I could feel the bones crunch against my limb like crumbling crackers, wincin’ in sympathy despite myself.
He keeled over, droppin’ to his knees where he cupped his bleeding face and started cryin’ like a fuckin’ baby even though he’d practically begged me for it.
But there wasn’t time to relish in a job well done since his three idiot friends were approachin’ at a clip, yellin’ curses at me, and assurin’ me I would ‘feel the pain.’
I chanced a look over my shoulder and jerked my chin at the girls. “Get inside, don’t need you gettin’ hurt after all this.”
Katie instantly moved toward the door, but Daksha waited. “Seems pretty shitty to leave you to get beaten up.”
I barked out a laugh then chuckled even harder when Katie jumped back from the backdoor as it swung open from the inside and a mammoth body that was hard to forget stepped into the dark lot.
I winked at Daksha. “Dick Head isn’t the only one with friends, yeah? Now get inside.”
She shook her head, but there was a smile on her lips as she ran back to Katie who was waitin’ for Zeus, Kodiak, Axe-Man and Bat to fit their huge ass selves through the doorframe.
They strolled slowly toward us, not in a rush even though the three assholes were in front’a me in the next heartbeat. I knelt quickly as one stepped forward and punched into his upper right knee.
He went down with a wail.
Another kicked me in the side.
I coughed, crouched on my hands and knees, allowing myself a fuckin’ breath before lurchin’ into the fight again. But then a massive mitt was in my face, knuckles tatted, fingers ringed with skulls and a gold ring that read ‘DAD’.
Grabbin’ hold of the hand, I got to my feet and smirked in the face of Zeus Garro who was shakin’ his head at me.
“Why do I got the feelin’ trouble follows wherever your pretty boy face goes?” he groused good-naturedly.
I winked. “I gotta feelin’ you’ve seen your fair share’a trouble too.”
Zeus grinned, a feral, wolfish expression that made him look more beast than man, but before he could respond, one of our attackers lunged forward to punch him in the gut. Zeus deflected the blow the way someone would swat aside a fly then landed a brutal, cracking punch against the man’s chin.
He went down in a way I knew meant he would stay down.
“Gotta say, I’m thinkin’ we’re cut from the same rebel cloth,” Zeus said as he wiped blood off his rings with the edge of his tee. “You wanna hang ’round with us, see how it goes, I’m thinkin’ we’d be happy to welcome you into the fold.”
Bat finished up with the last assailant, leavin’ him on the ground and steppin’ over him on heavily booted feet so he could slap me on the back. “Welcome to the club, Casanova.”
And just like that, a kid who had never been lost in his whole fuckin’ life felt like he’d finally been found.
LILA
“The father killed the mother.”
It was that time between sunset and twilight, when the sky bleeds from pinks and purples to a soft-edged blue. The crickets were chirping in the long grass in the field behind the old house, and fireflies were starting to sputter with light.
I sat on the concrete front stoop, legs bare against the rough stone, pebbled with goose flesh as the air cooled and the sun dropped past the horizon.
I was trying to focus on the night, on the earth as it inhaled and exhaled all around me. I tried to remember I was just a speck in the belly of the beast, nothing more or less significant than a mote of dust or a grain of sand.
But it was hard not to focus on my foster mother’s conversation as she spoke on the phone in the kitchen. Her thin voice wound like a ribbon through the cracked open window over the sink and fell in my lap like an unwanted gift.
“Poor thing was there,” she continued over the clang of pots as she prepared dinner. “She doesn’t speak much now. I wonder if she might be a bit…dim. Or if it’s just the trauma, you know?”
I peeled apart the blade of grass in my hand, pulling out the seeds and adding them to the pile beside me before I moved on to the next.
I knew the germination cycle of the grass in her back field. How long it would take to plant from seed to growth. What kind of conditions were needed for certain plants to grow. That it was stupid of her to plant hyacinth in the full shade at the side of the house when they needed sun.
I wasn’t dim.
But I understood why she might think so, given I’d avoided speaking to her and her wife, Rhonda, whenever I could get away with it. It wasn’t that they were bad people. It was that I found I had nothing to say, not even when someone asked me a direct question.