by JB Salsbury
Before they disappear inside, I lean away and shrug. “It’ll be interesting to have some new blood around here.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Damian yawns so hard that I respond with one of my own. “I better run.” He smacks his thighs, stands, and fishes his keys out of his pocket. “See ya tomorrow, and take it easy on the new guy.”
“I’ll try.”
I mean, sure, I’m not courtside-Lakers-game excited about someone coming in and disrupting what we have. I’m hoping the new kid won’t pull Laura and Chris’s attention from my brothers. What if this guy ends up being a huge pain in the ass? It’s always possible that Laura could send my brothers somewhere else, and I’m way too close to petitioning for custody for them to get rehomed.
I don’t have anything against the new foster. But I can’t allow him to threaten what little security we’ve finally managed to find.
Milo
I’M YAWNING AND rubbing my eyes when I push through the back door into the house. My alarm woke me up at the ass-crack of dawn so that I could get in extra studying for a history test before school, but I said screw it and hit snooze every fifteen minutes until six.
The house is quiet except for the sound of percolating coffee in the kitchen, which means Laura must have an early client today. I stumble down the hall to the bathroom, trying to walk quietly to avoid waking my brothers. Once they’re up and in the bathroom, getting a hot shower is impossible.
I slide my hands down the walls of the dark hallway and push open the bathroom door. Bright light sears my corneas. I blink and squint, and when my eyes finally adjust, I’m face-to-face with a ghost.
“Oh shit!” I slam the door, fall back, and hit the wall behind me. “What the hell is that?”
“Milo!” Laura’s in my face, one hand on my arm, the other holding together the collar of her robe. “Be quiet!”
I point at the door. My hand shakes, and my body floods with adrenaline. “What is that, Laura?”
“Shhh . . .” She whispers, “Milo, please. Calm down.”
“Calm down? There’s a . . . a . . . I don’t know what . . . What is that?”
“Milo . . . ?” Julian’s sleepy voice sounds from my side.
“Get back in your room, and close the door.” I stand between him and the bathroom, only noticing then that Laura is doing the same by protecting the bathroom door with her body.
Julian retreats into his room and closes the door.
“I wanted to introduce you this morning, but I didn’t expect you to be up so early.” Laura’s pleading eyes fix on mine but do little to calm my nerves.
“That’s the new kid?” I shove an accusing finger toward the bathroom. “She’s . . . she’s . . . she’s a she!”
“Yes, Milo, she’s a she.”
I step close and whisper, my eyes wide. “Something’s wrong with that she, Laura. Something’s not right about her. She’s white, like white. She’s . . .” I run both hands through my hair, making fists and trying to calm my racing heart.
“She’s albino, Milo.”
“What? A—”
“She was born without pigment. Her skin is . . . white. And she is our new foster, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t scare her to death on her first day with our family.” Her shoulders straighten, and she lifts her chin as if she’s proud of the girl hiding behind the door. “Her name is Mercy.”
“Mercy.” I blow out a breath and finally start to feel my pulse slow.
Born without pigment. I had an albino python once, and my uncle had an albino pit bull. I get that. I’ve just never seen it in a person before.
“She’s probably terrified, so why don’t you go pour yourself a glass of juice in the kitchen and calm down so I can see if I can convince her to leave the bathroom and go back to her room.” Laura sounds slightly put off, which is understandable.
After all, I completely lost it in the hallway. But dammit, a little warning would’ve been nice.
“I’m sorry. It just caught me off guard.”
She squeezes my upper arm and pushes me down the hall. “I understand. I probably should’ve told you yesterday, but I don’t want her skin color to define her. She’s no different than you.”
Another wave of guilt washes over me. She's talking as though I'm some racist prick, using the same words I’ve heard her use to others when they judge me because of my race and gang tattoos.
She raps softly on the door. “Mercy? It’s okay. You can come out now.”
The bathroom door clicks, and I can’t avoid looking back. I have to know if what I saw was real.
Like something out of a horror movie, the hinges creak as the door opens slowly. My pulse picks back up, but I can’t look away. Laura backs up just as the girl steps out into the hallway.
Her hair is bright white—not blond like Carrie’s but white. It’s long too, falling down over her button-up pajama shirt to rest at her hips. Her chin is against her chest, so I can’t see her face, and her baggy pajama pants fall to the floor, exposing only the tips of ten ivory toes.
I’ve never seen anything like her.
“Good morning.” Laura speaks in her soothing therapist voice as I’m cemented in place, held by the force of my curiosity. “Did you sleep well?”
Mercy answers with a deeper dip of her chin.
“I’m sorry about what happened. Milo’s not used to having a girl in the house, and I know he feels horrible about scaring you.”
She twists slightly to acknowledge me, and I catch a glimpse of her jawline. It too is as pale as a sheet of paper.
I clear my throat and take a few steps toward her—closer but not too close. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
Then she faces me head on, and I cross my arms over my chest, locking down every muscle to avoid recoiling. I force myself to stare boldly into eyes that are so pale blue they look inhuman. Her eyebrows, although thin, are just as white as the hair on her head, and even her lips are missing the natural darker color most lips have. When she blinks, I step closer because—oh wow—even her eyelashes are white.
She moves, catching me off guard, and I flinch. Her pale eyes widen before her gaze falls back to the floor.
“I’m sorry.” I clear my throat and try not to appear as utterly freaked out as I am.
Laura closes in, and she’s smiling, thankfully. “Mercy doesn’t see details well from far away. She was just getting a better look at you.”
Suddenly, I feel as if a spotlight is shining on my body. What I wouldn’t give for a shirt. Having just woken up, I’m in nothing but a pair of baggy workout shorts. Going shirtless around my foster family and brothers is no big deal—they don’t notice the ink anymore—but the way Mercy studies me makes my tattoos feel like neon signs in the dark.
Her gaze slides up my legs to my gut, and it feels like fingers dancing across my skin. She steps a little closer, and those pale orbs bounce from the Vega in Old English on my rib cage to the Latino Saints in script across my chest and finally the tat of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the side of my neck.
As if unaware I’m a man and not an object, she closes the distance between us, tilting her head and squinting at my throat. I can smell the mild scent of her hair, citrusy and sweet like orange blossoms. I was right about what I saw last night. Mercy is tall for a girl, bringing her chin to my collarbone. I suppress a shiver at the thought of her producing fangs and going after my jugular.
“Mercy?” Laura says from behind her, maybe calling her off her in-depth study of me, but the girl doesn’t budge.
My eyes shift between the top of the girl’s head and Laura, who looks uncomfortable, probably trying to figure out the same thing I am. I turn my head to give Mercy a better view. “It’s the Virgin Mary.”
“Mary,” Mercy whispers so softly that her voice sounds like a distant bell, and her breath against my neck raises goose bumps on my arm.
“I don’t care! I have to take a piss.” The door to our right swings open, and Miguel stumbles out.<
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Mercy steps back sharply and whirls to meet Miguel face to face. He sucks in a quick breath but manages to pull it together rather than embarrassing himself as I did. He shakes off whatever surprise he’s feeling and looks at Laura.
“Mercy, this is Miguel.” Laura introduces him, followed by Julian, who seems a little more hesitant but still not nearly as rattled as I was.
Once we’ve all been formally introduced, Laura ushers Mercy into her room, and I pull the boys into theirs.
After they both flop on their beds, I pace the length of the wall. “Okay, so the new kid is a girl.”
Julian wrinkles up his nose. “She looks funny.”
“That’s not cool, Jules.” Miguel pushes his hair out of his face. “She’s an albino.”
I stop pacing. “How do you know that?”
He glares up at me through a mass of messy hair. “Really?”
I cross the room and drop next to him on the bed. “I mean, I know it’s obvious with . . . you know, but how do you know about, um—”
“Albinism?”
Why is he smiling? “Yeah.”
“We learned about it in biology when we were studying genetics.” He turns his eyes on me. “How do you not know?”
“I think she’s cool lookin’.” Julian wipes his nose on his arm and sniffs.
The clock on their bedside alarm says six thirty.
“Shit. We gotta go, boys.” I push myself up and head to the door. “Light a fire under it. We’ll talk more on the way to school.”
WE DON’T TALK on the way to school.
Mercy stayed in her bedroom for the rest of the morning with the door shut, and the boys and I fell into our morning routine easily enough although I never put my back to the hallway. The feeling that she’d appear and scare the crap out of me was a risk I didn’t want to take. Screaming like a girl once today was enough.
I assumed my brothers would want to talk more about her, but no one brought her up, not even after we dropped Julian at school. We’re still not discussing her as Miguel and I cross the Washington High parking lot.
I toss him the keys to the car we share. It’s nothing fancy, an old Ford Explorer we bought off Laura’s dad. I worked in a warehouse and Miguel mowed lawns all summer to save enough money, and lucky for us, the old man cut a deal.
“I’m working in the sophomore and freshman building today, so meet me there after you pick up Julian,” I say.
We hit the front steps into the school, swerving to avoid those who think stairs are a convenient place to sit.
“Can’t,” he says. “I have to make up an assignment after school.”
My feet freeze on the third step. “When were you going to tell me that?”
Another shrug, this one saying, You never asked.
“All right. I’ll duck out and get him. Make sure you come meet us when you’re done.”
He nods and turns left toward the junior lockers while I head straight to the seniors’. The hallway is busy, with people weaving around me, and as I’m moving through the crowd, a wadded-up piece of paper hits me in the chest. It hardly registered on my body, but mentally, it was like a two-by-four to the throat.
“Uh oh. Looks like we caught the janitor slacking on the job.”
I turn my head toward the voice and find Frank, a senior who’s never given a shit about me before but who’s now looking smug, surrounded by his wannabe-Eminem-looking friends. I’ll never understand guys who want to look like gangsters—teenage boys with their pants sagging, wearing Jordans, backward hats, and gold chains, acting as though they’ve got street cred. They wouldn’t last a day in the life of a Saint. They’d be crying in their Volkswagen Jettas after living one day as a gangbanger.
“Aren’t you going to pick that up, Vega?” Frank laughs, flashing his straight teeth, which probably cost a fortune in ortho. “All those cleaning chemicals fry your brain?”
I can’t help it. I try to walk away, issuing my legs the command to move, but as I suspected, they don’t budge. A slow smile pulls at my lips. Frank’s flimsy group of wannabe muscle back up a step. Another thing real gangsters would never do is ease up when a brother’s being threatened. That was one of the things I loved about being an LS soldier. If anyone messed with me, they’d have to face the fury of a horde of brothers. They were ruthless outlaws, but they were loyal. At least, that’s what I thought until my mom disappeared. They were loyal when it served them, ruthless when it didn’t. I push that aside and take the opportunity to move in closer.
A flicker of genuine fear flashes across Frank’s eyes before he wipes it away and puffs out his chest. “You can’t touch me. I’m a minor, remember? You’ll go to prison and lose your awesome job.”
I breathe in through my nose and try like hell to think of my brothers instead of painting the inside of this kid’s locker with his blood. He’s right. Technically, he can mess with me all he wants, and I can’t do anything about it.
“Say whatever you want, puto.” I lean in, which makes him jerk away instinctively though he quickly regains his fake confidence. “I’ll be laughing all the way to prom with your girl. And I think you know what happens after prom, right?”
His pale face turns red, and his jaw tics.
“Guess she likes a man who knows how to work with his hands.” I wink and give them all my most charming smile. “Chingate.”
As soon as I turn, my grin falls, and I force my feet forward. I grip my backpack straps tightly to keep them from shaking with the rage that’s swirling just below the surface. The truth is I am the fucking janitor.
I was born into LS royalty, a position of power and respect that has most men groveling at my feet. When you insult an LS, you pay with your life.
But that’s not me anymore.
It will never be me again.
The sooner I get used to eating the shit that’s thrown at me, the better.
Andy, my caseworker, always says, “It’s better to be good than powerful.” News flash: being good sucks. I’d much rather be powerful and feed every single one of those pendejos their own tongues.
I hear Carrie before I look up and see her and her friend Amber waiting at my locker.
“Sorry about that.” Her gaze goes down the hallway where I left her asshole ex pissing in his Nike Pumps. She frowns. “I told him we were going to prom.”
I grin to myself because now that dick can see me talking to his ex, who’s probably given every one of his Beastie Boys friends a boner, and here she is waiting on the janitor. That’s gotta eat him alive.
“It’s cool. I handled it.”
The sliver of satisfaction does little to calm my nerves. Throwing that prick against the wall by his neck would’ve made me feel a whole lot better.
“Aww, you’re so good to me.” Carrie’s wearing the sweetest pair of hip-hugging jeans and one of those hippy-looking shirts that hangs off one shoulder. Her skin looks so soft. She pushes in close and wraps her arms around my waist. I keep my hands on my backpack straps.
“We’re going to the mall after school today.” Carrie pulls back her arms but stays close. “You wanna come?”
Uh, hell no. “Can’t. I have to work.”
She shrugs that one bare shoulder, and I notice how much darker her skin is than Mercy’s. The contrast between them seems funny to me now. I always thought Carrie was the whitest white girl I know.
“Can’t you, I don’t know, call in sick or something?” She bats her eyelashes, and I’m sure the same look has persuaded guys to sign over their trust funds, but I ain’t that guy. I work my ass off for every dollar I can earn until I save enough to take care of my brothers. And yeah, I do it cleaning up after entitled jackass high school kids.
“Nah, sorry.”
“Oh come on!” She pushes in close, and one soft, small hand slides up under my tee to brush the skin at my hip.
I approve of her methods, but it’s still a no.
“We can grab a movie.”
Wha
t is it with chicks and the mall? “Sounds like fun, but . . .” I rub my lower lip and hope she doesn’t take this the wrong way. “The mall ain’t my thing.”
Her lip pops in a sultry pout. “Are you sure? I was hoping we could pick out a shirt or something for you to wear for prom. My treat.”
She wants to buy me clothes? Pink clothes. I chuckle past the flicker of anger that ignites in my chest.
“I saw the cutest fuchsia pinstriped shirt that would look adorbs with my dress.” She claps her hands and squeaks. “It’s at Nordies, but don’t worry—I have my mom’s credit card.” Her eyes dance with excitement. “So you’ll come! I mean, it’s not like the school will explode if the garbage doesn’t get dumped. Please?”
I ball my hands into fists at my side and step so close she’s forced back until she hits the lockers. Leaning in, I bring my lips to her ear. “Do not treat me like a pet. I am not one of these assholes that’ll let you lead me around by my balls.”
She gasps, but it doesn’t sound like a bad gasp. I pull back a fraction to see her face. She doesn’t look upset or offended. She looks excited, which only confirms my suspicions. Carrie wants a bad boy. Great.
“No pink. No mall. No clothes shopping or makeovers or whatever else you have planned. I’ll do the prom thing with you, but I’ll go as me. Bad attitude, dumping garbage, and wearing whatever I want.” I tuck a long strand of her blond hair behind her ear and smile. “You cool with that?”
Her lips part, and her cheeks flush pink, but she eventually nods.
Damian was wrong. Women don’t want a man they can push around. They want one who they can try to push around but who’ll stand up for himself. No one wants a doormat.
“I’m okay with that.” Her eyelashes flutter.
I back away, putting space between us. “Amber . . .” I nod toward my locker, which she’s blocking as she stares up at me, wearing an expression similar to Carrie’s. “I need in there.”
She blinks rapidly as though she’s confused about my request.
I lift my brows. “My locker.”