Free Guarding Lacey: A Smokey Dalton Story by Kris Nelscott Page B

across the yard.
    Her hands are cupped as she leans forward
to light a cigarette. That’s another new habit, and one I’m surprised Uncle
Franklin and Aunt Althea haven’t figured yet. Lace stinks of cigarettes most of
the time.
    She’s gotta be cold, but she don’t look
cold. She looks like she’s waiting for someone, just like my Mom used to do,
only there ain’t no road here for them to drive up to, and no way for some guy
just passing by to ask her into his car so she can make a quick twenty.
    I can’t tell her none of this. I swore to
Smoke I’d never talk about Memphis ever because I might slip and the secret’d
be out. And the secret’s an important one. I seen something I wasn’t supposed
to and people tried to kill me for it.
    Smoke saved me, and then he brought me
here. Thanks to Uncle Franklin, we get to use his last name (and his kids all
think I’m a real cousin) and Smoke got fake i.d.s and stuff. People are
searching for me, but Smoke says we’re safe if we stay quiet.
    Still I get nightmares and I know if we
slip we might gotta leave with a moment’s notice. Smoke hates it when I even
think of Memphis because then I can’t sleep and stuff.
    But seeing Lacey like that, all tricked
out and me not able to say anything for fear of hurting me and Smoke, scares me
to death.
    I talked to Smoke about it last fall,
when things wasn’t quite so bad. We was in the car after dropping off Lacey. He’d
seen her tricked out—well, wiping the crap off her face anyway—and
he tried to tell her what happens to girls who look like that from our part of
town, but Lace didn’t listen, not really.
    After everybody got out of the car except
me and Smoke, I asked him, “You don’t think Lace’ll end up like my mom, do
you?”
    He looked at me. He’s got this measuring
thing, where he can see all the way inside you, and he was doing that to me
then. He could tell I was worried.
    He said, “She won’t end up like your mom.
Lacey has too many friends and family for that. But she could get hurt.”
    I remembered how Mom laid in bed for days
sometimes with ice pressed on her face so the bruises would go away, or that
last Christmas, cleaning up the blood she left all over the apartment because
she couldn’t afford no doctor. I didn’t want none of that to happen to Lace.
    “Some trick’ll hurt her?” I asked.
    “Some boy ’ll
hurt her. He’ll think she wants to do what your mom used to do. Lacey won’t
understand and—”
    “He’ll just do her. I know,” I said real
quick because I didn’t want to think about Lace like that.
    That’s when Smoke gave me that shocked
look, like he can’t believe half the stuff I know. Then he blinked, and the
look went away.
    “We can’t talk her out of dressing like
this,” he said. “We’ve been trying for nearly a year. She’ll do what she wants.
But if she does get into trouble — if she starts crying a lot, or acting
really angry for no reason, tell me okay?”
    I hated that. I hated telling on anybody,
even for a good reason. There was lotsa stuff Smoke should probably know, but
I’d make my friends and my pretend cousins mad at me if I said something, and
they wouldn’t like me no more, and worse, they wouldn’t trust me.
    “What if she don’t want me to?” I asked.
    “Tell me that too.”
    “Feels like tattling,” I muttered.
    Smoke ignored that. “If someone just
— does her — then she’s not going to want to tell her parents.
Maybe she’ll tell me. We can make sure it won’t happen again. We’d be
protecting her, Jim, not tattling on her.”
    Made sense, but it still scared me. I
seen them guys with my mom. There was no protecting. There was just getting by,
surviving, and trying all over again.
    But I didn’t say that to Smoke. I don’t
say a lot of what I think to Smoke. He don’t need to know all the details of
what happened before. I try to forget a lot of them too.
    But it’s dang hard when I see Lace
standing under that