"Supper!" Mom hollers from the kitchen while I'm in the middle of my fouettés, turns I've realized, that if I time them right, I won't kick my foot into anything.
But Mom's yell startles me, and with a kick, I end up face-planting onto my sister's bed.
A moment later, I'm shoving my shoes into my box, shoving the box under my bed.
I leave my room, glancing out the shuttered window to see the low sun in between the cracks. Time got away from me today; I probably spent two hours going over ballet.
I needed it. Between Kilorn and Farley, I needed to decompress through something, and there's nothing like dancing in my tiny bedroom to help me unwind.
It's no use thinking about it now anyway. Kilorn has to have time to cool off before I try calling him or knocking on his door. I doubt he's even home. The Scarlet Street Fighters cannot be found. Unless Kilorn already has an in with them, it's going to take him a little bit of effort to track that gang down.
Good. Make him work for it if he's so intent on destroying his life.
But I force the last few hours out of my mind as I enter our sparsely furnished living room and move across to reach the table tucked into the back.
The rest of my family already sits in the old wooden chairs enveloping the old wooden table, Dad at the head. Mom's distributed soup around the table, and Gisa's set out glasses for water and milk. I settle down across from my sister and next to Bree.
Seven o'clock on the dot every night, Mom, Dad, Bree, Tramy, Gisa, and I gather around the dinner table. We stay here for a half an hour, give or take, and though there are six of us, conversations are filled with small talk and otherwise painful lapses of silence. Gisa talks more than anyone else, telling us about her sewing and school. Mom will tell the occasional story, and Dad will share something he read in the paper. Bree and Tramy have nothing interesting going on in their lives, and I . . . well nobody wants to hear about what I stole on any given day.
I throw my money on the table every night, and somebody or other picks it off to be stuffed away. That's that.
In the Barrow household, anything goes at dinnertime. Slurping the remnants of our soup bowls, using the wrong sized fork . . . that's our thing. The shabby placemats over the table are stained thanks to my brothers, though it wasn't long ago that Mom washed them. Bree and Tramy have a burping contest once a week. I can't remember the last time we said grace.
Something bland, I think as I behold the soup bowl before me. Something with too many vegetables.
"Minestrone soup," Mom says, noticing how I stare at my food.
Though the comment isn't for him, Dad mutters his thanks before picking up his spoon to dig in.
Bree and Tramy happen to both be unemployed at the moment, but they have no problem eating as much of Mom's food as they're offered. My brothers are just as fast to begin eating, following Dad after a moment's pause. They'll go back for seconds before I'm halfway through my bowl. I roll my eyes incredulously as I watch them devour their bowls. Boys. Geez.
Only when Mom picks up her spoon at her place on the opposite head of the table, closest to me and Gisa, do I let myself eat, lifting my foggy and slightly bent spoon to my lips.
Yes, yes, too many vegetables, paired with a portion of pasta and a broth. And as much as I'd like to complain just once, I don't. Not when the food my mother cooks is better than I could ever do.
Gisa and Mom haven't let me in the kitchen for years after realizing that I'm hopeless when it comes to the culinary arts of life.
Any fragments of conversation my family members offer up dissolve into awkward silence unnervingly quickly. We all say our piece, respond with a "good" when Bree asks us how each of our days were. Though nobody really means it. Mom got home from her shift at the hotel a couple of hours ago. My brothers and father didn't do much of anything, as is the usual.
There's a reason for that, by the way. At least for Dad.
While six of us might dine at the table, only five chairs surround it when we're not eating.
See, Dad sits in a wheelchair.
That's why he doesn't work outside the home anymore.
Before the accident, Dad was a police officer with the NYPD. I was too young to remember much of that time, only blurry images of Dad walking through the door with his uniform on. He worked for a precinct nearby, and I'm proud to say that he actually cared about his job, unlike most of the asshole police in the neighborhood. Dad would give out tickets, patrol his assigned areas, and make arrests; he wasn't a detective or anything high-ranking, but his job paid the bills.
Before the accident, Mom and Dad had managed to put away a decent amount for a home upstate. The two of them had grand plans. This apartment that they've lived in for twenty years was only supposed to last ten, and eventually, they were going to buy a house in a nice-enough neighborhood, maybe in Albany or Buffalo. To at last give their children a chance at a better life with what little they could offer.
My parents were raised in impoverished households. They say that children, for the most part, will make the same amount of money as their parents do. So far, that statistic holds true for my family, my siblings. For me. An awful, vicious cycle.
From my understanding, Mom and Dad were just like their children. Grew up in a poor New York neighborhood, didn't bother trying in their academics, because they knew they'd never get anywhere with the kind of education their crappy public school was offering.
Getting out of New York City never happened. For a reason I can barely remember.
Since then, we've been stuck. Grown bitter. Mom works too much, Dad can't work at all, my brothers don't do anything, Gisa has better things to focus on, and I . . . well, I can't stand the idea of submitting to a nine-to-five job and turn to illegal methods instead.
Yet six stomachs still exist in the Barrow household. We live week-to-week, not even that most of the time. Will's generous when it comes to rent, and I'm sure that we're a payment behind.
If we wanted to leave, I don't think we could. We're just . . . stuck.
As stuck as Dad is stuck in his chair.
I was seven or eight the morning Mom took her five kids to a hospital downtown.
The whole situation was pure chance, pure . . . misfortune. Around then, Dad had been taking extra shifts a few days a week to earn some extra cash. Another year, he said, another year, and we'll be on our way upstate. Mom didn't like it, but he ended up taking extra shifts on Friday nights a lot. Friday nights are when the people of Manhattan are at their worst, Mom said. Please don't go.
Please don't go.
For some reason, I remember hearing Shade repeat Mom's words from my bedroom. Gisa was already fast asleep, but I lay awake with the door cracked open.
Please don't go.
The money didn't matter that night. I just wish he had listened.
A couple of rich college kids had decided to take a joyride through the city. It was around midnight, and it was Dad who took up the call when somebody reported them. Now of course, speeding in Manhattan in something pretty hard to do, no matter how stupid you are, but these kids managed to pull it off, switching lanes, freaking out drivers by honking their horns . . . when Mom told me those small details years later, it felt as though I had been there, in the bright lights of the city, riding so very fast.
Dad chased them out of Manhattan, onto the Brooklyn Bridge, into Brooklyn and then into Queens. Things got out of control from there in the less-busy parts of the city, and even when Dad called in backup . . . it was already too late. Whatever kid who was driving was good, whipping around corners of residential streets, whizzing through traffic lights, somehow making it onto the highway near JFK without causing a single accident. He wasn't even drunk.
Backup was a minute away when Dad lost control of the wheel. The kid was in a fancy sports car, something meant to be raced. Dad's cop car was good, but not . . . that good. It had just recently rained, and there the car went, drifting, drifting until it meant its fate on the side of the road, at a guardrail.
So Dad went to the emergency room, having entered his car being able to walk and leaving it without control of his legs. The doctors were useless, stitching up the cuts on his face and setting his dislocated shoulder, but there was nothing to be done about his back.
The precinct paid for his expenses. That was our only consolation.
The kid and his friends were arrested later, only to be bailed out by their rich parents. They paid their way out of the charges we pressed and never faced an actual trial. They even paid off the press to keep the story out of the paper.
Dad leaves the apartment a few times a month now. He's ashamed of what happened to him, blames himself for it, even when the rest of us blame those rich bastards. Over the years, he's taken up a dozen different jobs over the computer, each one more unfulfilling than the last. I wish he'd go out and find a real job, but I can't imagine how I'd even suggest that to him.
So we've been stuck ever since. Our savings ran down the drain during the time we had to adjust to living without Dad's income, and now . . . we're stuck.
For just a moment, I look to Dad with my spoon raised halfway to my lips. He's only in his forties, but hints of grey hair already show themselves, his honey eyes lack the brightness they once possessed, and his skin is much paler than mine from not going outside. Greyish stubble dots his face, cheekbones soft with age. The strong body of a police officer is long gone, having given in to his condition; Dad slouches in his chair as he finishes off his soup.
Before he notices, I turn back to my bowl and down my spoon of soup. Bree and Tramy have sauntered off to the kitchen for another bowl, and Mom and Gisa slowly progress through their first.
Over a backdrop of silence, two things permeate the air: the sound of spoons against ceramic bowls and heat.
How 'bout that weather we're having?
It wouldn't be the first time somebody half-jokingly said it at the table.
But I turn my attention to Gisa instead, who hates the quiet more than everybody else and launches into a story about the project her sewing mistress assigned her this week.
" . . . but then she told me, oh, no! That fabric just won't do! You do know who you're making that dress for, don't you, Miss Barrow?" Gisa mimics her mistress in a high-pitched, mocking voice. "So then she sent me back to buy a new bolt that looked the exact same but cost double . . ."
Gisa, out of all of us, is the talented, un-stuck one. Someday, she'll be good enough to open her own company, sell beautiful dresses and skirts and whatever else she feels like sewing. For now, she continues school, does well in it, while still honing her craft inside a highrise in Midtown. It's no Ralph Lauren or Michael Kors, but the company she apprentices for grows in popularity every day, or so I've heard from Gisa's yabbering on about it.
If it's in the Garment District and hasn't forfeited its portion of the highrise yet, it must be doing well.
And if Gisa's any good, which I know she is, then she'll get a scholarship into a fashion school, and my parents will use any drop of savings they've accumulated all these years to help pay for the loose ends.
My sister has dreams of being the best at her art. I don't have the stupidity to question it for a second. I've seen her designs. She's good.
She's great.
My parents nod and smile, happy for their youngest child but also totally lost as she continues on about the dress she's designing for some has-been Broadway understudy.
Gisa's eyes are always brighter than the rest of ours. They may be the same color, but there's a life in them that has since died out in my parents. Dying out in my brothers, in mine. She's easily the prettiest of us siblings, with her perfect, freckled and porcelain skin; straight nose; glossy, curling hair that goes to her shoulders; and a sense of style that could kill.
Bree and Tramy return to the table together, pulling out their chairs and sitting down in tandem. But no, they're not twins. While they both inherited Dad's height, unlike me and Gee, and work out enough to have bulky, muscular figures, Bree's a year older than Tramy. Almost twenty-two and almost twenty-one. Bree has closely-shaven hair, and Tramy's grown a beard, that chestnut, river-brown shade.
My two brothers have jumped from job to job ever since finishing high school with barely passing grades. They aren't unintelligent, Bree and Tramy. Just unmotivated by school, like me. Part of me wishes—for their own good—that Mom and Dad would kick them out already, force them into the real world.
But I'll be eighteen soon enough too, with no idea as to what I'm doing with myself.
Farley, that woman I had the misfortune and luck of meeting yesterday, will forever know that I'm a high school dropout. It shouldn't bother me as much as it does, when Farley looks rougher than me, with her cropped hair and neck tattoo. But I still wish that Will hadn't told her.
It doesn't matter, it's in the past, and it's my fault.
My fault that I've probably ruined my chances of having a decent life with that choice.
It's been about as long as I've stopped dancing in the studio as I haven't gone to school. In the state of New York, the legal dropout age is sixteen. I made it to seventeen, halfway through Junior Year. It was January when I left the studio, and after all of that pain, the feeling of my long-sought dreams being demolished, I didn't return for the second semester.
It wasn't like I was going to college anyway.
I had one dream in mind, however far tucked away it was.
But no, my studio couldn't have been good enough to mold a professional ballerina. No way. Too scared for an answer, I never actually asked my instructors if I was good enough. But I doubt I was. And besides, it hardly matters anymore.
Apart from the technique I still practice tirelessly, I run four times a week in Central Park, and more for each time I get caught stealing on the job. With the security cameras lining every street in Manhattan, those additional steps add up. The crowds are usually adequate to get lost in, but once in a while . . . they really make me run for it.
No, it's not an honest way to make money, and I'm not happy to call myself a felon. But at least I steal from the rich and give to the poor.
The poor being my family.
I rarely take the subway, so I walk miles a day to get to the nicer, busier parts of town. Sometimes that's part of my run, depending. But I never pickpocket people north of One-Hundredth East Street.
Besides for not having enough money to be worth it, the people on the north side of the city are expecting it, bracing themselves for it, and ready to fight back. On occasion, I've seen people in my neighborhood try to mug somebody else, only to end up being the one who gets stolen from. And those have been full-grown males.
If I ever get caught, and if my victim fights back, there'll be people to see it. To help me, even if I don't deserve it.
It's dangerous alright, but it will indeed always be worth it. With Mom as a hotel maid, Dad testing out yet another online job, two of my brothers unemployed, and a third one gone . . . the money and goods I bring in benefit us, even if my parents won't deign to admit it.
Mom notices me staring at the wall and snaps her worn fingers in my face.
I blink out of it, my thoughts of self-reflection corroding away in an instant.
"Yes?" I ask.
"Shade sent a letter," she says quietly, and I perk up even as my gut drops.
"Can I see it?" I ask politely, trying not to come across as too eager.
Mom gestures across the table to Dad, who's already pulling it out from the pocket at the side of his wheelchair.
"Enjoy," he says, eyes connecting with mine for a split second before he resumes eating his soup.
Shade. My third and youngest brother. The one that we don't talk about as he doesn't live with us anymore.
One day, my brother just left the house. He's a grown adult, has been for over a year now, but he just left. The explanation Shade offered Mom over the phone on the third day he had gone missing was that he got a good job, but he couldn't live at home anymore. Mom started screaming at him, accusing him of all sorts of nasty things with a red-hot anger I had never seen before.
"Drugs?" she asked him, clutching the landline in a bony and white hand.
"Did you join a gang?" she asked him, shaking the telephone so violently I thought she might drop it.
He spurned off the first allegation with contempt, but I still remember, listening in on the bedroom line, there was a slight pause after she wailed the second.
He hasn't come home since. Not for months.
Shade writes letters instead of visiting. Letters. Like the internet doesn't work and emailing doesn't exist. The text on the college-ruled paper is always and exactly one page long, never more and never less. And the writing is never about himself, but detailing the silly things he sees in various places, and questions. He asks so many questions about our lives.
"Thanks," I return, my spoon plunking in the bowl as I unfold the piece of notebook paper.
One page. Exactly one page, as always, penned in stalky handwriting.
Dear family, I am alive. Obviously.
I hope that life is treating you all fine as well, and I hope that I can come home soon, but I can't make any promises.
He goes on, writing and complaining about the heat, wishing for a big old storm to wash away that disgusting sweat that clings to almost everybody around town. He gives the address of a recently opened store Gisa might like and yells through the paper for Bree and Tramy to get off their asses and get some jobs they might actually keep.
He tells me to be careful on the streets, berating me to get my GED and use my brain for once. Half-jokingly.
He sends his love to Mom and Dad.
Again, I swear if this heat keeps going on, the dawn's going to start sweating red.
Love and best regards, —S
"Thanks," I say again, passing the paper back to Dad.
"It'd be nice if he came home," Gisa says.
"You know he always says that," Mom says, probably a little more snappy than she means for it to be.
Tempted to suggest that I go down to that P.O. box in East Village, I force myself to take another slurp of soup. That address is the only way we can trace Shade, though if I ever attempted it, I'd have to time it right, possibly loiter around the post office for hours. Who knows if he even picks up our letters the day they arrive? Shade, street-smart Shade, would know to wait a couple of days so we'd fail in tracking him if we ever dared to try.
"I still wonder what his job is," I murmur in between my lips, almost a thought to myself.
"Mom still wonders if he's in a gang," Gisa replies and scoffs, as if she doesn't believe it for a second. She heard that pause too, fourteen at the time.
The silence that follows at the table tells me that the rest of my family—including myself—isn't entirely sold on it.
He could be anywhere in New York City. The monthly letters are a small comfort, a reassurance that he's okay. We know nothing more than that he has a job, can't live at home, and refuses to let us come to him.
It makes my problems seem like mere annoyances, when Shade could be anywhere, doing anything.
When nobody speaks up again at the table, I excuse myself.
It's always like this, whenever a letter comes. A reassurance that he's okay, but also a reminder: that Shade's gone. Everybody in the family has their various theories, but we're already spent enough time debating them. When he'll come back, if he'll come back . . . what he's doing, who he's with . . . meaningless, unanswerable questions.
I retreat back to my room, closing the door with a quiet click.
To stop thinking about my brother, to figure out how in the world I'm getting out of Wall Street alive.