Chapter 1

“Baby, wake up. Come on, you’re starting school today.”

I moaned as the dream I was having vanished, the mansion we lived in replaced by the fake wood-paneled walls of our trailer.

“I was having such a good dream,” I whined, rolling over and pulling a pillow over my head.

“I know, sweetheart, but you don’t want to be late for your first day of school, and I have to get to work. Come on, I made you eggs.”

“Urrf,” I mumbled as I felt her get up from the edge of the bed and go back towards the front of the trailer, flipping on my room light as she left.

I lay there, head covered for another moment, wishing I could go back to sleep. I knew, however, she’d just be back, and I didn’t want to skip breakfast. While Mom wouldn’t be mad at me, I knew we couldn’t afford to waste the food, and I didn’t want to be the reason she was late for work.

Rolling over, eyes still squeezed shut from the light, I leveraged myself up, planting my feet on the rough carpet. I stumbled my way through getting dressed and brushing my teeth, finally managing to get my eyes open by the time I walked through the small living room into the kitchen that doubled as the entrance to our trailer.

I found her sitting at the table drinking a cup of coffee next to my spot, where she’d set out some scrambled eggs, a piece of toast, and a cup of milk.

“Just coffee for breakfast?”

“You know me; I’m not really a breakfast person. I just need to have my coffee.”

“What about your lunch?”

“I’ll get something at the cafeteria.”

“Don’t do that,” I said, sitting down my fork and giving her what I thought was a stern look.

“I’m not doing anything. You worry about doing good at school today and let me worry about the parenting stuff. You may be the man of the house, but I’m still your mother.”

“Mom, I’m not a kid anymore. Things are different now. We’re not getting handouts from bar kitchens, and Dad isn’t here to steal groceries anymore.”

“Don’t talk that way about your father, Charlie.”

“I heard Uncle Tony tell someone that once.”

“You shouldn’t listen to gossip, Charlie. He may have done some things I don’t approve of, but he’s still your father. He did what he had to do to support us.”

“What he had to do was not drink every dollar he made,” I mumbled under my breath.

I know she heard me, but she let it pass.

“Baby, I promise I’ll take care of myself. Okay?”

“Fine. I just worry about you.”

“And I worry you aren’t going to finish your food and make it to the bus on time. Get a move on.”

I rolled my eyes but wolfed down the rest of my eggs without argument. Looking at the clock on the stove, she wasn’t wrong.

I grabbed my backpack, which had the school supplies she’d gotten for me over the weekend in it. It was really light without any books in it yet.

“Bye, Mom. Have a good day at work,” I said, leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Have a good day at school, sweetheart. Make lots of friends.”

I gave a wave over my shoulder as I pushed through the screen door of the trailer and skipped down the wooden steps that had been set up in front of them. Our trailer was at the very back of Oakdale Estates, which was a ridiculous name for the single loop that made up the trailer park. We’d only moved in a few months ago, and most of the people who lived here were either young adults just starting out or older people living on a fixed income. There were a few other families, but all the kids I’d seen before were all a lot younger than me.

I assumed I was the only public school-aged kid since there wasn’t even a bus stop at the front road that led into the ‘mobile home community.’ Mom had called the school and asked about having a bus stop at the front of the park, but they said they couldn’t create new stops unless there were no currently available stops nearby. They decided since there was a stop just a few hundred yards from our trailer that was close enough. Never mind that I had to walk through a stand of trees, jump over a creek, and then either circle my way around twenty houses or go through someone’s back yard to get to it.

I circled around the back of our trailer and crossed the ten feet of open space into the trees. It had rained the night before, which made the ground a little spongy, and drops of water fall onto my head and the back of my t-shirt every time I bumped into tree branches as I pushed my way through to the creek.

That was another thing that made it so obvious no school-age kids lived in Oakdale. No one had crossed through this section of trees often enough to make a path, making me push through wet leaves. I broke a couple of branches off and made a mental note of where I entered this small patch. I figured if I took this same way every day and broke off some obstacles each time, I’d have an easier time of it by next semester.

The other thing the lack of trail told me was that no one from the nice houses on the other side of the creek ever crossed over to play with kids in the trailer park. Of course, that might not say anything about them, since there weren’t really any kids in the trailer park old enough to get visitors who’d be cutting through a grove of trees and over a creek, but I’d met enough people in the kinds of houses I was walking towards to know what to expect.

I slipped as I jumped over the creek, my ratty sneakers sliding in the mud, sending my right foot into the chilly water.

“Shit.”

Now I’d have a wet sock all morning.

I was just starting to shake the extra water off my foot when I heard a kid scream.

“Hey. Stop it.”

It was a little kid’s voice, still high pitched. It sounded like it was coming from in front of me. I assumed at first it came from some kids arguing in their back yard or something until I got a little closer and heard a second, much older voice.

“Harry saw the money, kid. Just give it to us, and you’ll be okay.”

“Aunt Jennifer,” the kid’s voice screamed.

It was probably as loud as he could get it, but it wasn’t loud enough. As I came around the back of the yard, I could hear someone say ‘ooff’ and a light thumping sound. When I got to a point where I could see who’d been talking I saw three kids about my age standing over a much smaller kid.

The younger kid was probably in elementary school, maybe seven or eight years old. He was wearing a costume of some kind with patches on one shoulder and some kind of toy space gun in a holster on his hip.

He was sitting on his butt, and it looked like he’d been pushed down, although he probably wasn’t actually injured. The three guys were standing over him menacingly as the little kid tried to push himself away from them. When one of the guys started to reach for him I decided I needed to do something.

I normally tried to not get involved in other people’s business, since that hardly ever ended well for me. Especially in situations like this. I wasn’t a fighter, and while I was fairly tall at an even six feet, I was rail thin. Not so much from genetics, since my dad was broad-shouldered and pretty well built, but more from just a lack of a good diet. We didn’t normally eat a lot and what meals we did have were made out of the least expensive things on the shelf, which never included things with actual nutritional value.

I might not have been the right person to try and do something about this situation, but I couldn’t stand bullies.

“Leave him alone,” was the cleverest thing I could think of as I dropped my backpack in what looked like a dry piece of grass and walked towards them.

“Unless you want your ass kicked too, you need to turn around. Right now,” the biggest kid in front said.

“So three of you can gang up on one little kid?”

“Listen you...”

He never got the rest of his sentence out. I’d watched my dad get in plenty of fights in bar parking lots over the years as we followed him from gig to gig, and the one strategy I’d picked up from that was, always get the first hit in.

Sadly, that was the only thing I’d managed to pick up from my dad’s fights since he got his ass kicked more often than not. I ran up the last two steps to get some momentum and threw a wild left swing that caught him completely off guard, landing in between his nose and his right eye. The punch hurt my hand like hell, but it dropped him to the ground like a bag of wet cement.

That was the last thing that went well for me. His buddies didn’t waste any time. One of them punched me in the cheek and the other one hit me square in the stomach. I had a weird thought as I doubled over that the punch to the stomach actually hurt more than the punch to the face. I didn’t have long to dwell on that, however, as the guy who punched me in the stomach followed up with a punch to my other cheek, knocking me to the ground.

“Run,” was all I managed to get out before a foot smashed into my chest, almost picking me off the ground.

I grabbed at his leg, managing to catch the end of his tennis shoe and pulled, sending him falling over backward, his wheeling arms catching their leader who was just getting back up, knocking the both of them down.

I was halfway to standing again when a foot smashed into my stomach again, sending me spinning over, crashing to the ground on my other side. A heel smashed into my foot, sending a burst of pain that almost felt like electricity shooting up through to my hip.

I tried to ignore it and punched straight out at the guy who’d smashed my leg, catching him right in the nuts. He fell over, giving me a moment’s breather. I tried to stand, but as soon as I put weight on my left leg I almost fell over again. I managed to shift my weight at the last second, staying upright, but my foot hurt like hell.

“I’m going to beat you to death,” their leader said as he finally got back up, blood streaming from his nose.

I took another wild swing, but he ducked back, and I missed badly. I was already stumbling and on the verge of falling when his fist smashed into my temple, sending me crashing hard to the ground, my head banging off the mud and grass.

I tried to push myself up again, knowing if they got me on the ground and got on top of me, I was done for. I got partially up, half kneeling, and managed a few more wild swings, clipping one of them in the hip and missing the second one entirely but unable to dodge or otherwise get out of their way, since I couldn’t put any weight on my back foot.

A kick at the knee on the leg I was using to hold myself upright sent me sprawling on the ground again. Thankfully it didn’t hit my knee directly, or I would have had serious long term damage, but it was enough to get me back on the ground.

The guy I’d punched in the junk was back up, and all three were on top of me. I pulled myself up into a ball as they surrounded me and started kicking the crap out of me. I tried to protect the center of my body by doubling over almost in the fetal position and put my arms over my head, trying to block the kicks they were trying to land on my face.

“Hey, get off of him,” a voice yelled from somewhere far away. “I called the cops.”

I wished I’d thought about doing that instead of trying to take on three guys bigger than me all by myself. I watched their feet run away, around the side of the house, and then half saw another blurry pair of legs come into my eye-line before I threw up and passed out.

There was a low murmur of sounds as I came to. It wasn’t loud, but it wasn’t particularly quiet either. More distracting than the noise was the strong smell of disinfectant.

My confusion only lasted a second or two as a wave of pain hit me the moment I tried to take a breath. The pain brought back the memory of getting my ass kicked. I tried to open my eyes and sit up, and then shut them again to keep out the piercing light that kicked my headache into high gear, lying back on the pillow.

“Gahh.”

“Are you okay?” a female voice came from somewhere a few inches from my head.

That stopped me cold. The voice wasn’t one I knew. I pried my eyes open slowly to adjust to the light and saw a girl sitting in a chair next to the bed I was in. I had no idea who she was.