“Are you going to eat?”
“Huh?”
Rafe points to my burger, which only has one bite taken out of it.
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.”
I haven’t figured out how to talk to Rafe yet. Fortunately, shoving food in my face gives me a great excuse not to. We don’t know each other, so there’s nothing to catch up on like there is with Xavier. No “How’s your mom?” or “Is your officemate still a jerkoff?” Usually, that would mean small talk, but Rafe has shown himself to be uninterested in that so it seems silly to bother.
“So, um,” I say, “I didn’t catch some of the kids’ names. Can you go through them again?”
Rafe’s eyes light up and I know I picked the right topic.
“Carlos,” he begins, and I nod. That one I got. “He’s a nice kid. I think he’ll calm down some. He’s been coming to the YA for about three years.”
“YA?”
“Youth Alliance.”
I nod and keep eating. The burger is really good, despite the fact that the floor is dirty and I can’t even tell what color the walls are supposed to be.
“Then there’s Dorothy. She talks tough, but she looks out for everyone. She’s a poet. Really amazing.”
“Who were the twins?”
“Oh, that’s Sammi and Tynesha. They’re not twins, they’re cousins, but they do everything together. They just started coming a few months ago, so I don’t know them that well. Edward is quiet—”
“Is that the Gap model? White T-shirt?”
“Shit, he does look like a Gap model.” Rafe smiles. “From the nineties.” He shakes his head. “Yeah, he’s quiet, but if you get him talking about music, he’s all right.”
“What kind of music?”
“Not sure, exactly. I don’t usually know most of what they listen to. But I’ve heard him talk a lot with Mikal about experimental music from, I don’t know, Sweden or Iceland or something. Not really stuff I know anything about, though it sounds interesting.”
He gets a look in his eye that I take to mean he’s going to look into it. Rafe seems interested in everything. I respect it, that curiosity. Like he genuinely cares enough about some teenager to look into the music he likes so he can talk to him about it. I can’t even imagine Pop doing something like that. Or my brothers, for that matter. Well. No, Daniel would do that. Hell, Daniel did do that. He’d ask me who did a song and then ask me things about the band. Then the next time that song came on the radio, he always remembered it.
“So what kind of music do you like?” I ask.
“Honestly?” Rafe runs a hand through his hair. “I mostly end up listening to whatever radio station the kids put on: Top 40 or hip-hop or alternative, usually. I think I know the words to every Taylor Swift song, but I wouldn’t know her if I fell over her.”
“Taylor Swift—I—wow.” I can’t help but laugh at the picture of Rafe singing along to Taylor Swift, but he smiles at me, not seeming embarrassed by it, really.
“What would you listen to at home, then?” I try to predict what he’s going to say; I’m usually pretty good at that, but he’s jammed every signal I have for this sort of thing and I really have no idea.
“I don’t listen to music that much,” he says. “Mostly in the car, and I don’t drive that often. I like country some. I used to listen to mostly rap and hip-hop when I was younger, but that was when I was with friends. Yeah, country. Bluesy country I like a lot. Mostly when I’m home, though, I listen to podcasts.”
“Like the news?” Just the sound of those people talking puts me to sleep.
“No. I like ones about history or politics, sometimes science. Do you listen to podcasts?”
I shake my head, my mouth full.
“They’re usually about specific topics, like… the Boxer Rebellion or black holes or how icebergs work. And then, depending on the show, they go into different levels of detail on the topic, tell stories about it, that kind of thing.”
“So, they’re like little documentaries?”
“Basically, yeah.”
Hmm. Sounds like school. But, again, he seems so interested in everything. “Black holes… I guess that’s pretty cool.”
“Actually, DeShawn’s the one who first turned me on to the podcast about astrophysics—black holes. DeShawn’s the—”
“Big black dude?”
Rafe nods. “He’s incredibly smart. Obsessed with science. He wants to be a geneticist.” A shadow crosses Rafe’s expression, as if that makes him sad or something.