hurt her feelings.”
Alex nodded. He hadn’t realized that two months earlier, when he’d started working at the chop shop, he’d not only gotten a job but evidently admission into Alejandro’s strange family. Mostly consisting of people who couldn’t get legitimate jobs for various reasons, they were all brought together with a common knowledge of the workings of various vehicles - and how to dismantle them quickly. Alex hadn’t been very fast at the beginning, but he’d watched the others and quickly improved. They got paid by their performance, so he’d had a goal to reach for when he realized he could save up for a private room.
His first week on the job, Alex met Alejandro’s wife, Zuma, who’d taken one look at him and decided that he was going to be her special project. Alex was certain that Alejandro restrained her quite a bit, but he found knitted scarves and hats in his locker from time to time, or Alejandro had an extra sandwich packed into his lunch. It never seemed too much for Alex to accept or make him uncomfortable, and for that he was thankful.
“You got the restaurant tonight?”
Alex shook his head. “Volunteering with Momma Cass.”
Snorting, Alejandro grinned. “She’s the only one who could get a restaurant to let their best dishwasher off on the day after Thanksgiving.”
Unsure of what to say and certain he wasn’t the best dishwasher by any stretch of the imagination, Alex just shrugged and continued to stare at the money in his hands. After a few awkward moments to Alex - for a man with such a huge family, Alejandro had never met an uncomfortable moment - Alejandro nodded. “Have a good weekend.”
“You too,” Alex said, heading toward the bathroom so he could hide his money.
GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE
Puck caught himself getting ready to rub his hand through his hair, a nervous tick he’d been working on remedying. “What time’s he supposed to be here?” He looked at the large clock above the doorway leading from the kitchen into the dining room.
He and Mercedes had been moved - promoted? - to kitchen detail, following the directions of a red-faced, angry man with a strong Italian accent. They’d been introduced, but Puck’s mind had been on other things at the time. He’d been trying to figure out how he and Mercedes could somehow ensure that they didn’t lose touch with their friend. Kurt - Alex - was already skittish, adamant that he was someone new who didn’t need their help. Obviously, he still had his pride. So they had to somehow figure out a way to keep Hummel in their lives without threatening his sense of freedom. They had to get him to choose to stay in touch. So far, Puck hadn’t come up with a single way to make that happen. So he’d followed the red-faced dude’s orders while furiously trying to come up with something, anything, to give them more time. The answer walked right past him, and he almost snorted at how dumb he’d become. Watching his chance start to walk out of the kitchen, Puck tossed his last peeled potato in the pot, absently wiping his hands on his apron as he jogged toward the door. “Momma Cass, do you have a second?”
GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE
Mercedes and Puck stood in the kitchen, watching the guy Momma Cass said had helped Kurt - Alex - and up until recently had been his best friend. He’d arrived early, followed by two creepy goth people, with the volunteers, but Mercedes had her doubts that he would stay after eating. This meant that they needed to talk to him before he inhaled the last of his food and disappeared.
“Maybe I should go alone,” Mercedes suggested, biting her lip. As tough as these homeless people looked and acted, they were awfully sensitive and had a thick protective shell. She didn’t judge it; she just wanted to see if she could get any information out of the kid before he bolted away from her, and she figured she was a lot less intimidating than Puck, with his swagger and badass attitude.
“Hell no,” Puck said. “I wanna hear what he has to say too.” He seemed to understand what worried her, though, because he added, “I promise that I’ll try not to be all tough and shit.”
She couldn’t help but smile at him. He’d been so awesome these last couple of days, letting her lean on him when he was just as shocked and lost as she was. Sure, he hadn’t been as close to Kurt as she had, but he’d been Puck’s teammate and fellow glee club member. He’d felt Kurt’s loss just like the rest of them and was just as amazed and disturbed and mixed up as she’d been after seeing Kurt, alive but looking like he’d barely been existing. Puck did deserve to hear what Chase had to say too.
Straightening her shoulders and pointing her girls forward - ignoring Puck’s snigger - she lead Puck over toward the table where he sat, hunched over his plate, arm protectively reaching around the tray to keep it close to him. She ignored the two goth people sitting beside him - she couldn’t even tell if they were male or female but dismissed it from her mind - and sat across from him, slowly setting down her tray so she wouldn’t scare him.
She wanted to roll her eyes at herself, wondering when she’d started thinking of them like the skittish colts she’d seen once on a documentary year before.
“Hi,” she said, seeing Puck sit beside her out of the corner of her eye. “I’m Mercedes, and this is Puck.”
The kid didn’t even lift up his head or slow down the motion of shoveling food into his mouth.
Mercedes had to fight off the urge to look at Puck; she was determined to step up and take the lead on this. “We were hoping to talk to you about K-Alex.”
The shoveling slowed, and his eyes swept across them before returning to his plate.
“He was a friend of ours… before,” she said.
He looked up at her again, his eyes glancing off hers and Puck’s before returning to his plate.
He was very pretty, angelic almost. It wasn’t a prettiness like Kurt; the blond hair curling from underneath his large dark knitted cap and the large grey eyes made him seem almost otherworldly. Small wispy hairs grew along the bottom of his face, but the scruff was also blond, so it was barely noticeable.
They sat in silence, and Mercedes thought about picking up her own fork, but she knew she really couldn’t eat anything. Not yet.
She was about to give up and had begun to turn to Puck when Chase spoke.
“I remember you.”
His words had been so unexpected that she thought maybe she’d imagined them. “What?”
“You got your purse stolen when you came up here to sing.”
“That’s right.” Mercedes looked at Puck, who shrugged, obviously just as confused as she was. “How did you know that?”
His eyes on his plate, he shrugged one shoulder. “We were across the street, watching you, and we saw Bu- someone snatch your purse.”
“Did Kurt- I mean Alex - was he the one who turned it in at the hotel?”
Chase shook his head. “I did it. He got the purse back,” Chase paused, small smile on his face before continuing, “and I turned it in for him.”
“Why didn’t he just come see us?” Mercedes asked. He had to have known that they all would have done whatever he needed to help him.
Chase shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him.” He pushed back from the table, grabbed his plate, utensils, and cup, and walked away, the two goths following him seconds later.
“I guess that’s all he had to say,” Puck said quietly.
Mercedes couldn’t seem to separate all of the feelings inside her. She was so happy to have found her boy, but everything she seemed to learn about him made him float that much further away from her. “Why didn’t he come to us?”
“What could we have done?” Puck asked. “Think about it. He was still sixteen at the time, which means that he’d have had to go back to living with that douche bag of an uncle, who has to be the reason he ran away in the first place.”
Mercedes wasn’t willing to give up. “But we could have-” she cast around in her mind for a solution.
“We couldn’t have done dick, and he knew it,” Puck said.
GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE GLEE
Alex felt his bag bump against his back as he stretched plastic over a table, waiting for another volunteer to tape it down. The way the woman leaned close to him made him uncomfortable, but he knew his body space bubble was way bigger than most. So he just held himself still while the she wielded her tape dispenser and was thankful when they finished covering all of the tables.
After that, he looked for Momma Cass for further instructions, but one of the other volunteers said that all available personnel were needed in the kitchen, so that’s where he headed next.
Walking through the doorway, his eyes immediately lit upon Mercedes, who was trying to grab a spoon that Marcel was holding out of her reach. For a moment, Alex was Kurt again, back in Lima, watching his best friend giggle and flirt with a cute boy. The clatter from a dropped pan returned him to the present, where he reminded himself that the past was the past and that he wasn’t that guy any longer. Quickly turning his back on the scene, he walked through toward the back entrance to find Momma Cass arguing with Toothless Tony who, actually, still had most of his own teeth. He was older, wizened. Living on the streets aged a person, so it was impossible to tell how old he was, but he was considered one of the old-timers, an impressive feat considering the shortened life expectancy of the homeless. But Toothless Tony was known for being a mean drunk, one who’d bash your head in if he thought you were a threat. Maybe that was why he’d lived so long, Alex thought.
Toothless Tony shoved Momma Cass hard, making her fall. Momma Cass was a formidable woman, physically and spiritually, and she’d done so much for Alex that he wasn’t about to stand there and let her be hurt.
Without a second thought, he shoved himself in front of Tony, stopping the man’s entrance into the building and barring his access to Momma Cass.
“Out of my way, Small Fry,” the man said quietly, the stench of alcohol and old sweat rippling off him like heat off a paved road.
“Leave now,” Alex said just as quietly. He’d learned quickly that yelling only drew attention, but a dead even voice and a tough body language were way more effective.
“I’ll split you open and gut you like a fish without even blinking,” Tony warned, pulling out a knife.
His weapons confiscated when he arrived, Alex didn’t have anything to fight with besides his attitude and the moves he’d learned after his years on the street. Curling his mouth into a snarl, he jutted his hand out quickly, snagging Tony’s wrist, pressing until he knew it hurt. Tony didn’t let go of the knife, but Alex didn’t expect that. Alex stepped right up into Tony’s face, eyes focused and hard. “If you’re gonna stick me, you’d better kill me, because if you don’t, I will find you one night, when you’re sleeping in some corner somewhere, and I will. Slit. Your. Throat.” He’d slowly been pushing Tony back as he spoke until Tony’s back was against the corner of the door. He punctuated the last three words by shoving Tony against the corner hard. “Leave or let’s do this.” He continued to stare at Tony until the older man’s eyes dropped slightly, and after a few more seconds, he let go with one last push.
Tony stood there for a moment, and Alex continued to stare unflinchingly into the man’s eyes. After an angry snort, Tony backed away and turned into the night.
After making sure the man was gone, Alex turned to Momma Cass, who was standing behind him. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, reaching out before stopping herself and dropping her hand. “Thanks, Alex. He took me by surprise.”
Alex nodded, burying the regret over her aborted move. He knew she had extensive martial arts training, but she’d dropped her guard. All the training and knowledge in the world couldn’t help if a person didn’t remain vigilant. Keeping up that wall had been taxing when he’d first been out on the street, but now it was secondhand. Perhaps it was still exhausting, he realized suddenly, but he’d just gotten used to it.
Pulling at the bottom of her shirt with a decisive jerk, she smiled at him. “Were you looking for me?”
“I wanted to see if I could help you with anything.”
She laughed. “I think you already took care of that.”
He smiled, absently rubbing at the strap across his chest. “Anything else?”
“Actually, if you could help in the donation room - it’s been unseasonably cold this year, and I thought we could offer blankets to people as they leave.” He turned to go, but she called him back. “I packed up some supplies for your new place, so see me before you go, and I’ll grab them from upstairs.”
“Thanks,” he said, heading to the storage room. He’d never actually been in it before and was surprised at the amount of stuff folded neatly in piles around the large room. Above each pile was a large piece of paper detailing what was below. He saw several papers listing “blankets” along the far wall and headed over when he heard a noise. Grabbing hold of his strap, he called out, “Hello?”
“You came to help?” He heard from somewhere inside the room.
“Momma Cass sent me?” He sighed inwardly at the hesitant sound of his voice.
“Great. I’m over here by the blankets against the far wall. Look for the moving pile of material.”
Alex smiled slightly and headed toward the wall. Passing a pile of sheets, he saw the back of a man as he tried to pull out a stack of blankets from the bottom of the pile. He ran closer and managed to stop the top of the stack from falling.
“Can you just hold that for a second?” The man scooched his bottom stack out a little further. “Push your pile toward the wall as I pull these out.” Between the two of them, they managed to keep the pile from falling as the man pulled out the bottom stack. Alex leaned against his pile, panting slightly.
“Dude, you came at the perfect time. I was headed for a serious collapse, and it would’ve been hell if I’d had to refold all of those blankets. I can’t fold for shit.”
As soon as he heard the first word, Alex realized he was in a room with Puck. He continued to lean against the blankets, uncertain of what to do. He wondered, a little resentfully, if this had been deliberate on Momma Cass’ part. After a few seconds, he realized that there was no way he could hide from Puck here and now, so he slowly turned around.
Only to find Puck’s back to him.
“I got the ones Momma Cass asked for, but did they really have to be on the bottom of the stack? Seriously?” Puck turned around, doing a double take when he recognized who was standing there. If there’d been a plan, he’d obviously not been a part of it.
Despite his dismay, Alex had to hold back a smile.
Then he watched, fascinated, at the play of emotions that crossed Puck’s face. Unused to examining people that closely, he didn’t recognize them all, but he was pretty sure he saw surprise, happiness, ending in what looked like dismay or fear. Those confused Alex; why would Puck be afraid of him? Even if he had seen Alex’s altercation with Toothless Tony, he wasn’t the type of person who would think that someone Alex’s size could take him on and win. Puck’s ego was too large for that.
After a lengthy pause, Alex looked around the room. “Did she need anything else?”
Puck snorted. “More blankets. What you wanna bet that they’re on the bottom of yet another pile?” He smiled. “But you’re here now, so you can save me if I get buried.”
Alex wasn’t sure what to say to that comment, so he remained silent.
Clearing his voice, Puck looked around until he pointed to a blanket pile toward the far corner. “She wanted the red ones. It looks like they’re scattered in that pile over there.”
Alex looked at the pile of green blankets in Puck’s hand.
“I guess she wants to go for a Christmas theme,” Puck explained. “People can go for the red or the green.”
“Better than the white.” Alex tilted his head toward two large piles of white blankets. They’d get dirty before they even left the shelter.
“What kind of idiots would give white blankets to a homeless shelter?”
Alex shrugged one shoulder. He tried not to think about other people’s motives.
They walked over to the pile they needed and quickly developed a routine, Puck pulling off the red blankets and Alex pulling off the unneeded ones.
“So,” Puck said conversationally, putting Alex on edge. “I hear you’re a working man now. What d’you do?”
“This and that,” Alex said.
“Here and there?” Puck smiled, making Alex smile back despite himself. After a few more seconds, Puck added. “I’m assuming that you’re not being that vague because you work at McDonalds.” He looked over Alex, making Alex want to squirm a little. “Besides, I can’t see you asking someone if they want fries with that.” He thought a moment. “This is what I think. I think that since you’re going by a different name and don’t want to be tracked by Evil Uncle, you have to work under the table so you don’t have to give out a social security number. The one thing I know you’re good at is working on cars, so I figure you’re doing something illegal with cars. Chop shop maybe?”
Alex didn’t realize he’d stopped to stare, fascinated, as Puck so easily worked out his life - or at least part of his life. He hadn’t realized he was so easy to figure out.
“Don’t look so scared,” Puck said, nodding for Alex to take the blue blanket on top of the pile. “While I’d love for you to believe I’m so brilliant that I pulled that out of my ass, I’ve actually been thinking about it since you picked up your stuff this morning. Although,” he grinned, “you can still think I’m brilliant if you want.”
Alex felt one corner of his mouth raise and realized that for once in a long time, he was curious about another person. “What are - are you going to college here?”
“I’m not cut out for college, at least not right now. That’s Mercedes. She’s going to Tisch. I’m in a band and work at Archetypes, a bookstore in Alphabet City.”
Alex nodded. It’d been so long since he’d tried to carry on a regular conversation that he was confused at how to continue it.
Fortunately, Puck didn’t really need Alex’s help. “I think the band is pretty good; we’re booking more and more gigs around the city, and we’re hoping to record our first EP in the next few months.
“I got really lucky. In fact, I’ve been coasting on the luck wave for a while now. Gotta make the most of it before it strands me on dry land.” They finally made it to the floor, and together they pushed Alex’s pile against the wall and put the red blankets on top of the green ones on the hand truck. Puck grabbed the handles and asked Alex to hold open the door before he continued. “See, I met this dude while we were up here for Nationals - ” he gave Alex a strange sidelong look but continued, “and he called after I’d graduated, wanted to know if I’d move up to join his band. Mercedes let me crash with her until one of her roommates had to leave, so now we live in a pretty decent apartment in Brooklyn with Thomas, who’s a junior at Tisch. We have three bedrooms and different schedules, so we rarely see each other. Plus, Thomas is pretty serious with his girlfriend, so he’s almost always with her.”
Alex nodded.
“You’ve just gotten more talkative, haven’t you?” Puck said wryly.
Alex almost laughed and stopped, surprised at himself. He dumbly followed Puck as they made their way to the cafeteria.
“And I gotta say that the dating pool up here has done wonders for my social life.” Puck caught Alex rolling his eyes and laughed. “I’m not saying that I was hurting or anything, but it’s nice having more choices. Look at glee; it was becoming almost incestuous how many times we switched partners.
“But now, it feels like my choices are pretty much limitless. It helps that I’m in a band.” Puck gave a small grunt as he pushed the hand truck full of blankets through a doorway. “And being bisexual has opened up a whole other set of options.”
Shocked, Alex stopped, watching Puck walk away.
Puck seemed to notice he was alone and turned to look behind him. “You coming?”
Alex nodded and scrambled to catch up. “When did you become bisexual?”
Lifting a shoulder, Puck continued pushing. “I guess I’ve always known it. It’s just that I wasn’t sure what was going on, because I’m not as attracted to men as I am to women. I mean, I can find something hot about pretty much every woman, but I’m a little more… discriminating when it comes to men. Evidently my bar is pretty high there. So I just kind of ignored the whole being attracted to men thing, because it rarely came up. And then, once I graduated… I don’t know. Maybe it was the freedom of not having to define myself in high school terms, but the rest just kind of fell into place.”
Alex knew he was looking at Puck strangely, but he felt a little lost. Puck still looked like Puck - a little more filled out now that he was older, but still Puck. But the words coming out of his mouth didn’t sound like the Puck he remembered. It was like someone had taken him, scooped out his insides, and filled him back up with another personality, a personality with maturity and an impressive command of language.
He wondered how Puck and Mercedes felt when they looked at him.
Puck laughed. “You should see your face right now.”
Blushing, Alex muttered, “Sorry.”
“I get it. You have this image of me from high school two years ago. I’ve learned that if you don’t bend through life, you’ll end up having life break you in half.” Another shrug. “Acknowledging every part of myself has made life a lot easier.” He grinned. “Besides, I get even more options at the clubs.”
“Obviously you haven’t changed that much,” Alex noted sarcastically.
Puck laughed.
“There you are! Put them up over here, and you can hand them out as people leave. One per person, okay?” Momma Cass just appeared out of nowhere, and Alex didn’t miss her quick speculative look at the two of them. Oddly enough, he didn’t mind it as much as he might have earlier.
Chapter 6: One Step Forward…
Entry with links to each chapter