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– that’s an Irish name. Are your parents Irish?’ I asked.
    ‘Nope, not a drop of Irish blood as far as I know. My mom liked movies of Broadway musicals. Finn is her shorthand for
Finian’s Rainbow
.’
    ‘Oh, it’s lucky she didn’t call you Georg. You know, like Captain von Trapp from
The Sound of Music
,’ I pointed out.
    ‘Wow!’ said Finn, ‘you’re pretty close to the mark. That honour was reserved for my little brother, but we call him Greg now.’
    ‘Georg was way too cruel,’ he added.
    ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Joanna, ‘I think “Georg” could be a cool name.’
    Finn and I exchanged quick looks. ‘Georg’ could never be a cool name for anyone – boy, girl, straight, gay, nobody.
    ‘No charge for the visit,’ said Joanna, ‘just three dollars for the beak conditioner.’
    I was able to sneak a long look at Finn as he dug his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. I’d never met a boy who owned a wallet before. Finn’s brown hair was a little long, just below his collar, and his eyes were dark and difficult to read. He had a dark shadow of stubble on his face and I wanted to reach up and touch it just to see what it felt like, but I didn’t. Mum always told me to try to recognise the times when it is important to pretend to be normal, and this was one of them.
    As Finn pulled some dollar bills out of his wallet, I noticed he was left-handed and that two, thin, white scars stood out on his deeply tanned left arm. He looked at me looking at him.
    ‘Ice hockey,’ he said, ‘a contact sport.’ He handed over the cash to Joanna.
    ‘Bye, enjoy the rest of the weekend,’ she said, and Finn trooped out, carrying Kurt in his cage.
    ‘Tell someone who cares!’ screeched Kurt.
    ‘How old do you think Finn is?’ I asked Joanna casually when the coast was clear.
    She looked at me with a little teasing smile, which I ignored.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I would guess sixteen.’
    ‘Way too old for you to be friends with,’ she added unnecessarily .
    Scott and Leela returned from Wyoming the following evening and we ate Thai food together. As I was telling Scott about Kurt and Finn, Leela suddenly waved her chopsticks in the air, nearly taking one of Scott’s eyes out.
    ‘Finn WINTERS!’ she announced triumphantly. ‘I know about him. My law firm represented his mother in the divorce. Well, we did represent her until she stopped being able to pay our fees and then we dumped her!’ She moistened her lips before continuing.
    ‘Finn’s father is an eminent Park Avenue psychiatrist and his mother is a theatre producer. They had a very long, very expensive, nasty divorce, with the two boys caught right in the middle of a big custody battle and …’
    Scott interrupted her abruptly.
    ‘I don’t think we want to hear gossip about your clients’ private affairs. Don’t lawyers have duties of confidentiality?’
    Leela tossed her head, sending a long, stray, dark hair into my lemongrass soup.
    I stared at it.
    ‘Please, honey,’ she snapped impatiently, ‘where would the tabloids that you read get their information from without the divorce lawyers? The case was the usual mess: the parents fighting, the lawyers fighting and filling their cash registers and the judge kept changing her decisions, giving the kids to the dad in one decision, then to the mom, then handing them back to the dad. Anyway, that kid, Finn, took matters into his own hands. He ran away on New Year’s Eve, taking the younger brother with him.’
    ‘Ran away,’ I gasped, forgetting about the hair slithering in my soup. ‘How old was he?’
    ‘Let me think. He must be fourteen now and the little brother, Craig or Greg, or something like that, is twelve,’ said Leela.
    ‘I thought Finn was at least sixteen,’ I said.
    Leela continued, ‘Guess where the boys turned up?’
    Scott and I remained silent.
    ‘WISCONSIN. They were living in a trailer home and Finn managed to talk himself