I have Sam and our future and that is…everything.
“Get out of here.” I shove the kid away, breath burning my lungs, making me aware of how much energy I’d been exerting.
He falls to the ground near the trash cans with a groan and doesn’t get up for a long moment, making me wonder if I took too long to regain control.
I silently start counting, promising myself I’ll go find a phone to call for help if he doesn’t get up by the time I reach ten, no matter how fucked I’ll be if I end up in jail in a foreign country. But finally, after another groan and a whimper that makes me think he was closer to thirteen than sixteen, he staggers to his feet and lurches away around the edge of the apartment building.
I watch him go, torn between feeling relieved and disgusted with myself.
A quick glance at the building reveals sheets hanging in the windows, a Christmas tree still visible in a second story apartment, and an air of poverty so heavy there is no mistaking the building for anything other than the slum that it is. This is where the people who are just a few rungs above rock bottom are clinging to the shit splattered concrete before they’re swept away into the sewer.
This is a place like the one where I grew up, a place where almost no one gets out and no one gets better.
Generation by generation, people are sucked into ever more crushing poverty until kids are born knowing it’s pointless to hope for something better. The only way out is to take what the world won’t offer you, to steal what the powers that be will never give you a chance to earn.
As awful as it was to see Sam with a knife at her throat, a part of me knows where that kid was coming from. And I know if things had been different, if Caitlin hadn’t met a millionaire with a trust fund who loved her crazy family as much as he loved my sister, and if Sam hadn’t made me want to change, I might have been that kid.
“Are you okay?” Sam appears in front of me, her eyes so wide in her thin face she looks like one of those Japanese cartoons, reminding me of the other thing that’s been bothering me since I pulled her into my arms at the Kahului airport.
“I’m fine, but you’re too skinny,” I say, sucking in a relieved breath as she lunges into me, hugs me tight, and proves she doesn’t think I’m a monster. “I’m going to buy you a big stack of pancakes as soon as we get checked into the hostel.”
“We should probably get cleaned up somewhere first,” she says, pulling back to look up at me, eyes still wide. “Your knuckles are split and I…I think I have blood in my mouth.”
I capture her face in my hands, running my thumb over her full bottom lip. “No, you don’t. You’re fine. No blood.”
“Are you sure?” she asks, bringing her fingers to her mouth and wiping too hard at the edges. “I swear, I taste blood. It’s like my mouth is full of it.”
“I can’t see anything, but that was dangerous, Sam.” I bend, scooping up our packs, ready to get away from the scene of our near mugging. “If anything like that ever happens again, just give the guy the money. It isn’t worth risking your life.”
“I know.” She crosses her arms at her chest as we make quick time down the street, toward the green hostel sign glowing at the end of the block. “I don’t know what happened. One minute I was scared, and the next I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. I don’t even remember deciding to fight back. I just…did it.”
Her fingers drift to her lips. “I bit him so hard, Danny. I think I felt something…snap. A tendon or something?”
“It’s okay.” I study her face in the glow of the streetlights, not liking how pale she looks. “Don’t worry about him.”
“I’m not, I just…” She brushes her sleeve across her lips hard enough for the fabric of her fleece hoodie to rasp as it drags across her skin. “It’s nothing. I just need to get the taste out of my mouth. I’ll brush my teeth as soon as we get there. It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
I want to believe her, but my gut tells me nothing is fine and maybe the fates are still against us, after all.
Chapter Eight
Samantha
One Week Earlier
* * *
“We are all the fools of time and terror: Days
Steal on us and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.”
-Lord Byron
* * *
“So you think I can finish in one more semester?” I pluck at the pilling fabric on the upholstered chair in my advisor’s cramped office, where stacks of hardcover books on mathematical theory war for space with his wide collection of antique beer steins.