While I waited for the water to boil, I opened the refrigerator—I’d removed the bulb months ago so no shooter could catch my silhouette—and grabbed the milk carton, which had been almost empty this morning. It was half-full now. My grandmother had added water to stretch the milk.
I slammed the refrigerator, grabbed the packets of condiments that I’d taken from the food court on my last field trip to the Smithsonian, and tore open four. After squeezing ketchup into my cup, I added hot water and stirred, then leaned against the counter and sipped the sweet-and-sour ketchup soup as an odd feeling came over me.
I glanced up. A shadow rushed across the living room.
Setting the cup aside, I took the hammer from my purse and crept forward.
Through the barred window, I saw only my grandmother’s rosebushes, the dewy petals glistening in the moonlight, but the quiet creak of the porch steps told me someone was coming to the door. I stole over to the entrance and watched the doorknob turn.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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2
The view through the peephole was completely black. Whoever stood on the porch had covered the hole with their hand so I couldn’t see out. I placed my palm flat against the door and felt the slight movement of someone pressing to test the hinges and deadbolts. Maybe peewees were trying to find an open house to burglarize, or the homeless guys from the Borderlands had followed me after all. But then, I thought about the Lobos I’d seen tonight. Maybe they’d grown tired of gunning for Rico. I jerked my hand back, annoyed, and suppressed the desire to open the door and smash in someone’s face in case a crew of Lobos stood on the porch, weapons ready to fire.
I slid the phone from my pocket and called Satch, who lived in the row house at the opposite end of the block with his aunt.
“Someone’s trying to break in,” I said in a low voice.
“I’ll come through the passage,” he said quickly.
Years ago, his dad had broken through the attic walls to make a secret passageway between the adjacent row houses. He had planned to use it for his escape on the inevitable day when the police came for him. But when that day arrived, Satch had been home and his dad hadn’t wanted his son to see him turn coward and run. He was now serving three consecutive life sentences in a Colorado supermax.
During his trial, the media had called him scum, but his homeboys had called him T-Rex. After they had beaten Satch into Core 9, they’d called him Baby Rex—a street name he hated, so Rico and I never used it. But that name was no worse than the one that Trek had tried to give him: Lost Boy. Satch had run away the day the cops arrested his dad. Lost Boy flyers had appeared on lampposts overnight.
Slipping the phone back in my pocket, I hurried up to the second floor, turned down the narrow hallway that ran alongside the stairs, and pulled on the rope attached to the trap door in the ceiling. The ladder unfolded and clattered down, bringing a wave of stale air and attic dust. It landed with a boom that shook the house.
Within seconds, footsteps pounded overhead and a bobbing light appeared in the hatch. Satch climbed down the ladder, bare-chested, wearing jeans, the beam from his flashlight streaking across the walls.
He snapped off the flashlight and clasped my elbow. “Where?”
“Front door,” I said.
He pushed around the ladder, his six-foot-three body brushing against mine, and made his way to the top of the stairs, then down to the living room. He crossed to the window, his stride fluid, his strength showing in the way he carried himself. I watched him peer outside, his handsome face, without scars, still perfectly shaped, because when he fought, he always won. In his left earlobe, he wore the diamond that had belonged to his father. His chest bore a single tattoo, Chantelle, his mother’s name, that Rico had punctured into his skin using a straight pin and pen ink after her funeral, when Satch was ten.
Judging from the way Satch opened the front door, he hadn’t seen anyone outside. He walked onto the porch, kicked at a rope left on the top step, and continued into the yard, where he shined the flashlight over the vent openings to the crawlspace beneath the house before he inspected the cubby under the stoop where my grandmother stored her gardening tools.
Finally, he gave me the smile that the girls at school adored, his expression a mix of teddy-bear brown eyes and chiseled features. “Hey, Toughness, they’re gone.”
His use of my nickname reminded me that we hadn’t always been friends. When I was younger, I had been afraid of Satch. Most kids were and, like me, they weren’t allowed to play with him because of his dad. But after losing Gabriella, something inside me had shifted and the next time I saw Satch, I hadn’t run. I had stared at him, lifting my chin in defiance. My challenge had made him laugh, until he had realized that I was the girl who had just watched her friend die. Then, the compassion in his eyes had brought tears to mine. To my utter surprise, he had held me and, after that, called me Toughness for having had the courage to face him.
“Why are you just standing there?” Satch asked, pulling me back to the present. “It’s safe to come out now.”
I set my hammer on the porch and walked toward Satch, the night breeze velvet on my skin.
“Thanks for coming over.” I snapped a leaf off the sassafras tree and breathed in its root beer and licorice aroma before I held the rounded lobes up to the sky.
“What are you looking at?” Satch eased closer behind me.
“The color of the leaf changes,” I explained, gazing at the lush moon-fed greenish yellow. “It becomes chartreuse, but . . . otherworldly, not like everyday colors. . . . Do you want to see?”
I turned to give him the leaf and, when I looked up at him, the sadness in his expression startled me. “What’s wrong?”
He seemed to shake himself out of it and, turning, looked up at the tree. “Just thinking how I saw that tree every day,” he joked, “and never appreciated it until it was too late.”
“The tree’s not going anywhere.” I laughed, tickling the leaf over his chin.
He looked back at me and, when he started to speak, a distant whistle stole my attention. The sweet melody sent a shudder through me.
“Maybe Lobos dropped someone when they drove through our neighborhood,” I said.
Sometimes for initiation, Lobos abandoned a new member in enemy territory and left him to kill his way home.
“Easy,” Satch said, pulling me behind the tree.
The branches bobbed in front of us as the whistle came again, bringing back the memories of funerals, four in a row. Kids in our neighborhood had used that whistle to locate each other at night until Lobos discovered it and tricked four of our friends into an ambush last summer.
“There.” Satch pointed to a maple tree that had grown against a house, its trunk molded into the bricks. From the gloom beneath its branches, a lone figure walked toward us.
I studied the tall silhouette, the easy, athletic stride. “It’s Rico,” I said as he stepped under the streetlight, his smile as big as the moon.
“Awooooo,” Rico howled, like a wolf. “Don’t you know Lobos are out? You should be inside.”
Satch stepped away from me. “I got love for you, homeboy, but no one wants to hear that whistle again.”
“Satch is right,” I said, irritated with Rico. “Someday you’re going to get shot, fooling around like that.”
“I’m Core 9 and I’m going to use that whistle till the day I die.” Rico punched Satch’s shoulder, then the two clenched hands, leaning into each other before they pulled apart. “I won’t let Lobos control my life,” Rico said. “They can’t kill enough people to make me stop using our whistle.”
“You’re crazy,” Satch said, shaking his head. “What did you do tonight?”
“I gave the Lobos some needed target practice. Bad shots, all of them, they couldn’t get a bullet in me.”
“Looks like
you barely got away.” I touched the blood oozing out of the cut on his cheek. “You got to stop.”
Some homies craved the danger and gambled their lives, taking risks, because the heavy doses of adrenaline could make them feel as high as an injection of morphine.
“Ariel said the Lobos are gunning for you because you’ve been messing with their graffiti, again.”
Rico shrugged, though his eyes remained tense, as if he still expected an attack. “I cleaned up some walls in their neighborhood.”
He glanced at Satch and a look passed between them that I didn’t understand. They had been friends since preschool and, by the time they were eight, had started picking up jobs together, sometimes carrying drugs and money for Satch’s dad, pulling a red wagon filled with contraband and toys, right past the cops. They went from baby homies to li’l homies and, the summer they turned twelve, they were beaten into Core 9.
Satch pulled his gaze away from Rico and said to me, “I’ve got to bail. My aunt needs me.”
To do what? I wanted to ask. His aunt wasn’t even up this late at night, but I didn’t call him on his lie.
He flicked on his flashlight and ambled away, the beam squiggling through the dark as he headed home.
“I don’t understand what’s up with Satch lately,” I said to Rico, who was pulling me into his arms.
“It’s nothing,” Rico replied. “He’s moody.”
“Only around me,” I whispered.
“Stop worrying about it.” Rico pressed against me, his breath soft on my face, his clothes smelling of the sultry night. “Think about us instead.”
I was the only girl at school who didn’t snap to it for Rico. My friends thought I was crazy not to want him, but our homeboys never stopped at kisses and I wasn’t ready for babies. Maybe I never would be. In this neighborhood, even toddlers got shot. Besides, I’d watched the worn-out girls at school who had kids. Nothing aged a girl faster than drooling, pooping, screaming babies.
Rico wanted kids, lots of them. Maybe because he didn’t know who his father was. Sometimes I caught him studying the men who sat outside Tulley’s, as if he were trying to find his features in theirs.
I touched the scar on his chin. I loved the complexity of his face, the unique color of his eyes, a pale brown, almost golden, that matched the color of his skin. I liked the curious way his nose dipped at the end, the double rows of lashes, thick eyebrows, and his lush, black curls.
He pulled me closer and tried to kiss me, his lips soft on mine.
“Satch is right, you know.” I laughed, twirling away from him. “You are crazy.”
“For wanting you?” he asked, catching me again.
“I know you, Rico—you ran out in front of the Lobos’ car and made yourself a target—”
“I don’t make myself a target,” he said, his fingers pushing my hair away from my eyes. “They’re always after me.”
“You’re taking stupid risks.”
“No risk involved. I knew I wouldn’t die. The night’s not pretty enough for dying.” He pressed a finger over my mouth to stop my words. “Someday you’re going to find out how selfish I’ve been, and then, you’re going to hate me.”
“I could never hate you,” I said.
“We’ll see.” He kissed my forehead. “I’ll catch you tomorrow at school.” His silver Saint Rita’s medal glinted on its chain as he raced away.
I went back to the house and lifted my hammer off the step. Though I didn’t know who had been on my porch trying to break in, an odd apprehension stayed with me. I hurried inside, locked and bolted the door, and slept with the attic ladder down in case I needed a quick getaway. The hammer lay cradled under the covers, against me, my blisters raw and stinging.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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3
The next morning, after bandaging my blisters, I squeezed into my tennis shoes and clomped down the stairs. On the bottom step, I grabbed the newel post, unable to ignore my anxiety as I glanced out the window. My grandmother stood outside, the leaves on her scrawny rosebushes fluttering around her. Shadows deepened the hollows under her cheekbones and eyes, the contours sharp against the bright sunlight that fell on her forehead. The robe that had fit her at Christmas flapped around her, engulfing her frame. She clipped a rose, her arm snagging on thorns and, moments later, stepped inside, examining the blood on her thorn-bitten wrist.
“You look tired,” I said. Ready to die. The thought came unbidden as I embraced her.
“I’m not tired.” She kissed my cheek, her lips cracked and rough. “A blessed morning like this one gives me strength.” She limped away, her gray hair flattened from the scrub cap she wore at the hospital, where she cleaned the floors.
I followed her into the kitchen. An open bottle of aspirin sat on the table, next to her Bible. The plastic pan she used to soak her feet drained in the sink.
She set the rose in a vase and, after washing her hands, counted out her pills and began breaking them in half to make her prescriptions last longer.
“Grandma, you’re losing too much weight.”
“No, I’m not.” She smiled at me and patted her sunken belly, then saw my face and said, “Maybe a little, but it can’t be helped. I have to push myself to get all my rooms mopped.”
I started to shake cornflakes into a bowl and paused. “What did you eat at work?”
She waved a hand. “I didn’t have time to take a break, even though I had to put it on the log that I did.”
I left the cereal for her and tore open a packet of sugar. “I wish you didn’t have to work.”
“I’m thankful I have a job. You should be grateful that I have one, too. Things could be worse.”
“There must be enough for us to live on with your social security and the government checks you get for me.” I poured the sugar into my mouth.
“The checks I get for you go straight into savings so you can go to college.” She snapped another pill in half. “All your teachers say you’re smart.”
“That was before,” I argued. Before I’d watched Gabriella die. After her death, I couldn’t study. Words had jumped around the page, impossible to read. My English teacher had sent me to the school grief counselor, who had just made me angrier. Homework no longer made sense. What did grades matter if I wasn’t going to live long enough to graduate from high school?
My grandmother’s voice pulled me back to the kitchen. She was still talking about what a good student I was. “Even your test scores show you’re—”
“Grandma, I’m being shot at, out there,” I said, sugar spitting off my tongue. “I have to run and duck to keep from being murdered and you want me to think about school? One day I’m not going to run fast enough, and then you’ll have worked yourself to the bone for nothing. You better stop dreaming about college and use that money for food.”
“Where’s your faith?” She frowned and put her hands to her temples. “Maybe you should go to church with me instead of loafing with your friends on Sundays.”
“Why? Bullets kill good people, too. You and I know that’s a fact.” I regretted my words the moment I saw the look in her eyes. I had meant Gabriella, but she was thinking about my dad.
“Your father was a hero.”
“I know.” I looked at his pictures, the yellowed, brittle newspaper clippings taped to the wall. His medals, wrapped in velvet, sat in my closet next to the box that held his gun. His death had happened far away, in Afghanistan. I had seen a casket, not his body. Only bits and pieces of him had come home. I still daydreamed that the government had made a mistake and my father would walk through the front door. No fantasy could bring Gabriella back.
“God won’t curse me twice,” my grandmother muttered. “I have faith that He only gives us what we can carry.” She left the kitchen without taking her medicine.
I trailed after her. “Maybe we
could figure out something so you wouldn’t have to work as many hours. Can’t we at least try?”
“You worry about school. I’ll take care of the rest.” She gripped the banister and, without giving me a kiss, or even a smile, started up the stairs.
When her bedroom fan switched on, misery settled over me. The conversation had ended. She was going to bed. As a day sleeper, she used the drone from the fan to block outside noise so she could sleep uninterrupted.
In the dust on the coffee table, I wrote “I love you” in case I didn’t come back, then left for school, burdened with her unhappiness on top of my own guilt. I had only known my grandmother to stop smiling once before. Normally talkative, she had gone silent, except for occasionally speaking in a muffled voice to someone on the phone. I hadn’t understood what I’d done to upset her.
Weeks later, when we had walked into the courtroom, I had feared she was relinquishing me for adoption until I saw the problem: my incredibly beautiful mother, who opened her arms, waiting for me to run to her. The gesture was for the judge, not me. She had never cuddled me. No one had told me that she had been released from her court-ordered rehab, again.
After casting shy, seductive glances at the bailiff and flirting with my grandmother’s lawyer, my mother had directed her sultry gaze at the judge, telling him how much she had missed me. She’d practically begged him to let me live with her. She’d wanted full custody.
I hadn’t needed to be an adult to know that she had only wanted the monthly checks that came with me. Fortunately, she hadn’t been able to charm the judge the way she had controlled other men.
My grandmother had smiled again after the hearing, even when she’d told me that she had to find a job. She’d taken a loan against the house in order to pay the lawyer, and the monthly mortgage payment was now more than her social security check brought in.