Page 3 of One of Them

The fear previously occupying her brain disappeared. If anything, she was feeling a strange sense of thrill. A pulsing under her skin that got her blood pumping. As if there was an adventure awaiting ahead.

Maybe it was her imagination running wild; she knew it often did. But in this instance, she possessed what she lacked before: a purpose.

She loved to daydream. In the darkest moments of the day, the girl would imagine herself being more than an orphaned teenager, but the road ahead had too many holes. Holes she had to patch up to move forward.

Her mother was gone.

Alone in the safety of the apartment she now occupied, the girl watched the news. A picture of a house on fire stared back, and all she could think about was how unfamiliar the structure looked from the front, the street the reporter stood at.

Grief and anger stirred inside her, but the tears refused to come. Too many nights she’d spent crying, exhausting herself to the point of passing out.

Many possibilities flashed in her brain during the endless hours of the night. Calling the police. Accepting help. Nothing ever felt right.

Maybe she felt like she owed it to her mother to keep her word.

Maybe part of her had something to prove. Or maybe she was already too lost.

She shut off the TV and crawled back to bed.

Taya was the girl’s name. The one who fixes. She briefly recalled the stories of a girl who healed wounds buried deep. Fairy tales in a foreign language her mother knew but never spoke aloud or taught her.

It made no difference.

No cure was strong enough to patch the emptiness within her. No force could fight the poison spreading through her. Nowhere to hide from the darkness of the world she’d entered.

In society’s eyes, she never existed. But Taya refused to see herself as a nobody. Under the darkness of the night, with only the quiet driver for a witness, she vowed in the yellow taxi that she’d become somebody. Somebody who wouldn’t cross paths with fear ever again.

With money and a place to stay, she’d remain focused on one thing and one thing only: becoming the best version of herself.

She only needed to figure out what that meant first.

Would it be my choice? This damn city wouldn’t even crack the top places to live. There had to be better opportunities out there, but I wouldn’t know.

Here I was, in NYC. They call it the city that never sleeps. When would it, with crime lurking around every corner?

Four years I’ve spent as a ghost, walking the same streets as the riffraff, blending in just enough to fly under the radar. To say it was a dangerous place for a teenager would be a fucking understatement.

A handful of reasons kept me around. Oddly enough, it was this twisted sense of belonging in a city drowning in criminals and wannabe gangsters.

For my first big girl purchase I got a computer at a pawn shop in midtown. It took months to figure it out, but once I did, I was unstoppable. A whole universe was at my fingertips, waiting to be discovered.

I worked hard to make sense of the new world I’d entered. I came close to cracking the code on society’s divisions and where I fit in. There were a lot of things I wondered about, but it was really the danger I wanted to understand.

To learn everything there was to know about the very thing my mother warned me about.

To understand the world, you had to be ready to face the ugly reality offered. To navigate it? The best way was to jump headfirst, become a part of it, and accept the consequences.

A simple concept, once you identify the power figures, except I had no intention of joining in.

Society split into groups based on affiliations. Everybody was on someone’s payroll. Some were born into their roles; others chose them based on heritage. Most were recruited or pushed into this life, desperate to survive. For the rest? Postcodes stripped them of their choices.

The territory was owned and divided by the biggest players. Powerful men fell so others could rise. The dynamics shifted quickly. You lost as fast as you gained in a full domino effect.

A mobster’s mentality formed at a young age. A code everyone respected and abided by. The saying: Snitches end up in ditches? In this world, they ended up carved up into pieces, shipped back to their families wrapped as Christmas presents. Don’t ask me how I know. The video would remain a vivid image, playing on the screen of my mind.

Punishments were both ordered and executed by their own people. Disobedience wasn’t tolerated. You had the strong, the weak, and the patsies, a term for the collaterals. Those caught in between.

There was no justice among criminals. Natural selection had sorted out the weak and kept giving to the strong. The ones who dared to take.

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