99 Problems

[Polly Smithson]

When the sun rose it was as a slow bleed, arterial pigments leaking through the veil of steely cold cloud cover and drowning out the lingering pale shadows of night with a persistence that was frightening. Any other time people would look at that, at the hungry spread of dawning light, and they would knot up inside with an uncertainty that couldn't be soothed in the face of such brutal impartiality. Had it been a gunman (but of ethnic descent only, preferably garbed in worn clothes that provoked both sympathy and also simmering condescension because if only he wanted to he could make something of himself) wielding that kind of intent, terror would have been the order of the morning and no one would give two nickels worth of damn about what the best part of waking up was because it sure as hell wasn't something that Folgers could mask the taste of.

Gradually the horizon faded into hazy focus, the veiled mecca a ragged landscape of staggered architecture wrapped in a shawl of congested air that rolled slow and sweet as the blossoming day warmed it and welcomed it to life. Closer, on the long vein of Banyon Street, a few arching palms waved their spiky fronds, shaking off the night chills in black silhouette against the brightening orange sky.

Such a scene was meant to be fortifying. There was a faith in mornings, held up by the mass of humanity who wanted only to know that there would always come a dawn after the darkness of their tribulation. Didn't matter what it was, maybe a death in the family or a crap night of cards or the inability to face another week at a dead-end job that was pounding you into the ground so you could go home to a shitty apartment and a miserable marriage and drown it all away with watery beer in front of Leno, dreaming of winning the Lotto or blowing your brains out, one no easier than the other. People just needed that truth. Needed the comfort that the clouds burned away each and every day. The whole world could crumble, hang in tattered and bloody ribbons and still: the sun would rise.

And wasn't that just a kick in the pants?

Because to Polly, sitting on the pavement outside of Redencion House, there was little solace to be found in the turning over of the earth. To her, all long youth at twenty-four, the marking of another day was a painful, indecent notch on the bedpost of her brother's absence. All the fiery heavens served to be were an unbearably vibrant, visible advertisement that once again, she had failed. Micah was gone, blown away in a windstorm of senselessness, and she had not yet found him, hadn't saved him - and he needed saving. She could feel it in her bones and in her breath and against her skin, as surely as she could feel the graceless rasp of the curb against her legs. Lord, it hurt. It felt like swallowing glass and gargling kerosene.

It wasn't an easy task, to get through the thick-skinned wall of her sensibilities. Polly was tough. A product of hard years and badly-dealt hands, she had put down roots in neighborhoods where the crack and hiss of gunfire was as common as dogs barking and where a soul knew that beds were for sleeping under, not in, because Kevlar was for the cops and their bitches who ran the streets, not the poor bastards who lived on and loved them. There was no amount of trash talk she couldn't stomach, not after having her ears christened by the movers and dirty suits in ugly, faded paper bars. She could stare at an incoming fist without flinching and she could take a goddamn hit and haul back up. Did, too, out of sheer ornery spite.

But that sun, that damning, luminescent sun... it made her go so cold inside that she couldn't tell if her body even existed anymore or if maybe everything was just smoke, just waiting to float away on the back of a stiff wind.

The cigarette in her hand fluttered, ash falling away and sinking to land on the oil-slicked surface of a puddle, runoff from a dimly-clattering sprinkler a few lots over that cut a river down the stretch of asphalt. She could feel the sick-slick slide of exhaustion threading through her, making everything slot into focus just this side of clear. All night she had sat up, leaning tense against the door of the bedroom provided, backpack in her lap and a pounding wariness in her head as she cataloged the night noises, each floorboard creak and rushing pipe and sleepy cough. The effort was catching up now. There was a burning in her eyes and just behind them a mottled drumming, like her head was full of tiny hammers. Like those gremlins from that old Bugs Bunny cartoon, wielding mallets and smashing at integral bits of airplanes so that the whole bird went down, plummeted to the ground. That was how she felt, like she was teetering on the high edge of a cliff and all it would take was just a little slip to send her over in the wrong direction, wind up a smoldering heap while some tiny little bastard laughed because he'd been clever enough to strike at the right bit of sheet metal.

Jim had said the place was a safehouse. Poor, clueless Jim. He didn't know there was no such thing, didn't know or didn't care, maybe, but either way he was wrong. Only the ignorant or the cavalier trusted in places and both fell hard, sooner or later. Both fell hard enough to leave craters of scorched-out earth.

"Shit," Polly whispered, hating the sound of her voice. The raspiness in it, like someone had taken a blunt razor to her vocal chords and stripped them. The woman coughed and shook out another Lucky Strike from her packet, lit up and stared hard and straight as a paunch-bellied Hispanic man came out of his house in boxers and a stained undershirt to fetch the empty garbage cans strewn at the end of his driveway. He looked at her, just sitting there across the street, and suddenly there was that uncertainty, heavy between his eyes.


Christ almighty. Slumming in the fucking barrio and the black kid still got shit and shifty looks just for having a smoke on the curb.

Go on, jackass. Polly wanted to say. I ain't gonna ape you pickin' up your fuckin' rubbish. But the words didn't come and after a second's pause he turned around, plastic bins scraping behind him, and disappeared into his garage, leaving her to her own considerations.

[Jacob Foley]

Jake stiffened as he stepped out onto the porch, a cool morning breeze swept down to greet him, the floorboards creaked tentatively underfoot. Behind him, Redención House slept, everything within was untouched and draped in a soft peaceful gloom, it was his favourite time of the day. Now that he was sleeping. Dressed in frayed jeans and a faded Led Zeppelin shirt, he crossed the lawn, enjoying the familiar feel of crisp grass against his bare feet. Banyon Street was silent, deceptively so.

There was a girl hunkered down on the pavement, squatting like a lone suburban gargoyle, motionless under an invisible weight. He recognised her from Jim's description, who still managed to recoil with fright by the fifth revision of his bullet-dodging story involving a shoot-out between the Three Elevens, the police, him, a skateboarder, and an angry black woman - this angry black woman. And just when things seemed to be calming down, Jake mused, plucking a cigarette from his pack. Anna weathered it with her usual brand of maternal sturdiness, but to her brother it seemed that, on top of the baby wories, all of the drama and violence was making her hard. And there was enough of that in people already. He lit up and came to a stop beside the stranger.

"Hey. It's Polly, right?"

[Polly Smithson]

Polly didn’t like things that came up from behind. Never was any decent reason for it, intentions that were good drew up front where you could look ‘em in the eye. It was the same with people. There was a reason hookers and hoodlums always used the back door; secret things crept up that way, mean-spirited, backlashing things that had a notion of fucking you up bad enough to leave marks. The first thing she’d learned, before she could hardly walk, even, was to never trust anything that would rather learn the shape of her scapula before it saw the colour of her eyes. She’d taught her brother too, the trusting little fool. For months and months she’d come up on him, sliding one foot right in front of the other because that was how the Indians in all those fucking western movies did it, and when she got to where he stood, watching television or staring at a bird or eating a Twinkie, she’d slap him hard across the shoulders, push his scrawny frame down and give him a kick - never hard enough to leave marks but enough to sting, enough to make his eyes widen and his breath go wild as a runaway drumbeat. Once, Micah’d pissed his pants.

He learned, though. Wasn’t long until his best friends were walls and fences, his favourite soundtrack the sound of someone approaching, ears so honed that he could pick it out of a South End block party without even trying.

With the quiet of the hour and the tenseness from being a stranger in an unsifted neighborhood, Polly had no trouble picking up that she wasn’t alone anymore. To be fair, whoever it was clearly didn’t give a damn about being heard, not with the way they shuffled baldly across the dust-burnt pavement. It didn’t make it any less shifty, but at least she felt benevolently irritated rather than fucking chapped.

Polly glanced up slowly, dragging her eyes from their resting place across the street to take in the man standing above her. She inhaled on her cigarette as she gave him a good once over. He didn’t flinch.

“Fuck me,” she exhaled low and deep, drawing the syllables out until they barely resembled themselves they were stretched so thin. A plume of grey-blue smoked twisted in the air around her lips. “We got Jon Bon fuckin’ Jovi in the hood. Nice hair, fella.”

Christ Almighty. They had all sorts out here, didn’t they? California was fuckin’ weird.

Turning back to her study of the street, Polly nodded in short confirmation and then snorted. “So, is this the part where we smoke and pretend not to be feelin’ each other out? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, champ, I’m sheets. You wanna just jump to the part where we trade subtle ultimatums about not fuckin’ around with what’s important to each of us respectively, I’m okay with that.”

[Jacob Foley]

Such was his way with women, and he'd been braced for it, oh, how he'd been braced for it. And always with the hair. Everytime. Had he been wearing his boots no doubt he'd have found himself at the mercy of a couple of dandy fop-related remarks, too. Jake stood fast for the duration of Polly's savage monologue, battered like a well-worn rock before the onslaught of the mad frothing sea, and in the end he sucked on his cigarette and smiled.

"Shit," he said, dispelling a geyser of smoke, "You could give Jim a run for his money."

[Polly Smithson]

Polly rolled her eyes and shook her head, squinting down the street at a spluttering hatchback in shades of white and rust that had it looking like an anemic metal Holstein as it coughed around the corner. She was glad for the excuse to look away, the time if offered to stomp down on the flicker of a grin that was yanking at her lips at the mention of Jimmy Jackrabbit. That fuckin' guy. Polly wasn't quite sure how to figure him. Hell, she wasn't sure if she wanted to because that might destroy the novelty of the kid and it'd be a damn shame if that happened, if some of the polish rubbed off.

They smoked in silence for a few moments, a sort of easy stillness settling in the space between them. It wasn't companionable but there was no threat to it; more a loaded sense of patience, a fisherman's waiting on a baited line.

Finally, Polly gave.

"Which one are you? The brother, the anarchist, what?" Ash gathered tremulously on the end of her Lucky and Polly gave it an absent flick as she leaned back, one hand bracing on the sidewalk behind her to take her weight. Her eyes slid unapologetically to Jake's crotch, lips arranging themselves into a smirk. "Ain't the fuckin' hippie, unless that thing retracts when you put on your leotard."

[Jacob Foley]

That gave Jake his first laugh of the day, one of those hoarse morning laughs that went best with a dirty joke. She was sharp it seemed, in both mind and tongue, for someone who'd gone the night without so much as a wink of sleep. He knew that all too well and wondered inwardly if she had quite reached the giddiness that came when one was entirely drunk with fatigue. Or whether the first birds had yet hollowed her insides with their hateful melody. If they had, she didn't show it, outside of the whole radiating blind hostility thing. He looked down now, bored with the sight of the flabby Mexican across the street, and met her freight train gaze.

"I'm the brother, Jake," he answered, then after consideration removed the cigarette from his mouth to add: "My friends call me Jon Bon."

[Polly Smithson]

He'd made a mistake with his approach but the follow-up had been played straight, which surprised Polly. Boy as white as him should've stuck out like a rack of ribs at a weight loss convention and yet there was nothing hesitant about his gait, no shift in step to tell the story that his mouth wouldn't release.

In fact, the only thing riding on his heels was a solid, worn-in rhythm that seemed to spring from the ground, a balance born of intimacy. If Polly looked close enough she could catch hold of it, feel the weight of that stride echo phantom-like in her limbs, the memories of other, distant streets worn into the soles of her feet so deeply that they were as much a part of her as the thrumming whirr of blood through her veins. That was something, to know a place so well that it leeched in marrow-deep and coiled about your joints. Polly missed that.

"Shoulda figured. Family resemblance and all," the woman leaned forward, resting her arms on the sharp slope of her knees. A chuckle limped from her mouth and then turned into a dry cough, the scraped feeling of too-little-sleep rising at the back of her throat and rebelling against the cloudy pull of cigarette smoke.

Polly made a face that had more to do with her fraying composure than anything else. Christ, she wanted a beer in the worst way. Something cheap and faintly sour, the sort of unpleasant swill that could be sucked back like water and that complemented stale cornflakes.

"Take a load off, rock star, you're makin' me fucking jumpy standing up there."

[Jacob Foley]

Jake obliged the invitation, settling down on the pavement beside Polly, toes curling against the rough tarmac. Elbows propped upon his knees, he studied the length and breadth of Banyon Street in all of its desolate glory, a long pale stretch of stagnant urban debris blistered by poverty and time. Sitting on the sidewalk had a way tilting the world, making everything appear so much bigger and distant, in the process shrinking him into something small and insignificant, he liked that. But what posessed his smoking companion to take refuge at the edge of the road, he could only wonder.

"Long night?"

[Polly Smithson]

Polly's shoulders hitched up in a loose shrug and she shook her head dismissively.

"No more'n any other," she replied, hand poised at her mouth. For an instant the smoldering Lucky rested against the swell of her bottom lip but Polly didn't draw from it, just wanted to feel the familiar brush of the manufactured end and get a sense of the bitter curl across her tongue. The anticipation of a thing was often the best part and with the heady, strung out pull of fatigue clouding the edges of everything and giving a soft, drunken light to the world, Polly needed any anchor to awareness that should find.

"I'll tell you what, though," Polly turned to squint at Jake, "it was hot as balls in there. If somebody'd warned me it wasn't gonna cool off, I'dda asked that lady cop to bag me. Least they got AC in the tank."

[Jacob Foley]

"You could've always taken a swim in the pool," Jake mused dryly.

It was still cool, the light which lanced the trees like flecks of sun-bleached straw carried only the promise of warmth. The shadow of a lonely cloud wandered across the street and bickering dogs shook the world from its gluttonous torpor. Jake eased back onto his hands and thumbed the cracks in the ground. On his shirt was the weakest hint of aftershave, exhuming the ghost of a forgotten night, of promises made in the fast unbroken dark. His eyes crept sideways.

"Black chick vanishes without a trace," he said at last with a smirk, "Criminal profilers will jizz in their pants."

[Polly Smithson]

Quick as a snap, Jake found himself caught beneath a sharp, surmising stare, shades of winter-stripped mahogany sweeping over his face. There were rules about cracking lines like that, degrees of acceptability that shifted with context and experience and the colour God had slapped you with. It wasn't politically correct to acknowledge that, of course. That sort of outlook implied that ugly was alive and well, lingering behind the proposed immunity of jokes.

Polly knew the taste of not-quite-right, the feel of it like gristle squelching beneath teeth. Knew it well, too, and had been force fed too many times to have much patience with it. There was none of it in Jon Bon's expression, though. Nothing lurking in the faint shadows beneath his eyes.

Gradually, she relaxed and slanted him a nod and smile.

"Hey, you never know," Polly shrugged, "maybe Nancy Grace would cover it. Get my fine ass on CNN."

The reality, of course, hit far too close to home to bear dwelling on. It was too goddamn early for ghosts. Wasn't decent to rouse them.

"Man, we are dancin' around this thing, huh?" Polly huffed and picked up a bit of gravel, tossed it sidelong into the street. She watched as it bounced manically across the pockmarked asphalt. When it disappeared beneath the belly of a parked car, she turned and glanced over her shoulder at the quietly slumbering house.

"See, the thing I can't figure," she drawled, a suspicious edge creeping into her tone, "is what the hell you and yours are getting out of a place like this, rock star. House full of freaks is a weird fuckin' gig to run."

[Jacob Foley]

"It was a roof over my head, in the beginning. Then I started to give a shit."

It was an unworthy answer, brittle and emaciated, sustained only by the faintest glimmer of truth. Polly didn't strike him as the kind of girl to humour long-winded dalliances down memory lane, and that suited him fine. It pursued him tirelessly, a brilliant damning spotlight of a question mark, threatening to strip naked his intentions and reveal the cracks in his reflection. A trickle of thick foamy water rolled down the trench between sidewalk and road, passing beneath them, Jake glanced up the street to where a stout young man was busy scrubbing his beloved pick-up.

"And Anna," he continued absently, "She's just a good person, and has always wanted to help people like us. The work is its own reward, you know?"

[Polly Smithson]

"Oh, yeah, sure. I can really see how that be would be affirming. Herd of foster home rejects all banding together, finding themselves, facing adversity through the power of friendship. That's golden. That's after school special shit, right there," Polly snorted and stubbed her cigarette out in the filmy stream of water, the tattered cylinder sadly bobbing away toward a long fall down a storm drain. "Bet you'd all make out like bandits, you do one of those TV pledge-a-thons. Get a bunch of pencils and t-shirts printed up, tote bags for the real big spenders."

More than sounding trite, Jake's explanation was a goddamned lie. It pissed Polly off, the falsehood edging beneath her skin like a splinter where it itched and prodded meanly. Nobody was 'just a good person'. Not that good, not without reason. Even the goddamn priests doing God's work supplemented their spirit of generosity by copping a feel now and then.

There was doubt in her mind that this place was getting it's jollies; she just didn't know how. Not knowing was a real, real bad place to be.

Polly swallowed thinly, her throat raw and dry. "See, you don't fool me with all that giving a shit bullshit. The selling point's the neighborhood. Primo real estate, bunch of cunts on reserve to welcome newcomers. They show you loonies a good time often, or was yesterday a special occasion?"

[Jacob Foley]

Once she was finished, Jake indulged himself in an extra long drag of his cigarette, enjoying nothing but the quiet hiss of smouldering tobacco. He cautioned a glance towards Polly, squinting at the morning glare that crested rooftops.

"Do you think you could boil all that down into something more concise? Think bulletpoints."

By the end of it, there was a note of disbelief in his voice and, with a slight shake of the head, he returned his attention to the unfolding nothing across the street.

"It's okay. I get it. Everyone has an agenda and is only out for themselves. You take a really long time to say shit."

[Polly Smithson]

It was like electricity, the throb of irritation that lanced through Polly's limbs. She felt it buckle and coil right down to her fingertips, her hands flexing faintly under the assault, carving into arched crests against the denim at her shins.

"Fuck you, you prissy-haired little fuck," she drawled, eyes meting out a prodding one-two punch of disgusted inspection as they flicked across Jake's profile. "You want for me to speak slower so you can comprehend? Jesus Christ."

Polly's shoulders were set high in the shape of a challenge, mountains that turned the concave hollow of her upper back into a startling valley that somehow defied the rigid defense along her scapula, instead broadcasting a guarded and frothing unease. Her nostrils flared as she reached a hand beneath the neckline of her shirt and tugged the crumpled pack of smokes from where it lay, pinned beneath the faded red line of her bra strap. For a moment, Polly simply held it cupped in her hands, the torn cellophane creaking absently where her fingers scraped across it.

"I ain't here to join in on this charity scheme of your sister's. M'lookin' for my brother. He ain't been here. So what I'm asking you, wiseass, is what the fuck those fence-climbing Mexican douchenuggets are all about."

[Jacob Foley]

"They call themselves the Tres Onces."

There was much about Polly that grated on him. Grated on just about everyone she met, he imagined. She was crude, abraisive, opinionated, and loud. His sister's antithesis. It was why he offered up that first nugget of information without pause, to satiate the beast if only for a moment, while he considered his words. The cigarette helped to stall things, and it helped to disguise the whisper of a grin that had threatened to turn a fresh string of abuse into something more explosive, and bloody. He didn't need to read Polly's mind to know what she was thinking, and he liked that, and found himself put at ease by her sudden confession of intent.

"This was their turf one time. Ran their business out of a club on the corner of Twenty-Second and Lakewood, you know it?"

He cast Polly a knowing look, searching for the spark of recognition behind her eyes. The building on the corner of Twenty-Second and Lakewood was nothing but a derelict husk, pockmarked and blackened and left to rot. A tension crawled into Jake's shoulders, he considered the smoking stub between his fingers for an instant, then cast it into the road. The cigarette tumbled over the tarmac, spewing orange embers until it rolled to a halt beneath an old Corolla, and died.

"The bastards are hellbent on tormenting every mutant in town. They love us," he added, glancing at the house.

[Polly Smithson]

Tres Onces. Twenty-Second and Lakewood.

Polly let the words roll around in her head untethered for a moment, gathering the shape and heft of them, the particular sharp edges and grating cadence as they clacked together harshly. A taste like iron danced across her tongue, sour where it rubbed its back up against the roof of her mouth. She was reminded of aluminum foil against new fillings and the way it fought back, the sharp lance of cold, snarling pain that shot through a body.

Truth was, she didn’t know the club. That was the problem. Polly was only familiar with the fragile outline of the neighborhood. It was the same bare-boned sketch as home, a delicate framework built in fuck-knows-where and shipped out in the express post to working class suburbs everywhere so that the ones that escaped, the ones that went on to drive vehicles with first-class safety ratings and live in gated communities, could look back and feel blessed, with a bonus side of righteous pity for all the poor saps still stuck in the grind. It was the details that Polly was ignorant of, the intricate shading and nuanced colours; the important stuff.

Gangs, though. Those she knew about. Knew that they weren’t something to get tangled up in because the moment you did was the moment you started racking up charges on a line of credit you didn’t even realize you’d been given. The buildup was slow and sweet, easing on up with every day, until one morning you woke up and found that it was taking everything in you just to keep your head above water and oh, shit, that was why they called it a MasterCard, wasn’t it? Uh-uh, no fucking thank you. Polly was gonna lie down in her grave free and clear, a slave to no one but her own damn self.

But Jon Bon’s confirmation unsettled her. It rattled against what she counted as fact.

The House was a target. No surprises there, considering the fact that it was filled with hacks and babies and wannabes and Jimmy. A place like that in a place like this provoked more interest than a hooker at a political rally. They were blood in the fucking water.

Micah, though? People left Micah alone. He was tough. There was a way about him that set even the hardest bastards on edge, made them sneer and posture and get the hell outta the way when that Smithson kid walked on by. There was an unholy quiet in him that ran deep, a stillness in his eyes that was flat and unapologetic, that seemed to say, Go on, son, try. I feel like dancin’ today, and mean it utterly. Sometimes it seemed like the whole world was telling secrets to him, bending around his broad shoulders and stroking his cheek like a favoured child; wasn’t any other explanation for the way that whispers seemed to slide behind him, instead of the sound of sneakers scuffing; wasn’t any other way to explain that old, old light glinting in his eyes; wasn’t any other answer to the way his words, so rarely spoken, cut so clean that by the time he threw his knuckles at a fella, sucker was already a pile of fine, bloody ribbons. Who wanted to mess with a kid who had life on his side? He scared people. Sometimes...

Polly suppressed a lonely shiver, the ache of it bright in her chest. Sometimes, Micah scared her.

“Yeah, I bet they do. ‘Specially since you’re all so fuckin’ cute,” Polly tapped the abused cigarette pack against her knee, knocked a Lucky loose, and pushed it back in with the point of her thumb. A lead was a lead was a lead, even if it didn’t feel right.

“So where d’these assholes tug their dicks at, now that this ain’t home?”

[Jacob Foley]

Micah. It came to him like a whisper on the wind, descended, and absorbed into his pores like a fine mist. Micah. Micah. Micah. Beating like a second pulse beneath the surface of his skin, like vital life, or the haunting pursuit of a restless clock, ticking second upon second. A bastard splinter of a word, too sharp to ignore, too small to unearth; the itch out of reach. Micah. Micah. Micah. On and on, with every flaring breath, and every grinding word, with the shuffle of sneakers, and the antsy twitching of fingers, and with each reflexive scowl at the world, there was Polly.

There was Polly, for the first time. The trademark hostility rolled back, softening the tomboy hunch of her shoulders and the one-way traffic glare, and it was if every hard edge peeled away to reveal the softer sum of her parts. She was looking for her brother. A timid peek, before retreating back into its shell behind a snort and a curse. A pavement scuffle of words tumbled out, catching on the air like a knife edge upon stone, but it was too late. There was Polly, and there was Micah, the ghost that stalked her as much as she did him.

In an instant, Jake was offered a fresh perspective of the woman slouching on the sidewalk, the light-traveller with calloused knuckles and a Boston drawl. Her question gave him pause, and he averted his gaze up Banyon Street, following the long stretch of orange and blue, where morning drew battle lines against the night. Tension deflated from him in a sigh.

"There's a pocket of them holed up in the projects off East Carson," he said, then turned curious eyes her way, "You wanna go get something to eat?"

[Polly Smithson]

The eager stretch that raced across the back of her hand felt like a yawn, like she'd been sleeping and had only just now come to the surface to catch a breath of air. Polly laced her fingers together, squeezed bone against bone and tried to feel the roughness in the pressure, forced an ounce of solace from the disingenuous touch that sloughed off gentler, more honest things. The middle knuckle on her left hand popped and the sound flew up into the sky like a spark: bright, small, and snuffing out after only a moment.

The world lay in two halves. There was what a body did, and there was what a body didn’t. The reasons behind action didn’t really matter - fools didn’t care why you hit ‘em, just that you had - but the fact that they led to broader, concrete motion did. A persons whole life was spelled out in the choices they made. Layed out end to end when that final curtain call came, it was almost like sculpting the shape of a life to remember the soul by.

It didn’t feel like Micah was brushing elbows with some savage group of local shit-for-brains who probably couldn’t find their cocks with a magnifying glass and heat radar. The chance that they knew something was just as likely as not. Less, even.

But Polly had to try. Polly had to try because there would be no didn’ts when it came to her brother. When she was nothing more than a pockmarked caryatid, the part of her devoted to Micah - the part shaped like vital things - would only read did and did and did.

She shrugged, a one-shouldered hitch that fell awkwardly in the space between them as Polly unzipped the outer pocket of her backpack and pulled out a dingy bottle of Tylenol. A smooth twist saw the cap undone, and she shook a pair of chalky white pills into the palm of her hand, chucked them back dry. The bitter tang brushed against her tongue. Polly watched Jake as she chewed once, twice, and then nodded.

“I am starving,” she said. Polly squinted as a ray of sun caught at the edge of her eyes and then her crinkled face mellowed into a fine smirk. “I ain’t never had breakfast with a white boy before.”