Coin did not like her family. She thought they were obnoxious, judgmental, and she was convinced her mother and father hated all of them. Especially Coin.
She thought it was because, at the tender age of fourteen, Coin made a decision: She hated most of her life. Coin refused to like school, knitting, jump rope, church, or New York City. However, she never mouthed a word of her distaste to Mush. He told her his dreams of books and classrooms, how much he loved the warm things she knitted him, that he wish he could play and be normal like other children, how he longed to go to mass. But most importantly, New York was his only parent. His only constant. He both loved and loathed the city that raised him but it was all he knew. Mush would never leave it.
Mush kept things from Coin too. It may not have made their relationship pure, but they felt a desperate need to protect each other.
That's why Mush never told Coin about the first day he met her father.
On an abnormally warm and bizarrely misty January day, Mush had left both the scarf and gloves that took Coin hours of frustration to knit him at the lodging house underneath his mattress. There was no need for heavy clothes today. Even at the break of dawn, it was almost warm, and no one could see their breaths turn white in front of their eyes. The magic that is cold weather disappeared for just a day.
Mush's mother was the kind of woman who believed in fate and magic. She was always looking for signs and warnings in normal things around her. If it was misty outside, or the full moon was coming she would stay inside the whole.
Her fear of the powers that be did not get passed down to her son. Mush didn't remember much about her, but that trait was on of the few things that stuck out in his mind. He thought it was silly of her to always run away from bad luck when it was clearly her fate to have it anyway.
So on the misty, warm January day, (which was also the day of a full moon unbeknownst to Mush) he set out to sell his papers very gladly. Mush had taken to selling in Coin's neighborhood, walking her to school, and selling on the way back. He saw her father go off to work every single day and it frightened Mush to see how big and burly her father was. He had a gruff way of walking, with his hands in his pockets always. His head was usually transfixed straight ahead; the hair on top of it jet black and his beard a dark red.
To Mush, he looked like an animal.
He was running late, and hoping he wouldn't have to see Coin's father on this day. But Coin's father was running late too. Coin's mother was pregnant yet again and she had gone into labor early that morning. Mush waited across the street from their towering apartment building filled with Irish immigrants just like them. People were yelling at each other, things came flying out of windows on every story. Mush's head was transfixed on the bedroom window that Coin shared with her other sisters. But on this morning she didn't come when she normally did. Mush waited, his heart aching to see her. His thoughts focused only on the dusty curtains that framed Coin when she came to wave to him before running down the seven flights of stairs in her plaid wool skirt.
He hadn't noticed that Mr. Carrigy was standing right next to him. In fact, he had asked the boy for a paper three times but Mush couldn't hear him.
Finally, Mush turned to see the grumpy man before him. His brow was furrowed in confusion; his hands were still in his pockets.
"What the hell is wrong with ya?" He demanded of Mush.
"Oh, sorry sir. Here's a paper on me," Mush responded politely.
"I've seen you before," Coin's father replied. "In this very neighborhood. There's no lodging houses here. There's no colored people here. Why are you always around?" Mush stood silently, staring at him. Colored people? "…Well?"
"Oh…well sir. Uhm…this is just where I sell. Gotta sell somewhere."
"Suppose. Do you know any of my sons? They're always talkin' about wanting to leave school and to be newsies. Say that they talk you people, that the know all the in's and out's. It's all nonsense if ya ask me. You can just go to the stand and buy a paper if ya wanted to," Coin's father just kept talking and talking, all while reading the paper just like Coin had that first day on the porch.
Mush was completely flabbergasted.
"Why do you do it?"
"I've got nothing else," Mush said bravely. Mr. Carrigy could call him colored, he could look down on him, and he could make fun of what he did with himself everyday. But Mush would never let anyone think that he sold papers from dawn to dusk everyday for the glamour of it. This wasn't a fanciful idea thought up by two private school boys. This was his life.
Mush turned from Mr. Carrigy, fed up with his pointless banter. He heard a thud and his pocket suddenly seemed a lot lighter.
Coin's book.
Mr. Carrigy was one step ahead of Mush. He bent down to pick up the book and stopped for a second.
"My daughter Anna, well we call her Coin, she has this book" he smirked and went to hand it to Mush. But he stopped when he saw the look on the young boy's face and opened the cover.
"To Mush," it said
No one kills themselves in this one! Isn't that great?
Love, Coin"
Mr. Carrigy understood it now. It all made sense.
His daughter. A boy. A newsboy. Mush ran eight blocks without stopping. Without breathing.
They had been found out.