would come soon.
He wished to meet Kira again, his special friend, that hurricane with a heart-shaped mouth and wood-green eyes, who had turned his day upside down and who would change his life soon, as he knew in the bottom of his heart.
KIRA
Princeton, Kentucky, July 12 th,2014
“I can't stand this situation any more! I don't care at all whether Darren Scott is the city boss! Yes, I understood...Yes...yes...Absolutely not! I'm not absolutely going to give up...I don't care if this war has gone on for four years! I'm tired of letting that monster spoil a young boy's childhood! I know he has already threatened to have me fired...He has been trying for ages, but luckily I'm too good at my job, so he couldn't get the Major's authorization...I understand...Yes...Okay, but I can't stand this state of things any more! Lucas is once more in my kitchen, he's hurt and my daughter is treating him! He had a wound on his lip last month, while he has a deep cut in his left eyebrow today!” Elizabeth Madis kept shouting on the phone. She was locked into her study, sure that the two young people in her kitchen couldn't hear her, but unfortunately her anger and her frustration seemed ready to break down the walls. She had been discussing with her boss for some years, about the measures they could take towards the powerful Darren Scott, but it seemed that all the people living in Princeton had family members working for him or renting a house in one of his crumbling blocks of flats. Everybody owed Darren Scott something, so they all feared consequences. Even the head of the Police.
In spite of that, Elizabeth had never given up: she was famous because she always got the best results in her job and for her incredible sixth sense which made her discover what was rotten in every family in town. After four years, she was still trying to obtain justice for that miserable child that she often had to put up and heal, together with her daughter Kira, who had never left Lucas alone since she met him.
Even if Kira was still very young, she had taken her best friend's troubles upon herself and she was very busy in looking for a plaster at that moment, so she wasn't listening to her mother's phone call, which she already knew by heart.
“You'll probably get a scar. Just sit down and go on pressing the gauze,” she ordered Lucas, feeling annoyed and nervous inside because she hadn't been able to prevent that new violence on the boy.
“It's hurting!” Lucas moaned, sitting on the stool in front of the kitchen counter, where all kinds of medicine, gauze, cotton and plaster were spread.
“Just hang on and sit comfortably! I can't get there,” Kira went on, snorting and trying to put the largest plaster she had been able to find on the boy's eyebrow.
“It's not my fault if you're small,” Lucas teased her as he found Kira's threatening look funny: when she screwed up her eyes, she looked like a character of Japanese mangas.
“You're just three inches taller than me and by the way, I wish to remind you that you were a real shorty last year,” Kira immediately underlined. She had realized lately that all her class mates had grown a lot and she was the shortest one now, while she used to be the tallest one in the past. Even her best friends Jane and Roxanne were a few inches taller than her by then.
“I'd better take up basket once more,” she thought, feeling vexed because she hadn't grown at all in the last two years.
“Take off your t-shirt now. It's stained with blood,” she ordered him soon after, thinking about the great amount of blood pouring out of his wound when she had gone and visited him that holiday afternoon. She had had to hold herself back and avoid feeling sick, after she had flung at Lucas's father, calling him “alcohol-addicted butcher” and “Jack the Ripper.” Just her mother's arrival had been able to save them from the furious anger of that man, who was in an alcoholic haze.
“But what shall I wear then?” Lucas got nervous and felt uneasy for being half naked, especially because the marks of his father's violence where still clearly visible on his shoulder blades.
“My mum and I bought a t-shirt for you at the market yesterday. Mum wanted to give it to you for your new school term, but I'm going to do it now! I chose it myself!” Kira exclaimed enthusiastically, making Lucas blush to his ears, but she simply ignored him and, taking him by his arm as she always did, she took him to her parents' bedroom, where her mother had hidden the present in her husband's socks drawer.
When they got into the room, Kira and Lucas locked themselves inside.
“Here you are!”
“Thanks” he muttered feeling moved and unwrapping it.
There was a blue t-shirt inside, with Super Mario's mushroom in its centre, like in Kira's Nintendo, and his name, Lucas, was printed under it.
“As soon as I saw it, I thought about you, because we always play Nintendo when we spend a Sunday together. You really love Super Mario Bross and jumping on the mushrooms in the game.”
“I usually jump on them, while you crash into them and are killed,” Lucas reminded her: he considered Kira like a genius at school, but an absolute duffer at video-games.
As an answer, Kira stuck out her tongue at him and Lucas smiled happily.
“So, how does it fit me?” he asked her, changing subject of conversation before Kira started listing the fields where she had no trouble in beating him.
She hated judging carelessly and not judiciously, so she placed her hands on her hips with her usual lofty air and started looking at him attentively.
The t-shirt fitted him wonderfully and Kira couldn't avoid noticing his muscles, which weren't there some time before. She had always kept silent about that, but she had realized that she was always the looser when they wrestled with their pillows now, or when they pushed each other on the sofa or played basketball in the courtyard. Even if Lucas was always quite thin, there wasn't much left of the nine-year-old boy that Kira had met four years before.
Time had gone by and Lucas was getting stronger, he was growing and becoming more and more defiant and brave. He didn't fear his father's blows any more, he had learnt how to take them without shedding any tear.
Kira stared at him for a long while and was spellbound by his face as it always happened. She had got to love it, even if his look was often different because of his father's blows.
His hazel eyes were always bright under his heap of messy, brown hair, in spite of a melancholic shadow which Kira had seen too often in his gaze.
Knowing that her friend was suffering made her feel very miserable, so she always tried to make him feel better and happy when they spent some time together.
She had even burst out crying in her mother's arms one night, thinking about Lucas.
“You're still too young to carry such a burden, but as you are considerate enough as to realize it, so just try to make him smile as much as possible! Kira, if you wish to help Lucas, you mustn't cry, you have to be strong for him!” her mother had told her that day. She hadn't understood very well what her mother meant by her words then, but she had been trying hard to be always cheerful and caring towards her best friend since that moment.
And now, after some years, she could see a very different Lucas in front of herself: much taller, stronger and very good looking.
“So?” Lucas spurred her, feeling nervous.
