Seizing the Day

Chapter Eight: Playing Your Cards

RACETRACK HIGGINS

It was the day after he turned fourteen that Jack Kelly had been locked in the Refuge.

He remembered that day; coming home from school, and finding Crutchie sobbing in the boys' room of Ms. Cardinal's Lodging House, frantic and shaking, Mush already there with an arm slung over the kid's shoulders. He'd glanced over to Race with a dead look in his eyes- a look that said everything and nothing all at once.

Something had gone horrendously wrong.

It was only later that he found out, and all the while he couldn't wrap his mind around it. Jack. Jack Kelly.

The Refuge.

Every child who'd ever been on the street, or close to it, or lived in the slums knew the place to be a nightmare. You didn't have to have been there to know; the house with the iron gates and the barred windows and stained bricks ate boys' souls and dreams like sweets, or so they claimed. Regardless of whatever stories proved to be true or false, Race had known at least one thing for certain at the time, and it was that nobody who went in ever came out the same.

When Jack had finally been freed after a six-month sentence that was supposed to be a year, but had been brought down thanks to Kloppman's begging and persuasion, Race had noticed that change in him the moment he'd walked out the large oak doors. There was something in him that had shattered a little bit, and he was just barely holding the hairline fractures together.

Race had never been to the Refuge- well, at least not in it, anyway. There wasn't a person he knew that hadn't walked past the old building at one point or another and felt a rancid, icy chill run its knuckles down their spine. It was the Monster House of Manhattan, and that was really all the warning you needed to steer clear of the place.

And yet, the feisty boy from Ms. Cardinal's Lodging House for Young Unfortunates had more cause than most to fear Warden Sneider's Lodging House for Young Delinquents.

He hadn't been kidding when he'd told Jack he was on his last straw with Pulitzer. For a man with little patience to begin with, he'd run out of leash to give the snarky kid with a penchant for tumbling headfirst into trouble's lap, and had finally called him into his office not even two months beforehand. Receiving a personal invitation to the Principal's office could only ever mean one of two things for a boy like Racetrack Higgins: accolades or punishment. He'd known right off the bat which one he was there for, even before sitting down.

He'd been anticipating a speech, heated words with little meaning or effect, and a great deal of griping from the greying man. A lecture would've been commonplace, a raised voice a nice spice for the mix. What he hadn't anticipated was the neatly stapled packet of official papers lying stiff as a body in a casket in a manila folder, his name- his real name- printed cleanly across the tab.

And those papers...Well, one stack was a legal document for expulsion from the school, his name typed into the allotted spaces and everything. Anthony Higgins. Anthony Higgins. Anthony Higgins. Seeing it repeated so many times on that bright white sheet in size twelve Times New Roman was enough to make his eyes ache, and his mind go as dry and fuzzy as his mouth. All the package required was a date and a signature from one Mister Pulitzer himself, he was informed, and Race's chances of achieving a high school diploma would have been more or less dashed.

It was the other paper that made his blood curdle and then freeze in his veins.

'RECOMMENDATION OF IMMEDIATE REHABILITATION: ANTHONY HIGGINS'

Pulitzer hadn't said a word as he'd slid this particular document right in front of the boy, undoubtedly catching how quickly the colour had drained from his face.