By Any Other Name Read Free Page A

more fun when the boys became friends for real. Until then, Andrew had never had a friend who liked him for who he was. Everyone liked him for what he could afford, buy, bribe. No, Skye wasn’t like that. When he shyly asked Andrew why he didn’t really have a name everyone called him but many names instead, Andrew had to confess that he didn’t know. The next day, Skye declared Andrew needed a name, and that name was Dru, with a u instead of ew . Nobody had ever cared enough to insist on giving Andrew a name before. Not a name for just himself, anyway. Andrew was his father’s name too.
     
    For some reason, Skye’s family had decided that Rowan Falls was the place for them, the one where they’d stay longer than a few months. A year and a half after the Walker family arrived in Dru’s hometown, the boys set up a campsite in the vast backyard of the Beckett family’s house. They had found a nice spot in the back of the garden, and that was where they put up their tent.
     
    Dru’s parents allowed this as long as they didn’t come into the house more often than absolutely needed. The boys were still served breakfast and dinner in the kitchen while Dru’s parents and their occasional guests ate in the dining room, but that was about it. Not that they minded. They were living the best summer of their lives. Skye’s family didn’t care much. It was easier for them to do their thing—his dad was trying to get sober once again, and his mom was trying to find another job, which seemed to be a full-time job in itself for an uneducated woman, so having one less teenager to care for suited them just fine.
     
    When the boys were sixteen, in the first hit-and-run in the history of Rowan Falls, Skye’s mother was killed while walking home from her first day at a new job.
     
    Dru did all he could, which was basically just staying by Skye’s side when he was needed. Supporting his friend in his pain seemed like a good idea, and the nights they slept together in Dru’s bed after Skye sneaked in through the window were kind of nice. Dru had known by then that he was gay, but he was still scared. He couldn’t even come out to Skye even though they shared everything else. This was something Dru couldn’t come clean about. Seeing rejection in the brown depths of his best friend’s eyes would surely have killed Dru.
     
    From the moment Mary Walker was laid to rest at the Rowan Falls cemetery, her husband began to lose his grip on the world. Ken began to drink more and more, not giving a damn about anything, least of all his son, who was just as alone now. Or maybe not—after all, Skye did have Dru to lean on. Even though Dru had never thought Skye’s parents had been happy together or that there had been love between them, he could picture the loss of a life partner doing something like that to a man.
     
    It took Ken about a year to end it all. Dru and Skye thought the man went and killed himself or got himself killed, but if he had, he managed to do so without ever being found. Everything but his wallet was still at the trailer the day Skye got home to find his father missing. For a few days he thought it was okay; Dru was staying with him, and the boys weren’t too worried. But when days turned into a week and then another one, the school and social services got interested in the situation.
     
    It was then that the boys got really scared. There were conversations that they overheard at school, the principal and some social workers talking about putting Skye in foster care if there wasn’t a family member to take him in. Skye was only a year and a half from turning eighteen; surely there was someone? They decided to let Skye be under the guard of the local social workers until they concluded their research. While they didn’t find Ken Walker, they did find a distant uncle, unrelated by blood.
     
    Walter Davies was the widower of Skye’s biological great-aunt Emily. Not that Skye had ever met the woman, but Walter