kept him from working, but it didn’t keep him from other things. I rubbed the swollen lump on my jaw as I walked and then fingered the four dollars in my pocket. I liked the feel of that a lot better.
“Dirt poor” wasn’t a new phrase, not in these parts, but it was a true one. That wasn’t going to be me, though. I sold blackberries, delivered papers in a place where most houses were at least half a mile apart, and had an after-school job at the same grocery as my mom. It was hard work, and there wasn’t much I hated more than hard work. But I did like money. One day I was going to figure out how to get one without doing too much of the other. I had plans for my life, and they didn’t involve rusted-out cars or jeans permanently stained red by Georgia mud. I had plans, all right, and plans required money. But it wasn’t going to be made by sponging off the government like Boyd. No, not like that sad sack of shit.
He was lazy. I could swallow that. No one knows lazy like a fourteen-year-old kid. But if I could make myself work, so could he. Instead, he squatted on the couch, scratching his balding head and blankly watching whatever channel happened to be coming in that day through our crappy antenna. He yelled a lot at the girls and me, during the commercials. And on occasion, if he was drunk or bored enough, he would lever himself off the worn cushions to back up his bark with some bite. He was careful not to break any bones. Boyd might not be smart, but he wasn’t stupid, either. Coyote-sharp cunning lay behind the cold blue eyes. That same cunning held his large fists from doing the type of permanent damage that would draw the eye of the police. He hadn’t touched the twins yet, and he wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let the son of a bitch get the chance. Girls were different. Girls were good… well, I amended as I scratched the bite on my calf, mostly good.
As for me, black eyes, bruises, some welts. No big deal. Teenage boys were troublemakers, right? We needed keeping in line. I might not have believed Boyd about that, but my mom didn’t say a word when he pounded the message home. She’d only smooth my hair, bite her lip, and send me off with ice wrapped in a worn dish towel. She was my mom. If she went along with it, it must be true. Boys needed discipline, and a good smack upside the head was the usual way to go about it. I told a kid at school that once, not thinking anything of it. Why would I? It was the way things were, the way they’d been as long as I could remember. But the look that kid gave me… it made me realize, for the first time, that wasn’t the way things were, not always. And when he called me trash, I realized something else. We were trash, and trash hit each other. It was the way of the world. The law of the trailer park. Being trash, I promptly punched that smug punk in the nose so he’d know what it was like to be me.
I didn’t hate Boyd. He wasn’t worth hating. I did despise him, though. He was worth that. A mean-spirited, beery-breathed sponge that did nothing but suck up money. He hadn’t even wanted to make Tess lunch and take her temperature for a couple of days, but he gave in rather than have Mom miss work and bring home a day less paycheck. He hadn’t wanted to be bothered, that was Boyd all over. Just couldn’t be bothered about anything. Tess and Glory were hell on wheels, no getting around that, but taking care of your kids is supposed to come with the territory. Sure, Tess chattered nonstop from sunup to sundown about anything and nothing, while Glory was sneaky and wild as a feral cat, but that’s who they were. You had to accept it. That’s family. I knew I’d done a lot of accepting in my time. The bite that itched on my calf was courtesy of Glory, and the cartoon Band-Aid over it was from her twin. Two halves of a hellacious whole.
I was heading home in the lazy afternoon, still idly scratching the Glory bite, when I first saw the gleam of pink. I’d cut through our neighbor’s property, twenty-five acres of scrubby grass, black snakes, and the foundation of a hundred-years-gone icehouse. Rumor was a plantation had been somewhere around there in the day. Now there was only scattered rock and an abandoned well.
The neon flash came from a foot-long scraggle of yellowing weeds. Hideously bright and a shade found nowhere in nature, it caught my eye. Curiously, I moved toward it, stomping my feet to scare off any snakes. As I bent over to study it, the smear of color finally shifted into a recognizable shape. A typically girlie thing, it was cradled in the grass as bright and cheerful as an Easter egg. Tessie’s shoe.
She’d lost it. When had that happened? It was far from the house. Yet Tess had lost her shoe way out here. I reached out and picked it up. The plastic of it was shiny and sleek against my skin. The only scuff was on the toe, and I traced a finger over it. It weighed nothing in my palm, less than a feather, it was so small. Tess’s favorite shoe, and she’d lost it.
But…
That was wrong.
My grip spasmed around the shoe until I heard the crack of a splitting sole. It was all wrong. Tess hadn’t lost her shoe. The shoe had lost her. I had lost her. Tessie was gone. Smothered in water and darkness, her wide blue eyes forever open, her hands floating upward like white lilies as if she were hoping someone would pull her up. No one had. My sister was gone.
God, she was gone.
How did I know? Easy. It was as simple as the river being wet, as obvious as the sky being blue. Unstoppable as a falling star.
The shoe told me.
2
They painted the walls pink.
They didn’t call it that, of course. They called it coral or salmon, more like Salmonella, or some such shit. Call it whatever you want, it was still pink. It was the last straw. Stupid, a simple color driving me over the edge. It wasn’t the bad food or the mind-numbing sameness of the rules. It wasn’t the bored, empty eyes of the teachers who could barely force themselves through the motions for kids they’d already written off. It wasn’t even the vicious fights or the fear of getting gang-raped in the communal bathroom in the middle of the night. Life in a state home wasn’t for the weak… it wasn’t for anyone who hoped to remain whole and undamaged, but I could’ve toughed it out for two more years until I was eighteen. I’d learned to hold my own. I was still skinny, but I’d picked up a whole bagful of dirty tricks that involved kicking or jabbing with my elbows. I could go toe-to-toe with your average son of a bitch and never have to touch him with my hands. That was another thing I’d learned. Touching people with my bare skin had gradually become a not very good idea. Even the split-second contact of fist against face would tell me things… show me things that I didn’t want to know. So I took my brawling in a different direction. It worked. The nickname Shotgun Jack didn’t much hurt, either.
Or the fact that I’d come by it honestly.
Yeah, I could’ve put up with it. Crappy meals and frequent doses of violence, it wasn’t so different from home… but home had been two years ago. The pink, though, that I couldn’t deal with. Every day I woke up to the reminder that home didn’t exist anymore. It stared at me with the blush of a cheek, the glow of a spring dawn… the bubblegum shine of a little girl’s lost shoe.
“I hate this goddamn color,” I growled, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
“Maybe it’s supposed to be calming,” Charlie said reasonably from the other bed.
He was always reasonable. Charles Allgood lived up to his name. He was all about the books, polite manners, and staying out of trouble. Unfortunately, the Cane Lake County Home for Boys wasn’t the place for the good and wholesome. With those labels tacked to his character, he would’ve been better suited to a Boy Scout troop than Cane Lake. It wasn’t surprising that he’d been through the front door less than an hour when he was knocked flat by a certain Ryder Powell. That was my first sight of Charlie, lying on his stomach surrounded by textbooks and clothes. The guy who’d taken him down, a small-eyed punk with an unlikely soap-opera name, had unzipped Charlie’s duffel bag and dumped the contents on the floor to see if there was anything worth stealing. I’d rushed forward, pushed Ryder aside, and helped the new kid up. We picked up his stuff, exchanged hugs, and swore undying friendship.
And if you believe that story, you’re going to love the movie version.
Truth was, I just kept walking. I was no one’s hero. Besides, this sort of thing happened on a daily basis. Superman himself would run his ass ragged trying to clean the place up, and Superman I was not. Primary colors, not my style. But as I moved on through the commons area, not giving Ryder’s fallen victim another thought, I heard a loud thunk from behind me. Turning, I saw Powell waver, then collapse to his knees. The hand he had clasped to the back of his head slowly became stained with small rivulets of blood. Charlie was standing over him
