Dare You To

Last spring, Noah graduated from high school and the foster system. He’s moving out and Isaiah’s going with him, even though Isaiah can’t officially leave foster care until he graduates next year and turns eighteen. My aunt doesn’t care where Isaiah lives as long as she keeps receiving the checks from the state.

I try to shake my head no, but it doesn’t work too well in sand.

“The two of us talked and you can have a bedroom and we’ll share the other one.”

They’ve been at this for weeks, trying to convince me to leave with them. But ha! Even stoned I can foil their plans. I flutter my eyes open. “Won’t work. You need privacy for sex.”

Noah chuckles. “We have a couch.”

“I’m still in high school.”

“So’s Isaiah. In case you didn’t notice, you’re both seniors this year.”

Smart-ass. I glare at Noah. He merely sips his beer.

Isaiah continues, “How else are you going to get to school? You gonna ride the bus?”

Hell no. “You’re going to get your sorry ass up early to pick me up.”

“You know I will,” he murmurs, and I find a hint of my bliss again.

“Why won’t you move in with us?” Noah asks.

His direct question sobers me up. Because, I scream in my mind. I flip onto my side and curl into a ball. Seconds later something soft covers my body. The blanket tucked right underneath my chin.

“Now, she’s done,” says Isaiah.

My ass vibrates. I stretch before reaching into my back pocket for my cell.

For a second, I wonder if pretty boy from Taco Bell somehow managed to score my number. I dreamed of him—Taco Bell Boy. He stood close to me, looking all arrogant and gorgeous with his mop of sandy-blond hair and light brown eyes. This time he wasn’t trying to play me by getting my number. He was smiling at me like I actually mattered.

As I said—just a dream.

The image fades when I check the time and the caller ID on my cell: 3:00 a.m. and The Last Stop bar. Fuck. Wishing I never sobered up, I accept the call. “Hold on.”

Isaiah’s asleep beside me, his arm haphazardly thrown over my stomach. Gently lifting it, I squeeze out from underneath. Noah’s passed out on the couch, with his girlfriend, Echo, pulled tight against him. Shit, when did she get back in town?

Quietly, I climb the stairs, enter the kitchen, and shut the door to the basement. “Yeah.”

“Your mother’s causing problems again,” says a pissed-off male voice. Unfortunately, I know this voice: Denny. Bartender/owner of The Last Stop.

“Have you cut her off?”

“I can’t stop guys from buying her drinks. Look, kid, you pay me to call you before I call the police or bounce her out to the curb. You’ve got fifteen minutes to drag her ass out.”

He hangs up. Denny really needs to work on his conversational skills.

I walk the two blocks to the strip mall, which boasts all the conveniences white trash can desire: a Laundromat, Dollar Store, liquor store, piss-ass market that accepts WIC and food stamps and sells stale bread and week-old meat, cigarette store, pawn shop, and biker bar. Oh, and a dilapidated lawyer’s office in case you get caught shoplifting or holding up any of the above.

The other stores closed hours ago, placing the bars over their windows. Groups of men and women huddle around the scores of motorcycles that fill the parking lot. The stale stench of cigarettes and the sweet scent of cloves and pot mingle together in the hot summer air.

Denny and I both know he won’t call the cops, but I can’t risk it. Mom’s been arrested twice and is on probation. And even if he doesn’t call the cops, he’ll kick her out. A burst of male laughter reminds me why that’s not a good thing. It’s not happy laughter or joyous or even sane. It’s mean, has an edge, and craves someone’s pain.

Mom thrives on sick men. I don’t get it. Don’t have to. I just clean up the mess.

The dull bulbs hanging over the pool tables, the running red-neon lights over the bar, and the two televisions hanging on the wall create the bar’s only light. The sign on the door states two things: no one under the age of twenty-one and no gang colors. Even in the dimness, I can see neither rule applies. Most of the men wear jackets with their motorcycle gang emblem clearly in sight, and half the girls hanging on those men are underage.

I push between two men to where Denny serves drinks at the bar. “Where is she?”

Denny, in his typical red flannel, has his back to me and pours vodka into shot glasses. He won’t talk and pour at the same time—at least to me.

I force my body to stay stoically still when a hand squeezes my ass and a guy reeking with BO leans into me. “Wanna drink?”

“Fuck off, dickhead.”

He laughs and squeezes again. I focus on the rainbow of liquor bottles lined up behind the bar, pretending I’m someplace else. Someone else. “Hand off my ass or I’ll rip off your balls.”

Denny blocks my view of the bottles and slides a beer to the guy seconds away from losing his manhood. “Jailbait.”

Dickhead wanders from the bar as Denny nods toward the back. “Where she’s always at.”

“Thanks.”

I draw stares and snickers as I walk past. Most of the laughter belongs to regulars. They know why I’m here. I see the judgment in their eyes. The amusement. The pity. Damn hypocrites.

I walk with my head high, shoulders squared. I’m better than them. No matter the whispers and taunts they throw out. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

Most everyone in the back room hovers over a poker game near the front, leaving the rest of the room empty. The door to the alley hangs wide-open. I can see Mom’s apartment complex and her front door from here. Convenient.

Mom sits at a small round table in the corner. Two bottles of whiskey and a shot glass sit beside her. She rubs her cheek, then pulls her hand away. Inside of me, anger erupts.

He hit her. Again. Her cheek is red. Blotchy. The skin underneath the eye already swelling. This is the reason why I can’t move in with Noah and Isaiah. The reason I can’t leave. I need to be two blocks from Mom.

“Elisabeth.” Mom slurs the s and drunkenly waves me over. She picks up a whiskey bottle and tips it over the general area of the shot glass, but nothing comes out. Which is good because she’d miss the glass by an inch.

I go to her, take the bottle, and set it on the table beside us. “It’s empty.”

“Oh.” She blinks her hollow blue eyes. “Be a good girl and go get me another.”

“I’m seventeen.”

“Then get you something too.”

“Let’s go, Mom.”

Mom smoothes her blond hair with a shaky hand and glances around as if she just woke from a dream. “He hit me.”

“I know.”