Laughter and I glance over at Cynthia. She nods in approval. One down, one more to go, and I can get the hell off this stage.
“Another question?”
More hands go up, and as Cynthia goes to point, a man next to a camera yells out, “What crime were you convicted of?”
“Don’t answer,” Cynthia whispers to me, then motions to the man behind him. “Charles, you can ask your question.”
“It’s a valid question.” The guy continues to talk as if she didn’t ignore him. “How do we know he wasn’t convicted of jaywalking? The type of changes the governor is promising with this program sound good, but how do we know if the results aren’t skewed or tainted?”
My eyes shoot to the back of the crowd, straight to Axle, and my brother’s face falls because we both feel it coming. The tidal wave we felt the rumblings of in the distance is about to crest and hit the shore, destroying me in the process.
“What did you do?” the man shouts again, and when Cynthia turns toward me I see the question on her face. Will I do it? Will I answer and save the governor’s program?
Blank slate. Second chance. Sealed records. All of it is bull.
Ellison
It’s a train wreck, and everyone is watching. Someone needs to do something, and no one is moving. Cynthia wants him to answer the question. It’s also clear, Drix doesn’t want to answer, and I understand why.
“What difference does it make what he did?” I whisper in hopes Dad will hear, but he’s three people away.
My mother shushes me, and Sean, my father’s chief of staff, sends me a glare via certified mail. He and I live in mutual distrust purgatory. To Sean, I’m supposed to be mute and look pretty, but Drix helped me, and staying silent is wrong.
“Mom?” I say, and her head jerks at the sound of my voice. Me speaking onstage without a teleprompter or typed speech is the equivalent of me biting a newborn. “He shouldn’t have to answer.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” she snaps in a hushed tone.
Lydia, my father’s press secretary, walks to the podium with that air of confidence that only she possesses. She’s an intelligent and beautiful black woman who has told me several times that how you walk into a room defines who you are before you open your mouth.
Whenever I see her, I believe this. She demands respect from the moment she comes into view, and I envy her how people so readily give it. “Mr. O’Bryan, I am kindly asking you to wait your turn and wait to be called on before asking questions.”
I’ve seen Lydia at work enough to know that the smile she just flashed Mr. O’Bryan, a loser reporter who has hated my dad for years, is telling him to shut up. There is a hum of uncomfortable chuckles from the families, and Lydia goes on to explain that Drix is still seventeen and that his records are sealed.
She’s saying all the right things, she’s saying all I want to say, but I see it on the faces of the crowd. They want to know what he did so they can judge. Drix’s past defines him, and that’s not fair, especially when it’s his future my father is trying to create. Especially when I know that my father’s program worked.
As Lydia wraps up, Mr. O’Bryan calls out again, speaking over her, “I saw Mr. Pierce and the governor’s daughter on the midway together.”
Lydia freezes her expression, and the entire convention center goes silent.
“The point I’m trying to make,” Mr. O’Bryan says, “is that this program has been the governor’s main priority for over two years. Lots of taxpayers’ money is going into a program we have no idea will work, and the first contact we’ve had from this program was seen, by me, on the midway with the governor’s daughter. This could be a friend of hers the governor has asked to read a speech to make us happy. If Mr. Pierce isn’t willing to tell us about his real past and let us, the press, verify who he is, what he’s done and let us judge how far he’s come, then how do we really know if this program has worked?”
Cynthia whispers to Drix, and he shakes his head slightly. She’s asking him to confess. He doesn’t want to, and he shouldn’t have to. I begin to run hot with the idea that I’m letting him down after what he did for me.
“Is this true, Elle? Were you on the midway with him?” my mother whispers under her breath, and her glare makes me wish I could disappear. Sean superglues himself to my side, and the way my father is eyeing me makes me feel as if I have somehow betrayed him.
“He saved me.” I shake that off because it sounds overly dramatic. “Drix helped me. Some guys were harassing me, and he stepped in to help.”
“What happened to Andrew?” Mom demands.
I shift from one foot to another. “I ditched Andrew.”
Mom’s eyes shut like I announced I kidnapped someone, and Sean pinches the bridge of his nose. “Did Hendrix Pierce get violent with these guys?”
“No. He offered to hang out with me until the guys got the hint that they should leave. Drix never said a word to them.”
“He saved you.”
“Helped me,” I correct Sean.
Sean stares straight into my eyes, and he’s making a silent promise to yell loudly at me later. “No, Elle, he saved you.”
My eyebrows draw together, and before I can ask what he means, Sean takes my hand and pulls me toward the podium. Drix’s head jerks up as I pass, and for the first time since I saw him earlier, he looks at me.
“Excuse me,” Sean says into the microphone. “I’m Sean Johnson, the governor’s chief of staff and Ellison’s godfather.”
People watch him, each of them curious, and I know what Sean has done—humanized himself and me. With a few words, he told everyone he’s in a position of authority, and that he should be respected. Me? I’m still the pretty girl standing beside him.
“We typically don’t allow people like Mr. O’Bryan to shout off like he has, but we’re trying to be respectful. In return we’re hoping he’ll be respectful to the governor and his daughter in the future.”
Lots of mothers shoot death stares in Mr. O’Bryan’s direction, and I’m okay with this. Mr. O’Bryan needs to be digested whole by a T. Rex.
“Secondly, Mr. Pierce confessed to his crime, has served time for it and he has gone through the governor’s program. He has paid his debt to society, and he has learned from his mistakes. To prove it, the governor’s daughter is going to explain the events that happened today on the midway.”
Sean tilts his head to let me know if I screw up I will never be let out in public again.
The lights are brighter than I thought they would be. Hotter, too. Makes it more difficult to see individual faces, makes it more difficult to figure out how many people are staring at me and if they are happy, annoyed or on the verge of rioting.
My mouth dries out, I swallow, then wrap my fingers around the edge of the podium. “Hendrix Pierce helped me today.”
Sean clears his throat.
“Saved me today. I was on the midway, and two college-aged guys began to harass me, and Drix...that’s what Hendrix introduced himself as...he intervened.”
Multiple flashes of light as pictures are snapped, multiple voices as people talk, even louder voices as people ask questions.
Sean talks into the microphone again. “We will take questions, but I want you to remember you are talking to the governor’s seventeen-year-old daughter. I will not allow anyone to disrespect her.”
Sean points, and a woman in the back asks, “You never met Mr. Pierce before?”
I shake my head, and Sean gestures to microphone. “No. I was playing a midway game earlier, and he ended up playing beside me, but then we went our separate ways. I left the game, and these guys started to harass me and then Hendrix asked if I needed help. I agreed, and he suggested we talk. He said that if the guys thought we were friends they would eventually lose interest, and they did. Hendrix played a game, and we talked unti
l Andrew showed.”
“Andrew?” someone asks.
“Andrew Morton.” That causes enough of a stir that nervousness leaks into my bloodstream and makes my hands cold and clammy. Why is it that I feel that I said something terribly wrong?
“Are you and Andrew Morton friends?” someone else asks, and the question hits me in a sickening way. I name-dropped the grandson of the most powerful US Senator...the position my father is campaigning for. Sean is going to roast me alive.
“Yes. We’ve been friends for as long as I remember.” Friends, enemies, it’s all semantics at this point.
“Did you and Andrew Morton plan to attend the festival together?” Another reporter.
“Yes.”
“Were you on a date?” a woman asks.
My entire body recoils. “What?”
“Are you and Andrew Morton romantically involved?”
I become one of those bunnies who go still at the slightest sound. “I thought we were talking about Hendrix.”
“Did Mr. Pierce confront the men?”
Finally back on track. “No, he was adamant that there should be no violence.”
More questions and I put my hand in the air as I feel like I’m the one on trial. “Isn’t that the point? Hendrix went through my dad’s program, and one of the first chances he had to make a good decision, he made one. We’re strangers, and he helped me without violence. That, to me, is success.” A few people nod their heads, and because I don’t want to be done yet... “Mr. O’Bryan—grown men shouldn’t be following seventeen-year-old girls. I’m curious why you didn’t step in when I was being harassed. If you saw Hendrix and me together, then you know what happened, and it’s horrifying you didn’t help. Hendrix made the right choice. You did not.”
A rumble of conversation, Sean places a hand on my arm and gently, but firmly pushes me to the side. The raging fire in his eyes says he’s mentally measuring out the room in the basement he’s going to let me rot in for the next ten years.
My father approaches the microphone with an ease I envy. “Any more questions for Ellison can be sent to my press secretary. As you can tell, it’s been a trying day for my daughter, but we are most grateful for Mr. Pierce’s actions. We promised a program that was going to help our state’s youth turn their lives around, and, thanks to Mr. Pierce’s admirable actions, we are proud of our first program’s success.”
He offers Drix his hand again, and Drix accepts. Lots of pictures and applause, and Dad leans in and whispers something to him. I can’t tell what it is, but I do see the shadow that crosses over Drix’s face, his throat move as he swallows and then the slight nod of his head.
I don’t know what happened, but I don’t like it. The urge is to rush Drix, but Sean has a firm hold on my elbow, keeping me in place, silently berating me for causing problems.
Drix stands behind the podium and drops a bomb so huge the ground shakes beneath my feet. “Because Ellison had enough courage to explain what happened today, I’m going to tell you what I was convicted of...”
As Drix continues, it’s no longer just the ground that’s shaking—it’s the entire world. Because the guy who paid to let a five-year-old win at Whack-A-Mole, a guy who stepped in when no one else did, a guy who told me that not all members of the male gender were jerks...he committed a very violent crime, and my world is indeed rocked.
Hendrix
Armed robbery is a class B felony in the state of Kentucky, punishable by ten to twenty years imprisonment. Whoever robbed the convenient store with a Glock ran off with 250 dollars. That’s enough money to settle a cell phone bill and to fill the tank to an SUV. The payout doesn’t seem worth the risk, but I’m the one who did the time, so that makes whoever did it smarter than me.
Two hundred and fifty dollars. It’s still a kick in the gut.
Axle pulls into our neighborhood, and lights flash behind us as Dominic follows us in his car. Holiday’s asleep in the cramped back seat of Axle’s aging truck, and Dominic drove Kellen.
Me and Axle, we’ve been quiet. There’s not much to say. The whole world now thinks I robbed a convenience store at gunpoint. Won’t be long until someone does an internet search and discovers the trigger was pulled, the shot missed and that kept me from being charged with manslaughter.
“They painted you as a hero,” Axle says in a hushed voice. We pass box after box of the same house that are all stained yellow by the streetlight. It’s ten, and the night got darker once we turned down our street. “That’s what people are going to remember. You swooped in and helped the governor’s daughter when no one else would. That’s something to be proud of.”
Maybe. But I caught the expression on Elle’s face after I made the announcement. She wasn’t thinking about heroes anymore. She was thinking about a masked guy high on drugs waving a gun in someone’s face.
I glance back at my sister, and I take comfort that she’s in my life again. Holiday—the girl with the big heart and even bigger voice. Just like her namesake, Billie Holiday. “You want me to carry in Holiday?”
“She’s not six anymore,” Axle says as he coasts into the driveway. “She can walk.”
But she doesn’t look like she just turned sixteen. In her sleep, she reminds me of huge eyes, huge hugs, hours of coloring pages and her begging me to let her paint my nails pink.
There was a girl in the program, younger than Holiday, but she also had big eyes. During the day, she had an attitude a mile long, but at night she’d become terrified of the dark. First few nights, she didn’t sleep, and that made the hike the next day hell for her, especially carrying a pack that was a fourth of her body weight.
She was falling behind, she was getting down and with each new level of spiral she hit, her mouth got nastier. On the fifth day, she tripped. Mud in her hair, a tear in her athletic pants, blood on her knee and something in me shifted when her bottom lip trembled. I understood how she felt. Sometimes the weight of my problems and my pack was almost too much to bear.
I heard that she had never cried during her stay in detention, and five days into the woods, she was being cut off at her knees. I thought of Holiday then, and before this girl had a chance to break, I walked over to her, grabbed her pack and offered her a hand to stand back up. She took it and lost the attitude as she walk alongside me. After that, a lot of the younger people on the trip followed me like I was the Pied Piper.
“You’re right. Holiday can walk,” I say, “but I’ll take her in.”
“I’ll get her. Why’d you tell everyone? Your records are sealed. Only reason I agreed to this circus was because they promised no one would know what you were convicted of.”
Cracking of pleather in the back seat and Holiday’s groggy lids open, but her face remains pillowed by her hands.
There are some people you don’t say no to, not without there being consequences. The governor asked me to tell as a “personal favor.” He said it like it meant he would owe me, but I don’t believe that for a second. I rub the governor the wrong way, and he has the power to send me to prison. People like him don’t owe anyone; they own. Telling Axle that won’t make him feel better, so I lie. “Seemed like the right thing to do.”
Axle kills the engine and shakes his head at the wheel.
Dominic and Kellen lean against the back of his run-down 1980-something junker that’s put together with gray tape. Their dad doesn’t leave for his third shift job until ten thirty. Neither of them will enter the house until he’s gone.
I glance over at my front stoop, and my heart stops. “Holy hell, he came.”
Axle’s head rotates to the house so fast that I place a hand on his arm to calm him down. “It’s not Dad. It’s Marcus.”
My brother’s chest deflates, and I’m out the door. Marcus was my breath of sanity in the program. My cell mate. My fellow outdoor warrior. The guy who had my back. My friend.
While some followed me around, I followed him.
Marcus rises to his feet, a six-foot-two towering black man, and his smile pushes the darkness of my neighborhood away. He’s barely seventeen, and due to a messed-up situation, he’s a year behind me at school, but it doesn’t matter. I call him a man because that’s what he is. Both of us offer our hands for a shake, but pull in for a hug. A hard hug with pats to the back.
“You said I could stop by anytime. Hope you meant it.”
“I’m glad you’re here.” I step back and take him in. It’s only been a few days, but seeing him here feels like a lifetime has passed since I saw him last. He looks a bit different with his hair shaved close to his scalp, and I had no idea his ears were pierced. Fake diamonds are now in both lobes. Marcus is the same height as me, but has the build of Dominic.
“How’s home?” I ask.
The smile fades. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
I nod because I get it. “How bad?”
“Bad.” His somber expression jacks me in the head hard. Marcus is as rough-edged as they come, but this year broke him down, built him back up and I know he’s just as scared as I am of screwing the second chance up.
“Mom’s moved up in the world,” he says. “Went from dating a dealer to a gangbanger. Hanging at home isn’t healthy for my probation.”
When the plea deal was offered to Marcus after he stole three BMWs in a single night, then crashed one of them while high, his mom promised the program she had changed her life. Guess she did change, just not how Marcus needs. I understand having a crap mom. Marcus, unfortunately, doesn’t have an older brother who gives a damn like I do so I told him he could borrow mine.
I owe Marcus my life. His friendship kept me sane during this past year. His friendship kept me from losing my mind. His friendship, even in the darkest moments, gave me hope.