AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Garrett, Archie, and I didn’t have a lot, but we had each other. And if we continued to look out for each other the way we had been, I was convinced we were going to be okay.
It was on those thoughts, the ones I had that reminded me why I was doing what I was doing, that I came to the conclusion that we weren’t bad people.
Even if I wasn’t doing something that was legally right and morally questionable, I was doing what I had to do to help this family I’d found to survive.
THREE
Hanna
Two Years Later
Things had changed.
They were much more intense now than they used to be, and that meant it became harder and harder to justify what I was doing.
Somewhere along the line, it stopped being about survival and turned into something else. I no longer did things with Archie and Garrett so that we could simply eat and stay safe from the elements.
I now joined them as we attempted to make a living.
Garrett had eventually convinced Archie and me to step up our game in a way that had nothing to do with us getting actual jobs. It took some effort on his part, but Garrett was persistent.
It wasn’t particularly difficult for me to say no and to turn him down, but once Archie caved, I couldn’t be the only one left out.
Plus, on some level, I felt I owed it to them.
For more than two years now, they’d been looking out for me. Sure, I played a role in doing the same for them, but when it all boiled down, I realized that these two were the only people in my life that I could depend on. Maybe I didn’t always agree with all of the things they did, but deep down, I knew that everything they were doing—that we were all doing—was to benefit the three of us.
We relied on one another, and considering they were my first real shot at having that, I wasn’t prepared to let them go over a difference of opinion.
I knew it was wrong.
I knew this had gone somewhere it shouldn’t have gone, but I was so caught up in it now, there seemed to be no way out.
At just over sixteen years old, my resources were still very limited. So, I had almost no choice and had to go along with what the guys were doing.
And if I thought what we’d done years ago, simply attempting to get a loaf of bread or a handful of fruit was bad, it didn’t compare to this.
Garrett, Archie, and I took far more risk now.
Of course, there was the saying that with great risk comes great reward, but for some reason, even when we scored big, I never felt that same sense of accomplishment that I saw on their faces.
I think the reason for that was two-fold.
There was the moral aspect of it. I just didn’t feel good about taking things that weren’t mine. It was one thing to justify taking the bare minimum of food when we were so much younger and had nothing. It was something else entirely to steal valuable items from people, so we could sell them and make a profit.
Ultimately, we were still kids attempting to feed ourselves, but we were getting far more than the minimum we needed.
The other reason I didn’t feel so proud about what we were doing was because I knew the consequences we were facing. The three of us had all been picked up at one point or another over the last two years for some misdemeanor stuff.
Fortunately, we’d managed to get each other out of those situations when they happened, but we’d moved on from doing the things that would likely be considered misdemeanors.
This was serious, and if we got caught, I had a feeling the consequences were going to be bad.
That was why, even as I stood here as the lookout doing what I always did when we were on a job, I felt nervous.
Terrified, in fact.
For some reason, I felt more worried about this job than I had about any of the others we’d gone on before now. Something about this one felt different. Off.
