Free Scare Crow by Julie Hockley Page B

the phones
     every time. I suppose I was a little surprised when he confessed to me that the man
     he beat up was the chick’s father. And that she was still taking his c alls.
    As weeks of quiet nights passed, our friendship grew, our trust grew, and while Spider
     and I weren’t very chatty, I had heard enough bits and pieces of information to put
     the whole story toge ther.
    Carly’s father was a drunk, who beat up his wife, spent any money he managed to make
     on booze and women, and had a preference for younger girls, like his own five daughters.
     Because Carly’s mother didn’t speak English, any work she managed to find had to be
     at night and under the table. She still barely made ends meet. Spider was Carly’s
     next-door neighbor. He had spent most of his childhood creeping through her window
     in the evening and sleeping on the floor next to her bed, keeping Carly’s father away,
     usually with a baseball bat or a broom, like one would an alley rat.
    One night, as a luckily not-quite adult, Spider had accosted Carly’s father after
     he had gone on a drunken rampage of the house, breaking everything in sight, including
     Carly’s mother’s jaw. Spider ended up in juvie, and Carly’s father ended up in jail
     after he was released from the hosp ital.
    Time was running out until her father was done paying his debt to society and ready
     to take his revenge on the six women in his life.
    Kids like Spider and me belonged in juvie. It prepared us—people like us—for things
     to come. First comes juvie, then comes prison. That’s just the way it is for people
     who come from the same shitholes as us. There’s no sense hoping for anything different.
     A kid like me should have never been enrolled in Saint Emmanuel, the most prestigious
     and expensive private school in the eastern Unites States. Hell, a kid like me should
     have never been enrolled in any kind of school. We were lucky if we finished grade
     e ight.
    And yet I was enrolled in Saint Emmanuel’s Academy. Not because of any kind of Daddy
     Warbucks selfless rich benefactor. I just happened to be the kid of a con man who
     needed to put on a show, who found a way to pay Saint Emmanuel’s ridiculous tuition
     because he knew that it would pay off ten times over if he played his cards right.
     With an outlandish foreign accent, a sports car, and a kid in prep school, my father
     was irresistible to any rich old lady.
    When I’d told Spider about Saint Emmanuel, he didn’t believe me at first, until I
     told him about my con-artist father. Fraud, scams—using innocent people to our advantage—these
     things were second nature to us. So we started talking about using my so-called good
     fortune to prey on the rich and reckless. The plan he and I concocted to sell drugs
     at my private school wasn’t just a way for him and Carly to get out of the slums;
     it was a way for them to pay her dad enough money to stay away from her mom and sisters
     forever. Carly’s father left town with a wad of cash and never looked back.
    Now, once in a while, Spider showed up with cash in whatever hole Carly’s father had
     been lying in. He woke her father up long enough to sign a letter of apology to Carly’s
     mom and throw money his way. Carly sent the letter to her mother, along with a hefty
     sum of money. Having it come from her useless husband was the only way Carly’s mom
     would accept the han dout.
    Carly and Spider chose this life so that Carly’s mom and sisters could live a better life.
    Now we were on a plane, heading into another pile of trouble. And Spider was expecting
     a child with the girl he’d devoted his lif e to.
    “You know we can’t have this, right?” I told him.
    “I know.”
    “There’s no room for a kid. Especially with all the shit that’s been goin g on.”
    “I know!” he barked. “I’ll figure something out.”
    Spider went back to the raindrop on the window, and I poured us both a stiff d rink.
    We landed