Page 2

Sonny Rule #20: Burn it all on your way out.

I texted the promised video to Dan—and an oopsie text to his wife Cheryl with the beer cooler video. It soothed the burn of once again being back on the hunt for another garbage job that would at least pay the rent on my tiny hovel I called an apartment.

Normally, I would wait for the bus at the stop a few blocks away from the gas station, but today, I wanted to walk. I needed to feel the wicked bite of the Detroit fall creeping in. I could almost see it slithering against the shattered, dimpled sidewalk. Its belly low and scraping the pitted path, long haggard nails digging into it as it pulled itself along. Trash gathered in its hair and crunched beneath its chilling body. A broken-toothed, sinister grin spread across cracked lips.

I shuddered. I’d always had an overactive imagination, even as a kid. It had gotten me in all manner of trouble when I swore that the little man with skin that blended in with the hardwood floors in the Wilson’s home had stolen Greg Wilson’s beer. Or the incident in the now-crumbling, rotting Victorian home of Anne Harrison, foster mom number twenty-one. The great puddles of black sludge crawling up the rickety stairs was that of the very woman who walked the paths in the woods.

I’d stopped seeing them, “The People Between” as I called them, after Crystal Valentine, adopted daughter of foster parents number thirty-six, beat my head into the door of her bedroom. She’d told them I freaked out and kept hitting my head until I passed out. It wasn’t the first time I had been hospitalized, nor would it be the last, but it was the last time I acknowledged The People Between.

Crystal had accused me of being evil. The evidence of my alleged wickedness? Missing dolls she venomously charged me of stealing.

She had always hated her altruistic parents and their need to help other kids. She had done everything in her power to shove me out the door as fast as possible. Everything from trashing the garage when I was supposed to be home alone to lighting small brush fires. I had blamed them all on The People Between, unable to grasp the diabolical nature of a sixteen-year-old girl who had seen the worst of the dregs of the foster system. I had been so fucking naïve. So young and stupid.

Just my luck, Molly and Brian Valentine were the nicest people I’d ever met in my eleven years of life. It was the first time I had felt like I was loved. It was the first time someone had hugged me, held me, brushed my hair back and kissed my forehead, when no one else was watching.

I was used to the performance of good parenting. I was used to what it looked like and what it felt like when fosters performed for the courts and the social workers who would randomly drop by. But Molly and Brian were different. They had made me feel something. They had made me want to throw the trash bag out. They had made me want to have something aside from a couple pairs of clothes and a good pair of running shoes. They’d made me want a blanket of my own, a door of my own, a brand name toothbrush, a side of the bed, a routine, a habit, something, anything to signify I was finally settled . . . They’d made me want a home. Crystal saw that and decided it was her life’s mission to take that away from me. The day she put my head through her door, I had found the dolls. The brat had pulled up one of the floorboards in her room and had been secretly stuffing them in there. I’d only found it because she had tripped me when I came to drop off her laundry and my hand landed on the right section of the floor to tip the board up.

I’d known all along I hadn’t been taking her dolls. The bleak reality of life had swallowed the childhood whimsy that Crystal still clung to long before I had come to the Valentine house. I might have the shittiest luck in the entire world, but I hadn’t had any black outs. The only explanation I had was that maybe The People Between had taken them. I had been so desperate to believe it that, even when smacked in the face with her crime, I kept trying to blame them. I kept shouting, “See! See! They took your dolls!”

It never dawned on my young self that another girl with the same background as mine, someone who had lived the same rough life as I had, could want to take it from me. It never occurred to me that someone who had experienced all the trauma and horrors I had would want to bring that on someone else. But there she was, screaming at me that I was a weirdo and that I had stolen her dolls.

She kept screaming that as I cried, and when I finally realized what the score was and told her I was going to tell the Valentines, she attacked.

Sonny’s Rule #2: The sheep are just as deadly as the wolves.

That was the last night I spent in the Valentine home. Two days in the hospital, and I was back on the road to another. I never saw the Valentines again.

I think about them once a year, though. February had become one of those months that was a long line of disappointments. It was only fitting that it was my birth month. Leap-year baby. I wasn’t even lucky enough to have a birthday every year. What sort of shit was that?

Chapter 2

It took me an hour to make it from the gas station to my shitty studio. At least the pimp who lived in 214 wasn’t on the corner with his girls tonight. When your luck was as fucked as mine, you celebrated the little things.

Sonny Rule #18: Appreciate the little things. Odds are, it’ll be all you get.

So, I did just that, I put a little skip in my step as I wandered down the moldering halls of my apartment building. No pimp meant no screaming through the hallways tonight. Which meant I might get more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep. It’d been a few weeks since I had that treat.

I was mentally salivating over the idea of four hours, even getting a little greedy and hoping for a full five hours without nightmares or screaming, when I finally unlocked the four deadbolts—each in varying states of unreliability—and announced to Cricket I was home.

She looked up from her warming lamp and stared at me in that lidless way she had. I liked to think that the flick of her tongue was her way of saying, “Ah! Human. You have returned. Make with the wiggly things.” Which I imagine was as close to a warm greeting a ball python could manage. Appreciate the little things.

I flopped onto the couch and clicked on the TV for background noise. Something about the silence in this apartment had always weirded me out. It was as if there was someone standing in that absence, watching me. I liked to fill it up with meaningless chatter every chance I got.

“Got fired again, Cricket,” I called over my shoulder. She didn’t have the good manners to even slither around her cage a bit to pretend to care. “Late again, of course, why else do you think? You saw me hauling ass out of here this morning. I’d have been on time, too, if the stupid sack hadn’t broken again.”

I opened the job search app and started applying to random jobs. It didn’t matter which I applied to—a job was a job when the rent was due, and I had to figure out exactly how long I could stretch the box of Hot Pockets and Totino’s I had in the freezer.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, don’t worry, Cricket. Mama’ll find a new job. Wouldn’t want to deprive you of the sweet, sweet lil squeak wigglies. Plus, it’s almost winter. I can’t just let you loose and hope you come back.”

I’d done that in the summer, letting her into the fenced-up, empty lot next to the building, hoping she’d come back. It wasn’t the responsible thing to do, wasn’t even the sane thing to do, but it was either that or let her starve, and only one of us had lost their job. She shouldn’t be punished just because her mom was a fuck-up. There had been field mice aplenty, and I’d found her sunning herself in an old tire two days later, fat as can be. She didn’t even flinch when I gathered her up and took her back inside to her tank.

No experience necessary. $19 an hour. Must have driver’s license, health panel, and library card. Elder care.

A library card? I hadn’t seen a library since I was a kid, but who really needs a library card to take care of old people? I fired off the PDF that held more creative wording than reality and tossed my phone as I rose. I only managed to get three steps away from it before it was chiming with a text message.

“No way, Crick.”

Cricket flicked her tongue in annoyance at the lack of mice falling from the roof of her tank, completely uncaring as to the reason I was frowning at my phone and snatching it up.