It was my own stupid fault, just like everything else in my messed-up life.
“It’s all about choices,” Deacon, my youth worker, always used to say. “There are good choices and bad choices, and each one leads to more choices.”
Okay, so it was a bad choice to decide to take a shortcut through a dark alley. Not that I expect anyone to believe me, but I actually thought about it before I did it. And I chose to take the shortcut anyway because (a) I’m a guy, not a girl, so it wasn’t like I had to be afraid that some crazy guy would attack me and drag me behind some bushes, and (b) I was in a hurry to get home before my foster mom started to worry. So I ducked into the alley.
I was exactly halfway down it, kicking a stone ahead of me and enjoying the rattling sound it made as it skipped across the broken asphalt ahead of me, when a guy came up behind me, stuck something hard into my back and offered me another choice: Hand over my backpack or else.
I stuck my hands up in the air and turned around slowly. Maybe you wouldn’t have done that. May be you would have just dropped that backpack without a second’s hesitation. But I wanted to know who I was dealing with—a guy who was pretending to have a gun shoved in my back or a guy who actually had a gun shoved in my back.
The guy was holding what looked like a real gun. He was wearing a balaclava, you know, one of those hood-like things that guys pull over their heads when they’re up to no good. All I could see were his eyes, which were hard and cold, and his mouth, which was small and mean.
“Hand it over,” he said when I didn’t immediately do what he wanted.
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” I said.
I know. You probably would have kept your mouth shut. But, really, he did have the wrong guy. I wasn’t some rich kid. There was no wallet bulging with cash and credit cards in my backpack. There was no bank card that he could grab or force me to use. There was nothing in there worth stealing except maybe my camera, and even that wasn’t worth much to anyone except me. There was no way I wanted to hand it over to someone who would either toss it or sell it for five or ten bucks.
“Don’t make me say it again,” the guy said. He raised the gun and pointed it at my head.
I stared at the barrel. Up close, it looked as big as a cannon. My legs were shaking. I looked straight into the guy’s cold, hard eyes.
“Seriously,” I said. “There’s nothing in my backpack. I’m broke. I live with foster parents. And they only took me in because of the money the government pays them.”
Only part of that was true. The Ashdales probably would have taken me in even if they didn’t get paid. It wasn’t about the money for them. They were foster parents because they wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids like me. They were strict, but they were nice.
“This is your last chance,” the guy said.
I know what you’re thinking: What’s the matter with you, Ethan? Give the man the backpack before he hurts you. But you’re not me. You don’t understand how much that camera meant to me. You don’t understand what it would have been like to let some nut job with a gun grab it and either junk it or sell it for cash, probably so he could get high.
I stared at that gun again. It looked real enough, but, come on, the guy was mugging me. What were the chances that anyone would come at a kid with a loaded gun just to get a backpack that might contain a few dollars or a bank card or maybe an iPod? You have to be hard up to do something like that. Either that or you have to be totally out of it, some kind of crazy or drugged-up junkie. Idiots like that don’t carry real guns. They can’t afford to. It had to be a fake.
I glanced at the stone I had been fooling around with—it was a couple of inches from my foot—and made my choice.
I lowered my hands slowly to my shoulders, watching the guy the whole time to make sure he understood that I was moving them toward the straps of my backpack. I saw the same satisfaction in his eyes that I had seen in the eyes of dozens of bullies over the years, the pure joy they always experience when they succeed in forcing someone to give them what they want.
Then quickly, trying not to think about what I was doing, I kicked the stone as hard as I could. It ricocheted off a dumpster, startling the guy. When he turned his head to see what had happened, I swung my backpack hard at the hand holding the gun. The gun clattered to the ground, and I kicked it as hard as I could in the other direction. Then I sprinted down the alley. I was almost at the other end when I heard a shot. I felt sick inside. The gun was loaded after all.
I powered on the speed. I never once looked behind me—it would only have slowed me down. I zigzagged through alleys and up and down streets. I ran until I was sure my lungs would explode.
When I reached my street, I slowed down. No one was following me. I stopped, gasping and panting, and looked around again. Still I saw no one. My breathing returned to normal. I ran up the front walk, opened the door and was greeted by the smell of Mrs. Ashdale’s meat loaf. Home sweet home, I thought. I was safe. Nothing would happen to me here.