Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 136731 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136731 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
But my gut clenches at the memory of Julius’s first glimpse of Alejandra, the unconcealed awe in his gaze as he took in her loveliness, and the flash of jealousy on my partner’s face when Alejandra made to kiss her husband.
I saw it.
I fucking saw it. And I didn’t like it.
He never looks at me like that.
With an annoyed sigh, I walk away from him. Just before I head back upstairs to my room, I taunt a man who doesn’t deserve it. Holding onto the banister with my pump resting against the first step, I confess, “I went up there to do what you weren’t man enough to. I went up there to put a bullet in her brain.” As his jaw steels at my admission, I go on, “Doesn’t matter though.” I move up the stairs with an impassive smile. “Li’l bit is planning on killing herself.”
Choke on that, boss man.
I was sixteen and still in juvie when I got the call. An officer who I considered a friend—only in private—came bearing the news. His face averted, hat in hand, he told me my sister, Tonya, had taken a bunch of pills, and although her stomach had been pumped, it didn’t look good.
She wasn’t going to make it.
Tonya was only fourteen and a new mom. With our parents dead, she had only the help of my mother’s sister, our Aunt Georgia, who took guardianship of Tonya. With six children Aunt Georgia had of her own, it wasn’t easy for Tonya’s small voice to be heard over the majority. Whenever I got the chance, I called to check in on my baby sister and my niece, but it was seldom, and our conversations were time limited.
Tonya told me that being a mother was hard. She rarely slept, and the baby was demanding. Aunt Georgia helped out, letting Tonya sleep when she could, but our aunt had to work to support her now extended family. Aunt Georgia’s shifts became longer, because the bills weren’t going to pay themselves, and there were hungry mouths to feed, and Tonya, at the age of fourteen, who should’ve been playing with Barbie dolls, was nursing a child. A restless child.
The last call before my sister attempted to take her own life, she spoke about putting the baby up for adoption, refusing to speak Keera’s name. She told me that she was a terrible mother and her baby deserved a good life. Tonya stated it wasn’t the baby’s fault she was born into our family. And I sat emotionless, remaining silent, listening to a little girl grown up too fast, making decisions no fourteen-year-old should have to make and making those decisions on a rational level.
Before our time was up, I told my sister I loved her and that she needed to do whatever she felt was right, that I would support her decision. But the truth was I didn’t want my niece to be adopted out.
It was hard to explain, especially with people not knowing the truth about Keera. But Tonya and I did. And Keera was as important to me as my baby sister. They were family, and I was all they had.
I was escorted back to my cell, left on my own after the news of my sister’s suicide attempt. Emotions swept through me.
Sadness. Hurt. Anger. Betrayal. And finally, guilt.
My baby sister was going to die in a sterile hospital bed somewhere unfamiliar. I wasn’t there to hold her hand, to protect her. I couldn’t pray to a deity I didn’t believe in. I had nothing behind me, nothing divine, no god to help me see the light.
I felt nothing. And I felt it completely.
That afternoon, when I went out to the quad for some fresh air, I had my first run-in with a boy who would unbeknownst to me become my biggest ally.
There he was, a lanky scrap of a boy with wavy black hair that had grown too long, anger set in his hooded brown eyes. He obviously hadn’t found the pecking order in the yard to his liking, because he came at an older boy, a boy built like a tank, at full speed after the basketball he’d been shooting hoops with was taken from him.
I sat on the ground and watched him, waiting for him to back down. But he wasn’t. He didn’t. And he was going to get his ass beat when the older boy stopped being amused by the unusual show of fight.
My brow dipped in confusion. The boy was different, savage and animal-like. From the way his eyes darted side to side, assessing, to the way he held himself, his body language was barely human.
Thinking of my sister and my not being there for her, something inside me coiled then released. A protectiveness came over me, and I found myself getting involved in a yard fight I had no place being involved in.