Any Friend of Yours

Book Two

Benji

The numbers weren’t adding up.

I slumped back in my old office chair, which creaked beneath me and bent a little too far backward, and pinched the bridge of my nose.

No matter how I tried to crunch them, shift them, or re-allocate them, there just wasn’t enough in my account to cover the operating costs of the shelter for the next quarter. Things were going to be very tight from July through September, and I was going to have a crew of very unhappy teenagers on my hands.

The summer months were the ones the kids looked forward to the most. All of a sudden all the activities weren’t reduced to only being indoors. They had free reign of the yard out back where, admittedly, there was still a lot of work to be done, but where they were free to split into small groups or sit in solitude in the shade with one of the books from the library I’d built last year. The shelter had some connections to local libraries and used book stores that often donated some of their duplicates to