Chapter 1
I hear my foster mom arguing with one of her daughter's from across the house. Dios mio, I think. Not this again. Is a nap too much to ask for?
I guess it's only to be expected; now that everyone knows about my relationship with Amanda, there's probably going to be a lot more of this going around the house. More than usual, I mean. Especially since I'm starting to feel like El Diablo himself is behind making this town my own personal Hell on Earth.
I got to cut myself some slack though. Thing's really only started going bad around here when Amanda's mom caught us together. She started yelling about how disappointed she was and the vein in her forehead popped out... It was not a pretty sight.
And when she finally calmed down enough to actually stop and say something I understood; it was to tell me that if I wasn't off her property in thirty seconds she was going to have me arrested for trespassing.
Needless to say, my relationship with Amanda is over. Gone. Finito. Adios. It's kinda hard to date somebody three thousand miles away, and who's in some 'Christian Reparative School'. My English is perfect, far from it, but that just sounds like a really fancy way to say; "We don't approve of who you are, so we're gonna force you to be like everybody else." But maybe that's just me.
If you ask me, being normal's overrated.
The yelling gets louder and I pick out my own name, Antonio, in the midst of the swears flying from Jasmine's mouth. I sigh, I love my sister, but she has got to stop being such a baby about everything. I throw my pillow over my head and try to block her out.
After a few more minutes I give up on sleep. Climbing out of my bed, I stretch, figuring it's probably time to see what injuries I would have gotten from last nights turf battle. Pulling off my shirt as I walk toward my mirror, I stifle a yawn. What's looking back at me in the mirror probably shocks everyone who looks at me, but I'm used to it.
Even though I've had them for almost five years, I pause to admire my LB tattoos. The Latino Bloods symbol is the uppercase letters L and B engulfed in flames, with two guns crossed behind them. I know it must seem stupid, my being in a gang, but that's really only how people who aren't in it seem to think.
The LB is kinda like a really big, dysfunctional Spanish family. We're made up of mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican and Mexican's, but there's a couple Columbians in here too.
When most people think of gangs, they think of violence and drugs and murders and all the other mierda they hear on the news or read about in the papers. They look at the kids in gangs and act like they're better than us.
They never think about the good things. Like the fact that the LB took care of a kid who watched his dad get stabbed to death by his mom when he was three. Or that they taught him what it meant to have a family when he had none. Or that they taught him how to fight and take care of himself because, frankly, no one else would. Or that they have your back and you've got there's; as long as you stay loyal they will.
It's funny how the good's always second to the bad. But I guess that's life right?
I look past the tattoos and the fine layer of scars from old battles; I've already seen those. I'm looking for the one's from last night. The one's that will raise suspicion at school if a teacher saw them.
Not that they'd actually do something. They've seen the tattoos and bandana's that I share with half the Spanish kids at West Afresin High. They know what we are and what we do, and they don't really care as long we aren't doing it at school.
