Free The French Revolution by Matt Stewart

refused to confess, they showed him the incriminating footage in super-slow motion. “Not me,” he repeated in a dour voice, “not me.” When they eventually took him home, he ran straight to the kitchen and shoveled rice down his throat until it all came coursing back up.
    Murphy was spanked, then grounded. But he held his position, repeating that it wasn’t him, it was a case of mistaken identity, he’d been framed. He insisted so loudly and fervently that his foster parents, Marvin and June Ahn, started to wonder if there had been some kind of misunderstanding; maybe another kid in the store that afternoon had the same Washington Capitals T-shirt and buzz cut, the same addiction to sucrose. It wasn’t impossible—the video was black and white and grainy, and Murphy was so vehement, his sense of injustice so furious, that Marvin and June, after dispensing tough love to dozens of misbehaving foster kids, ended the grounding after only two days.
    The next afternoon Marvin found Murphy out behind the
dumpster with a carton of Reese’s Pieces, his fingers stained with candy coloring, his breath sickly with corn syrup. Marvin was halfway through imposing a double grounding, with interest, when Murphy observed that he’d seen a big furry rat run along the grout. Maybe he should tell the health department—they could shut down the store, and that would really suck. Marvin grabbed the candy and shoved the kid into the office, amazed by the extent of the seven-year-old’s ability to believe his own bullshit, his wanton dearth of innocence. In his years of foster parenting, he’d seen plenty of lying, name-calling, theft, and general loutishness, but blackmail was a first. And extra-alarming from a kid who could barely form complete sentences.
    He put Murphy to work building a display out of expired soup cans and flipped open the Pepsi calendar on his desk. September. Maybe there was a way to get him in a football league. Not a team guy but hardheaded enough to be useful; open-field tackles and wind sprints were just the thing to burn off this edge. He checked in on the soup-can display, rising into two tall twisting staircases boxed in by Doric columns, a palatial grand foyer. Murphy lay on the floor working on stylized trim arrangements, gnawing on a pack of Rolos and working on his side kick. Martial arts could work, possibly boxing, and Marvin scanned the Yellow Pages for nearby training gyms until he heard a leaden collapse, dumbbells rolling off a sawhorse, soup cans rolling in eight directions, Murphy standing over the pile with chop-hands ready, favoring his left foot after what was likely a leaping round-house. Marvin threw the phonebook on the ground and watched the kid bounce out the door and across the parking lot, a whirling dervish yipping imitation Japanese, throwing Bruce Lee double jabs as candy corn spilled from his pockets. Last thing Murphy needed was mugger training, Marvin realized, and instead decided to tire him out the old-fashioned way: floor-scrubbing and shelf-stocking and all-purpose ass-licking; work him till his feet swelled up his sneakers.

    For four years Fanny lived alone in the modest banana-yellow house where Esmerelda had grown up, a block from the beach and within walking distance of the elementary school. The solitary space swelled with the morning of April 1, 1979: a bowl of oatmeal at 4 AM, an extra spoonful of brown sugar, a ham sandwich and an apple in a paper bag for lunch, a last scrape of her husband Harold’s chapped lips against her forehead before the day’s fishing expedition to the Farallones. The door shutting on a creaky hinge, which Fanny oiled immediately lest it wake up Esmerelda. Harold’s truck coughing into the fog. A rainy day of soap operas, cleaning, grocery shopping, a hot bath. Dinner in the oven, Esmerelda doing homework in her room. The doorbell. A police officer describing squalls, dropped radio, Harold’s skiff miles off course. The Coast Guard out