The Truth About the Moon

Prologue

Rain in Manhattan makes people look gray. People are always hurrying with their heads bent down, trying ta get home to their warm beds before the storm. No one stops for papes, no matter the headline. No one looks at what the creaky, wooden carts are selling. Second glances aren't even a possibility.
Twelve years old, crouched in an alley, and the only attention she got was the stingy old shopkeeper, shooing her away with his prickly broom. The only people in Manhattan who take a second glance are the ones who know what it's like to be shooed away by the same prickly broom. Jack Kelley found her curled in an alley looking like Brooklyn. Brooklyn was the alternative word among newsies for death. She had a face like a specter and a sallow body to match. He tried to give her to the church. Nuns know girls betta, he reasoned.
They were standing right outside the church. It was so easy. All he had to do was ring the bell and hand over his gaunt, shaky problem to the holy saviorness of the nuns. After all, he was Jack Kelley, he practically owned Manhattan. Little Brooklyn Specters weren't his problem.
But she was.
So, instead of dropping Brooklyn-girl into the Rosary-tangled fingers of the nuns, Jack Kelley carried the Brooklyn-specter to the lodging house.
For two years, Brookie, as they were calling her now, stayed in the lodging house. When she reached fourteen years, she turned to Jack and told him she was heading out. She never returned to the 'Hattan House.
Queens called to her, its strong newsie army appealing to her hot-headedness. Woodside- headquarters of the Queens newsies, pushed its doors open when Brookie came knocking, hair tucked in one of Race's old caps. Reluctant though they were after hearing she came for a Manhattan home, they were glad two years later, when she helped Twillings-head of the Queens newsies- take back Bayside, one of the newsies groups that were faltering in their loyalty to Queens. And when Twillings "grew out" of his Newsies suspenders and found himself a jealous little goil, he put his newsies cap on Brookie's head and said, "Lead 'em to greatness, King of Queens."
She smiled and pulled her new cap over her eyes. The "'King' of Queens" was a girl and only two people in all of New York knew it.