Here is another one of my outrageously short chapters! I am feeling outrageously nice today, so I thought I would put up this chapter even with the very limited turnout of reviews; please rmember that you can review this story and not just the old one, guys :). Well, this is Scratch O'Brien, who still does not own Newsies. I do however own all other unfamiliar characters. I would like to note that I did change events around a little bit... and don't I feel POWERFUL!

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"Business is a combination of war and sport."

--Andre Maurois

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We shoved our way through the crowd of newsies to the Horace Greeley statue that stood right in front of the distribution office and gazed on what we correctly guessed was a fight.

Spades spoke first: "A dime says it's the Delancys and Kelly. Anyone?" None of us would bet against her, to her immense dissapointment. She should have been expecting it; we all knew there wasn't anyone else who Jack would be fighting this early in the morning. I took a tight hold of Becca's hand as we walked away the great gathering of riff raff, thankful that we had gotten our seventy papers before the fight started. Becca trotted along beside me, happily chattering away at me. She always said hellp to nearly everyone we met on the streets, and I'm sure my little sister being such a soicial butterfly contributed to the money in our pockets for food at the end of each day.

It truly is a good thing to have an adorable little sister like Becca when the headlines are bad for three weeks straight. During those times, you find yourself saving part of the half of a stale roll the nuns give you every morning so that at the end of the day you can draw that baked reminder of poverty out of your pocket to drop into a pot of boiling water alongside whoever else had the foresight to save some bread to contribute to the mix. When times are even harder, we substitue some or all of the bread with newspapers. When that happens, we soak the papers beforehand to get as much ink off as possible before we boil the stuff.

But by that time, we're almost too hungry to care if we had to eat the papers dry, much less if they had ink on them.

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It really doesn't take much to sell papers.

To sell them well it does.

You have to like what you do. Can you imaging coughing, screaming, cheating, sprinting from the cops, living in alleyways, eating your leftover papers, and running back to the distribution office to do it all over again for as many editions as Pulitzer decides to print out to cover all the news, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, three hundread and sixty-five days a year , for as many years as you're cute enough?

If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

But we can. And so we cough, scream, sprint, live in alleyways, eat our leftover papes, and run to the distribution office to do it all over again for as many editions as Pulitzer decides to print out to cover all the news, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, three hundread and sixty-five days a year , for as many years as we're cute enough.

And we stick together; in a town as tough as here, it's all you can do.

Unless you're beaten to death for your jacket first, that is.