greedy and too eager to hurry and get out of there. The setup should have been obvious, but I’d never been caught like that before. I’d been getting too lax with my targets. Maybe one too many wallets had been lifted at that mall in the last few weeks. I didn’t think I’d done that many, but there might have been more pickpockets there than just me.
The problem was I only had the forty dollars, still short of what I needed. I only had tomorrow morning to find the rest or we’d get tossed out into the streets. The Citadel Mall had been an easy spot, full of tight corners and distractions. It was also close to the hotel we were living at, and closest to the Savannah highway in West Ashley. I wasn’t sure I had time to scout a new area, like one should do, when picking a new place to haunt. I needed time to figure out cameras and security routines.
I turned the corner down the street, walking through the parking lot of the extended stay hotel, where rent was over two hundred dollars a week, and the place was usually always packed.
A white utility service truck pulled up just as I crossed through an empty parking space. It took a spot near the staircase I was heading to. The window rolled down on the passenger side. An old man with a grizzly beard stuck his head out and catcalled at me. “Hey there, pretty girl. Staying here? Need a free room?”
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.