Number 8 (3 page)

“Wow, your mom tells you everything, doesn't she?” Esmerelda cuts in.

“Not everything. I heard all this when Bev dropped round, her friend from the casino. Mom thought I was asleep, but it's pretty hard to close your eyes when there's all this loud talking and thumping of tables and swearing going on in the next room. See, Bev
hates
Tony, she says he's a WMD—”

“A what?”

“Weapon of mass destruction—he causes devastation in a wide radius wherever he goes. Well, finally, it's so cold out there in the parking lot and Mom doesn't have her coat either, so she goes back to the casino. She hurries past the slot machines on the ground floor and takes the elevator down to the basement, to Tony's office where she left her bag. But at the door she hesitates. There's a noise inside, a shuffling sound like paper being rustled. And then she hears someone humming the theme from
Rocky
.”

“The security guy!”

“Yeah.” Esmerelda's eyes are huge. The light through the window is shining right into them and now I can see little flecks of gold in the green. I'm not usually a gabbler—in fact, I'm used to keeping stuff to myself. But there's something about this girl. Maybe it's her eyes or maybe it's the way she's listening to me like she's about to hear the winning number to the lotto but I realize she's not the kind of girl you can disappoint. I have to find the right words.

I crack my knuckles twice. “So this Rocky guy, he gets really mad when anyone argues with Tony. But what can she do? She has to get her bag. Slowly she opens the door and
the first thing she sees is Rocky's fat shaved head. He has his back to her and she's so close she can see the rolls of muscle sweating like salami over his collar. She holds her breath, trying not to make any noise. She spots her handbag lying on a chair an arm's length away. Maybe, she calculates, she could grab it—quick as lightning—and go. She's looking at the bag, measuring the distance, when suddenly Rocky moves and she sees what's on the desk. She nearly chokes. There are these piles of small plastic bags filled with white powder, and stacks of one hundred dollar bills.”

“Drugs!” breathes Esmerelda. Her eyes are wider than I've ever seen them. They're shining like twin stars. “My uncle is a policeman. You should hear him go on about drug dealers. Scum of the earth, he calls them.”

I nod. “And lying smack in the middle of all this is a gun. So Rocky finishes scratching his butt or whatever he was doing, and brings out more money from a metal safe on the desk. Time to go, thinks Mom, bag or no bag, but just as she turns she sees something move on the floor. The Persian rug flips back and a trapdoor opens, right there near the desk. She's standing, frozen, not believing her eyes when a head looms up out of the hole in the floor. It's Tony, and he's staring right at her. She's trapped!”

“Oh, no!”

“Rocky turns to see what Tony is glaring at, and he leaps up, gun in his hand. ‘That won't be necessary—yet,' says Tony to Rocky in an icy tone.”
Icy
is good. I wish I could think of phrases like that in English essays. “Tony climbs up out of the hole in the floor and carefully closes the trapdoor. Then he smoothes the rug down. In one quick step he reaches out and grabs Mom's arm. His fingers dig deep. On his breath she can smell the cigar he just finished.

“‘Tell me, Val, what have you seen here tonight?' Tony asks in this steely voice.

“‘Um, well, nothing out of the ordinary,' Mom stammers. ‘Just Rocky counting the night's earnings. You know my eyes aren't too good without my glasses.'

“‘That's right. And you'll do well to keep your mouth shut, if you want to stay around to see your grandchildren,' says Tony.”

“But she doesn't have any grandchildren—does she?” says Ez.

“No.”

“Oh, I get it,” says Esmerelda, her brow clearing.

“Anyway, so Tony lets go of her arm and she takes her handbag. ‘Silly me, I forgot it,' she says.

“‘Drive safely,' he whispers, real nasty, and she runs out of the room, out of there.”

We sit looking at the lawn for a while. In the bright sunshine, sitting on the step and full of cake, it's hard to believe that night ever happened.

Esmerelda shivers. “Is that really true?” she says softly.

“Yeah, I wish it wasn't. But after that night, Mom never went back.”

“Who would!” cries Ez with a shiver. “Pity my uncle lives so far away. Did she think of going to the police?”

“No. She didn't want to put us in any more danger. Big gangsters like Tony have a whole army of henchmen. The underworld of crime is like a giant octopus—tentacles everywhere. They strike quickly. You have to go into witness protection if the police investigate—it can take years to get evidence and you can never be sure you'll be covered. That's what Bev told Mom. She said it was better to move, and move quickly. She found us a cheap hotel and we stayed
there until Mom found this place. She likes it because it's far away, on the other side of the city, plus there's a job opening at the local pub. And then there was the name of this street, Valerie. It's destiny, she thinks.” I can't help rolling my eyes. Mom's decisions about destiny have had some weird consequences.

Esmerelda looks at me. Her eyes are fringed with lashes so thick it looks as if they're outlined in black.

“Are you on the run then, Jackson?”

I shift around on the step. Her voice is all husky with awe. In a way I'd like to keep the drama going, so beautiful Esmerelda Marx will keep looking at me with admiration and concern. But then I realize I'd have to keep talking about it all, which means I'd have to think about it, and actually the whole thing still makes me nervous.

“No,” I say. “Mom and I are small fry. People like Tony don't bother with us. They know we'd be too scared to do anything.”

Esmerelda shudders. “I'd be so freaked out if anything like that happened to me. The scariest stuff that goes on in our family is Mom threatening to ban TV if I fail a math test.”

I don't tell her that that level of danger sounds like heaven to me. I don't mind math. “Well, now it's life in the slow lane, in the suburbs.” I sigh like a Mafia gangster who's seen it all.

Esmerelda grins. “Yeah, but I've got a feeling you'll quicken the pace.”

We talk a lot that afternoon. Esmerelda wants to know more about the casino—the dealers, the pit bosses, the entertainers, what it's like singing to an audience of gamblers on a losing streak … I don't know much so I tell her what I do know
and then I start to make it up. I tell her about the guy who was banned because he counted the cards. It's legal, but the casino doesn't like it. He won forty million dollars in one night. Esmerelda says most people choose certain numbers to play because they're lucky, like when her Dad played a seven because she'd just had her seventh birthday. I tell her yes, many believe in luck and magic, but it's a common mistake. The only guys who can actually beat the casino are those who have systems. They count. It's actually quite interesting, I tell her, and I start to talk about the numbers—how in blackjack the aim of the game is to collect cards with a total count nearer to twenty-one than that of the dealer. Now if there are fifty-two cards, and you play with an eight deck that's four hundred and sixteen cards. I'm about to go on about how you can't possibly count all these but there's a way where you put like-numbers into sets, when she gets up and starts to fiddle with the keyboard again.

I guess she's not so interested in numbers. Hardly anybody is.

She keeps turning the conversation back to Tony and how many thugs do I think there are in the gambling world and is a security guy the same as a bouncer? I wish we could get back to the numbers, or even to discussing more normal things like the kids at school. When I ask her, she tells me a bit about Lilly, one of the girls who I noticed was plastered to her—at lunchtime the girls all seem to walk together in close huddles, as if they're guarding a secret, or a bomb. They're impossible to get at like that. She doesn't seem too keen to talk about Lilly, so she starts on about this kid they call Badman, the tough guy in our grade, but then she says how Badman reminds her of Tony and we're back onto the life of crime. Now I'm regretting ever having told her. I'm
thinking: will I have to be this entertaining and streetwise forever? Will I have to invent bigger and better stories about the seething underbelly of corruption just to get her attention? It's my own fault, but by six o'clock I feel jittery and sort of empty under my skin, as if I'm wearing some kind of Superman outfit and she can only see that.

We watch the shadow of the mango tree stretching long across the grass. Suddenly she leaps up and says she has to go. I'm almost relieved. I've been dying to have another good cough. I walk her to the door. We don't say anything as we walk. It takes twenty-seven steps to get from the back door to the front. I wish it took twenty-six.

She stands there at the door.

“Oh, wait, you forgot your mother's plate,” I say. I rush back the nineteen steps to the kitchen to get it. If I ever grow up to be an architect, I'm going to build houses using even measurements only.

When I hand her the plate she says, “Hey, Jackson, how come you're brainy
and
good-looking?” and she gives me this slow smile like the sun coming out.

I stare at her like an idiot. I can feel my cheeks burning. What should I say? No one's ever said anything like that to me before. What can I say?

“Well, see ya,” she says, flicking her hair. I watch her run across the road. She doesn't look right and left. She doesn't look once. I guess you can do that in the suburbs. Do that on Trenches Road and you're instant roadkill.

I walk back down the hall and it seems like I'm floating. I don't even notice the number of steps. I go to look at my face in the bathroom mirror. It's still red and shocked looking. Then I go and lie down in my new bedroom. I hope Mom brings french fries back from the pub.

“Hi, Ez, how's it going?”

“Oh, hi, Lilly.” I weave the telephone cord through my fingers. It bends neatly over each knuckle. I'm not going to say anything about this afternoon. Let her sweat.

“Listen, I'm really sorry I couldn't come over. I know we said—”

“It's okay, don't worry about it. You missed out on my mom's lemon delights though.”

“Oh, wow, the ones with the custard filling?”

“Yeah. You know I let the first bus go, waiting for you. And the second one was late. I thought it'd never come. I guess you found something more interesting to do.” Damn, why do I say this stuff? What a pathetic whiner. Let her think you don't care, you idiot. You
don't
care, anyway; you decided that a long time ago in sixth grade.

“Well, Ez, you know we've got this assignment due on Friday? Mitch said he'd help me with the Ancient Egypt stuff. He knows a site on the Internet that's got all these cool pictures, and my printer's not working so—”

“Oh,
Mitchell
, well that explains it. Did you get your project finished?”

Lilly giggles. “Not exactly—his brother was using the computer and he said he'd kill us if we got in his way so we
went up to the mall, got a drink, just hung around together. Oh, Ez, it was so great. Ez?”

“Yeah.”

“What did
you
do? Is your assignment finished?”

My stomach is so tight. I want to tell her about all those amazing minutes between four o'clock and six, and I want to keep it just for myself. I've known Lilly since kindergarten. Now we're in high school and this torn feeling is still happening to me. Lilly calls herself my best friend, but often I feel like I'm just the carpet she walks on: always there, wall-to-wall, keeping her feet toasty. Well,
I
used to like Mitchell, too. I was the one who pointed him out to her—his awesome imitation of Mrs. Hatfield's voice, the cool way he faced up to Badman as if he didn't give a damn, his smile—when he turned it on, you felt like the only person in the world. But after I told her, she focused him on
her
, like the sun on a piece of glass. His face went red as fire when she spoke to him. He became her slave. I bet he would have worked on a pyramid like one of those Ancient Egyptians, hauled bricks for three hundred years in the flaming sun if she asked him to.

So what will she do with Jackson Ford?

“Ez, I've got to go now,” says Lilly. “Dinner's ready. But I'll see you tomorrow and we'll talk then, okay?”

“Yeah sure, Lils. I gotta go, too. Bye.”

“Ez, set the table for me, would you? Dinner's almost ready.” Mom's in the kitchen and I can smell Bolognese sauce.

“What's for dinner, Mom?” calls Daniel.

I stand in the doorway of my little brother's room. He's playing PlayStation, his thumbs moving so fast they're almost blurred. Mom yells something back to him but his eyes never move from the screen.

“Oh, that's good,” he calls but I know he hasn't heard. He's just died and the screen is going black, showing Game Over. Now he'll have to start the whole level again from the beginning. He starts whispering all the bad words he knows. I hear a couple even I didn't know.

“You'll beat him next time,” I say, and tickle him under the arm.

“He's a poop-head
STINKbug
,” he shouts, and thumps the floor. There are tears in his eyes. Mom worries about how much time Daniel spends getting killed on the screen. She thinks it must be bad for his self-esteem. Dad worries about how many men, animals, and monsters he murders with such a variety of weapons. He thinks Daniel may become a serial killer.
I
think Daniel's just found a way he can escape from the world and Mrs. Hatfield. I had her in second grade as well, and I know she is far more terrifying than any monster he'll meet on PlayStation.