Someone to stay || JJ Maybank

02

"Home sweet home"

"John B!" I yell to the boy who's walking few steps ahead of me. He's complitely lost in his thoughts and doesn't notice me. I take a couple of running steps so that I'm walking next to him and look up to him but he still doesn't see me there. "John B!"

"Hm- oh hey." Finally he wakes up from his thoughts and looks at me. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to get some groceries for mom", I show him the bag I have on my other hand. John B seems somehow worried. And I don't think it's about the dark clouds that have gathered over the Outer Banks during the afternoon. "What are you doing here? Didn't you have the DCS meeting today?"

"Um, yeah, I just came from there", he answers. He opens the door to Heyward's seafood and I follow him inside looking worriedly at him.

The store is quite full of people who have gathered around the tv in the front. John B pushes past the people towards the front and I follow close behind him, apologizing from everyone I can on the way for stepping on their feet or taking their places on the front. Finally John B stops, directly in front of the tv where the news had just started.

"Hey, what's going on?" I ask him. Once again, he's too focused on something else to even realise me talking. I nudge him on his side which makes him look at me confused.

"Sorry, what?" He says. I furrow my eyebrows worriedly to the boy.

"I said 'what's going on'? Did something happen with the DCS lady?"

"Cheryl? No. No, not really. It was the same as always", he answers not very convincingly. Usually he complains a lot about how annoying Cheryl is or something, so something definitely happened. It wasn't exactly unusual for him to be a little down after these meetings but this was far from 'a little down'.

I look at him from the side but don't dare to ask anything. I'm really worried about him, I've been for nine months now. And there sure has been times when he has acted like this and been even worse, but this doesn't feel the same. He's worried, and he's scared. For a moment we just stare at the news in silence.

"They're coming to talk to uncle T", John B says after a while without turning his eyes off the news.

"Oh." So that explains the worry.

John B's father went missing on the seas nine months ago. Three months after looking for him without success he was announced dead. John B refuses to believe it. Big John surely wasn't the perfect dad but he was important to John B. He was the only parent he had since his mom left them before I met him. He was there for John B, some of the time at least. I basically grew up at the cheatau, John B's house, and knew Big John somehow well. The days he spent working behind closed doors or travelling around the world for work but in the evenings, when he was home, he would tell us stories about shipwrecks and pirates before bedtime. But the more John B grew, the more distant his dad became. It was sad to watch from the sidelines how the little boy slowly lost his father to those fairytales he used to tell us.

John B's uncle T became his legal guardian after the dissappearance of his father. From what I've heard from John B, his uncle is somewhere in Shouth America building houses or something. And when the DCS finds out that a sixteen year old teenage boy is living on his own, they'll take him to foster care to the mainland.

"John B, I'm so sorry-"

"Holy shit."

"Mhm?" I follow his eyes back to the news.

"Hurricane Agatha continues it's steady march towards the Kildare island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.."

"This is good!" He turns to me smiling, his mood complitely changed.