I want to lunge for him and squeeze the life out of him with my bare hands, but before I can grab for his arm, he tugs Sam several steps back, increasing the distance between us.
“Give me your wallet and anything else you got that’s worth anything,” he says, his voice breaking in the middle of the last word. “Do it or I cut this bitch!”
“Relax, okay,” I say through gritted teeth, holding up my hands as I size him up.
He’s a little taller than Sam’s five seven, but the arm locked around her neck looks strong beneath his stained white thermal. Judging solely by his fuzz-free face I’d peg him as no more than thirteen, but his body looks older, solid enough to be in high school.
But it doesn’t matter if he’s thirteen or sixteen, or how easily I could take him if circumstances were different. Right now, all that matters is the knife at Sam’s throat and how quickly I can make it go away.
“Hurry the fuck up, man,” the kid says, head jerking as he casts a nervous glance up and down the street. “I’ll cut her. I swear I will. I don’t give a fuck.”
“I’m getting the money right now.” I slide Sam’s pack off my shoulder to rest on the sidewalk and then set mine down beside it. “Give me ten seconds.”
I try to catch Sam’s eye, to silently assure her that I won’t let this little monster hurt her, but her eyes are closed.
Her lids are squeezed tightly shut, her lips are pressed together, and she’s trembling so hard her curls are vibrating around her head. If I didn’t know her the way I do, I’d say she was scared out of her mind, but I was there that day in seventh grade P.E. when Sam jumped the girl who’d been calling her pube head all year. I was there when we were sixteen and caught two homeless guys torturing a dog behind the Mana Health food store in Paia. One moment, Sam was vibrating on the sidewalk next to me, the next she was shoving the bigger guy so hard he ricocheted off the Dumpster before falling flat on his drunk ass on the pavement.
The man was nearly twice her size, but he was a coward who got off on torturing animals and he didn’t have a knife. If she decides to fight back right now, it could end with her throat getting slashed open in the middle of the street and her life isn’t worth the risk. Not even a little bit.
I’m opening my mouth to beg her not to do anything crazy, but it’s too late.
My words die on my lips and my heart lurches into my throat as she reaches up, grabbing the arm that’s holding the knife with both hands. The kid reaches for her hair with his other hand, but she’s already turned her head, opened her mouth wide, and bitten down so hard I can see the tendons in her jaw pop as her teeth dig into his flesh.
“Fuck!” The kid screams and the knife clatters to the pavement.
He fists his hand in Sam’s hair and pulls hard enough to make her cry out, but before he can do any more damage I’m all over him.
My first punch connects with the center of his forehead, bone hitting bone with a satisfying thud, sending a wave of pain up my forearm I barely notice because it feels so fucking good to know Sam’s free and this trash is getting what he deserves. As he stumbles back, Sam slips out of the way, giving me a clear shot at the rest of the creep. Before the kid can recover his balance from the first punch, I’m pummeling him in the stomach, hunching my shoulders, ducking my head, and getting in close, protecting my torso as I make him wish he didn’t have one.
It’s been years since I’ve been in a real fight, but it comes back to me like I never left that rough, sad schoolyard in South Carolina. Like I was never spirited away to a softer existence in Maui, and an even softer one in Croatia, where Gabe’s money made sure I was never treated like a waste of flesh again.
Back in Giffney, I’d been nothing but Chuck Cooney’s oldest son, the kid most likely to get sent to juvie. I’d grown up in a neighborhood where you had to fight to prove you weren’t an easy victim, and I’d learned my hood lessons well. I was a runt until my fifteenth birthday, but by the time I was eight, I could level kids twice my size.
I learned to fight like a monster because I knew no one was going to take it easy on me if I didn’t. If you lost a fight in my old neighborhood, there was a chance you’d lose a few teeth or an eye, as well. I once watched a kid get beaten so badly he was puking blood by the time the two guys beating the shit out of him got bored and went to go steal cigarettes from the corner store.
When you grow up like that, you don’t see any other way. Beat or get beaten.
Learn to be tougher than the people who want to hurt you, or get used up, battered, and abused.
If I were still the little beast I used to be, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of regret for beating the fucking shit out of this kid. Back then, I knew the laws of the jungle. I had absorbed them into my blood stream, been born with them encoded in my DNA. Weak fucks who try to take what the stronger fucks have deserve what they get. They deserve to suffer and to die if they’re unlucky enough to get punched in the wrong place one too many times. This kid had tried to hurt someone under my protection and take what was mine, and he’d lost, and now it was my right to make him wish he had never been born.
But I’m not that monster anymore. I don’t have a taste for blood, or the freedom to risk killing someone with my fists. I have a conscience that would eat me alive if I took a life for any reason other than self-defense, and I have so much to lose.
I have Sam and our future and that is…everything.
“Get out of here.” I shove the kid away, breath burning my lungs, making me aware of how much energy I’d been exerting.
He falls to the ground near the trash cans with a groan and doesn’t get up for a long moment, making me wonder if I took too long to regain control.
I silently start counting, promising myself I’ll go find a phone to call for help if he doesn’t get up by the time I reach ten, no matter how fucked I’ll be if I end up in jail in a foreign country. But finally, after another groan and a whimper that makes me think he was closer to thirteen than sixteen, he staggers to his feet and lurches away around the edge of the apartment building.
I watch him go, torn between feeling relieved and disgusted with myself.
A quick glance at the building reveals sheets hanging in the windows, a Christmas tree still visible in a second story apartment, and an air of poverty so heavy there is no mistaking the building for anything other than the slum that it is. This is where the people who are just a few rungs above rock bottom are clinging to the shit splattered concrete before they’re swept away into the sewer.
This is a place like the one where I grew up, a place where almost no one gets out and no one gets better.
Generation by generation, people are sucked into ever more crushing poverty until kids are born knowing it’s pointless to hope for something better. The only way out is to take what the world won’t offer you, to steal what the powers that be will never give you a chance to earn.
As awful as it was to see Sam with a knife at her throat, a part of me knows where that kid was coming from. And I know if things had been different, if Caitlin hadn’t met a millionaire with a trust fund who loved her crazy family as much as he loved my sister, and if Sam hadn’t made me want to change, I might have been that kid.
“Are you okay?” Sam appears in front of me, her eyes so wide in her thin face she looks like one of those Japanese cartoons, reminding me of the other thing that’s been bothering me since I pulled her into my arms at the Kahului airport.