Thief (3 page)

Ugh.

I ignored him, and rushed for the stairwell. I skipped the steps two at a time and took my key out for Room 221B.

“I’m home,” I called out the moment I had the door cracked open.

“Kayli!” my brother called. He could usually hear when it was me.

“Wil!” I called back, like I always did. I locked the door behind me, and turned from the short corridor to the wider hotel room.

Wil was in the kitchenette. He waited by the coffee maker and emptied a packet of oatmeal into a coffee mug. “Where have you been?” He looked up, his green eyes covered by a pair of glasses meeting mine. His thin lips pursed as he studied my face. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to slow my breathing and look casual. “Those jerk construction workers were just bugging me.”

“Work ran late?”

I checked the time on the clock over the microwave. Six was pretty late to get back if I wanted to be here before our old man got up. If I wasn’t, he’d root around for money, sometimes breaking things and sometimes finding our stash and taking it to go drink at the bar. “Yeah,” I said, avoiding his eyes by pretending to be engrossed with a crack in the tile on the counter.

“How’s Tasty’s?”

Tasty’s was the name of the Chinese restaurant where I worked part time. It was the only place within walking distance that would hire me. The owner paid me barely minimum wage under the table and it wasn’t enough for the outrageous rent required by the hotel. “Busy,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe the line of customers.”

“Liar,” he replied. He sighed. “No leftovers for us today. Damn. I was hoping for something else besides bananas and oatmeal.”

One of the few benefits to living in a hotel was it served free breakfast in the morning. Unfortunately, it often consisted of oatmeal, bananas, apples and a few pastries. And lately there hadn’t been any pastries. To save money on food, we picked up more than our fair share of breakfast staples to last throughout the day. Occasionally I got rice from the Chinese restaurant, and if I was really lucky, I’d get someone’s order that didn’t get picked up.

The coffee maker beeped. Wil poured his hot water into the coffee cup, and started stirring the oatmeal mix. For being the younger brother, he was taller than I was, with the same eyes, and the same dark brown hair. His was cropped really short. Mine was straight and reached midway down my back. From that point, our looks differed. He was gruff, wiry and usually had a playful grin that seemed permanent to his face. Meanwhile, I hardly ever smiled. There isn’t much to smile about when you live in a dump hotel and scrounge for food and pick pockets to make the rent.

A snore broke through our mutual silence. I turned my head, spotting Jack in the bed closest to the wall. Daddy, Dad, Papa and other father names never really fit well between my lips and his ears. Jack was the thing we’d settled on. And those moments he wasn’t cursing at me, he sometimes remembered my name was Kayli.

Wil and I were more like roommates to him. He stayed up all night, drinking my hard-earned money away at the local bar, while my brother and I tried to catch some sleep before he got home. Most of the time he came back alone, but every once in a while he bought enough beer for one of the barflies to believe his promises about drugs, money, or more beer at the hotel room. He’d shoo us out, and we’d escape to spend the night in the hotel lobby on the overstuffed sofas, or by the pool that was always under repair. Management only hassled us every once in a while. If that happened, we’d break in and sleep in the hotel’s laundry room, cramped up together in the overheated space.

The lump in the bed shifted. I groaned internally, rolling my eyes and turning away from him.

Wil didn’t say a word, but looked at me, asking me quietly about money.

I yanked out the twenty-five dollars I had earned working too few hours today. I also dug out the forty dollars I got at the mall.

Wil sighed. “I didn’t get that much either,” he said. He pulled out thirty dollars and a few ones.

I counted it again just to be sure, but including the money we’d made earlier that week, we still didn’t have enough for the rent that was due tomorrow. Jack had broken into our stash this week. I could have shot him for spending nearly seventy dollars on a barfly and himself.

“I should just quit,” Wil said. “School isn’t that important. It takes up too much time.”

“No,” I said. “You have to finish high school. Mom would have wanted it.”

Wil grunted. “Do you think she’d care at this point?”

I didn’t respond. He knew the answer to that. If I didn’t think it was important, I wouldn’t have objected. But I managed to get us this hotel room after our father had a scrape with one too many landlords and we couldn’t get another rental apartment within city limits. We were one step away from a cardboard box.

“How did you get the money anyway?” I asked. “You went to school, didn’t you?”

“I got a quick job helping mow someone’s lawn on the way home.”

I scrutinized him. Unlike how Wil could read me, I couldn’t tell when he lied. I think it was those big eyes and the way the smile tripped in the corner of his mouth almost constantly. A goofy type of smile, and I was always a sucker for goofy smiles.

“But I should do more,” he said.

“You should get through your senior year with those good grades and get a scholarship into college.”

“We don’t have the money for college.”

“Colleges give you the money. And you can get loans and stuff, too.”

“The last thing anyone would give me is a loan.” He dipped his spoon into the coffee mug and took a bite of oatmeal. He grimaced. “I think he put out the expired packets again.”

I groaned, but shooed him out of the way to take one of the bananas. “The point is, you’ll be able to go to class and eat campus food and maybe even pick up an internship that will pay you. You’d be set for like four years. Maybe even longer if you decide to become a doctor or something.”

“Do you want to tell me which classes to take, too?” he asked, ending his question with a smirk.

“No, dummy. I want you to go to class so we don’t have to live here anymore. Not with him.” I nodded toward Jack.

Wil’s eyes narrowed. “We can just leave him here,” he said. “No one will say anything.”

“They did last time. He may call the cops on us again and tell them you’re a runaway. Finish school.” I stuffed pieces of banana in my mouth and chewed and swallowed. “You can’t leave mid-term anyway. And if we left and you continued going, your school is the first place he’ll come looking for us. There’re only a few months left. This is your last year. And you can start applying to colleges in January. Maybe you can get in on the summer semester."

“There’s fees.”

“I’ll figure it out,” I said. “We’ll get Jack to buy the cheaper whiskey.”

Wil pressed his fingers to the edge of his spoon, smoothing over the metal. He started shoveling the oatmeal into his mouth. I ate my banana and took a glass of water. When I was done, I cleaned both the coffee pot and the glass. With nothing better to do with my time, cleaning the tiny room helped.

Wil settled into the second double bed. Textbooks were stacked neatly in the corner and he picked up one. The room had a television, but since Jack slept during the day, we rarely ever turned it on. The hotel had a complimentary business nook, with a single old computer with internet access and printer. Late at night, when everyone else was mostly asleep, Wil would go down and do whatever homework he needed. If he didn’t need to use it, I sometimes used it to look for jobs.

I left to steal newspapers from the front lobby. I returned, sitting on the floor, scanning for jobs I could do, hoping to find one open close by.

After a while, I gave up. Most of the jobs listed were repeats. Some I’d tried before and failed. Most were out of my skill level.

I told Wil I was going to bathe. I pilfered through one of my two book bags for clothes and locked myself into the bathroom. I ran the shower as hot as I could, undressed and under the spray with my arms crossed over my body until I could adjust to the temperature.

While I did, I thought about pretzel boy. How had he spotted me from across the mall? They must have caught on to what I’d been up to for a while. Maybe they hadn’t been sure who I was, but they knew how I operated. So they set up the tall guy to be a target? And their plan was to corner me?

Why did pretzel boy offer me a job? What was that about?

And how was it I managed to run smack into the nerdling who was part of their team? And then his doppelganger, his brother most likely, in the hallway?

It made me wonder if they had a whole team of people working every section. One thing was for sure, I had to switch stomping grounds for good. This made it harder, especially with rent due the next day. It couldn’t be another mall, as they’d likely cover any of the others now. There weren’t many crowded places with people carrying full wallets walking around. People rarely used cash these days anyway, since they had credit cards. The mall had been my best chance.

And now that was ruined. Why now? Why when we were trying so hard to do this the right way? I only took what I needed. If I ever had the extra money to spare, I'd dump every last dollar I stole into some donation box for orphaned kids.

I swallowed back a thick lump in my throat, letting the stream of water wash away my tears. I hated pickpocketing. I hated feeling like a thief. I hated living in a hotel, where men traveling on business stayed. I hated their lecherous eyes and their catcalls. I hated the constant nerve-wracking worry about needing to make rent, and always being a dollar short.

I hated cringing every time I heard a siren passing by in the night. I always assumed they were coming for me.

When I couldn’t stand the self-pity any more, I washed, shaved and shut off the water.

I changed into to a pair of old pajama pants that belonged to Wil once, but had gotten too short for him. Since I was smaller, they were still snug but comfortable. I put on a black T-shirt. The pajama pants stuck to my skin, which was already itchy from the old, worn blades that liked to nick at the crevices behind my knees. I wasn’t sure why I bothered grooming at all, outside of trying to blend in at the mall. There was no one to impress. I couldn’t date anyone. I simply did it because I should and it wasted time.

Holding the thin blue men’s razor made me think of my mother’s pink razors before she died. Back when I was little, maybe around six years old, I would sneak into the bathroom, and tamper with pink razors, and tampons, and other girl items she kept in a drawer away from everyone else’s toothpastes and washcloths. I didn’t have much to play with as a kid. Rocks and sticks weren’t allowed in the house, so I’d used the razors and the tampon box to build a pretend mansion, where little Molly and Polly Tampon lived in luxury with horses and breakfast cereals I saw on television, and toys overflowing from every closet.

My mother had caught me and laughed at my imagination. “You’re my little storyteller,” she’d said, braiding a strand of my brown hair, the same color as hers. “Always something interesting. You don’t need a toy when you’ve got such vivid ideas of your own.”

I sighed at the fogged hotel mirror, blinking away the memories. It was still too hard to think of her back then, because inevitably, I started thinking about the day she died.

And that was something that made me angry at Jack. I was so tired of being angry, feeling a weight in the pit of my stomach that never went away. When Wil had his diploma, and finally settled into a college, I’d be able to strike out on my own. Then we’d leave Jack to his fate. He wouldn’t be able to come after us. I’d stay for Wil, but not a second more.

A grumbling old voice, muffled through the bathroom door, broke my thoughts. “Where is she?”

I made a face, and then drew a frowning face into the fogged up mirror that I thought mimicked my own. I didn’t really want to deal with Jack now. I hung my towel properly to let it dry and yanked open the door.

Jack was leaning against the wall, his arm up ready to knock. His scruffy face was in dire need of a wash, with grime darkening the crevices. His teeth had yellowed. He had thread veins and a drinker’s nose. “What are you doing in there?” he asked, his question full of suggestive intent.

“Nothing,” I said, trying to duck around him, and holding my breath as I did. I wasn’t sure how he managed to lure women to the hotel room. Probably on a promise of a twenty dollar bill he’d nipped from me. His heady armpit smell surely wasn’t what they were after.

Jack coughed thickly, as if he had a fur ball. “Your brother told me you haven’t made rent.”

“It’ll be here tomorrow,” I said. I bit my tongue to the fact that if he didn't require me to be here when he was awake, I could probably get a better job and make enough for a better place.

“It better be. How am I supposed to teach you responsibility at your age?"

"By setting a good example and getting a job, yourself?"

"Don't you start that snippy attitude with me." He shoved the bathroom door open. "Now go clean up the room before I get out."

I moved slowly until he grunted and shoved me aside. When he was behind the bathroom door, I made a face to mock him. Not that there was a point, but at least it made me feel better. A little.

I got to work changing the bed sheets and getting fresh ones from the dresser.

Wil got up from his reading. He picked up one of the pillows and changed the cover.

“You should study,” I said.

“I have time to help you change the sheets.”

Since we lived in a hotel, technically we could have had a maid come in. Jack had already irritated the maids enough that I’d promised them I’d clean the room and change the sheets regularly if they’d leave what we needed outside the door. They were more than happy to leave it to us, since they knew they’d never get a tip anyway. I ran a powerless sweeper over the thin carpet and Wil replaced the bed’s blanket. The worst part was the mess Jack made: collections of bottles, crumpled Kleenex tissues and occasionally a pair of ladies’ underwear of unknown origin.