Free Scam by Lesley Choyce

Chapter One
    I don’t think I ever had it easy as a kid. My dad left when I was only eight. He might not have been the best father, but at least I had one. He and my mom were party people. I was mostly just in the way of their fun. Their madness.
    In her darker moments, my mom admitted that she wasn’t much of a mother. She had her own demons. Plenty of them. Looking back, it seems that she could have pulled herself together, but every time she planned to clean up her act, something would surface that would drag her down. She had tried her share of drugs. Mostly different pills. I was never sure which were the worst. Painkillers sometimes. Antidepressants. But it wasn’t like she got them from a doctor.
    It got worse over the years. I tried to get her to ease off. She tried to quit a few times, but by the time I was sixteen, I guess I knew it wasn’t going to stop. It was wrecking her health. I worried about her all the time. I tried to help. I really did. But it didn’t do any good.
    And then it happened. It was on a Wednesday a week after school was out for the summer. I woke up in our rundown apartment and the sun was shining in. I could hear pigeons out on the window ledges. My mom seemed to be sleeping in, but that wasn’t unusual. But by eleven o’clock I went into her room to check on her. I’d had nightmares about this a million times, but they were never as bad as the real thing.
    She was gone, and there was no bringing her back. End of story.
    Or, in this case, beginning of story.
    It’s hard for most people to imagine my life. Not many people were as alone in the world as I was. I was trying to “protect” my mom up until then. I was trying to keep her going. I did the cooking. I paid the bills. We had welfare money coming in—not much, but enough to squeak by. When it came time to meet with our social worker, I got her cleaned up. I made us look respectable. Or at least like we were doing okay. I was a good cover-up artist. I knew that if they wanted to, the social workers could have me sent away to a group home. I couldn’t let that happen.
    Mom went along when I took charge like that. That was my part of “protecting us”—that is, keeping everyone from seeing what basket cases we were. Because of my cover-up, I didn’t really have any friends. And there were no relatives who wanted anything to do with us. Aside from social assistance, we were on our own.
    But now my mom was gone. I was truly on my own. And it really sucked.

Chapter Two
    Picture this.
    It’s five days after my mom’s death. A warm, sunny summer day. But I feel, like, terrible. How can I feel any other way? When my mom died, our social worker, a nice but frazzled woman named Emma, took over. She handled the cremation and organized a funeral. And now I was walking down the street on my way to that funeral service. Emma said it was the right thing to do for my mom. Not that we ever had anything to do with a church. The people who would be there would not be family or friends. They would be members of that church. The minister there did these services for welfare families when someone died.
    I hated the idea. I didn’t want to go. My mom was dead, and this would be a bunch of strangers trying to do a good deed by showing up for me—Josh Haslett, poor teenage boy who lost his mother to drugs and bad health. Screw them.
    I had almost decided not to go to the service at all. It would only make me feel worse. I was trying not to think about my options. Well, I really didn’t have much in the way of options. I didn’t want to think about my future. Maybe I had no future outside of being placed in a group home. Screw that.
    But then this strange thing happened.
    This girl walked up to me out of the blue. “Great day,” she says. “I love this weather.”
    Girls don’t usually stop me on the street and strike up a conversation about weather. What was with that? I just stared at her.
    “Sorry. Sometimes I freak people out. I was