“KENNY, I can’t do this anymore.” Kelsey held out the little brown paper bag and wished she’d thrown it in the trash. Except that what if someone found it there and got hurt by it? Or figured out that she’d put it there? What if they found out it was drugs and did fingerprints like on television and knew it was hers?
“You have to,” Kenny said. “If you don’t, someone’s going to tell on you and you’ll be in big trouble.”
She dug the toe of her tennis shoe into the dirt. “Who’s going to tell, Kenny?” Only him. Mom wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t let Don, either. “Besides, if you do, you’ll get in trouble, too.”
“Not if I just tell that I’ve seen you over here.”
With tears starting to come, even though she was trying really hard to hold them back, Kelsey stared up at him. “Would you do that to me?”
“I wouldn’t wanna,” he said, and looked down. “But don’t you get it, Kelsey? You get to see your mom. I don’t get to see my dad at all. We need this money.”
Yeah, she’d thought about that for a long time and just didn’t know what to do.
“It’s not a big deal, I promise,” he said now, taking hold of one of her hands. She liked how that felt, a hand a little bigger then hers but not as big as an adult’s so that it swallowed hers up. “For drugs, the trouble you get in depends on how much you have. And there’s not much here.”
“How much?”
“Only an ounce,” he said. “Just over a thousand dollars’ worth, and my dad says they won’t do anything to us for that except maybe put us in counseling. My dad says prosecution costs the state a lot of money and they have too many bigger cases to worry about.”
She didn’t know about any of that stuff. And she didn’t want to know.
“My dad wouldn’t lie to me, Kelsey, and he wouldn’t get me in trouble. Just like your mom. She wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. She loves you too much.”
“Do you know my mom?”
He nodded. “I met her once with my dad, before they took me away from him.”
She felt a little better inside. “Did you like her?”
“’Course,” Kenny said, brushing his hair away from his face. “I wish she’d been my mom.”
Wow. Kelsey smiled. She was pretty special. And lucky, too. She just had to be a big girl and help them all be happy again.
And quit worrying about going to jail.
“Do they whip you in jail?” she asked Kenny. She’d thought of it last week when Timmy Dorien had to go see her dad for spitting at Mrs. Melrose and her teacher told them that in the old days principals would take a strap to a student for such behavior.
“Nah,” he said. “I’ve been there once, when my mom thought I stole a stereo and reported me to the police.”
Staring at him, Kelsey asked, “Did you?” Kenny knew so much stuff.
“’Course not. My dad gave it to me, only I wasn’t supposed to be seeing him.”
“Were you in kid jail?”
“Juvenile detention is what they call it.”
“How long were you there?”
“Just overnigh
t. The judge believed me about my dad, especially because he came to court and told them he bought it and showed them the receipt.”
“What was jail like?”
“Not so bad,” he said, but she had a feeling he wasn’t telling her the whole truth about that. “The worst part was taking a shower without doors and having to wear their stupid clothes and slipper things.”
“You don’t get shoes?” She squirmed her toes in her tennis shoes. She loved her shoes.