Chapter 7: Shadows on Concrete

By the time I turned twelve, I had long stopped expecting anything from anyone. Not affection. Not protection. Not even fairness. So when Child Protective Services dropped me off in front of the flat gray building that was the Santa Fe Group Home for Special Needs Youth, I didn’t flinch. The woman who escorted me looked embarrassed, murmuring something about a temporary placement. Her eyes didn’t meet mine. They never do.

The place smelled of bleach, overcooked rice, and something vaguely medicinal. Seven kids lived here full-time, all of them diagnosed somewhere along the autism spectrum. I wasn’t. But someone, somewhere, had probably glanced over my file, seen my silence, my resistance to touch, my constant vigilance, and made a convenient misdiagnosis.

It worked in my favor. Nobody tried to force anything on me. I was given my own corner in a dorm room with two others who didn’t speak much either. As long as I showed up to meals and didn’t cause problems, the staff left me alone. They were overwhelmed with kids who actually needed their attention, their structure. I slipped through the cracks like a ghost.

School was a public middle school with underpaid teachers, metal detectors, and hallways that echoed like concrete canyons. I continued my habits from before: minimal interaction, just enough answers to pass, excelling silently in the subjects I valued—math, science, Spanish. I found the library on my second day. It became my sanctuary. Books didn’t ask questions or betray you. They just offered knowledge, one page at a time.

The city felt like a cage. I missed the wilderness, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the scent of pine and dust and clean air. The concrete, the traffic, the noise—it all made my skin itch. So I started walking. Long stretches, at odd hours, exploring alleyways and construction sites, parks with broken benches, rooftops accessible by rusted ladders. I moved through the city the way I’d moved through the New Mexico hills—reading its logic, finding where it funneled and where it opened, mapping exits and approaches and the unguarded seams between things.

That was how I found them. Or rather, how they found me finding them.

There were four of them. Crespo was the oldest at seventeen, the one the others defaulted to, loud and instinctive and physically dominant in the way of someone who had never needed to think past the immediate moment. Yolanda was fifteen, sharp-eyed and fast, better than any of the boys at reading a space before committing to it. A boy everyone called Flea was fourteen, undersized and reckless in a way that probably kept him alive because it kept him unpredictable.

And Julio Reyes, twelve years old, the same age as me, who had no particular seniority in the group and didn’t need any because he had something more useful than seniority.

Julio had charm the way some people have height—structural, unchosen, impossible to fake and pointless to envy. He moved through the world with the easy warmth of someone for whom other people had always been legible, and that quality got him into rooms and conversations and arrangements that the rest of them couldn’t have accessed. He wasn’t the leader. But he was the reason the group had things to lead.

They moved through the city in a way that had no name I knew then—just what happened when physical kids with no money and nowhere to be spent years treating the urban landscape as a playground and an obstacle course simultaneously. They weren’t trained. There was no system to it. Just years of improvised necessity: vaulting dumpsters and chain-link fences in the dark, crossing rooftops when the street-level route was watched, dropping from fire escapes, squeezing through gaps in construction hoarding. The movements were ragged and individual, each of them having developed their own vocabulary from their own body. But the underlying grammar was the same—the city is a surface and surfaces can be used.