A Girl in New York (Pre/Sequel to The Outsiders: A Girl in the Gang)

Chapter 12- Kid

        I walked through the front door of our apartment, listening to it squeak on its rusty hinges.  It even hung crookedly from the door frame, but I wasn’t going to do anything to fix it, even if I could have.

        I was rubbing a bruise on my cheek, wondering if it would make me look tough, like the cuts and scrapes on Dally’s face always made him look tough.  I was judging on probably not because it was pretty big, the boy I’d picked a fight with had been a lot stronger than I’d pegged him for and had beaten me good.

        “Kid?  You home?” I heard our father’s rough loud voice call, and terror clenched my gut, forming it into a knot, as I remembered the phone call I had heard being made in the principal’s office.

        I hadn’t been scared when I’d been dragged down to the office, or when the principal was yelling at me for not acting like the young lady that I was, but I was definitely scared now.

        Our father had chewed me out a few times before, with the whole closed-door-when-we’re-gone thing, but for some reason I felt like this was an entirely different chewing-out speech.  I vaguely wondered if our father would even remember my name or if he was too drunk to do that right now as he lumbered down the hallway from his and our mother’s bedroom.

        Our father was a big man, tall, overweight, and scruffy looking, usually reeking of body odor and alcohol.  He had a colorless stubbly beard and scraggly white hair with a faint hint of blond left in it.  It was long, he never got a haircut—none of us had ever gotten haircuts before—but it was made even worse by the fact that he was bald on top.

        He was wearing a scruffy white undershirt, ripped at the neck, frayed at the hem, and so dirty and stained it looked yellow, along with a nearly brown pair of old blue jeans.  He was barefoot, clutching an empty bottle of beer in his hand.

        “I got a phone call today from someone, saying you had gotten in some trouble with a boy in your class,” he said offhandedly, like he was talking about the weather.  Not that he ever talked about anything with me.

        I stayed silent, wondering if I should just turn around and go right back out the door to miss the speech, but then remembering what had happened to our mother a couple weeks ago.  I decided it’d be better to stay, at least until he tried strangling me.

        “You hear me kid?” he asked, raising his voice and coming towards me.

        “Yeah, I heard you,” I said, a bit defiantly, trying to make myself feel braver than I knew I was, but I didn’t raise my voice at him.  I hated being called kid, even if I was one at seven years old.

        “Are you talking back to me kid?” he asked, offended.

       It was like that was my name now or something, I mused before saying, “No, I’m just answering your question,” I smarted off.  Dally always talked to our parents like that, and I had gotten to picking up a few of his habits.

        He growled and raised his hand, and I flinched as he slapped me, hard, right across the cheek where I already had a bruise from the fight I’d gotten in.  That’s what this was supposed to be about, the fight I’d gotten in, not talking back to my old man.

        I didn’t run though, I just stood there and waited for another smack.  He didn’t hit me though, he just turned and disappeared into the kitchen.  Maybe he realized it wasn’t a good idea to beat up his kid, but either way I was relieved.

        I went down the hall to mine and Dally’s room, and he wasn’t there, not that I expected him to be.  I crouched down next to the cardboard box that had my clothes, and pretty much all my other belongings in it, and began digging through it.

        Jeans with holes torn in the knees that used to be Dally’s, some old T-shirt’s I had stolen from a second-hand store, socks, underwear, a small notebook filled with drawings, a few books, a sweatshirt, and then I found my blade. It was buried in the bottom where I stashed it when I went to school so I couldn’t get caught with it and have it taken away.

        I grabbed it and then climbed out the window, not even caring that I left the door to our room open, and headed down the fire escape, roaming through the alleys and searching around by the dumpsters until I found a pile of cardboard.

        I set the old broken down cardboard boxes up against the wall, throwing some scraps of packaging material in for good measure, and then pulled out my blade.  I flipped it open and threw it at the cardboard, practicing my aim and trying to get it to spin through the air like a tomahawk.

        Thunk, thunk, thunk, clang!  I threw it at the cardboard target, missing one out of four shots.  I snatched it up from where it had clattered against a rusty pipe and stepped back, whipping it again.  I could never get the right spin on it but I kept trying until it was too dark to see in the alley, even with the help of the flickering streetlamps.

        I trudged through the cold night, the wind nipping at my nose and blowing my brown hair that was just past my shoulders around, whipping it into my face.  I would need a warmer jacket soon, this one was worn through and getting to short at the cuffs so my wrists were cold, even jammed in my pockets.

        I climbed back through the window into the silent apartment, expecting to see Dally under the blankets atop his nearly bare mattress, but I wasn’t surprised when he wasn’t.  I should have been worried though, as I found out the next morning.