smiling at me.
The last time I’d skipped school, we ditched together. We smoked a joint in my room and took a cab to Mario’s house, so we could go swimming in his indoor pool. That was after I’d taken her bathing suit shopping. The only suit she owned was a bikini with a giant hole in the bottom that showed her ass crack. She wasn’t comfortable wearing it, but God, I’d wanted her to, even if that meant holding my breath and going underwater and opening my eyes until they burned from the chlorine. I’d do that if it meant I could see more of her body. I didn’t tell Kyle that. Instead, I offered to buy her a new one. She couldn’t afford one, which meant she wouldn’t have gone swimming at all. And that meant she wouldn’t have gone to the beach that summer. I couldn’t let that happen. The beach was the best part about this hellhole town.
“How much did you make tonight?” I asked her.
Her hair had fallen into her face. As much as I wanted to tuck it behind her ear, I didn’t. Not now and especially not in front of Billy.
She held out her closed fist and slowly unfolded her fingers. There were a few crumpled up dollars in the middle of her palm. “It’s winter. There’s no beachgoers that I can sell bottles of water to and no tourists walking the boardwalk. And, when I try to panhandle outside the casinos, everyone has lost so much money in there, they won’t even give me their change. I’m not as good as you guys.”
“Then make ’em look at you, Kyle,” Billy said. “Stick out your tits, hike up your skirt, and make ’em want to open up their wallets.”
“Shut it, Billy!” The look I gave him told him I wasn’t messing around. Another word, and I’d rip his fucking face off. I didn’t care if he was my best friend. He would never give that kind of order to Kyle. “You want some dude to grab her off the street and rape her? Because that’s what’ll happen if she does that.”
“Damn, Garin, you’re right. I wasn’t even thinking. Course I don’t want nothing like that to happen to Kyle.”
Kyle dropped the cash onto her lap and buried her hands inside her jacket. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean it, Billy.”
“You’ve been trying real hard to earn money, and I know that,” Billy said to her.
She nodded. “I just don’t know what else to do until summer.” Her voice was so soft, and I knew she was trying not to cry. “Garin, you’re so good at dealing, and you make a ton doing it. And, Billy, you’re the best hustler in our whole school. You could steal a diamond ring off a woman’s finger, and she wouldn’t even know it. I can’t do that. I can’t do anything.”
“Bullshit,” Billy barked. “You’re smarter than me and Garin, and you got more talent than the both of us combined. Those things you make on the computer ain’t like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“You mean my designs?”
“Yeah, those.”
“But they need so much detail, and I need so much more practice. The only time I get to work on them is during Mr. Gunther’s second period class…unless Mom plans on getting me a computer, but we all know that isn’t going to happen.”
“Well, whatever. They’re good,” he said. “Real fucking good.”
I waited until Billy was done redeeming himself. “He’s right,” I said. “You’re too good to be out there, hustling, and definitely too good to be dealing. You just figure out how to sell those designs and leave the street stuff up to us.”
She finally tucked her hair behind her ear. I was glad it was out of her face, but I wished my fingers had done it.
“You guys pay for everything, and that’s not fair,” she said. “I’ve got to help out somehow, and I’ve got to come up with a way to pay you back.”
We didn’t give her much—food, mostly, some clothes, taxi rides around the city since none of our mas had a car. I was happy to do it. I’d buy her food every day if she’d let me. But there was no way she was paying us back.
“You do help,” I said.
“How?”
“Yeah, how?” Billy asked.
I gave him another nasty look to shut him up. “Just trust me, Kyle. You do.”
Kyle was the reason I hadn’t dropped out of school to go live in one