Free The Short Game by J. L. Fynn

you don’t know about me. And I want to be honest with you. Completely.”
    “Okay.” She sat down on the chair across from me.  
    “Well, you know how I told you I’m a Traveler?”
    “You’re not really a Traveler?”
    “No. I am. Will you let me get this out?”
    “Yeah, sorry,” she said.
    “No, I appreciate your questions,” I said, not wanting to hurt her feelings. “This is just really hard for me. So it might take a minute.”
    “No interruptions. I promise.”
    “Have you ever heard the rumors that gypsies are crooks?”
    “Yeah,” she said with less hesitation than I would’ve liked.
    “Well, we’re not. At least not all of us. There are a lot of Traveler clans that are mostly straight, and I can’t really tell you about the Roma because we don’t have much to do with them, but my clan...we’re not always on the up-and-up.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, you know how the day I met you, my brother accidentally got an extra ten dollars in change?”
    “Yeah?”
    “That wasn’t exactly an accident.”
    “You stole from me?” she said, for the first time seeming upset.
    “Not stole, exactly.”
    She gave me a hard look.
    “Okay, well, yeah, it was stealing, but I didn’t take anything out of the register. We used a quick-change scam to get you to give us an extra ten bucks.”
    “Jimmy! You realize I had to pay that money back to my boss.”  
    The hurt in her expression made me feel like a monster. “I’m really sorry, Trace. I know what I did was wrong. That’s why I wanted to come clean, but I’ll leave right now if you want me to.”
    “No.” She stood up and started pacing the room. “No. Tell me the rest of it. I’m sure ten dollars doesn’t have you this worked up.”
    I let out another long breath. I didn’t want to go on. I felt like I couldn’t, but I knew I had to. If I didn’t get it all out now, I never would, and I needed to know that Tracy really cared about me. Not the whitewashed version that I’d given her up until now, but the real me. The one with a small, but not insignificant rap sheet. “Well, it’s not just silly quick-change scams. When we’re on the road, we do driveway paving, roofing. Except, we don’t always do the best job. We go door-to-door, tell people we have materials left over from a previous job, then tell them that we can give them a great deal. Or we’ll go to businesses and tell the people there that someone already okayed the work. Then we’ll do a half-assed job, but because we’re out of there the next day, it doesn’t matter. We just move on to the next town and do the same thing.”
    “So you don’t really know how to do roofs or pave driveways? I thought you were handy.”  
    “I am,” I said distractedly. “I mean, I know how to do it. It’s just cheaper to cut corners. We make more money that way and for less work. But, I haven’t gotten to the worst part yet.”
    “There’s something worse?”
    “You know how I’ve told you about my brother Shay?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, he’s not really away at college. Or, he is, but he’s not enrolled at Balanova. He’s gone up there for a con. A long con. A really long con. One that Pop Sheedy’s had in the works for twenty years now.”
    “Pop Sheedy?”
    “Our clan leader.”
    She let that sink in for a moment. “What sort of con’s he up there for?”
    “I’m not sure. I know it has something to do with my da and how he was killed when I was little. Payback. But I don’t know more than that because my mam—Maggie—she won’t tell me what’s going on, and there’s no way Pop Sheedy will tell me even if I had the guts to ask. Shay might, but I don’t think he knows a whole lot more than I do at this point. I’m just worried he’s in danger. Actually, I’m pretty positive he’s in danger.”
    I pushed my hands through my hair. “I should go,” I said, getting to my feet.
    Tracy blinked, clearly surprised by this sudden announcement.