A Girl in New York (Pre/Sequel to The Outsiders: A Girl in the Gang)

Chapter 10-He Smacked All of Us

        The first thing I needed if I was going to learn to fend for myself was a blade.  Every tough person I knew had one, including my brother.  Though it wasn’t like I knew too many people who weren’t tough in the first place, considering I spent most of my time on the streets of New York.

        Thanks to my pre-acquired skill of shoplifting, I had a blade easy as that, along with a few other assorted food items seeing as how our cupboards were so bare they didn’t even have their usual inhabitant of rats.

        I was still going to school, though Dally was going less and less, and we had almost no money because our mother was to drugged up most of the time to look for another job after she had been laid off, and our father didn’t work.  Any money he got from gambling or other frowned upon activities, he drank away, or occasionally my mother would steal it for her prescription drugs.

        Dally was good at getting to it first though because apparently he knew where our father stashed it.  He wouldn’t tell me, so I resorted to shoplifting everything and stealing meals from school even though I knew it was wrong.  Dally would sometimes get a lot of money, who knows where from, and we’d be set for about a week with food seeing as how we kept it hidden in our room.

        Dally was actually really lucky our father didn’t catch him though, because he caught our mom snitching some of it one time.  He had left it on the counter, and Dally wasn’t home but I was.  I remember hiding in the hallway, watching them.

        Our father had smacked all of us at one time or another, but nothing as bad as this.  He was swearing at her, cussing her out and delivering a blow with each angry word.  She was yelling right back at first, until he punched her in the mouth and she went down.  I remembered clearly seeing our mother spitting out blood and what looked vaguely like a few teeth he had knocked loose. 

        She tried to get back to her feet and I almost felt bad for her, even though she had never done anything for me or loved me even the slightest bit.  Our father delivered another belt that kept her on the ground, and I had to resist the urge to run over there and make him stop unless I wanted to get hit myself.

        I stared in open-mouthed horror, watching as he grabbed his rifle from against the wall.  I’m still not sure why he had that, we lived in New York and though most people had a handgun, they rarely kept a rifle in their apartment.

        For a second I thought he was going to shoot her, and then I was going to scream and he’d find me and shoot me to, but instead he just rammed the butt of it into the middle of her back and she crumbled on the floor.  Another blow to the head and she was out cold, but I still stayed frozen where I was, peeking around the corner into the living room from my hiding spot in the hallway.

        With a growl our father threw the rifle across the room, where it hit the wall, but it didn’t break. He stomped into the kitchen and I could hear him breaking dishes as he tossed them all over the place.  He had always had quite a temper, kind of like Dally and I.  I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

        Through the shattering glass, and my muffled yelps of alarm when something extremely big busted and showered to the floor, I watched the still form of our mother in a heap on the floor.  Her head wasn’t bleeding, so I thought that was a good thing.  It meant she wasn’t dead.  I wasn’t sure how well I could have handled a dead person at the age of seven, though now I couldn’t care less so long as I wasn’t the one that had killed them.

        Seeing that event in my oh-so-tragic life story was what made me even more determined to learn how to fight, despite only being in second grade.  If our father could do that to her, who’s to say he wouldn’t do it to me?  And who’s to say Dally wouldn’t be around to save me, like I had always counted on him to do before?

        It may have been stupid, but I figured the best way to learn how to fight was to get in a fight.  I was smart enough, and wary enough, to not bring my blade to school for fear of getting in trouble with it, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t learn the basics. 

        So I picked fights in school, always with boys because seven-year-old girls’ version of fighting involved turning their heads away and swatting at each other like they were trying to learn how to fly.  Sissy fighting, and I was not a sissy by any means.

        At first I got let off easy, cause I usually lost.  Dally sure had a fit about that once he found out, so I avoided home, or the rundown place where I slept and stashed food only, as much as I could from then on.

        When I got the hang of it though, I was called down to the principal’s office and our parents were given a phone call, before we had no electricity because they didn’t have enough money to pay bills.  Only rent, and barely at that if Dal forgot to scrape some up.

        And the one time that our father found out about me getting in a fight at school, I thought I would end up like our mother had that one time.