Free Matt & Zoe by Charles Sheehan-Miles Page A

work.” I look back at her. “Pizza?”
    She nods. Then she says, in a very low voice, “Sorry, Zoe.”
    I suck in a breath. Jasmine should not have to apologize to me. She’s going through hell, and I need to remember that.
    “It’s okay, sweetie. Pizza it is. We should both go shower though. You go first.”
    She runs out. I sag against the counter, exhausted.
    I’ll call Nicole back later and apologize. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the disaster of the kitchen. Flour covering the stove. Oil splattered everywhere. Oily black soot coating the range hood and the wall above that.
    That’ll take some cleaning.
    I turn to walk upstairs, but stop in my tracks when the phone rings again. Who the hell is that?
    I pick the phone up off its cradle once again. I need to get a shower and change into not-horse-and-fire-smelling clothing, and go to the bank and get some cash, then we’ll head to the pizza place up the street. Hopefully this will be a quick call.
    “Hello?”
    “Zoe? It’s Matt Paladino.”
    My mind stops in place, and my body follows. I breathe a sigh and say, “What … what can I do for you?”
    He hesitates. I’m guessing that means it is bad news. “I wanted to let you know—the teachers union met this afternoon. The vote was near unanimous to strike.”
    I close my eyes. “Do they even care how this is going to disrupt people’s lives?”
    I can almost hear his sigh. “Zoe…”
    I exhale. “I know. I get that there are reasons. But … you can’t just disappear, Matt. You can’t. She’s lost everyone she depends on. We don’t have any other relatives, and she barely knows me, and you’re the only adult she even knows. You can’t just disappear.”
    There’s a long silence. Then he says, “I’ll do the best I can, all right?”
    I guess that’s the best I can expect.

Chapter Six
    Red (Matt)
    Red Jackson wasn’t called Red because of his hair. It was because of his temper. He’d always had a bad reputation as a scrappy little bastard, a dirty fighter, a not so smart guy with a chip on his shoulder. I encountered him for the first time when his family joined the Ringling Brothers Circus when I was twelve. Red was about two years older than me, and at that age two years makes a big difference in size. He had the frame and muscular power of someone already well into puberty, who regularly worked out on top of that. I wasn’t in bad shape… after all, my parents had me up on the rigging by the time I was 10. I was still considerably smaller than he was.
    We were on the northern tour that fall—New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia—when Red’s father, a cat handler, joined the circus. If Red ever had a mother around, I never heard anything about her. That Saturday afternoon, I was hiding out. I’d spent the morning doing my chores, laying out the spare ropes, arranging the costumes and laundering them, and cleaning up the trailer. It was almost one in the afternoon when I finished that, and the adults were all practicing for that night’s show. I made myself scarce.
    No matter where we were, we always tried to arrange the trailers and equipment in the same way. It made for a much quicker and better organized set-up and teardown. Most of the time, when I wanted to hide, I picked a spot behind the funhouse—it was invariably a dead spot on the lot, surrounded by generators, trailers and ticket booths.
    That particular day, I couldn’t take my usual spot. I’m not sure where we were. Allentown? Pittsburgh? Somewhere in Pennsylvania anyway. The lot shape was unusual, long and narrow and curved, so we were configured very differently than normal. I found a spot not far from the ticket booths where I settled in, sorting through my Yu-gi-oh cards.
    The cards were precious to me. I didn’t get much of an allowance, though every once in a while Papa would give me spare change. Whenever possible, I would pick up extra work on the lot. Shoveling manure, cleaning out trailers, whatever, it