Jack rubbed his neck as he walked through the Lodging House door.  He'd sold alone again that day, and it had seemed like forever before he ran out of papers.  His neck ached—he must have slept badly the previous night—and he continually felt the dull pain of a headache.  On top of that, his stomach was beginning to hurt.  He thought perhaps something he had eaten at the Jacobs' had disagreed with him, but more likely it was just what David had said.  Jack's plans for the rest of the evening were nothing more ambitious than a long nap, comfortable in his own bunk.

As he crossed through the lobby, he heard voices and caught sight of Moshe chatting with a young lady.  He looked away and didn't acknowledge Moshe at all.  The two hadn't spoken since Moshe had gone off to sell on his own, setting the stage for some tense moments in the lodging house.  But as Jack set foot on the steps, he heard a peal of laughter—Moshe's—that was joined by a familiar female giggle.  Then:

"Jack!"

He turned and saw the girl was Sarah.  Sarah, talking so familiarly with the boy he had come to consider his archrival.  Her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks flushed, her lips parted in the sort of smile he liked to think only he could bring to her face.  Jack's girlfriend seemed oblivious to the freezing of his features, and stepped up to him.

"Jack, how are you?" she asked cheerily.  "You forgot this last night, and I asked Mama to let me bring it by."  She thrust something into his hands, and he looked down to see that she had brought him a pie plate, with almost half an apple pie.  Esther Jacobs never let Jack leave without sending him 'a little something to share with the boys'.

"And you forgot to kiss me goodbye," Sarah added coyly, stepping closer.

Jack ignored her request and cut his eyes toward Moshe, who was just making a timely exit out the front door.

"What were ya talkin' ta him for?"

Sarah frowned and said, "What do you mean, Jack?  I was just being friendly."  She cast a look in Moshe's direction and let out a squeak when Jack caught her arm.  "Jack!"

"Sorry," he said immediately, and loosened his hold on her arm.  He dropped his voice again.  "Sarah, I don't want ya talkin' ta dis one, a'right?"
            "Why not?"

"Just don't, a'right?  Now t'anks for da pie, but shouldn't you get home b'fore it's dark?"  He kissed her cheek distractedly and tried to guide her in the direction of the door.

She dragged her feet, resisting.  "Jack?  Is he the one you think is taking over?"

Jack stopped where he stood.  "Who told you dat?"

"Well, David may have mentioned it…" she said.

"Well don't you listen to dat!" Jack said, and she jumped visibly.  "Dat ain't happening, you understand?"

"Yes, Jack," she replied quickly.  Then, apparently trying to smooth things over, she patted his cheek and said, "I'd just like to still be able to brag that I'm seeing the most powerful newsie in all of Manhattan."  She kissed him, and left.

The most powerful newsie in all of Manhattan, Jack heard in his head, and permitted himself a small, weary smile.  But that smile would have disappeared if he could have known that just steps outside the door, Moshe waited to offer his girl a walk home, and have his offer accepted.

Jack slept restlessly and could barely drag himself out of bed the next morning.  His stomachache had returned, and now he felt disoriented, distracted.  He just wanted to curl up in bed and sleep the fever away, but he couldn't do that now, he knew.  It would only make it too easy for Moshe to wrestle all that he loved away from him.  What he didn't know was that Moshe's plan was already going into effect.

In his condition, he didn't notice a thing.  Not the whispers or the unsure looks or Moshe's cool confidence or anything that would ordinarily have tipped him off.  Then, just at they headed toward the circulation desk, Boots approached him and came out with it.

"Hey Jack…  I dunno if you hoid about it or what, but we ain't sellin' today."

"What?"

Boots avoided Jack's eyes and twisted a loose button on his cuff.  "I mean, y'know, we'se startin' da strike t'day.  For forty cents a hundred."

Forty cents a hundred.  Had it only been three days ago that he had first heard that phrase that had apparently taken root in the brain of each newsie?  He licked his lips and fought another wave of nausea.  "Yeah, shoah," he said at last.  "I hoid of dat."

"So're you sellin'?" Boots asked, and Jack wondered if he just imagined the trace of hope in the voice.  Hope for what answer, he couldn't have said.

Jack glanced toward the window, where the new man, Danner, was just opening the shutters.  When he looked back toward Boots, he suddenly saw all the other newsies clustered behind him, just as they had encircled the would-be scabbers months earlier.  There was Moshe, right in the center, his eyes glinting in the morning light.  When Jack hesitated only a moment, Moshe stepped forward and out of the crowd.

"Yeah, Jack.  You sellin'?"  His words, Jack knew, were a direct challenge to his authority.  If Jack said no, he was only submitting to Moshe's idea.  If he said yes…  He took a step backward.  Then another.  And then he turned and walked directly toward the window.

Behind him, a swell of hushed voices rose from the newsies' group.  "Don't you do it, Jack!" he heard Mush plead, voice breaking.

"It ain't worth it!"

"What are ya, a scabbah?"  That was Racetrack.  Jack flinched.

"Don't you give up on us!"  Blink's voice.  No, Jack thought, you're the ones who gave up on me. 

Just like he did every morning of his life, Jack reached into his pocket and drew out a fifty-cent piece, feeling for the first time each ridge and contour of the coin's face between his fingers.  His hands suddenly seemed so sensitive, almost as if they were feeling the individual fibers in the material of his trousers, each grain of dust settled in his pocket.  At the same time, his ears heard nothing of the admonitions of his so-called friends.  Then there was the click of the coin on the wood of the counter, and the spell was broken.  The voices had risen in volume, and the sound of the shouts assaulted his ears, making him cringe involuntarily.  They said he had betrayed them, they said he was a scab.  He'd heard these words before, and maybe he deserved them then, but he didn't deserve them now.  His mouth tried to form the words, "A hundred papes," but he couldn't work his lips.  He felt hot and clumsy and the world began to blur around him.  In a moment, the shouts fell silent as Jack collapsed to the ground.

When Jack awoke, he was lying on the bunk below his usual bed.  Someone had removed his shoes and dropped them by the bed, and a glass of water sat on his beside table, but his mysterious helper was nowhere to be seen.  Jack made himself sit upright and took a shaky sip of water.  Now what?  He was surely too late.  The strike had begun, and the boys he had once considered his were biting off more than they could chew.  Well, it was their problem now.  His collapse had been his fall from grace, effectively removing him forever from his rank as leader.  His stomach churned again as the thought crossed his mind, and he stumbled from the bed to throw up.

As he sat in a cold sweat with his head hung over the toilet bowl and the taste of vomit in his mouth and nose, he realized not one person was there with him, and slumped back against the stall partition in defeat.  Who had laid him out on the bed, he wondered.  They might as well have dumped him by the curb with yesterday's garbage, because that was what he was.  He stumbled to his feet, washed his face and rinsed his mouth, and fell back onto his bed.  He didn't know how long he lay there, feeling nothing but a numb despair, until his hand dropped off the side of the bed and his knuckles brushed the floor.  No, brushed something on the floor.

He rolled over and picked up the object he had touched.  There, his money pouch.  Why was it on the floor?  He opened it and looked at the bills inside, still crisply folded just as they had been when Pulitzer first handed them over.  That was when Jack really had betrayed his friends, accepting Pulitzer's bribe—this money, and freedom—in exchange for working as a scab.  The money was going to be for his long-awaited move to Santa Fe.  And in the end, he had returned to his friends and supported them and given up his dreams of Santa Fe.  Well, there wasn't much holding him in New York anymore, was there?  He ran a finger along the side of one bill, and the edge sliced his finger.  He lay without moving and watched the cut turn red.  A small dark bead of blood slid around his finger and hung poised above the dollar in his other hand.  Jack watched without blinking as it rolled off his trembling hand and darkened the bill in a single uneven drop.  He shut his eyes, his vision blurring.

Time at last to go to Santa Fe.

Plink.

The rock bounced off the window and clattered on the fire escape.  Jack bent, keeping his eyes on the window he knew to be Sarah's, and picked up another stone.

Plink.

At last, a glow appeared in the dark of the room.  Jack quickly climbed the stairs and arrived just as the window slid open.

"Who's there?"

"It's me," Jack whispered.  Sarah pushed the curtain aside.

"Jack!  What are you doing here?"

"Shh, keep it down, wouldja?" Jack said quickly.  "Come on up ta da roof."

Sarah met him on the roof shortly, wrapping herself in a thick lace shawl for warmth and modesty.

"Jack, it's two o'clock in the morning," she said, drawing the shawl close around her.

"I had ta tawlk to ya, Sarah.  It's important."  Important.  That was surely an understatement.  But he didn't know how else to say it.  He'd made a decision, sure to be the most significant he had ever made, and it was time for Sarah to make one too.  "It's important," he repeated, stuck on that word that didn't seem to do the occasion justice.

"Well, Jack," she said, "I have something important to discuss with you, too."

Jack paused, his thoughts interrupted.  He'd had it all planned out in his mind, and now she'd thrown him off.  "Why?  What about?"

Sarah focused on her fingers tugging at a loose thread in the shawl.  "Umm…Well, Jack, I've been meaning to tell you.  I've been thinking and, um, I don't think we should see each other anymore."  She pulled the thread as far as it would go and snapped it off with a quick jerk.

Jack looked at her in dumb shock.  After a silence, he sputtered, "But why?"

Sarah held up her fingers so the wind could lift the thread from her fingers.  She watched it coast to the ground and then looked up at him with blank eyes.  "I don't know."

An angry heat flushed Jack's face as he saw her vague, emotionless reaction.  "Is it someone else?" he demanded.

"Well, no Jack, of course not.  Not exactly…"  Seeing him start to question this, she hastily added, "I mean, I guess yes, but I don't know yet."  The pitch of her voice crept up like a frightened child's.  "Stop—stop interrogating me!"

"I came heah t'night ta ask you to go ta Santa Fe wit me," Jack whispered, his voice aching with disgust.  "I was gonna ask you to marry me, Sarah."

"Oh, Jack," she said, sounding pitying, and looking right at him with those blank eyes, those emotionless eyes.  Those damned cow eyes! The sounds of her words seemed to reach his ears seconds behind the movement of her lips.  "I never could have married you.  Don't you know that?  I mean… Jack, you're not even Jewish."

Jack stared at her.  Then a terrible realization came to him, and though his blood was fairly boiling, his face looked as cool and hard as stone.  "It's Lipman, isn't it," he said, his voice terrifying in its quiet hatred.  "I should have known.  It's Moshe Lipman."  Her ashamed silence answered his question.  "Dammit!" he suddenly shouted, knocking a flowerpot to the ground in his rage.  "Dammit, why Lipman!"

Sarah drew away from the shattered flowerpot.  "He's capable," she said meekly, wrapping herself deep in her shawl.  "He's…he's popular, independent…"  Her voice rose as she started to speak again, possibly with some absurd notion that she could somehow make Jack understand, or agree.  "He has ideas…  He's starting things.  He's powerful.  Jack…"

All the things I used to be, Jack thought with absolute clarity.  Oh God, that he was going to marry this girl.  Better that he had heard these words from her, and never longed for what he had left behind.

There came a noise from below, a window sliding open, and Jack saw a light cast against the wall of the building nextdoor.  "What's going on?" said Mr. Jacobs' voice.  "Is anybody up there?"

"It's that cat again, Mayer," answered his wife's voice.  "Come back to sleep."

Sarah stood completely still until the light disappeared and the window slid shut.  Then, eyes brimming with tears, she turned back toward Jack, only to find she was alone.

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