While Elliott had been concerned about the kid prior to the storm, they were now convinced that something was very wrong. If he was sleeping in the park, as Elliott suspected, the situation would need to be resolved before it got any colder. The only question was how to go about it.

Without knowing anything about the boy’s past or family situation they were hesitant to involve the authorities, but they couldn’t just ignore the fact that he appeared to be homeless and without another soul to depend on. With this in mind, Elliott decided that they were going to have to work up the nerve to ask some more direct questions than they’d previously thought wise. They could only hope that by now Puck would trust them enough not to take evasive maneuvers. 

Instead of preparing for a run that evening, Elliott dressed in warm layers before heading over to the park. They found Puck in the usual spot, hunched over his makeshift shrine at the base of a tree. Elliott knelt beside him, lighting a stick of incense as had become their custom. 

“How’s it going?” they asked, hoping to work up to the more pointed questions they had in mind.

“Not bad. You?”

“Same. Where’d you end up going last night?”

“It stopped raining, so I figured I’d take off. Thanks for letting me dry off though.”

“Any time,” offered Elliott, who couldn’t help noticing that Puck hadn’t actually told them where he’d gone. “If you don’t mind my asking, who do you officially live with, if not your family?”

“Officially?”

“You know, like on paper… since you’re a minor.”

“Oh, right…” Puck looked down at himself, almost as if confirming this fact. “That’s a good question.”

“Look, I’m not going to force you back into a bad situation, I just… I want to help if I can. You need somewhere safe to live.”

“I promise, I’m fine,” he insisted.

“How old are you, Puck?”

“Older than time,” he answered with a self-conscious smile.

“I’m serious,” said Elliott, being careful not to raise their voice.

“So am I,” the boy said with a shrug. The thing was, Elliot didn’t get the sense that he was lying. As far as they could tell the kid actually believed what he was saying, and that was perhaps the most worrying thing they had heard so far.

“Where are you sleeping tonight?” they asked, not really expecting an answer. As expected, Puck merely shrugged again. “You can’t just stay in the park every night. It’s getting colder. We need to figure something out.”

“We?”

“Unless you have a plan...” Elliot was in over their head and they knew it. They were only 23 and had never had to deal with something like this before, but luckily some distant memory surfaced in their mind before they had to figure out how to end the sentence they’d begun. “What about a runaway hotline?”

“Huh?”

“They deal with this kind of situation all the time. They’ve probably got lots of resources we haven’t thought of,” Elliott explained, pulling out their phone to look for details. 

“Seriously, it’s fine,” Puck insisted, but Elliott had already pulled up a website and was reading it. 

“Okay, so it looks like there are shelters specifically for runaways. We could see if there’s one around here…” they said while entering their zip code into the website. The closest youth shelter was in a larger city, an hour to the north. “Hmm… probably not very helpful for tonight, but we might as well give the number a call to see what ideas they have.”

It was only when Elliott looked up from their phone that they realized Puck had slipped away. 

***

That weekend Elliott met up with Ian, who they’d befriended in school. He was one of a handful of friends who had remained in town after college, and the person Elliott was closest to at this point. 

Though Ian was fairly extroverted, he understood that Elliott was not, and was good at giving them enough space for them to actually want to spend time together when asked. Even so, he gauged from Elliott’s hunched posture and unusually subdued demeanor that they were preoccupied with something.

“How’s everything in your world?” he asked, never one to beat around the bush.

“Can’t complain,” said Elliott, who was too distracted to have noticed that they’d been asked a genuine question and not just a social nicety.

“Yeah? You seem kind of distant.” 

“Do I? Sorry… Actually, there’s something I’ve been trying to figure out.”

“Oh? Want to run it by me?”

“That would be great. There’s kind of a weird situation with this kid I met…” and so Elliott proceeded to explain what they knew about Puck. 

“Yeah, that’s a tough one.” Ian said, running a hand over his sandy blonde buzz cut in contemplation.

“I just don’t know what to do. I have no idea what his family situation is, but obviously it’s bad enough for him to run away.”

“Well, he hasn’t actually told you that. If there’s a mental health issue, it could have been a dispute over medication or something that prompted him to leave.”

“I guess that’s true. I just don’t have enough information to know if it’s safe for him to go home.”

“Right, but there are professionals whose job it is to determine that,” Ian pointed out. “And it’s definitely not safe for him to keep sleeping in the park.”

“I know, I’m trying to figure out how to help him before it starts freezing at night.”

“I mean that’s definitely a concern, but there’s a lot of other reasons he needs help as soon as possible. Human trafficking is a very real thing, and--”

“Okay, okay! I get it,” Elliott interrupted. The thought of Puck getting involved in something as grim as that gave them chills.

“I’m just saying, there are potentially dire consequences regardless of what you do, but at least if you get Child Protective Services or whatever to intervene there'll be somebody keeping an eye on what happens to the kid. It’s kind of a trolley problem you’ve got here…”

“Right, the fucking trolly problem…” muttered Elliott, recalling the classic ethical dilemma: do nothing and five people die, pull the lever and only one person dies, but you’re directly responsible for his death. “So I have to pull the lever…”

“I mean it’s up to you, but in this case doing nothing seems like it could potentially have the worse outcome…” This was a very Ian solution -- he tended to be quite analytical, whereas Elliott was more emotional, and besides, Ian had no personal ties to the kid in question. What he did have, however, was a point. 

“Yeah, you might be right,“  Elliott conceded. “I need to call someone who’s actually qualified to deal with this.”

“I think so. It’s good of you to take this on, though. That kid’s lucky to have met you.”

“I’m afraid he’s not gonna feel that way,” Elliott said with a sigh.

“Yeah, well… teenagers. What can you do?”

Author's note: I finally made a "thank you" graphic for subscribers, so this is for everyone who has already subscribed. Your support is much appreciated!