All is fair in Love and Strikes (Sprace)

Chapter 22 | Mush

Blink and I were out selling by the fountain in Washington Square where I usually sold. Jack had advised us against buddying up 'cause the whole point of the buddy system was to keep us from getting beat, and if we were doing PDA outside, then that would definitely call for yet another shiner. But being the little shits we are, we did it anyway.

As much as I agreed with Jack in the sense of fighting back and the precautions we had to take, such as the buddy system, the idea of it still kept me up at night. I had woken up this morning with sweat soaking through the cotton sheets, and shaking. There was a difference between fighting the big guys like Pulitzer and fighting your own kind. Brooklyn knows us, they know how we fight. We grew up with them next door. We've had borough wars before, but they were rare. The last one happened when I was one of the little kids instructed to stay in the lodging house. Boys came in every day beaten, bloodied, and bruised. They were fighting in the streets and there'd been record arrests to the refuge. The difference was that now, there was no refuge. Roosevelt shut it down after the strike.

"Thank you, miss," Blink said as he tipped his cap to a girl scurrying off with her left hand in her father's and her right hand clutching a newspaper. Across the fountain, a little boy pointed at me. His mother gasped and grabbed his hand to drag him away. I looked at the ground and played with a rock that was sitting at my feet.

"Oh my goodness, are you okay?" I looked up to see an older woman gesturing to my black eye. Bits of it were turning yellowish-green, and that mixed with the purple, red, and blue were making for a nasty bruise.

"Yes ma'am," I said. "It ain't hurtin' too bad now."

"Do you need a doctor? Someone to tend to it?"

I shook my head. "I appreciate it, Missus, but this ain't me foist. It's healin'." She looked at me the way a mother might look at her son. I choked down a sniffle. No one had looked at me like that since I was a little boy. She put a hand on my shoulder and dug the hole further.

"Where's your mother? Surely she could dress all these." she gestured towards old scars and bruises elsewhere, also a cut I had on my cheek that was caked in dirt and dried blood.

"Dead," I replied. I still remembered how she had looked in bed. Cold. With a wet towel on her forehead and the stench of sickness in the room. I shook off the urge to cry and stood up straight. I noticed how the woman's eyes had turned apologetic.

"I'm sorry dear." She said, handing me a quarter.

"Pape's are only a dime," I said, handing back the quarter. She just smiled, took a newspaper out of my bag, and left to go about her day.

I let my fingers close around the coin and pocketed it. I felt Blink's arms wrap around my waist from behind.

"I'm sorry, love," he whispered in my ear. He buried his face in the crook of my neck. I looked in the fountain water and saw a streak in the dirt on my face. I watched the tear hit the water and lifted Blink's hand to my lips. It was little moments like these that kept me going. Moments like these when the world fell away and it was just Blink and I and I knew someone cared. It made me feel less small compared to the world.

Suddenly, chaos over by the arch split through the somewhat quiet afternoon. A Harlem kid I recognized and a Brooklyn kid were ganging up on a couple of Bronx boys.

"We should get outta he'ah," I said.

"Yeah." I let go of Blink's hand and we started walking away with our heads down, trying to avoid being noticed.

"Hey!" Yelled a Brooklyn accent.

"Keep walking," I said, grabbing Blink's arm.

"Hey, I'se talkin' to you'se!".