You could learn everything you needed to about Diggs by looking at his car.
It was just like him - dirty, run-down, made up of ill fitting and mismatched parts and, like all things that spent a significant time around Peter, a little impossible in the way that was just out of reach.
He'd built that car in a junk yard out of dilapidated and forgotten old scraps. The doors didn't match the engine, the lights and bumper and dashboard were a burning timeline of automobile development starting from 1967 and getting somehow worse. It was probably the shittiest piece of metal calling itself a car in the country and Diggs was more proud of that car than he was of anything else and his hands still were stained with rust and motor oil that he wore like a medal. He did a tune-up every morning and cleaned it out every night. In between it was filled with a distinct perfume of sunny d and cigarettes and whatever else Diggs did when he wasn't filling his dutiful role as Peter's menacing shadow.
Gwen was as repulsed by the car as she was impressed by it, and that infuriated her. It should have been easy to dismiss Diggs with his messy hair, stained shirts and ripped jeans and his tragically shitty car, and yet, both he and the scrap metal he drove possessed a certain kind of chic cool that bragged about its unattainability.
Diggs hardly spoke more than Lily, not that you could hear anything over the protests of the overworked engine, and Gwen had learned fast that if he wasn't interested in a conversation it wasn't going to happen. Small talk wasn't good enough for Diggs to waste words on, so he didn't. Which, of course, made the long drive to the farm house in his backseat even more uncomfortable, although she knew with an annoying sense of certainty that the only one who was uncomfortable was her. She tried to occupy herself by figuring out the items strewn about the beaten leather seats, a sleuth looking for clues about who this mysterious boy was.
It occurred to her that no one really knew.
Gwen had heard that he worked the late shift at the truck stop as a waiter. She'd heard Diggs was secretly taking night classes but too embarrassed to tell anyone. She'd heard that he drove weed over county lines, or that he slept under a bridge, or that he volunteered at the children's home, or that he just sat in his smoky car until Peter called him and then drove into the dirt until he was called again- a wraith of dubiously legal activities and exhaust fumes that followed him like storm clouds that stole the essence of innocence from anything around him.
She hated that she found him so cool and intriguing almost as much as she hated him. He seemed as dangerous and unreal and faraway as a black hole. No one had been brave enough to get close enough to know him and he left zero clues to follow. The car was cleaner than you'd expect, but obviously used. Empty plastic bottles sat at her feet, blue caps and bright labels faded from what may have been age but seemed more likely to be the dust that was inherent in Kennsington. Beside her on the backseat was a patched backpack with straps that were duck-taped on and a dated flip phone stuffed in the outside pocket, the zippers straining against whatever was stuffed inside. Under it sat a sketch book, flipped open to a page dirty with sketches in red and blue ink. She recognized Peter's grin in a corner, bright and teeming with unspoken promises of adventure and shockingly realistic in its rendering. Gwen glanced to Diggs in the driver's seat whose eyes were still focused on the road and blatant in their disinterest in her. She pulled the sketch book closer to her and out from under the bag so she could see it more clearly.
The page was crowded and confusing, hardly any white space visible between the lines of smudged ink. She recognized Peter's smile again, scattered around and interspersed with gesture sketches of running, kicking, fighting. The page was full of movement and life in a way that seemed to clash with the stillness of the boy who it belonged to. They were really good, too, which was even more surprising. It didn't seem like Diggs had passion for anything that didn't bleed oil let alone care about anything enough to put time into it enough to be good at it. She frowned and tried to flip the page without drawing any attention from the driver's seat.
The next page was very different from the first. There was only a single figure on the page, a boy, curled up and surrounded by shadows. His hands, drawn with precise detail, covered his eyes and all you could see was a mouth contorted in a brutal smile. The boy was drawn with clothing that looked like it was from a long time ago, the style reminiscent of pictures she'd seen in books about Victorian etiquette. Beside him was a doll with button eyes and a frown stitched into it's cloth face. It was bare except for the face and a pin in it's forehead. There was something incredibly off putting about the picture. This was more in line with her image of Diggs - strange and distant and unknowable.
"That's not yours," came the bored drawl from the front of the car and Gwen flinched so hard she hit her elbow on the window.
"Er, sorry, I just-" She hated how her heart sped up like she'd been caught doing something dirty, she'd just been looking at some drawings, "Did you draw these?"
It seemed like an hour before Diggs responded, "I guess."
"You guess? You either did draw them or you didn't."
She heard him let out a long breath, like he was trying to push all the air out of his musty lungs, "Sure."
She felt herself begin to get annoyed, "What does that mean?"
"It means sure. Don't touch my shit."
"I'm sorry," she apologized on reflex, "I was curious."
They drove in silence for a while. Diggs seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. Gwen shifted nervously, "They, uhm, they're quite good. The drawings, I mean."
Diggs hummed but otherwise didn't respond.
"Is that Peter?" She gestured vaguely to the sketchbook, "It looks like Peter."
"...yeah." The car roared as he punished the accelerator, "It's him."
"Oh." She wasn't sure what else to say.
"Oh," he repeated, "Peter's good to draw. He's more than other people so it's a better picture. He likes when I draw him, too, he says it makes him more real."
"What does that mean?" What an incredibly strange thing to say. She noticed how, when Diggs talked about Peter, his voice changed like he wasn't talking about a person but more like he was telling a story about some impossible legend. Or like he was actually a person instead of an idea of a person like he so often seemed to be.
"You know what it means," Diggs drawled, and she had to admit that she did.
