that there should be no violence.”
More questions and I put my hand in the air as I feel like I’m the one on trial. “Isn’t that the point? Hendrix went through my dad’s program, and one of the first chances he had to make a good decision, he made one. We’re strangers, and he helped me without violence. That, to me, is success.” A few people nod their heads, and because I don’t want to be done yet... “Mr. O’Bryan—grown men shouldn’t be following seventeen-year-old girls. I’m curious why you didn’t step in when I was being harassed. If you saw Hendrix and me together, then you know what happened, and it’s horrifying you didn’t help. Hendrix made the right choice. You did not.”
A rumble of conversation, Sean places a hand on my arm and gently, but firmly pushes me to the side. The raging fire in his eyes says he’s mentally measuring out the room in the basement he’s going to let me rot in for the next ten years.
My father approaches the microphone with an ease I envy. “Any more questions for Ellison can be sent to my press secretary. As you can tell, it’s been a trying day for my daughter, but we are most grateful for Mr. Pierce’s actions. We promised a program that was going to help our state’s youth turn their lives around, and, thanks to Mr. Pierce’s admirable actions, we are proud of our first program’s success.”
He offers Drix his hand again, and Drix accepts. Lots of pictures and applause, and Dad leans in and whispers something to him. I can’t tell what it is, but I do see the shadow that crosses over Drix’s face, his throat move as he swallows and then the slight nod of his head.
I don’t know what happened, but I don’t like it. The urge is to rush Drix, but Sean has a firm hold on my elbow, keeping me in place, silently berating me for causing problems.
Drix stands behind the podium and drops a bomb so huge the ground shakes beneath my feet. “Because Ellison had enough courage to explain what happened today, I’m going to tell you what I was convicted of...”
As Drix continues, it’s no longer just the ground that’s shaking—it’s the entire world. Because the guy who paid to let a five-year-old win at Whack-A-Mole, a guy who stepped in when no one else did, a guy who told me that not all members of the male gender were jerks...he committed a very violent crime, and my world is indeed rocked.
Armed robbery is a class B felony in the state of Kentucky, punishable by ten to twenty years imprisonment. Whoever robbed the convenient store with a Glock ran off with 250 dollars. That’s enough money to settle a cell phone bill and to fill the tank to an SUV. The payout doesn’t seem worth the risk, but I’m the one who did the time, so that makes whoever did it smarter than me.
Two hundred and fifty dollars. It’s still a kick in the gut.
Axle pulls into our neighborhood, and lights flash behind us as Dominic follows us in his car. Holiday’s asleep in the cramped back seat of Axle’s aging truck, and Dominic drove Kellen.
Me and Axle, we’ve been quiet. There’s not much to say. The whole world now thinks I robbed a convenience store at gunpoint. Won’t be long until someone does an internet search and discovers the trigger was pulled, the shot missed and that kept me from being charged with manslaughter.
“They painted you as a hero,” Axle says in a hushed voice. We pass box after box of the same house that are all stained yellow by the streetlight. It’s ten, and the night got darker once we turned down our street. “That’s what people are going to remember. You swooped in and helped the governor’s daughter when no one else would. That’s something to be proud of.”
Maybe. But I caught the expression on Elle’s face after I made the announcement. She wasn’t thinking about heroes anymore. She was thinking about a masked guy high on drugs waving a gun in someone’s face.
I glance back at my sister, and I take comfort that she’s in my life again. Holiday—the girl with the big heart and even bigger voice. Just like her namesake, Billie Holiday. “You want me to carry in Holiday?”
“She’s not six anymore,” Axle says as he coasts into the driveway. “She can walk.”
But she doesn’t look like she just turned sixteen. In her sleep, she reminds me of huge eyes, huge hugs, hours of coloring pages and her begging me to let her paint my nails pink.
There was a girl in the program, younger than Holiday, but she also had big eyes. During the day, she had an attitude a mile long, but at night she’d become terrified of the dark. First few nights, she didn’t sleep, and that made the hike the next day hell for her, especially carrying a pack that was a fourth of her body weight.
She was falling behind, she was getting down and with each new level of spiral she hit, her mouth got nastier. On the fifth day, she tripped. Mud in her hair, a tear in her athletic pants, blood on her knee and something in me shifted when her bottom lip trembled. I understood how she felt. Sometimes the weight of my problems and my pack was almost too much to bear.
I heard that she had never cried during her stay in detention, and five days into the woods, she was being cut off at her knees. I thought of Holiday then, and before this girl had a chance to break, I walked over to her, grabbed her pack and offered her a hand to stand back up. She took it and lost the attitude as she walk alongside me. After that, a lot of the younger people on the trip followed me like I was the Pied Piper.
“You’re right. Holiday can walk,” I say, “but I’ll take her in.”
“I’ll get her. Why’d you tell everyone? Your records are sealed. Only reason I agreed to this circus was because they promised no one would know what you were convicted of.”
Cracking of pleather in the back seat and Holiday’s groggy lids open, but her face remains pillowed by her hands.
There are some people you don’t say no to, not without there being consequences. The governor asked me to tell as a “personal favor.” He said it like it meant he would owe me, but I don’t believe that for a second. I rub the governor the wrong way, and he has the power to send me to prison. People like him don’t owe anyone; they own. Telling Axle that won’t make him feel better, so I lie. “Seemed like the right thing to do.”
Axle kills the engine and shakes his head at the wheel.
Dominic and Kellen lean against the back of his run-down 1980-something junker that’s put together with gray tape. Their dad doesn’t leave for his third shift job until ten thirty. Neither of them will enter the house until he’s gone.
I glance over at my front stoop, and my heart stops. “Holy hell, he came.”
Axle’s head rotates to the house so fast that I place a hand on his arm to calm him down. “It’s not Dad. It’s Marcus.”
My brother’s chest deflates, and I’m out the door. Marcus was my breath of sanity in the program. My cell mate. My fellow outdoor warrior. The guy who had my back. My friend. While some followed me around, I followed him.
Marcus rises to his feet, a six-foot-two towering black man, and his smile pushes the darkness of my neighborhood away. He’s barely seventeen, and due to a messed-up situation, he’s a year behind me at school, but it doesn’t matter. I call him a man because that’s what he is. Both of us offer our hands for a shake, but pull in for a hug. A hard hug with pats to the back.
