Wanted: An Outlaw Anthology

by Lane Hart

Pressing the ice pack over my throbbing eye, I lean back in my chair and wait for the Advil to kick in. “Fighting solves nothing, Hailey, and there are consequences to your actions.”

  Hailey’s blonde ponytail bobs as she throws her arms over her chest and turns to glower out the window. “They started it.”

  “I saw you throw the first punch. They may have been doing something to make you angry, but you never solve a conflict with violence.”

  “Says who?” The man in the doorway is tall and muscular. He looks like a giant standing in the doorway of my office, his shoulders so wide they fill the frame. Wild blond curls poke out from beneath the hat he wears on his head, framing his handsome face and drawing attention to his eyes. Eyes that remind me of a steel blue colored shark, watching me with intensity from across the room.

  His cold stare flicks to Hailey and I watch with shock as his expression softens. “What’s going on, Hail? Those bitches start in on ya again?” Hailey’s lush curls bounce as she nods. Tears fill her eyes and her lower lip trembles as he steps inside. “Did you kick Krista’s ass?”

  A tear escapes, slipping silently down her cheek as she shakes her head.

  The man purses his lips and huffs out a heavy sigh before turning his attention to me. “What’s the damage?”

  I blink up at him, my lips parted in surprise as I slowly lower the ice pack from my eye.

  “Shit,” he winces, his eyes narrowing in on what I’m sure is the very puffy beginnings of my first ever shiner. “Krista or Hailey?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  His eye roll is identical to the one Hailey had given me earlier. “Your eye,” he says, motioning to his own eye as if he was talking to someone without a brain in their head. “Somebody hit you. Was it Krista or Hailey?”

  My gaze slides to Hailey whose shoulders slump forward as she peers down at her lap. Seeing her guilt snaps me out of it like a rubber band stretched tight and released against my skin. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, tossing the ice pack onto my desk and pushing to my feet. Getting hit in the eye by flailing fists is the least of my worries, and honestly, it’s embarrassing. Such a rookie mistake. “Please, come in. Are you Hailey’s father?”

  I regret the question as soon as it escapes my lips. This guy might look a lot like Hailey, but he can’t be any more than twenty-three or twenty-four. Much too young to be the father of the thirteen-year-old girl in front of me.

  “Brother,” he states, not moving from the open door. He watches me through narrowed eyes, his expression otherwise unreadable as they travel up my body and back down again. “You’re new here.”

  It’s not so much a question as it is a statement. And his cocky tone ensures that I don’t like his statement one bit. “Georgia Addington,” I say, stepping around from behind my desk and walking toward him with my hand extended. “Yes, I am new here. Today is my first day, actually.”

  The corner of his mouth twitches just a little as he takes my hand in his and gives it a gentle shake. My hand is swallowed whole by his and I can’t help myself from thinking he could easily crush every bone if he got a wild hair to do so.

  “Ya don’t say.” He smirks and flicks a glance over at his sister before focusing his attention back on me. “Tripp Fletcher,” he says, poking a thumb toward his chest as if I wouldn’t get his self-introduction. “If you’re looking for Hailey’s father, you’ll be wasting your time. Haven’t seen him in almost ten years. And you can try calling our mother all you want, but if you do get a hold of her, tell her to call her damn kids.”

  My gaze slides to Hailey and then back to her brother. Their mother is gone? “Mr. Fletcher. Your sister started a brawl in our homework room. There are consequences to those actions, and if you won’t be part of handing those out, I will have to take measures to contact her legal guardian.”

  I watch as the condescending smirk falls from his face and he stands up a little straighter, his jaw tightening. “Look … Miss Addington,” he says, my name slicing through the air between us. “I don’t know how things are done where you come from, but here on the south side, I’m guessing it’s a little different. Krista O’Malley is a bully and a thug. She’s been harassing my sister since they were four years old, and Hailey learned a long time ago to show no weakness with her or her little punk ass friends.” He flicks a hand out, motioning for his sister to come to him. “And as for her legal guardian? You’re lookin’ at him. I got our mother to sign the papers as soon as I was eighteen.”

  I watch, speechless, as Hailey gathers her school bag and her jacket and moves to her brother’s side, her face flaming as she keeps her eyes on the floor, unable to look at either one of us.

  “I appreciate you have a job to do,” he continues. “But maybe instead of getting your ass kicked by stepping in the middle of teenage scraps and calling people away from the only work they’ve been able to score all week, you’ll do a little research on the community you’re in. It’s a whole different world than what I’m sure you’re used to.”

  Anger burns in my belly and I feel the tips of my ears growing hot as I stare back at him through parted lips. “You don’t know a thing about me, Mr. Fletcher,” I seethe.

  He levels me with a glare as he steps aside and ushers his sister through the door, never once taking his eyes from me. “I know you didn’t take five minutes to read that file to find out a damn thing about my sister,” he says, motioning to the cream-colored folder on my desk. The name Hailey Fletcher is displayed neatly along the tab. And he’s right. I only opened it long enough to grab the phone number for her guardian. “And I know that you assume Hailey was in the wrong, without having all of your facts.”

  I open my mouth, ready to tell him how wrong he is, but he cocks an eyebrow. “Where’s Krista O’Malley then?”

  I snap my mouth closed. I’d sent her home with an icepack just like mine.

  Tripp Fletcher scrutinizes me from the doorway. “And I don’t know a whole lot about teenagers, but I’m willing to bet they don’t exactly enjoy watching you prance that tight ass of yours around in front of them, wearing jeans that cost more than their families make in a whole month.”

  With a frown, I glance down at my jeans. They’re Fendis and artfully torn in a way that looks both stylish and expensive. I hadn’t really given much thought to the price of them when I’d gotten dressed this morning. My whole goal had been to fit in. Dress casually. Look like someone these kids could connect with. But he’s right. Thousand dollar jeans in this neighborhood don’t exactly fit in at all.

  “Mr. Fletcher,” I say, lifting my head and feeling like a complete ass, I intend to change the subject–maybe even apologize for my hastiness–but when I look to the doorway, it’s empty.

  I sigh then, and walk out into the hall, watching as Hailey and her brother reach the main door to the community center. His arm is draped casually across her shoulder, and I hear the lilt of her giggle as he pulls her towards him and presses a kiss to the top of her head. And then they’re gone.

  “He wasn’t wrong, you know.” Startled, I turn and find Jane, one of the social workers I’d met today, standing just a few feet behind me. “Sorry,” she says, her cheeks turning an almost impossible shade of crimson. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but Tripp’s voice carries. He’s in here quite a bit. He can be a handful sometimes and I was coming to help if I could.”

  I force a small smile and lean back against the wall with a heavy sigh. “Is he always so … intimidating?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jane says, shoving her glasses up on her nose, her long brown ponytail bobbing as she shakes her head. “But he’s not even the worst one we have to deal with around her. He’s actually a good guy, I think. He just doesn’t have much use for social workers.”

  My gaze travels back to the closed entrance to the building where Tripp and Hailey had disappeared just a few moments before. “This job will take some getting used to,” I say softly, admitting it to Jane just as much as I’m admitting it to myself.r />
  Jane nibbles on her lower lip, seeming to weigh her words before she says any more. She’s a pretty girl, even if she is kind of mousy. Her hair is a flat shade of brown that matches her chocolate covered eyes, and she has a light smattering of freckles sprayed across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. She wears no makeup and is donning a sweatshirt and jeans that are about three sizes too big for her tiny frame. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere else than standing in this hallway with me right now.

  “He’s right about the jeans though,” she says in a rush, her lip disappearing back between her teeth. “Um … they’re nice and everything, but …” She trails off then, obviously uncomfortable with offering me any sort of criticism. “If you want to connect with these kids, you can’t be dressed like you think you’re better than the rest of them.”

  It’s obvious from the look of horror on her face, how hard it was for her to tell me that. And she’s not wrong. When I’d accepted the job at the South Side Community Center, I’d known I’d be walking into something unlike anything else I was used to. I just hadn’t really gotten it, until now.

  “Thank you, Jane,” I say, softly, not wanting to scare off the woman that was reminding me more and more of a frightened little mouse by the second. “I think maybe I need to go shopping later and get a few outfits for work.”

  Jane’s face brightens a little. “May I suggest Walmart?”

  Just the suggestion has me curling my nose with distaste. I’ve never been to a Walmart before in my life. “Walmart? Really?”

  Jane grins. “It’s not that bad, I promise.” She presses her lips together and tilts her head to the said. “I could go with you. You know … if you want me to?”

  I can’t help the smile as it spreads slowly across my face. This day had been one of the most disconcerting, culture shocks of my life. Between being thrust into a room full of teenage gangster wannabes, breaking up a fight and getting socked in the eyes, and ending it all with Tripp Fletcher knocking me down a couple of pegs, I could use a pick me up. I just never imagined that would come in the form of a shopping trip to the local Walmart with one of the shyest people I had ever met.

  “I would love that,” I tell her with a grin. “Let me grab my purse.”

  Chapter Two

  Tripp

  As we step inside the front door, I immediately know two things. One, it’s cold as fuck in this house and two, the gas company is tired of waiting for me to pay the bill. I reach down and place my hand on Max’s shoulder, stopping him as he unzips his coat. “Leave that on, bud,” I tell him, squatting to right his zipper. “Looks like you’re gonna need it.”

  Max doesn’t even blink. Instead, he just nods and tears off down the hall to the living room where he’d left the Legos he’d been playing with this morning. Sometimes I envy him. Being a six-year-old with no responsibilities would be a million times better than the hand I’ve been dealt.

  “How much do we owe?” Hailey asks from behind me.

  “Too damn much,” I tell her, giving her hat a little tug so it covers her eyes. “Around two hundred.”

  Hailey nibbles on her lower lip. “I’ve got thirty dollars in my mason jar,” she offers. “And I’m supposed to babysit for the Rodriguez’s tomorrow night. That should be another thirty.”

  I stare at my baby sister, feeling like the biggest piece of shit in the world. “Nah, Hails. You keep your money. I’ll get this shit sorted. Just gonna be a little chilly for the next couple of days.”

  “Okay,” she says with a shrug. “But you can have it if you need it.”

  “Thanks,” I tell her, and then watch as she wanders to the stairs and heads up to her bedroom.

  Fuck. I knew this shit would happen, but I figured I had at least another week to come up with the money. It’s only the first week of November, and already it’s so cold outside. The night times are even worse. I need to find a way to pay that bill and fast.

  Leaving my coat on, I walk into the kitchen and drop Max’s backpack on the counter. At least the electricity is still on, but even won’t last forever if I don’t pay the bill. There’s no use calling the gas company, because we’ve been down this road before. They won’t reconnect us until I pay what I owe, along with a reconnection fee for the inconvenience.

  Instead, I dig through the refrigerator and pull out the items I need to make supper. As I set about turning on the oven and chopping up an onion, I think about that stick in the ass social worker at the after-school program.

  That bitch had called me away from a temp job I’d landed for the day, and losing that money would set us back even farther on bills and rent. She was just trying to do her job–I get that–but we could have had that same goddamn conversation over the phone. She had no clue how to deal with these kids. That much was clear just by the way she dressed and her bossy attitude.

  I wasn’t exactly a fan of the community center and its programming, anyway. My brothers and sister didn’t go there by choice. It was mandated by the courts that they attend the South Side Community Center, every day after school until five o’clock in the evening. This was Children’s Services way of keeping a finger on the pulse of our family and making sure I was taking care of them without actually taking them away from me and splitting them up into different foster homes.

  Mostly, the social workers just let us be. They could see that everyone was fed and had clean clothes and wasn’t covered in bruises from being beaten. But regardless, it was a pain in the ass for all of us, and this wasn’t the first time one of my siblings had been involved in a fight there. Not by a long shot.

  The South Side of Chicago is not the kind of place you want to raise a family. It is filled with gangs, drugs, and violence. It is also the place my mother was when she gave birth to all four of us, and we’re here, whether we like it or not. We’ve learned to adapt. To survive. To fight if we have no other choice.

  It is also clearly a far cry from where Georgia Addington comes from. Sure, those jeans looked hot as hell on that sweet ass of hers, and her long brown hair looked like strands of silk cascading down her back, but they were a far cry from anything else you’d see on the South Side. She looked like a walking fucking billboard for the North Side Country Club, minus the cute little tennis skirt.

  “Meatloaf again?” Carter groans when he walks into the kitchen. I close the oven door and double check the temperature.

  “It’s cheap and it will last us a couple of days. Get over it.”

  Carter flops down into one of the rusty old chairs that should be sitting in some museum from the fifties instead of in an actual family’s kitchen and puts his feet up on the seat across from him. “Gas got cut off again?”

  “Yep. We’ll live though.”

  He shrugs and digs out his sketch pad and a pencil. “Always do,” he mumbles, already setting up to work on another drawing.

  Carter is by far the most difficult one of my three siblings to read. At sixteen years old, he’s a moodier version of myself. He rolls with the punches life throws at us, without putting up much of a fight, but he’s harder somehow. Distant.

  When my mother had left us almost five years ago, I’d thought that was it. I’d been seventeen, still in high school and working my ass off at a local convenience store to help her pay the bills. Mom had always been a bit of a flake, and I could never remember a time when she wasn’t an alcoholic. It wasn’t unusual for her to go out for the night and not return home for three or even four days, reeking of alcohol and cigarettes, without a penny to her name.

  I’d been taking care of Carter and Hailey since I was about seven years old. My parents loved to party, but instead of paying a babysitter, they had me. And then Max came along and Dad left. He was convinced Max wasn’t his. Or so he said. Personally, I think he was just looking for an excuse to bail, and when Max was born with dark hair, instead of the blond locks he, myself, Hailey and Carter had, he took it.

  The day he left, whatever motherly instinct my mother had pos
sessed disappeared entirely. She drank more. She partied more. She started bringing strange men into our home at all hours of the day and night.

  Her leaving had been a blessing, really. She was one less mouth I had left to feed, and I didn’t have to worry anymore about her breaking into the meager savings I’d had stored in my room to feed her alcohol addiction. I’d seen her once in five years, and that was on my eighteenth birthday.

  I’d tracked her down at a run-down old bar on the other side of the city. She’d been wasted, hanging off the arm of some fat biker wannabe, her tits practically popping out of her low-cut blouse. She had smiled so big when she’d seen me standing there, then wrapped her arms around me like I’d once prayed she would do when I was a child.

  This time was different though. I didn’t know this woman. She wasn’t a mother to me, and she’d certainly never been one to Carter, Max, and Hailey. It was all I could do to pull her off of me and ask her to sign the papers granting me legal guardianship of my siblings.

  I don’t know what I’d expected. Tears? Maybe an argument? I definitely hadn’t planned for her to just shrug her shoulders and snatch the pen out of my hand. She’d signed those papers without another thought. In her mind, she’d just been given a get out of jail free card. In mine, I’d just saved my family.

  “Heard Krista was harassing Hailey again,” Carter says, yanking me out of the memory.

  “Yeah, got called in by the social worker this afternoon.”

  Carter looks up from his drawing. “The hot one?”

  I smirk. Carter may be distant but he doesn’t miss much when it comes to the ladies. And yes, Miss Addington definitely was a very attractive woman. Too bad she may as well be from Mars. “The one that looks like she wipes her ass with hundred-dollar bills.”

  Carter chuckles. “Yeah, that’s the one. Today was her first day, I guess.”

  “It was obvious.”

  “Ralphie says she pulled up this morning in a fucking Lexus. She’s lucky she didn’t get jacked.”