Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106953 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106953 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
“Why not?” I wonder how bad of a person I am to want to beat a nine-year-old into a bloody pulp.
“Because.”
This is getting us nowhere.
“All right. You don’t have to tell me. You’re going to stay home tomorrow.” I spin around and point to my back. “Climb on. We’ll get some lunch.”
She scrambles onto my back. “I can teach myself,” she says. “I don’t need school. I can learn from Dora and the Girls and Sid the Science Kid.” She prattles on about all the TV that she can watch.
I tap on her shoe to get her to stop talking for a second. “Other than the boy whose nose you punched, you like that school okay?”
“It’s okay,” she concedes.
“The other kids are nice?”
“I guess. They’re not bad.”
“You sure you don’t want to tell me what the boy said?”
She rubs her nose across one shoulder blade.
I keep quiet, thinking she’ll spill eventually. In the two years that we’ve lived together, there’s not one thing she’s ever kept a secret from me. She’s always confessing, even to little shit that doesn’t matter like copping an extra cookie before bedtime.
I hitch her a little higher and pick up the pace. “I’m hungry for meatballs. Should we eat at Luigi’s tonight?”
“I guess.” Her hands twist under my chin.
Man, she must really be feeling blue. The kid loves meatballs. I guess I gotta wrangle the intel out of her. “Look, Bitsy, if you don’t tell me what happened it’s gonna fester like an untreated wound. It’ll build inside of you until you’re sick. Best you spit out what he said and we’ll deal with it together.”
She heaves a big sigh. “He said you looked like you hurt kids.”
“What?” I swing her around so I can see her face. “Why’d he say that?”
Tears pool in her eyes. “I don’t know. I swear I didn’t say anything. I told him you were the best. That you were the only one who ever took care of me. He said you took care of me cuz you wanted to diddle me. What’s that mean?”
I set her down carefully and wipe her tears away with my thumbs. How bad would it be if I hit a nine-year-old boy? “It’s a stupid thing. Is that when you punched him?”
She ducks her head and says quietly. “No. Not until the other boys started in, too. It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s bad.” How the hell am I explaining this to her? “Then what?”
“And then he said that you’re stinky and that I’m stinky, too. So I punched him.”
“Show me how.”
She lifts her tiny hand and folds her fingers into a fist, the thumb lying on top. I tuck the thumb lower and across her fingers. “Gotta keep your thumb down when you punch. Did you hurt him?”
“Yeah. He cried like a baby,” she says scornfully. Then she ducks her head, as if remembering she wasn’t supposed to be happy she punched a kid. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For getting in trouble.”
I start to say I don’t care, but I realize that I have to pretend like I do. I don’t know much about school, but I know enough that watching TV isn’t going to cut it. I don’t want Bitsy having to spread her legs for someone like Beefer, which means I’m either going to have to swallow my pride and beg for Annette to take her back or find some other way to get my girl an education.
“Remember how I said that school’s your job?” Her head bobs up and down. “Part of your job is not hitting kids.”
She sighs heavily. “Why?”
“So you can grow up and be better than the Powerpuff girls and Dora and Sid put together.”
“Like you?”
A vision of my fist caving in a dealer’s face over on the south side flashes in my mind. “Better than me.”
Her hair whips from side to side as she shakes her head. “No one’s better than you.”
I bend down and flip her onto my back again. This time, though, it’s so she can’t see me struggling with the wave of emotion that her words brought about. There are thousands of folks better than me. Guys that don’t kill, maim, threaten, and mete out violence for money. But if she wants to believe I’m good for her, I’m going to do everything I can to keep that fantasy alive.
10
Leka
“Should’ve been a banker, then I wouldn’t be here,” Beefer says right before he drives the butt of his gun across the client’s nose. Blood sprays Beefer’s black shirt. He’s in a bad mood. “I’d be in bed getting my dick wet instead of teaching some motherfucking cokehead who thinks that his fat wallet gives him the right to mess with our property.”
“Isn’t he a banker?” I ask, pointing my own Glock to the row of suits hanging to my left. The closet we are in is bigger than my entire apartment, but I’m the one with the gun, and the owner of all those clothes is on his knees getting a beat down from two thugs without a high school diploma between them.