Page 27 of Bad Medicine
Sway looked at me, his face carefully blank, a look I had made myself give everyone once upon a time.
“This is where I want to go.” I watched as he cast one last look around the interior of the car, like he was memorizing it. I guessed he thought this would be the last time he’d get to experience a car like this, and that thought made me fuckin’ sad.
“Well, alright, kid.” I waited, horns honking all around us, but still, Sway didn’t move.
So, I figured I’d give him an olive branch.
“You know,” I started slowly, feigning indifference. “I remember when I was your age, my social worker was always on my ass about somethin’ or other.”
Sway’s head snapped to me, his eyes wide. “You were in the system.”
“Since I was four years old,” I answered, meeting his gaze. “I think I went through every shitty foster parent and group home in Clark County.”
“I’ve been to a few myself,” he said.
“This one time,” I began, watching as a pair of uniformed officers started walking our way, one on his radio, the other with his hand on his gun.
Yeah, you run those plates, motherfucker.
Keeping my eyes on the two cops, I tapped my thumbs on the steering wheel as I continued. “The dad at the foster home I was at, Irving, he was laying into this girl, man. Like, the kid was maybe seven years old, and this guy was screaming at her like fuckin’ crazy.”
“What’d the girl do?”
“Somethin’ minor, like spilled her juice or some shit.” I shook my head, remembering the scene I had walked in on that day.
I had been out, skipped school with Enzo and bummed around the Strip for the afternoon, trying to con tourists out of their money with a little Three-card Monte. I might have been a poor orphan, but Enzo was always well dressed, so we cleaned up good because we were both handsome as fuck. The ladies ate that shit up.
But I was late getting to the house; I always tried to be back before Irving got off work, not wanting the little kids to be there alone with him. His wife was never around because she worked third shift as a cocktail waitress at one of the smaller casinos, but even when she was around, she didn’t do shit to help us.
The state supposedly vetted foster parents, but the system must have really sucked, because most of the places I ended up were trash.
So, I’d tried to be home on time, but this time, there was an accident somewhere and my bus had gotten hung up, so I was almost an hour later than usual.
When I walked in that door and saw Irving, his hand fisted in Honey’s hair, shaking her back and forth and calling her every name in the book, I lost my mind. Busting through the front door, I flew across the small living room and rammed into Irving, knocking him sideways into the piece of crap television he stared at night after night. Honey was dragged to the floor with us, crying out as she connected with the TV stand hard. Scrambling to my feet much faster than Irving, I pulled Honey behind me, shielding her as best I could while I waited for Irving to gather his wits and come at me.
“Who the fuck do you think you are, you punk?” he’d snarled at me, spit flying out of his mouth. “I’m gonna beat your ass, boy.”
“No, you won’t,” I said, my voice firm even though I could hardly breathe. The anger coursing through my veins was causing my entire body to shake, and I felt like I was about to explode. “You won’t touch me, or any of these kids again.” I jerked my head to the hallway behind me where I had seen the other two boys that Irving and his wife fostered, both of them under the age of ten.
Both of them had previously sported bruises courtesy of Irving, too.
“Oh, yeah?” Irving asked sarcastically. “And what the fuck are you gonna do about it?”
I could feel Honey behind me, her little body pressed tight against mine, making herself as small as possible and I hated it. I hated that she felt the need to be less in front of him.
No one should have ever made that sweet kid feel less than amazing.
“If you lay a finger on any of us, if you swear, or yell, or so much as breathe wrong at any of us, I’ll tell my social worker about Evan.”
Irving’s eyes went wide, and I could see the nervousness in his eyes.
“I’ll tell about Colin, and Renee, too.”
I had been around the system for a long time—eleven years at this point—and I had learned a long time ago that the most valuable thing you could have in your possession was information. So when Irving and the missus were out, doing whatever it was they did when they were supposed to be caring for their charges in a responsible manner, I did what I did best: I went through their stuff.
And it didn’t take me long at all to learn that Irving and his wife were scamming the system. Big time.
They were registered foster parents to seven kids, but only four of us lived in the house. Turned out that the other three, Evan, Colin, and Renee, were runaways. Kids that had lived here at one point, but had probably had enough of Irving’s shit and taken off.
