Free The Patriots Club by Christopher Reich Page B

case of acne, but the guy’s face was one big zit. His personality wasn’t much to write home about either. Mostly, he pouted about his parents getting divorced, or talked about what he was going to eat when he got his braces off. Still, he was here—and not in school, where he was supposed to be—and that made Phil Grabowski his friend.
    “We really gonna do it?” Philly asked. “I mean, you’re not serious, are you? It’s too hairy, even for you.”
    “How else you plan on earning a hundred bucks? Concert’s Friday. I, for one, am not missing the Stones.” Bolden started playing the air guitar, singing “Brown Sugar.” He was dressed in Levi’s and a Rolling Stones T-shirt, the one with the pair of flaming lips that was the logo for the ’74 North American tour. His jeans were pressed. The shirt was old and fit snugly, but it was clean. Bolden did his own laundry, made his own meals, and generally looked after himself. His newest foster mom had said from the start she “wasn’t there to be no one’s slave.”
    No, thought Bolden, she was just there to collect her four hundred dollars a month from the state for giving Tommy a cot to sleep on in the same room as six other kids. White trash. Soon she’d be nothing more than a figure in his rearview mirror. Her and everybody else in the Land of Lincoln. He didn’t need the money to go see the Stones. He needed it to get the hell out of Dodge. He was leaving Chicago, once and for all.
    Nodding his head, he led the way up Brookhurst. The sky was overcast, threatening rain. A chill wind blew a crumpled pack of cigarettes down the sidewalk. Bolden scooped it up to check if there was anything inside. “Dud,” he said, and chucked the pack over his shoulder.
    A few miles away, he could see the redbrick towers of the Cabrini-Green projects. He knew well enough not to cross Martin Luther King Boulevard. You didn’t go north of MLK if you were white. His own neighborhood was bad enough. Clapboard houses in varied states of disrepair lined both sides of the street. This one missing a front window, that one with a hole in its roof, the next needing new front stairs. Every one of them painted in the same shade of neglect.
    It was mid-April. The last snow had fallen three days earlier. Patches of the stuff mottled with mud and grime dotted the sidewalk. Bolden made a game of hopping from one to the next, calling out the names of islands in an archipelago. Midway, Wake, Guadalcanal, Tulagi. Or the central provinces of Vietnam. Quang Tri. Binh Dinh. Da Nang. He thought a lot about joining the marines.
    “My mom will kill me if she finds out I’m ditching again,” Philly Grabowski said, hopping behind him.
    “I can’t believe you’re scared of your mom,” said Bolden. “You’re fifteen. You should be telling her what to do.”
    “What do you know about it?”
    “A lot. Like everything there is to know. I’ve had like thirty moms.”
    “Not real moms.”
    “They must be pretty real, because they sounded a lot like yours.”
    “It’s just because she cares about me.”
    “Then stop complaining,” Bolden said angrily, stopping in his tracks to confront his friend. “Maybe she’s not so bad.”
    “Maybe not,” said Philly. “At least she didn’t dump me.”
    “My mom didn’t dump me either.”
    “Why did she take off on you? You never told me.”
    “She had stuff to do.”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know, but she said it was important.”
    “How do you know? You were six.”
    “ ’Cause I do.”
    “Maybe you were just a royal pain in the ass. That’s what my mom says.”
    Bolden considered the remark. There wasn’t a day that passed that he didn’t ask himself what he might have done to make his mother stay. If he could have been more lovable, more obedient, more playful, smarter, taller, faster, more handsome, more helpful, more anything that might have convinced her to hang around. He shrugged. “Probably.”
    Bolden shoved his