After that, the route they’d always followed cut through a small dingy neighborhood where she’d always felt a little concerned. The path went through a narrow, shady alley that always seemed deserted. Roni wondered whether she could go some other way, but she’d never taken another path. She thought to herself that the only thing worse than going down the dingy alley that frightened her would be turning down an even dirtier, shadier, back street and finding that it came to a dead end.
As she turned the corner, she glanced back to her left, hoping to see Hax, but she didn’t. She didn’t really know why she hoped to see Hax. Nick was bigger and stronger than either of them. Or both of them put together. Even if Nick and Hax were the same size it’d be hard to imagine her awkward brother winning a fight against an athletic guy like Nick. Roni’d be better off fighting Nick herself.
Roni glanced back as she turned into the alley. Nick was getting closer!
She stepped up her pace again, just short of breaking into a run. Roni told herself she should stop and stand her ground, but at the thought of it a sick, dead feeling crept over her limbs like she got in nightmares. Instead of stopping, she kept walking, now at a tempo so high she thought it might be sucking more energy than if she actually started running.
She glanced back.
He was right there, reaching out!
Roni turned to run, but found herself slammed up against one of the little garages that lined the alley. “Roni, where are you going in such a hurry?” Nick said, not even sounding a little short of breath.
“Home!” Roni said with a gasp. “They need me.” She sucked in a deep breath, feeling a need to explain herself. “My dad expects me to work in the store… right after school.” These were all things she’d told Nick in the past. But hopefully he’d be reminded of the possibility that if she didn’t show up her family would come looking for her.
In her heart, Roni knew that if she were late, the only thing her father would do would be to curse her lack of discipline. He’d start planning a tirade about her failure to do her share. He wouldn’t think to come looking—not for hours.
Nick forced his body against Roni’s, pinning her uncomfortably to the wall of the little garage. “But you’ve been walking so fast. They won’t expect you for a while yet, right?” He didn’t wait for her answer, just said, “So we can get to know each other a little better, right?” His lips approached hers.
She turned her head violently to the side.
Undeterred, he kissed her neck. She felt something warm and wet. He’s licking me! Roni thought, aghast. “No,” she said twisting and forcing a hand between his chest and hers, “No, my father’s always angry if I’m late.”
She tried to use her forearm to lever Nick away from her chest, but to her horror Nick responded by forcing his lower body even harder against her. Then he reached up and grabbed her wrist, pulling her arm out from between their bodies. This seemed to require little effort on Nick’s part. He said, “Surely a few minutes won’t make any difference.” He pulled her arm around himself in a grotesque parody of a hug.
Roni had never felt so helpless in her life. She’d had dreams like this. Dreams in which her body seemed practically paralyzed as she fought against some monster, but she’d never felt that way in real life before. She tried to pull up a leg and, twisting, to force the leg between them, but Nick deflected it and forced his knee between her thighs instead. He went back to kissing her neck. She gasped out, “No! He’ll be angry. And,” she said with sudden hope, “I don’t want to have to tell him what kept me.”
She jerked her head aside in disbelieving revulsion when Nick tried to put his tongue in her ear. He chuckled unpleasantly, “I wouldn’t worry about it. Your father and mine, they have a… working relationship, you know?”
Roni didn’t know, and she didn’t want to know. Ravinder might be a tyrant and he might yell and scream at her, but somehow those things didn’t seem nearly as bad as the mere possibility that he might have something to do with Nick’s father. “No!” She said, getting a hand free and trying to push his face away from hers.
She was desperately trying to think of something else she could say to deter Nick when he was suddenly knocked off of her. Wide-eyed, Roni scuttled away while trying to come to grips with the sight of her younger brother on top of Nick, flailing furiously, though ineffectively, at the bigger boy with both fists.
Hax might be small and clumsy, but he was frenzied. Roni wanted to run but held back out of a sense of duty. Hax’s doing what he can to help me; I should be fighting beside him.
But, maybe if I were gone, there’d be nothing to fight about? Torn with indecision, she backed away a little further. Suddenly her chance to run was gone. Nick threw Hax off, then rose to a knee and punched the younger boy in the stomach.
Sick at herself and embarrassed at her own paralysis, Roni slowly sank to the ground by the fence she was leaning on, trying to make herself small and unnoticed. I should have either helped Hax or run away. Standing there and watching had to be the stupidest of all possibilities. Even now she should be running, but her legs were trembling and she didn’t think they’d hold her up.
Nick was looking around. He muttered, “Where’d the little bitch go?” He swept the area with his eyes but didn’t seem to see her.
It was as if she wasn’t crouching there in plain sight. She’d tried to make herself small but felt amazed that he could miss her.
Nick stood and brushed himself off, then walked past Roni to peer around the next corner as if he thought she might have gone on. He turned and walked back, again walking right past her as if she wasn’t there. Nick walked up to Hax who heaved and made an odd moan.
Suddenly Roni realized Hax had had the breath knocked out of him and was gasping like people typically did while trying to suck in some air. She wanted to go to her brother but, if Nick couldn’t see her where she was for some reason, she really didn’t want to bring herself to his attention.
Dispelling the notion that Nick might not know who her brother was, Nick planted a vicious kick in Hax’s side and said, “Hey creep, this is between me and your sister. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay the hell out of it.” With that he stalked down to the end of the alley and, glancing both ways, disappeared.
Roni crawled tremulously over to her brother. Wondering why she felt too weak to stand, she leaned closer and whispered, “Hax, are you okay?”
Hax drew another of his gasping breaths and, as he expelled it, he seemed to say something though Roni couldn’t understand him. She leaned closer yet, “What?”
This time he rasped a little louder, “I’ve felt better.”
Roni stifled a laugh. Trust her brother to make light of having had the crap beaten out of him. Of course, he had a lot of experience with beatings from Nick’s jerky little brother. “I’m so sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“I should have run.”
“Or done your thing… where you disappear.”
Roni frowned in confusion, “What?”
“You know.” He took another breath, “How you hide so no one can find you.”
Roni said, “What?” but already she remembered a couple of occasions in the past where she’d hidden successfully behind objects she’d thought were too small to conceal her. Also, a time or two when she’d done something really embarrassing, but no one had seemed to notice.
Hax rolled to his hands and knees but didn’t stand. He seemed to be breathing better in that position. “Come on,” he said with a tone of disbelief. “You were always the world’s greatest hide-and-seeker and, just now you did it again. You disappear, then suddenly you’re back.” He frowned, “How do you hide so well?”
“We’d better get home,” Roni said, grabbing Hax by the arm and tugging him to his feet.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to answer his question.
She didn’t know the answer.
As they walked home, Hax started asking Roni abou
t how she hid again. At first she ignored him; then she shook her head and told him to drop it. Finally, in exasperation, she turned on him, “I don’t know! Okay? I don’t know how I do it; I’m just good at hiding… And I’m sorry I hid today. I should have helped you with…”
This time Hax shook his head. “No, you did exactly the right thing. Without you there, there was no reason for him to keep pounding on me.” Hax paused, then said, “But what’re you going to do next time? He’s not going to go away, you know?”
That question dragged Roni’s mind back to the stomach churning problem of the future. Even before Hax had said it, she’d known Nick wasn’t going to go away. She stumbled once, then just kept walking, her head down.
Hax reached out and touched her on the arm, “Roni? What are you going to do?” When she didn’t say anything, he said, “Shouldn’t we call the police?”
Roni shook her head miserably, “No, they wouldn’t do anything. There’s no evidence. Besides, what could they do? Follow me around?”
“We’ve got to do something. He’s just going to keep…”Hax broke off, evidently not wanting to say just exactly what he thought Nick had been doing. When Roni didn’t respond, Hax said, “You know, he’s Vito’s brother. I know what Vito’s like. Being a jerk runs in their family.”
Roni gave a spasmodic nod but just kept walking. When Hax asked her again what she was going to do, she stopped and turned angrily on him, “I don’t know! I don’t know what to do and you asking me over and over again isn’t going to help me figure it out.” She wiped at her eyes, suddenly embarrassed that she was crying in front of her little brother.
To her amazement, Hax stepped forward and gave her an awkward hug. As brother and sister they were rarely even friendly, though they had been when they were little. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time they’d touched each other, except when one of them was trying to be annoying. They didn’t hit each other like some of her friends’ siblings did, but they never displayed affection either.
As Hax hugged her, she became aware of how small he was. He hadn’t reached his growth spurt and she realized that he was probably at that age where the girls in his class were taller than he was. It struck her just how amazing it was that he’d attacked Nick, despite Nick’s bigger size. Nick was substantially bulkier than Roni, and she was much bigger than Hax.
She remembered kicking Vito off of Hax during the attack several years ago. She’d done it because… she wasn’t sure exactly. She guessed it was because Hax was her brother and she felt like she was supposed to protect him. Besides, she was a lot bigger than Vito then, so there didn’t seem to be any danger for Roni. For Hax to attack Nick though, that took real courage. Hax had to know he couldn’t possibly win. He’d done it, knowing he was going to get hurt. Hax hadn’t just paid Roni back for her meager help with Vito in the past; he’d gone all in despite knowing he was going to lose.
Fresh tears formed in Roni’s eyes at the thought that her brother, who she usually thought of as such an annoying pest, loved her enough to do what he’d done. Hax relaxed his graceless hug and stepped back. Concern blossomed in his eyes when he saw her new tears. After a moment, not recognizing the real source of her dismay, he said, “Don’t worry; just hide from him. He can’t hurt you if he can’t find you.”
Roni said, “What if there’s no place to hide?” Even as she said it, her mind was going back to the sensation she’d just had that she was in plain view when Nick hadn’t been able to find her.
“There wasn’t any place to hide back there!” Hax reminded her, jerking a thumb back toward the site of the attack, astonishment in his voice as if he couldn’t believe she was so dense. “Do whatever you do.” He shook his head, “You’ve got to tell me how you do that.”
“I said I don’t know,” Roni said, so focused on thinking that she needed to figure it out that she didn’t realize she’d inadvertently admitted she could hide.
Then they were home. Roni derailed any further questions by saying, “Dad’s going to want my help,” and turning toward the front of the store.
As usual recently, Ravinder had Roni working on the store’s books. Actually, he had her do any of the work that required using the computer. She liked computers and was facile with them while Ravinder despised them. When he did undertake something on one of the computers it usually ended with a lot of swearing, followed by a demand that Roni figure out what was wrong with the machine.
Much of what she did in solving the problem usually involved undoing whatever her father had done. There wasn’t ever anything wrong with the computer itself.
In Roni’s opinion, the software Ravinder had purchased to handle inventory and accounting for the store was poorly designed. The introductory paragraphs in the manual claimed that their software made everything easy. Roni thought that perhaps it was easier than keeping books and tracking inventory with pencil, paper, and abacus, but many things in the program’s interface were much more difficult than they had to be.
At first she’d spent time going through the documentation for the software trying to figure out how to improve her ability to work with it, certain that the programmers had built it with better methodology and she just hadn’t found it. Eventually she’d decided that they’d assembled the program without ever really understanding what the end-user would be trying to do with it. She thought they should have hired some people who worked in small commercial establishments to give them feedback. Or they should’ve done more beta testing and listened harder to the complaints.
When she’d told Ravinder that she thought the software was badly written he’d accused her of not learning how to use it. This despite the fact that he struggled futilely to use it himself. Roni wanted him to buy a better program, but it quickly became obvious that wasn’t going to happen. Eventually she realized that just buying the software had represented a substantial financial outlay for their small business.
Even if it had been a bad choice, they were stuck with it.
After that, Roni’s tactic had become one of searching online for workarounds. A lot of other people around the world were unhappy with the software and had posted various workarounds for its clumsy interface.
Roni fondly remembered the first time she’d found a post that suggested hacking the program rather than working around its inefficiencies. Elated when the program mod had worked and excited to realize that she just seemed to “get” how the program coding functioned, she’d begun spending much of her free time learning about programming.
She’d joined a club at school and begun hanging out with other kids who were interested in computers. Unfortunately, a lot of those kids just wanted to play games, but Roni did find a small group who were actually interested in how computers worked. They’d become her best friends at school and constantly challenged one another. However, Roni’d soon learned that none of them could see at a glance how a program worked like she instinctively could. She often pretended to struggle like they did just to keep them as friends.
However, tonight she was excited to see how a new modification of the program had worked. She frowned. “Dad?” she called out. “What’s this ‘Insurance’ debit from yesterday?” Her new programming had flagged it because it lacked a payee. Their usual quarterly insurance payments went to Regent’s Insurance. Roni said, “Is Regent’s assessing some kind of additional charge?”
Ravinder leaned around the corner into the little room where Roni worked. He looked thunderous. “Just forget about that one!”
“But I’ve got to enter a payee,” she said plaintively, then thought to herself that, the way her father looked, she should have just left the payee blank.
To her surprise, though her father still looked angry, he also appeared uncertain. He chewed his lip as if he didn’t know what to say or do and she realized he wasn’t sure how to respond to her question. Abruptly he said, “Charge it to ‘Castano and Co.’” then went back around the corner.
Roni started to ask what
kind of insurance Castano provided, but seeing the unhappy yet angry look on her father’s face she let the question die.
Then the fact that Nick’s last name was Castano punched her in the gut.
With a sick sensation she remembered Nick’s words, “Your father and mine, they have a… working relationship, you know?”
***
That evening, as Hax set the dinner table, he found his mother watching him with narrowed eyes. He’d been bent over and moving a little slowly because his stomach still hurt where Nick had punched him. He considered telling her he wasn’t feeling well, but he was hungry. If he claimed he was sick she wouldn’t expect him to eat dinner.
Just then Ravinder and Roni came in. Tansey glanced at her husband, “Ravinder, your son’s been in a fight.”
Hax glanced at Roni’s wide eyes, then at his father. Ravinder was glaring at him suspiciously. “Is this true?”
Hax wanted to lie, but in his experience he frequently got caught and the punishment was much worse. He jerked an embarrassed nod.
Between gritted teeth Ravinder ground out, “What were you fighting about?”
“He was hurting… a friend of mine. I tried to help.”
This seemed to reduce Ravinder’s anger, but his eyes searched Hax’s face. He turned to Tansey, “How did you know he’d been in a fight? His face isn’t bruised or scraped.”
“The way he’s moving.” She turned to Hax, “You got hit in the stomach, right?”
Hax nodded.
“Was the guy bigger than you and your friend?” Ravinder asked.
Hax nodded again.
“Well, it’s important to help your friends.” Ravinder looked thoughtful, “But you shouldn’t be getting in fights. Just stay away from people like that.”
What if they come after you? Hax thought, but didn’t say.
Tansey said, “Hax’s still clumsy. We should send him to some self-defense classes.”
Dismissively, Ravinder said, “We haven’t got money to waste on that.”
The Girl They Couldn’t See (Blind Spot #1) (Blind Spot Series) Page 2