Page 99 of Darcy
“Maybe I won’t,” I admit. “But I can try.”
He sighs. “You’ve never been poor, have you?”
I shake my head. Even before Man took me in, my parents were comfortable. Not rich, but nothing like what Arlo described them going through.
“Money’s like a drug. Except it’s not the money you’re attached to. Not really… It’s the security. Once you’ve lived at the bottom—the true bottom—not knowing where your next meal will come from or if you have a place to stay at night, then you get a taste of this”—he gestures around us—“you’ll do anything to avoid going back to that life.Anything.”
He scuffs his feet as he walks, not meeting my eyes. “I grew up watching my mom disappear into her room to fuck men for money every night. She spent her mornings carefully partitioning every single dollar into this folder full of plastic pockets, and each one was labelled.” He looks me hard in the eye. “Rent, food, electricity, school, emergencies. Most of what she earned went to feeding and clothing me. She rarely kept anything for herself.”
I squeeze his hand. “She sounds like a good mom.”
Dodger’s shoulders slump. “I fucked it up for her. One day, one of her clients stayed over and left his wallet on the table. I was a teenager who’d just been told we couldn’t afford for me to go on a school trip. It just seemed so unfair. How come this guy could literally buy my mom’s body for a full night, but we couldn’t manage a bus fare to the city? So I took it.”
I blink. “You went into juvie for fraud.” I know that much from his file.
“Yeah. It started a long, slippery slope,” he admits. “I paid for that trip. Then I got into a habit of going through wallets and writing down card details—or just taking them. I bought myself a new pair of jeans and a backpack. Upgraded our internet package and got a calculator for math class. Little things. Things no one would notice on their bill.”
“But you got caught.”
He scoffs. “Yeah. I got stupid. Started buying bigger and bigger shit. Cocky asshole that I was, I figured no one had noticed so far. Why should they notice if I sent my mom on a cruise for Mother’s Day? Why would they notice a car?”
“You bought a car?” My eyebrows rise into my hairline.
He shrugs. “Neither of those things outed me. It was a cocktail, actually. I booked myself a holiday to Europe, and they blocked the card when I tried to use it at a bar in Italy—I didn’t think to see if it would work abroad. Anyway, the card company called the rightful owner about the suspicious transaction. The Italian police showed up, arrested me, and flew me back home to stand trial.”
He stops, jaw clenching as he wrestles with his demons in the middle of the crowded street. “I landed in juvie, and my mom was still trying to get work, except it was harder because word got out about what I’d done, and a lot of her men thought she’d been behind it all. So, not only was I in prison, I’d accidentally stripped her of most of her income with my stupid stunt. When she got ill, she didn’t have the money for medicine. She didn’t even get a proper funeral, and I wasn’t allowed out to watch them stick her in the ground.”
Oh, shit.
“Dodger, I’m so sorry.” I pull him close, wrapping him in a hug. “You couldn’t have known, though. You were just a kid.”
“If I hadn’t done it, she might’ve lived.” His voice is dull now. “I went into juvie with a mom and came out as an orphan. I have to live with that. At the start, it was harder. The grief was… raw, I guess. I didn’t know how to deal with my emotions when they got too much, and… well, you’ve seen my scars.”
I have, and my heart breaks all over again for them. I hug him tighter, burying my head in his chest as I try to convey through touch just how much I wish I could’ve spared him all of that.
“Money could’ve saved her life.” He pulls away, and I catch a glimpse of the anguish in his expression before he shuts down. “That’s why I won’t let you, or anyone else I care for, pay for shit. I know, logically, that you probably could, but what if one day, that hundred dollar food bill is the difference between you being able to pay rent and you being homeless?”
“No one can predict that,” I reply. “All we can do is trust that we have people around us who will take care of us when we’re struggling and return the favour if they need it.”
“You guys okay?” Slate calls, tactlessly, from where he and Arlo have stopped ahead.
“Fine,” Dodger calls, clearing his throat. “I was just asking Darcy if she thought Arlo would let me piggyback on his night.”
“It might be Prophet’s night,” I retort, as we catch up, and the four of us start walking again. “What happened to the bowl?”
Slate rolls his eyes. “Prophet is too busy being noble to sleep with you. Plus, he can’t have any idea you’re coming tomorrow, which means it’s Arlo’s turn. He can sleep in your room to make sure you don’t have to deal with any cameras or shit.”
We all grimace at the reminder. “I’ve set all the footage on that drive to corrupt after a few hours,” I mutter as we catch up to the two of them. “But yes, I’m game for a sleepover.”
“A three-way sleepover?” Dodger presses.
“You’re not stealing my night,” Arlo warns.
“Oh, come on.” Dodger pulls his best puppy eyes, effortlessly hiding the pain from before. “We all know you love being watched. I even promise not to snore.”
Arlo’s eyes narrow. “I don’t believe you.”
“I promise not to snore as much as Darcy does,” he amends, dodging my playful elbow to the ribs.
