by Ws Greer
“Move now,” I tell the manager. As she obliges, I press my gun into her neck as she pops open the cash register first, rapidly removing the bills and shoving them into the bag. Once the register is empty, she drops to her knees and opens the black safe underneath with a few spins on a combination lock. The black door to the safe swings open, and I’m greeted by the sight of stacks on top of stacks of cash. I can hardly believe my eyes. Just like we thought, this is a jackpot, but there’s no time to stare in shock, because the clock is ticking. I hand the manager my duffel bag and she stuffs all of the money inside. My heart pounds with elation as I watch the bag fill up with what I know is more money than we’ve ever taken before, and just as she’s finishing up, I hear Nix’s watch start chiming.
“Game time!” Nix shouts as he zips up his duffel bag, hops over the glass counter, and starts for the door.
Following his lead, I zip up my bag, force the manager back into the corner with the rest of the group, and start for the door. But just as I’m about to dart out onto the street, my new cell phone chimes in my pocket, and I know it’s Reina.
“Whoa. Hey, wait,” I yell to Nix, who’s beyond eager to leave.
“What the hell? We don’t have time for this!” he retorts loudly.
Reina: Cop’s about to walk in front of the building. Stay in if you can. I got this.
I read the text and my eyes bulge.
“Do not open that door,” I say to Nix. Hearing the tone in my voice, he pauses.
It feels like a century goes by, and Nix is standing at the door with his hand on the glass, ready to run for it, but I shake my head, telling him to wait. We have to trust Reina. While we wait, I turn around and aim my gun at the group still cowering in the corner until my phone chimes again.
Reina: We need to leave. Now.
“Alright, let’s go,” I tell Nix, and the two of us dart out of the door. With no one on the sidewalk to block us, we jump into the backseat of the Ford Focus and slide down so anyone who may drive or walk by won’t see us as we start to remove our masks.
“What the hell happened?” Nix asks as Reina steps on the gas and we drive away, leaving Julia with a lot less jewels that she had before we arrived. Both of us look out the back window to see if we’re being followed, but there’s nothing at the moment.
“Cop,” Reina replies to our surprise. “He was walking towards the building. I didn’t want you guys to come out and run right into him, so I went and distracted him. Gave him some bullshit story about being pickpocketed and he went chasing after some invisible suspects.”
I let out a loud laugh as I realize Reina saved us from the cops.
“Nice work, Reina. We were about to come out. Your text saved our asses,” I tell her, looking at Nix to let him know to never doubt Reina again. “Ah yes! Seeing as how we just took who-knows-how-much money from Julia’s, and Reina has become our savior, I think we can all rest comfortably. Reina Christ, in the flesh!”
Nix lets out a laugh and finally puts his guard down as we drive back to Strawberry Mansion with tons of money from the register and safe, and what has to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewelry. We know we’ll have to be careful with how we spend the money and how we unload the jewelry, but we’ve got that under control. Nix will take care of all that. We just hit the jackpot for real. No more Ramen noodles for me! I’m a king now! King Solomon! Oh that really does have a ring to it!
Once we get back to Strawberry Mansion, we dump the car right back where we found it—I even try to stuff the wires from the underside of the steering column back into their place so the owner isn’t the wiser—and walk as quickly as we can back to drop Nix off. I tell him I’ll meet up with him later to go over everything, and Reina and I take the duffel bags and head towards my house, where our take will be stored until I divide it up between Nix and me.
“I still can’t believe we did that,” Reina says in nearly a whisper as we make it to my house and approach the exterior door leading to my room in the basement. The sight of my house usually fills me with dread, but it’s our safe haven today. “I mean, I know it wasn’t your first time, but . . .”
I smile while the look of joy takes control of her face and body language. “Well you did good for your first time. Quick thinking. I like that.”
“First time?” she inquires. “You think I’ll do it again?”
“You would if I needed you to,” I reply as I open the door and step into my room. I shove the duffel bags into my wall locker and cover them with blankets so Whitney doesn’t find them, then I turn around and step towards Reina, who’s still standing outside of the doorway. “You would if I asked you. Wouldn’t you?”
Reina seems to know that her answer means everything to me, even though she knows I’m already aware of what she’s going to say. It’s about more than just knowing. She has to say it. I need to hear it. Both of us need to feel it.
“Yes. I would,” she replies with total confidence. She even straightens out her posture like she’s proud of it. She’s proud to do dirt with me. Proud to be my criminal accomplice as long as it’s me she’s committing crimes with. And she is just that—a criminal. Just like me.
The side of my mouth lifts into a grin, then I reach into my pocket and hand something to her.
“Take this,” I tell her.
Reina grabs the gold necklace and looks it over with shock on her face. The pendant hangs from the chain and drops down in a curved line, coming back up and stopping at the halfway mark of the other line. In the middle of the curved gold rests a single reddish-orange diamond, and she stares at it like she’s realizing right then and there that it means the world to her. Her reaction makes me smile even wider. She likes it. I like that she likes it.
Suddenly, Reina stops paying attention to the chain and takes two steps towards me. She gets up on her toes and presses her lips against mine. A new feeling explodes to life within me as we kiss for the very first time after nearly three months of knowing each other. I don’t know what comes over me, but when she pulls her mouth away from mine, something in me won’t allow us to stay apart. It’s something I’ve never felt before, and it’s like all the fighting that was happening within me about her has finally stopped. The battle is over. Reina has won. There’s no going back now. She’s mine.
While she waits for me to respond, I step over the threshold and push my mouth against hers. The passion of it all is too strong to control and I end up pushing her backwards until we hit the wall of my neighbor’s house behind her. We don’t dare stop. Our tongues dance together and my hands come up to her face as this new feeling of heat courses through me and I feel like I’ll die if I stop kissing her. I feel like an animal pounding against its cage and I’m losing all control. Something primal is being born within me and I can’t fight it off, even as my hand moves to her neck and grips it tightly. I feel myself about to lose control completely and I have to force myself to end it.
When we part, both of us are breathing heavily. I look at her and I see her differently than ever before. After all this time of getting to know each other, and wondering if this thing between us was real, things are stitching together now. My feelings towards Reina are something I can’t explain. All I know is that she’s mine, and that means more to me than anything else.
“Thank you,” she says, still panting. “For the necklace.”
I smile and chuckle as she breathes and tries to steady herself. “Let’s get going,”
TIME WAITS FOR no one. You must be ready for it, or it’ll leave you in the dust. It’s like a restless, junkie mother who’s getting ready to leave the house, and if you’re too slow coming up the stairs from your room, she’ll leave you behind, standing there on the crumbling front porch for being a few steps behind her. So after a while, you learn to be ready before she is. You have to stay ahead of her at all times so you don’t get left behind. That’s how I treat them both now: my mother and time. I hate them both, but with practice, I’ve learned to be a
step ahead of them.
I’m not being left behind by time now. I’ve been prepared and a step ahead for the past three months since the Julia’s Jewels robbery. It’s been the best three months of my life, because I’ve changed everything. I took a life that was complete trash and molded it into something I’m proud to have built with the only two people I care about in this litterbox-filled-with-shit world.
I’m basically rich now. Julia’s brought Nix and I more wealth than either of us thought possible for lowlifes like us. We came out of the high-end store with two duffel bags, one filled with money from the register and safe, and the other filled with jewelry. In the end, I counted it out to be fifty-three-thousand dollars in cash, and roughly eighty-thousand in jewelry. Jackpot! Nix and I split everything sixty-forty, which is how he and I do business since I’m the mastermind behind all of this, and neither of us could be happier with how things have turned out. As we watched the report on TV from my room in the basement, we were filled with excitement as the reporter went on and on about how all this cash and jewelry was taken, but the cops didn’t have any suspects yet. The surveillance video played on TV a few times, but even as we watched, Nix and I could barely tell it was us. After a couple of days of useless, fruitless questioning and investigating, the police were getting nowhere, and the reports started dying off. We were in the clear with more to our names than ever!
We’re kings in this crappy neighborhood now, and people are starting to recognize it. No one knows for sure what happened in the places we’ve hit, but after a while, people from the hood catch on. When you’re from where we’re from, you don’t need a bachelor’s degree to be a genius in street smarts. Poor people in the hood know what’s going on in the hood, at least enough to know who and who not to mess with. Nix and I make that list of who not to mess with. People have their suspicions, but just like the cops, they don’t know anything and they’ve got no evidence to prove any suspicions they do have. But suspicion is all we need in Strawberry Mansion. Suspicion is enough to strike fear in people, and the look of fear on people’s faces has become one of my most cherished sights in this world. I love seeing it spread across their faces as Nix and I walk through our neighborhood, and it’s even sweeter when I see it as we walk through neighborhoods that aren’t ours. Everyone is starting to know that he and I are different. Even if they’re not sure how, they know we’re different in a way that makes them fearful. One day at a time, one step at a time, one robbery at a time—we’re taking over.
The hardest part has been trying to make sure that suspicions don’t become evidence. People can think what they want, but they can’t ever know for sure. That’s how you get robbed in a place like this. That’s how you wind up dead. That’s also how your mother could end up stealing every dime you’ve made.
It’s been interesting hiding all of this from Whitney, who hasn’t changed a bit. She’s still shooting that crap up her veins and passing out in the middle of the living room in a puddle of piss. Two weeks ago, she passed out right in front of the door to my room. I heard her fall, and I tried to open my door to see what was going on, but her stupid body was blocking it and I had to push her out of the way with the door. Once I realized she wasn’t dead, I left her lying there in nothing but panties and a tank top as I walked out of the house, and reminded myself that I could never let her find out about the money. She doesn’t deserve to have any of it.
I keep things subtle for the sake of keeping my money hidden, but I’ve also spent a little. I mean come on, what kind of king would I be if didn’t splurge a bit? I decided to get my first tattoo, with the idea that I would just tell Whitney I got it from a friend, although it looks much too fancy and expensive for a friend to have done it. I figured Whitney’s brain cells are too fried to ever catch on. Since my goal is to become the king of the criminal underworld, I got a gold, flame-covered crown tattooed on my left forearm. It’s big, and it’s the first of many tattoos that’ll cover most of my skin by the time I’m done. After I got it, I loved the look on Reina’s face as she looked at it for the first time. She smiled and told me how sexy and badass it was, which was exactly the reaction I’d hoped for.
That leads me to Reina. My Reina. She and I have been getting closer and closer over these past few months. We’ve always had this spark between us, and that spark has become a flame neither of us can control ever since that kiss after Julia’s Jewels. I’ve always been quiet about how I feel about Reina, but deep down I know she’s special to me. Scratch that. She’s everything to me. We’ve spent so many weekends together here in Strawberry Mansion that I’m getting to the point now that I can barely stand it when she can’t make it down to see me. I know she has some annoying parents to placate, but I hate it when they get in the way and tell her she has to stay in. These bastards even have a nanny or some crap come keep an eye on her sometimes. Like, are you kidding me? Reina is fifteen years old now, and she doesn’t need a damn babysitter. All she needs is me, but her parents would never see it that way.
In all honestly, I don’t even think Reina’s parents know about me. From what Reina tells me, they’re too horrible to ever find out, because they wouldn’t be happy with their little “innocent” baby girl hanging out with the likes of me. What a joke! Reina isn’t a baby, she damn sure isn’t innocent, and she belongs more to me than she does to them. She belongs with me. She belongs in this environment with me. But that’s the last thing little weak, uppity pricks like them want to hear—that their little girl is a woman who’s capable of taking care of herself and old enough to make her own decisions. They don’t want to know that she’s too much for them, and just enough for me. Yeah, I bet their poor little heads would explode if they knew about me, so I let Reina handle them however she needs to. I couldn’t care less about her parents. All I care about is her.
Reina is the perfect ride or die chick. These past few months have proven that to be true. I watched her go off on a group of girls much older than us as we walked through the mall, because she said they were staring at me a little too strongly. She asked what the hell they were looking at and ran straight over to the tallest one of the group and pushed her face backwards like it was nothing. She was ready to square up with any one of the other three girls in the group after the tall one looked at her like she was insane. After the four of them acted like they were going to try to gang up on her, I intervened and shut that down by drawing my favorite box cutter from my pocket. They backed off, and Reina and I went on our merry way, hand in hand. I told her she was the sexiest version of crazy I’d ever seen, and she reminded me that if a group of guys had looked at her that way, I would’ve beat the hell out of every single one of them. I couldn’t argue with her there.
In fact, I had my own little situation about a month later, when someone had the nerve to ask me if I had any drugs on me. Now, I assumed the reason this idiot asked me that was because I was wearing black Timberland boots, brand new gray denim jeans, and a black and gray leather jacket. I figured he assumed I was a drug dealer because of how nice my clothes were, because that’s usually how it goes in my neighborhood. However, things turned for the worse—or better—when I told him I don’t mess with drugs, and I hate people who do. He decided to lose his cool and mention the fact that I’m related to one of the most known drug addicts in Strawberry Mansion—my mother. He even called her a junkie whore. I’m not exactly sure how he ended up on the ground, but once he was down there, I decided to beat him to a bloody pulp with my bare hands. It wasn’t until I couldn’t see the skin on his face anymore because it was so covered with blood that I realized I’d let this interrupt my walk with Reina. I wiped off the blood that coated my hands on his shirt and left him there, unmoving. The guy probably needed reconstructive surgery on his face for all I know, but I didn’t wait around to find out. Reina and I walked away like nothing ever happened. No big deal.
We’ve become the best of friends, Reina and me. I’m not even afraid to call her that either. It is what it is
. I care about her, and these weekends together have been the thing I look forward to the most. We kiss, we hang out in my room, we walk the streets like we own them, we shop like there’s no tomorrow, and we laugh our asses off all day. What more do I need? Reina is the positive in my life, because everything else is negative. I’ve turned things around, sure, but I still live in Strawberry Mansion. My mother is still Whitney King, the well-known “junkie whore.” My horrific past is still my horrific past, and I’m still not a normal guy because of all of those things. But Reina is the positive in my life, and I’m the positive in hers. When we’re together, I often forget she has a horrible life on her side of those train tracks as well. She needs me just as much as I need her. Even Nix says we’re crazy together, but we’re a perfect match, and he’s exactly right. We’re Bonnie and Clyde. We’re perfect together. She’s perfect. She’s mine. Which is why I have a bit of a problem.
A few weeks back, Reina and I were hanging out at a park in Philly. I can’t remember what led to the conversation exactly—something about her mother being a bitch again—but I’ll never forget the moment she turned around and looked at me. Her ice-blue eyes locked onto mine and grabbed my soul, begging me not to get upset with what she was about to say, and from the look on her face, I knew I was going to struggle with that.
“So I’ve gotta tell you something,” she said as she sat up and faced me, adjusting her black sweater and flipping her flowing blonde hair over her shoulder. “I need you stay calm about it, though.”
I smiled at her pleading face as I sat up and braced myself for the bomb about to be delivered.
“I’ll do my best, baby,” I replied.
“Prom is coming up.”
I immediately felt heat manifest in my stomach and climb out of the pores of my skin. My face tightened, but I didn’t respond. I knew where this was going.