I am almost eight years old, and some people just bought me. I’m not sure what that means. I’m not a toy on a shelf in a store.
Early this morning Miss Gina had banged on our bedroom door to wake up me and Danielle. It’s not a school day, so we weren’t sure what was happening. Miss Gina rushed in with two trash bags in her hand, way more mad than she usually was.
“Get up,” she ordered. “Pack your stuff. You’re moving. Someone is waiting for you downstairs. You can’t have the sheets or the toothpaste. You have ten minutes.”
Danielle and I looked at each other for a second, and we both started to smile when we realized what this meant.
We were finally leaving this horrible place!
Kendra was in the corner like normal, but I didn’t care. I was moving!
We couldn’t grab things fast enough. Neither one of us ever had a lot of stuff to begin with, so fitting it all in one trash bag each wasn’t hard. Carrying the full bag was heavier than I thought, and I just dragged it clunking down the stairs behind me.
A big, sweaty, unsmiling lady in a brown suit stood just inside the front door. She had her own picture in a square piece of plastic stuck to her suit near her neck, and she had two paper folders under her arm. She watched me clunk my trash bag down the stairs, but she didn’t offer to help. She just stared.
When Danielle came up behind me with her much fuller trash bag, the sweaty lady opened the front door and jerked her head toward the outside. As Danielle and I started to walk out the door, we saw Mister Butch and mean Carl sitting in the living room watching TV. As they looked in our direction, I saw Danielle hold up just the middle finger of her hand in their direction. I don’t know what that means, but it must be a kind of joke because Mister Butch laughed. Danielle didn’t laugh back. Carl just pulled his Yankees baseball cap from his hands, ran his hands through his thick red hair, and looked back to the TV.
Hustling outside, we saw that the unsmiling lady had opened the back doors of an ugly gray Ford Falcon with rusted bumpers. She sat in the driver’s seat with the car already running. Danielle had to help me get my trash bag up into the car and close my door. Her door wasn’t even shut all the way before the lady was backing out of the driveway.
I was so glad to see Garrison sitting in the front seat. He was coming too!
We drove for a while. The lady smoked cigarette after cigarette with her window only open a tiny crack as she wiped her dripping face with a hand towel. She had the car radio station tuned to some really old, boring music. I watched out the window mostly, but whenever I looked up to face the front windshield, the sweaty lady was glaring at us in the mirror.
My stomach made funny noises.
They forgot to give us breakfast!
“I’m hungry,” I said to the sweaty lady.
“Zip it, boy!” the lady barked. She took another long puff of a cigarette. “I ain’t your personal chef. The people who bought y’all can deal with feeding y’all. You can wait until you get to your new houses.”
Bought us? I didn’t know we were for sale.
For now, Danielle and I just shrug at each other. I find my lovey blanket and my stuffed elephant in the top of my trash bag and pull them close.
Not much later, the car pulls into a tree-lined, shady driveway. Danielle and I try to sit up tall to see where we are. A nice-looking red brick house with a wooden swing on the front porch comes into view. We both smile big at each other. I imagine us playing kickball in the front yard grass, and swinging together on the porch while we sing “Old MacDonald.”
As the sweaty lady stops the car, she honks the horn and opens her door. Her feet on the driveway, she leans in through her door to face the back seat and point at me.
“You’re staying there, boy,” she says. “This is your sister’s new house, not yours.” She slams the front door.
Danielle is almost out of the car now, and her eyebrows scrunch together. “Wait, what?” she asks as she looks back at me. “You’re splitting us up?! You can’t do that!” Now she’s crying hard as she reaches out to try to grab me. “Danny!”
The lady pushes Danielle out of the way and slams the back door shut. Grabbing Danielle’s elbow, she drags my sobbing sister toward the pretty house. Danielle continues to scream my name and point at me.
I holler and cry, too. “Don’t take my sister away! Danielle! Nooooo!” I kick and hit against the door, and I try hard to open it, but I can’t unlock it.
My face pressed against the dirty window, I see the sweaty lady pull Danielle to the house where a man and lady stand at the bottom of the porch steps, smiling really big. They can’t hear me, but I cry and scream anyway.
The happy lady squats down and opens her arms up to my sister. Scooping her up in a big bear hug, she turns and carries Danielle, still crying hard, up the stairs and into the nice brick house. The happy man pulls his wallet out of his pants pocket, takes out some money, and gives it to the sweaty lady. She gives him one of the paper folders she’d been holding earlier. Picking up Danielle’s trash bag, he turns and follows his wife into the nice, shady house.
My sister is gone.
Hugging my lovey blanket tighter, I turn back to Garrison. He’s backward in the front seat now, facing me, and I can’t help falling into a dark sleep.
The slam of a car door shakes me awake. I forgot where I was until I see the inside of the dirty gray car and my trash bag on the seat beside me. My heart hurts so bad.
My sister is gone.
I almost start crying again, but my door flies open and the sweaty lady yells at me. “Let’s go, boy. Time to meet your new mommy and daddy.”
Giving me barely a second to get my trash bag, my lovey, and my elephant, the sweaty lady grabs my elbow. She walks fast, and I have to try hard to keep up with her. She had parked the ugly gray car right along the curb in the street, and I didn’t see a driveway at any of the houses here. I do see a bunch of cars parked along the street. One of them is sitting up on big concrete blocks. One car doesn’t have a hood to cover the engine. Another has two flat tires and a broken window. Three older, skinny boys sit on the hood of that car smoking cigarettes.
My mouth drops open as I see the house we’re walking toward. All of the houses along this street are connected, with no yard or alley between them. Each house has its own front porch, and the steps from the porch come right down to the sidewalk. There’s not much open space, just house after house. It’s all so nasty and dirty.
The roof over the porch is kind of sagging to one side. The house we’re walking toward is mostly a gross yellowish color, but lots of the paint is peeling off and it’s a gray color underneath. If it was nighttime at Halloween, this would be a haunted house.
Railing pieces run along the front of the raised porch, but some of the pieces are broken and hanging down. Some pieces are just gone, and there are holes and ragged pieces of wood sticking out every which way. The porch steps are concrete, but they’re all cracked and crooked. The houses on each side of this house have small fences with gates at the steps, and the fences and gates are all crooked and broken. I see a few pieces of white wood that must have been a whole fence for this ugly yellow house a long time ago, but there’s no gate. One of the upstairs windows has cardboard taped over it.
There are no trees or grass anywhere. Just concrete steps, sidewalk, bare brown dirt, and the street. A dog barks from somewhere close by, sounding large and scary.
Garrison stays right next to me as the sweaty lady walks me up the broken concrete stairs onto the porch. She goes so fast I almost drop my trash bag. There’s a metal screen door with half the screen part all torn up. The sweaty lady opens it and pounds on the front door. “Roland!” she yells. “The boy’s here!”
Scooting closer to Garrison, I hear thudding footsteps coming from inside the yellow house. The front door creaks open a second later. Seeing me and the lady, the man squeezes through the door to come outside. He wears a torn tank top and oil-stained blue jeans, and I see some of the same dark blue painted pictures on his arms that I saw painted on Rocko. He stares down at me with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He is not smiling or happy.
“So this is what two hundred dollars gets me, huh?” he asks the sweaty lady.
She pushes me toward the unhappy man. “Danny, this is your new father,” she says. “His name is Roland Pierce, but you will call him Dad. Your name is now Danny Pierce because he has adopted you. You live here now. Do you understand?”
I definitely do not want to live here.
I look at Garrison. I’m so glad he’s here. He doesn’t look afraid. He looks strong.
As I start to nod with a yes, I jump as I hear a super loud pop sound, almost like someone had set off fireworks right behind the house. But it was the middle of the daytime, so it couldn’t be fireworks. Right after the pop sound, I hear some people yelling at each other. My eyes grow wide and I fight the tears that want to come.
“Wilson!” this man I’m supposed to call Dad yells toward the street, much louder than I expected. “Knock it off, man!”
The yelling people start to quiet down as Dad pulls a fist-sized roll of money from his pocket. “Man, that guy’s lost it,” Dad says as he counts out some of the money and hands it to the sweaty lady. “He don’t quit the dope, he’s gonna get his self or somebody else killed, know what I’m sayin’?”
She gives Dad the other paper folder she’d been holding. Looking at the papers inside, he asks her, “There a receipt in here in case I need to return him?”
The sweaty lady rolls her eyes and turns back toward the concrete stairs. Before she reaches the bottom, out of nowhere a green muscle car comes speeding up the street. Its back windows are open, and a tall, creepy looking man leans out the window looking back down the street. I see a small black gun in his hand. Tires squeal and a dog starts barking crazy. A second later, those three older, skinny boys come running up the street as fast as they can go. They’re yelling something mean about getting to the people in the green car. One of them holds a gun, too.
Dad laughs at the look on my face. It’s not a nice laugh. He pushes the front door all the way open.
“Welcome to The Pit, kid. Don’t make me ask that lady for my money back.”