ASHES (Ignite Book 3)

by R. J. Lewis

  Two

  Liv

  …7 years old…

  I rattled the Styrofoam cup every second of every minute. There were only a few quarters in it. I was having a slow day and stressing about it. The kids in the tunnel depended on me to bring in the most coin. It was hard enough most people seemed to think I was scamming them, that I wasn’t a child in need of money.

  I was sitting there, back against the brick wall of a café, wearing an oversized sweater with holes the size of a man’s fist in random places. To complete the homeless look, I had a fly buzzing around, and I probably smelled funny. Bathing in public washrooms had become my norm, but Naynay liked it better if I smelled bad. Said it made my story more “authentic.”

  Naynay was kind of my mom now. She said to call her that and to forget my first one, but I didn’t. She wasn’t my mom. In my head, my mom was still in that apartment sleeping. It was the only way I could function. I didn’t need to know what death was. I was traumatized enough of my current situation.

  When mean man disappeared my mom, he said she didn’t exist anymore, and neither did I. “Forget your name and who you are. You ever tell anyone about me, or about your mom, I’ll come after you. I’m the Bogeyman, little girl.”

  Then he took me to a dark place. A place I’d called home for the last year. It looked like an abandoned tunnel and people were living inside it in tents. There was graffiti on the walls you could only see in the early morning when the sun was shining in. I slept in Naynay’s tent with her wrapped in a thick blanket. She smelled like stale cigarettes and she coughed until she dry-heaved almost every few minutes. It made sleeping a nightmare. But it was all I was beginning to know about life, including begging.

  Bogeyman went away for a while, but not for long. He came around every few weeks to speak with the women in the tunnel. Sometimes he yelled at them. Then he’d have a word with Naynay, and I’d be in the tent, huddled under the blankets, terrified he’d barge in there. Thankfully he didn’t, but even in the tent I was paranoid he was staring through the light screen at me. In my mind, he was always there, watching me.

  I wasn’t the only kid in the tunnel. There were four others a little older than me. We all begged, but never at the same time. Naynay sent us on shifts. I took the morning rush, and typically averaged around twenty dollars over four hours. I was the big money maker, apparently. I was the “cutest”, she’d said. I never begged in the same spots, and if I saw a police car, I had to return to the tunnel immediately. But I never saw a police car. Naynay said not even the devil came to these parts.

  The tunnel was next door to the Riptide housing estate. It was made up of six tall, red-bricked buildings. They were all sixteen floors high, housed hundreds more than allowed and was named around Winthrop as the biggest slum in the city. From the sky, the buildings were so close to one another, they formed the shape of an O. So, it didn’t take an Einstein to wonder why the gangs around there tattooed an “O” somewhere on their bodies, most commonly their faces or arms. It was a message. A statement, like, “I’m from the O, so eff off.”

  Bogeyman had an O on his face. Right under his eye.

  When I didn’t beg, I was usually collecting cans and plastic bottles into garbage bags. Naynay would take it to a recycling place and come back with some money. And when I wasn’t doing either of those, I was playing with the nameless children, or taking care of two of the little ones. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was drawing on the tunnel walls with a box of chalk that had probably been around a century judging by the state of them. I drew pictures of Mom and me, pictures of the apartment, or the window overlooking the streets, of people waving at me.

  Nobody waved at me here.

  I was invisible.

  Lonely.

  And I missed my mother so much, it made me want to cry. But I never cried. Bogeyman might find out, and maybe he’d come back for me if he did and disappear me too.

  My breaths came harder as I thought about her. I had made a measly amount of money. Just three quarters, and even though I didn’t know that amount, it was nothing like it was yesterday. I should have been putting on my charming show and singing some song to draw the grownups in, but I just sat there, cold and sad, staring into the Styrofoam cup in a lost daze. It was like that sometimes. I felt distanced from my body, like I didn’t want to be in it and living like this anymore. Mom hadn’t done right by me, but at least we had each other. And I secretly hoped she’d come back for me when she woke up. She’d find me on the sidewalk and tell me it was all a bad dream. Then I could go back to my window and wave. When I thought of that, it usually brightened my day.

  But it wasn’t working today.

  “You really homeless, or you puttin’ on a performance?” came a voice.

  I looked up at the person, and like a robot, I lifted the cup and shook it. Opening my mouth, I sang a song. It could have been Jingle Bells because it was that time of the year. Or it could have been Down by the Bay. I couldn’t remember. Nor could I remember the person that spoke to me, except that he was tall and old.

  “It’s obviously a scam,” came another voice. “There are no homeless kids around here on their own. Child services, remember?”

  “That’s assuming they give a shit,” the first voice retorted. “And haven’t we established they don’t many years ago?”

  The second man grunted in response.

  The first man knelt in front of me and slipped a note into the cup. There was a 5 and a 0 on the front of it, but I didn’t know how big that was. Naynay was teaching me numbers and the alphabet, but not regularly enough for me to remember.

  “Where do you sleep at night?” he asked me.

  Naynay said if people ever talked to me to ignore them and avoid looking at them. She said she had little spies everywhere and would know if I did, and she’d report it to Bogeyman. So, I stopped singing and stared into the cup, thinking of the O on Bogeyman’s face.

  “You okay?” There was a tone in his voice I hadn’t heard directed at me since my mother. It was…concern.

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. My stomach ached from hunger, from sadness, from the urge to open my mouth and tell him I wasn’t.

  “We gotta go,” the second said urgently. “She’ll be here tomorrow. You can grill her then.”

  The old man lingered for a few beats. I could feel him staring at me, but I didn’t look. Naynay would know. Then Bogeyman would know.

  He’d make me disappear.

  “Be here tomorrow, kid,” he told me, firmly. “Right in this spot.”

  I didn’t respond, but when he stood to leave, my gaze shot to him. The sun was in my eyes, and I could make out the silhouette of a lean man, but his face was caught in the sunlight and I couldn’t see it except for a white beard. Both had white beards. They were both really old. They walked away, and I watched them until they turned a corner and disappeared.

  For a long time, I looked at the money he had put in the cup. I’d never seen a number like that. I knew it must have been a lot. To this day I couldn’t explain what went through my head. To be frank, I wasn’t really thinking with my head in that moment. I was thinking with my stomach. It growled, the ache so deep and painful, I couldn’t escape it. I stood up on shaky legs and wandered the streets, following the first delicious smell that hit me. I found myself inside a kebab shop, slamming the note down on the counter as I stood up on my tippy toes. The worker behind the counter leaned forward and gave me a strange look.

  “A little rat,” he remarked, frowning. “Who sent you here?”

  I shook my head. “Nobody.”

  He looked down at the money I gave him with suspicion. “And where you did get a note this big?”

  “Someone gave it to me just now.”

  “What, right now?”

  I nodded.

  “You better not be giving me a fake bill.”

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know if it was. I wrapped my arms around my front, nervous as he picke
d it up and inspected it. He raised it up to the light and then turned it over.

  “What do you want?” he finally asked, looking at me warily.

  Mouth salivating, I pointed to a picture of a kebab on the wall behind him.

  He made me a kebab right then and there. It was long as my arm and covered in foil. When he gave it to me with a handful of change, I took off out of the shop and ran to the nearest alleyway. I sat beside a smelly garbage can and stuffed my face with food. Even when my stomach pained, and I was close to vomiting, I didn’t stop eating.

  I had every inch of it.

  And then I spent the next while digesting in the smelly alleyway. When the feeling of fullness settled foreign in my belly, my crime suddenly hit me. I’d spent money. Something Naynay had forbidden me to do. I’d eaten without her knowledge. Another strike against me.

  Worried, I wiped my hands against my pants, hoping the smell would go away. I tried to remove all traces of the food, going as far as removing my sweater and dusting it of any crumbs.

  When I went back to Naynay that afternoon, I decided not to tell her about my encounter. Something inside me prodded me to keep quiet, so I did. She was satisfied with my Styrofoam cup of money, never suspecting I’d eaten. I crawled into our tent as she hung up wet clothes on a rickety rack. I buried myself under the cigarette smelling quilts and closed my eyes.

  “You made a lot of money yesterday,” Naynay said as she wrapped a bedraggled scarf around my neck. “Whatever you did, do it again.”

  I stood before her patiently waiting for her to finish dressing me up. She had purposely let my hair down and all around my face. She said something about it giving me an extra edge to my already sad look. When she zipped up my puffy red jacket, she grabbed me by the chin. I tried not to cringe. It was her nasty hand with the yellow tipped fingers. She brought me close to her, so close I could smell her morning breath.

  “You’re a good girl,” she said, patting me on the back with her other hand. “You’re quiet, and you’re clean. I wanna protect you for a long time, baby girl, but you’re only gonna get older, and you’re not gonna be so cute no more. Do your job and be good at it, and I promise I’ll put you to good use. Understand?”

  I nodded, saying nothing. I didn’t know at the time what she meant, but when she glanced over my shoulder and at the older girls returning after a long night of being out, looking tired and bruised in tiny skirts and thin singlets, I knew it had something to do with them. I knew also that I didn’t want to be like them because of how sad they looked.

  “Get to it, baby girl,” Naynay then said, swatting me on my bum in the direction of the streets. “Get us something good.”

  The sky was overcast and spitting on my walk to my usual spot. I was cold, and I couldn’t wait for bed already. My stomach growled something awful. I wondered if I would get lucky with a lot of money again. Naynay didn’t know I’d spent it. Bogeyman hadn’t come looking for me, either.

  I nodded. It made sense. I’d come back with so much money. If I did that, they’d never suspect it. I was feeling optimistic until I looked up. I stopped suddenly, recognizing the two old men from yesterday standing at my spot. The tall one said he was coming back for me. I didn’t actually believe him.

  I looked around, searching for Bogeyman. What if he was watching me? What if he knew they had talked to me? Fear tugged at my heart. I quickly hid in the alleyway and waited forever. When I stepped back out, they were gone.

  I stayed away from my usual spot and found somewhere else to beg.

  “How many kids you got around here?” asked a voice nearby, stirring me from my sleep.

  “A few,” Naynay answered. “Why?”

  “We’re looking for a kid. Her mom disappeared, and word on the street is the little girl’s homeless.”

  Rubbing my eyes, I sat up, acutely aware they were extremely close.

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” Naynay responded, stifling a cough. “We don’t take in loose kids. The ones ‘round here are with their parents.”

  “This kid is different.”

  “How?”

  “She’s the daughter of a very powerful man.”

  Naynay laughed, hacking at the same time. “Ain’t no one around here that important, Mr…?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Huh. Well, I can’t help you.”

  Heavy footsteps approached her, so close he must have been merely feet from me. “Well how about you start, old lady. Round up the kids and let me get a good look at them.”

  “It’s gonna be a waste of time.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. Now how about we start?”

  “You giving me a choice?”

  “No, I ain’t giving you a fucking choice.”

  “Fine,” she replied, irritably, “let me grab my cigs first.”

  The tent unzipped, and she poked her head in. It was very early in the morning. The sky had only just begun to lighten. When she saw me sitting there, she leaned forward and casually shoved me down. Then she grabbed at the quilt and covered my whole body, making sure I was fully hidden. After she climbed back out, they walked away, and I stayed like that for a while, listening as she called out the kids.

  Even though I had no idea what was happening, it occurred to me I was hiding for a reason. Even young, I wasn’t that naïve. I kept quiet, barely stirring. Footsteps drew near, these ones heavier than Naynay’s. My heart raced when the tent suddenly unzipped again, and I felt the presence of someone else. I heard their breaths, deep and slow. I felt a hand rummage under the quilt, right there from my head. My eyes squeezed shut, feeling scared now because I had a bad feeling I’d get in trouble if I was found. My heart went wild.

  “I got all the damn kids right here! What’s your other guy doing in my tent?” Naynay hollered, angrily.

  The hand beside my head paused – a pause that lasted a life time – and then disappeared. The person moved back, leaving the tent and me in it. Footsteps faded away, and I managed a deep breath in, relieved for a reason I didn’t understand. I didn’t know how long I stayed like that, and now that they were a good distance away, I could only hear snippets of the conversation. The man was rounding everyone up, and grilling Naynay about what was going on at the tunnel.

  “You a cop?” Naynay snapped.

  “Why? You got something to hide?” the man retorted.

  “I got nothing to hide. I sleep in that tent over there, and your other guy’s already been in it.”

  “Then why you giving me such a hard time?”

  Naynay chose not to answer, but I knew her well to know she was very angry. Instead, she said, “Look, mister, we don’t control the tunnel. We just live in it, and then we answer to the O’s.”

  “The O’s?” The man laughed.

  “They run these streets. They won’t be happy to know you’ve been here, harassing us about some girl and her mommy.”

  “And what exactly are they gonna do?”

  “I don’t know what they’ll do. That’s their business, but word is it ain’t good.”

  “You warnin’ me or something?”

  “I’m just saying what happens when you cross them.”

  “They sound like wanna-be thugs to me. Bunch of try-hards trying to control a bunch of drugged up prostitutes in a tunnel? That’s fucking funny.”

  Naynay didn’t respond after that, but the man chuckled long about it, mumbling under his breath something about the O’s knowing nothing about what it really takes to run the streets.

  They left after what felt like a long time. I stayed in the tent, waiting for Naynay to come back and let me know it was okay to get up. I poked my head out of the quilt, watching as the light through the tent grew darker. The day seemed to pass, and I lay there the entire time, holding in my pee, feeling hunger all over again. Only hunger had become an extension of me. It was second nature to feel the gnaw.

  When a person did return, I threw the quilt back over my hea
d so Naynay wouldn’t think I disobeyed. I waited for her rough voice, for the cough that signalled her return, but it wasn’t her. Instead, the quilt was torn roughly off me, and I blinked up at… Bogeyman’s face. I sucked in a breath, another wave of terror hurling through me. He looked furious and desperate. His blue eyes were wide, his teeth clenched as he looked at me.

  “Get up,” he ordered, grabbing me roughly by the arm, doing the work for me.

  “No!” I screamed, tugging back, but I couldn’t fight him. “Let me go! Let me go! Naynay, help me!”

  Why was he here? Had he found out about my kebab? Oh, god, was he going to disappear me too? He dragged me out of the tent. Naynay was sitting on a lawn chair beside the clothes rack, not looking at me. She had a kitten in her hands, her sole attention buried in it.

  “Naynay,” I cried, as he began to drag me away. “Naynay, he’s taking me! Naynay!”

  She didn’t look at me once, and while I never gave two shits about her, she had protected me from Bogeyman. Now she wouldn’t even look at me.

  “She got herself a new pet,” Bogeyman said, steering me into the tunnel.

  Everything went dark, and all I heard were my breaths coming fast and hard. We emerged from the other side, coming upon the back of a church yard that had seen better years. The state of it was bad. The lawn was overgrown, vines and moss hugged almost every inch of the stone structure.

  He led me to a black car and threw me to the ground by the back wheel. His shoe came up and pressed against my chest. I tried scrambling free beneath him, but that just made him add weight to his foot. I felt crushed. I wheezed, trying to breathe. He stared down at me, his greasy black hair falling over parts of his face. He looked terrifying. I went still and started to cry.

  “People are looking for someone just like you,” he growled through clenched teeth. “Some big people. You know anything about that?”

  I shook my head, confused. “No.”

  “No?” He added more weight against my chest, and I gasped, crying out louder. “Don’t you lie to me, girl. Who is your fucking father?”