“No, little girl. We’re done here.”
He turns and walks away, leaving me leaning against the red brick. Only when he’s gone do I take a breath, that sickly sweet air a familiar relief in my lungs. For the rest of the school day I have to keep reminding myself that I can breathe. I’m not underwater.
Even if it feels like that.
* * *
When the school bus screeches to a stop in the road, a cloud of dust rises into the air, turned golden by the waning sun. The Happy Hills Trailer Park is to the west of the city, nestled between Tanglewood’s slums and a ridge of wilderness on the other side. It gets dark here before anywhere else, in the shadows of either side.
My backpack feels heavy with the book Mrs. Keller gave me. Trigonometry Proofs, it says in large block letters. The cover is wrinkled and torn, the inside pages marked up with pencil. I don’t know where she got it from, but she said it’s mine now.
I want to go home and look inside, but there’s a hurt inside that stops me. I don’t think it’s only hunger. Guilt. That’s what I’ve been feeling all day, the hundred-dollar bill I stole burning hotter in my pocket with every minute of the day.
What I should do is return the whole thing, but it’s already Friday. The school gives me breakfast and lunch with my number, but that leaves me awful hungry on the weekend.
The bus lurches forward, leaving me in the middle of the road. Dust settles back around me, a thin layer sticking to the sweat on my skin.
Instead of taking the path into the park I follow the road to the end.
Thick burglary bars cover the windows of the Tanglewood General Store. Colorful lottery posters and cigarette ads peek through the black iron. A bell rings above me when I open the door.
Mr. Romero stands up and comes around the counter, leaving his baseball game playing on the small TV on the counter.
“Penny,” he says, his voice scratchy. Nothing like the smooth voice of the stranger at school.
“Hello,” I say without meeting his eyes.
If Daddy comes back with money I can get candy sometimes. Kit Kats are my favorite because I can eat one and save the rest for later.
Instead I head down the pantry aisle, where the noodles and peanut butter are.
I don’t know if Mr. Romero thinks I’m going to steal something, but I’ve only done that a few times. He follows me down the row, staying too close for comfort. I pick a few cans of soup—mushroom barley and turkey rice. When I have four cans my arms are full. I walk to the counter and set them down so I can take out the hundred-dollar bill.
The bushy eyebrows on Mr. Romero’s face go up. “Where’d you get that?”
I shrug, because he doesn’t really want to know. He doesn’t really care.
“Your daddy come back?”
“Not yet.”
A grunt. “He’s been gone a long time, this time around. What’s it been? A week now?”
Two weeks. “I don’t know.”
Mr. Romero runs a blackened rag across his forehead. “Runs off and leaves you behind. I know times have changed, but that doesn’t seem right. I don’t say anything to him usually, since he’s one of my best customers.”
Half the trailers in Happy Hills are empty. Some of them have squatters, but they don’t spend much at the store. I’m sure Daddy has bought most of the lottery tickets that get sold here. Every so often he wins a hundred dollars, but it’s never more than he spent.
There’s such a long pause that I think Mr. Romero isn’t going to sell me the soup. Then I would have to walk a long way into town to buy something else. Or most likely go hungry again.
“If your daddy doesn’t come back, you come see me. You know which trailer I’m in.”
There’s a lot I’ll do to survive—lie and steal. But I won’t ever step foot into Mr. Romero’s trailer. He looks at me like he’s calculating. Not numbers, though. Something else.
If I went inside I don’t think I’d ever leave. “Okay.”
He presses a button and the register pops open. Slowly he counts out change.
Ninety-eight fifty-two. That’s what I should get back.
He puts four twenty-dollar bills on the counter. A five. Two ones. Twenty-five cents.
It’s short, so I hold my ground until he adds the rest of the money. Finally I meet his eyes. His flash with dislike. I don’t like letting people see what I know, but it’s not worth losing money over.
Especially when the money isn’t mine.
He gives me a thin plastic bag, the handles stretching under the weight of the cans. I pass my trailer and head into the woods, the same way I went the night before. I have this idea for a deal. Or maybe it’s a plea. Whatever the word, I’m going to offer the cans and the money back to the boy. Then he’ll have what he started with, so maybe he won’t be so mad.
Maybe he’ll let me take one of the cans.
When I get to the lake there’s no one there. Nothing left of his backpack or the Styrofoam or his grown-up magazines. Only a few scuff marks by the water to show that anyone was ever there at all.
Chapter Three
The first time I cheat is by accident.
Most nights Daddy plays at The Cellar, a bar underneath an old hotel, the wooden wine racks still standing. In the back corner there’s a table covered with fraying green fabric, its surface marked with burns and sticky blackness from a lifetime of games. The chairs around the table don’t match—some of them stained cloth, others brown leather with stuffing poked out.
The chair I like best is cream-colored with drawings in blue—a boy chasing a puppy, a pie on a picnic table. It’s like someone’s happy childhood, wholesome and innocent.
On that particular night we get there early enough that the chair I want is empty. I tuck my feet underneath me and read a book, pressing my face into the pages, blocking out the voices and the smoke.
I’m deep in the world of fairies and dragons when I hear the clatter of poker chips. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Daddy tense up as he shoves most of his small stack into the center of the table.
I count up the colors. One hundred and fifty dollars in red, white, black, and blue.
My chest feels tight when I think about him losing that money. I’m so tired of being hungry. So tired of being scared.
From over his shoulder I can see his cards. A seven of hearts and a three of clubs. What could he be making with those? The other man left in the game has an ace and a jack of spades on the table. That could easily be a straight or a flush. Maybe even a straight flush.
Maybe even a royal flush.
It’s wild to even bid against that. Daddy gets more reckless as the night rolls on, as the glasses of whiskey drain away. It’s a sign that he’s not completely drunk, that he’s kept something back for the bus fare.
Even so, that’s a lot of money in the pot.
He lifts the corner of his new cards. A single pair.
It’s not very strong, and when the man across from us raises the bet, I can see that Daddy’s ready to fold. It could buy so much food. And it’s all we have left. The pot in the center? Almost a thousand dollars in clay. We could eat for weeks. Months.
If he wins.
I tug on Daddy’s arm. He mumbles something, not paying attention. None of the other men pay me any attention. Maybe they think I want money for the soda machine.
My heart squeezes.
“He doesn’t have it,” I whisper in Daddy’s ear.
Most of the spades have been played in previous games. The only ones in this hand are the nine and six. Those are in the hands that folded. A straight is more possible. There are a lot of cards that can make that happen underneath, but the odds are with us.
And anyone would use such a strong initial showing to bluff.
He pauses, his hand clenched around the last chip.
We’ll be walking home if I’m wrong about this. I might be no better than him.
Daddy throws the chip into the pot.
I
can see the flicker of anger in the other man’s eyes. Sweet relief lets me breathe again. The cards flip over, revealing a hand with absolutely nothing—the perfect bluff.
Our pair of sevens wins the largest pot Daddy’s brought home in ages.
The good thing about that night is that I could make deals with Daddy after that. I’ll only help you win if you leave money for the gas bill. The bad thing is it only encouraged him to play deeper and harder, losing himself in the game.
We came up with signals that I would use during the game, never leaving my seat so that no one would suspect. There are higher stakes games that I’m not allowed into, being a kid. Daddy loses more money there. He enjoys them more. That always seemed strange to me.
It’s almost like he likes to lose, the same way that Mama did.
Is he going to leave the way she did?
That was before I met the wild boy by the lake.
Before I wondered if I share the same weakness, because I’m sitting in the trailer with almost a hundred dollars that isn’t mine. That boy doesn’t know which trailer I’m in but it would be easy enough to ask around and find out which trailer has a little girl. Daddy isn’t even here to protect me. I told him that, didn’t I?
“And you’re supposed to be smart,” I say under my breath.
What would my life be like if I hadn’t told Daddy about counting cards? Or if my brain were different, if I couldn’t count them so easy?
I put the money under my pillow. It’s not like I can spend it right now anyway. Leaving the trailer at night is a bad idea, especially with a strong boy who has a right to be angry with me roaming around.
If I had only stayed there I might have eaten last night.
I could eat right now if I open a can of soup.
Instead I pull out the heavy volume of Trigonometry Proofs. I feel bad for pretending to be dumb when the man asked me questions, especially after Mrs. Keller went through so much trouble. I know I’m supposed to trust grownups, but I don’t trust him.
I lose myself in Pythagorean identities and inverse trig functions.
This is where things make sense. There’s no such thing as hunger when I’m solving proofs, no such thing as darkness. No way to fall into the water while turning pages and twisting equations in my head.
* * *
When I wake up the moon peeks between the plastic slats at my window, the quiet creak of the trailer the only sound. But I know something’s different. The air feels different.
Someone is here.
My chest feels full with relief and a stupid kind of happiness, before I realize it can’t be Daddy. He would never be so quiet, especially coming from a two-week bender. He would crash into the counters, bang his head on the doorframe, and swear in loud whispers before finally falling asleep with snores that rattle the walls.
A burglar? We don’t have much of anything to steal, but people get dumb when they’re desperate. Maybe Mr. Romero told someone I had a hundred dollars.
Or maybe it’s Mr. Romero himself, come to my trailer since I won’t come to his. My heart beats wild and loud, banging against my ribs like it’s trying to break out.
“Trigonometry,” says a voice in the darkness.
For a half second I think it’s the man from school. The one who’s tall and dark, his voice too smooth and his smile too cold to be trusted. Jonathan Scott. The terror that rises up in me is bigger and sharper than when I thought it was a burglar, or even Mr. Romero in my trailer. The very worst threat. The same as drowning, my very own nightmare.
And then my sleepy mind registers something about the voice. It’s not deep.
“What’s a little kid doing with a trigonometry book?”
I sit up in bed. My gaze moves over the shadows in the room until I find him against the wall, his shadow thumbing through my textbook. “Don’t touch that.”
He flips the book open to a page, pale white from the moonlight through the blinds. “To prove an identity, you have to use logical steps to show that one side of the equation can be transformed into the other side of the equation. You know what that means, Penny?”
I’m supposed to feel bad for stealing his money, and I do, but right now I’m mad. Mad that he wasn’t there and mad that he suddenly appeared. Mad that he scared me.
“Yeah, I know what it means. Probably more than you.”
His laugh sounds so much like the man from school that I narrow my eyes, looking at the way he holds his head, the way his shoulders are set, the way he carries himself. Same, same, same. “You some kind of baby genius?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“And I’m the dumbass who left you with my money.”
My cheeks turn hot. “I’m sorry I did that. I have it here, under my pillow. The rest of it, anyway. After I paid for the soup. But you can have that too, if you want.”
He laughs, the sound clanging like bells. “I don’t want it back.”
“You have to take it,” I say, scared that he sounds so much like that stranger. “The soup is enough for me, if you leave it. And you need the money more than I do.”
His shadow goes still. “What do you know about that?”
“I know you have a dad who’s mean, mean enough to run away from.”
“Doesn’t take a baby genius to figure that out. I pretty much told you.”
“Then there’s the man from the school.”
“What school?”
“From some fancy private school, I guess. He came to visit me at recess.” Something cold touches my bones, making me shiver. There’s a reason his laugh sounds the same. A reason he’s run away from home. The answer comes to me the way numbers do, before I’m even sure I want to know.
Black eyes narrow. “What did he look like?”
“Like you.”
This strange feeling comes over me, like it did when I first cheated. I knew I had something important I needed to do. But I didn’t have a deck of cards in front of me. No trigonometry proof to solve. Numbers were easy, but people are hard. They always have been.
A boy without any place to go.
A man who promises me safety, a real future.
The proof doesn’t write itself inside my mind. There are gaps between each logical jump. Unsolved variables. Unknowns. I can figure out the answer anyway. It makes too much sense.
“He talk to your class?” The boy’s voice is casual, but I can hear the tension underneath.
“Not really. He came at recess. I think Mrs. Keller told him what I can do.”
“And what’s that?”
I shrug in the dark. “Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it matters. It matters if you told him what he wanted to hear.”
That dark wave passes over me again, dragging me under. A warning. “He gave me a bad feeling. Not the same as Mr. Romero, but worse. So I told him a wrong answer.”
“Good. When he comes back you tell him as many wrong answers as you need to until he goes away.”
“How do you know he’ll come back?”
“Because he doesn’t give up.” A short laugh. “I thought that meant he would keep looking for me. Instead he went looking for a replacement.”
“Did you go to his school?”
The sound he makes is hard and mean. “His school? Yeah, I guess you could say that. Learned a lot. You wouldn’t like it there, trust me.”
“They don’t have the free lunch program?”
A longer pause this time. “It’s important that you don’t go along with him, understand? No matter what he says. No matter what he promises you. It’s not worth it, okay? You need to believe me.”
“I don’t even know you.”
He tosses the book aside. “I’m serious. You need to stay away from him.”
“Tell me your name. And don’t say it’s Quarter.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Because you want me to trust you. At least I should know what to call you.”
“Damon Scott.”
My stomach sinks. “So that means your dad is…”
“Jonathan Scott, yes. You’ve heard of him, then. That’s good. You know what he’s capable of.”
Everyone in the trailer park knows about him, after Lisa Blake. The people my father plays cards with are dangerous, the ones he borrows money from even more so. But even he would never dare go near Jonathan Scott, the man who rules the west side of Tanglewood.
“Why would he want me?”
“Because he likes to fuck—sorry. He likes to mess with people. That’s what he does. Moves people around on his big ugly chessboard. You know how to play chess?”
I shake my head even though he can’t see me. Some of the books I’ve read have descriptions of chess. I know how the pieces move but I’ve never played. Never even seen a chess set in person. “Not really.”
“Well, pawns are the front line. They’re easy to find, but they can only move one way, one square at a time. A kid who’s what? Six years old?”
“Seven,” I say, indignant.
A soft laugh. “A seven-year-old doing trigonometry. Imagine what he could turn you into.”
“What?” I asked, a little awed by the idea that I could become something. Something other than one of the tired mothers with three kids from different men or one of the women on the street corners. A girl from the west side didn’t have other options.
“He’d turn you into a weapon,” Damon says, his voice flat. “A bullet. He would spend years making you, and when you were done, he’d pull the trigger.”
“Is that what he did to you?”
“Why?” he asks, his voice rough. “Do I seem dangerous?”
I remember the way he had looked that first night, all puffed up and strong. Like he could shoot me with the gun he claimed to have. Or slash me with his knife. Instead he had offered me food.
And he didn’t hurt me now, even though I’d stolen from him.
“You’re not dangerous.”
After a beat he says, “Not to you, baby genius. Not to you.”
Chapter Four
Mafia Romance Page 24