Maybe this was the time when he grew a heart and asked me what was wrong. About my aversion to Craig. Or maybe he would talk it out with me. Try to figure out how the trip could be a little less awkward for me. “Don’t forget to memorize your speech.” He pointed at the pile of pages on the corner of my desk, before slamming the door and heading to the shower.
Ransom Lockwood didn’t do compassion.
Then.
The pickpocketing turned into larceny. We ended up breaking into places, Tom, Lawrence and I. Mainly big stores and corporate chains. People who wouldn’t want the hassle of pressing charges even if we got caught.
At some point, we graduated and became small-time drug dealers. Mr. Moruzzi was a prolific criminal, with many people working under him. On the surface, he was a successful businessman, with several hotdog stands across Chicago. But the amount of dirty money that passed through our hands was ridiculous.
First, we were the errand boys, fetching and picking up small parcels. Then, around junior high, we became the dealers. We never touched anything. That was Mr. Moruzzi’s rule. He didn’t want any druggies under his roof.
To compensate for our shitty lives, which consisted of going to school, scoring excellent grades to please CPS, then working ourselves to the bone for him (zero commission, thanks for asking), he paid us with a questionable currency—women.
Specifically, high-end prostitutes. I think he wanted to distort our view on love and marriage. There was no need for him to go the extra mile. One look at his miserable marriage to the therapist—Mrs. Moruzzi—who was hardly home, and had a lover who lived in Canada where she visited frequently, did the job.
Whenever Mrs. Moruzzi was away, he took his anger out on us. Beating was out of the question. We were all bigger and stronger than he was. Instead, he made us fight each other. For food. For money. For women.
Over the years, Lawrence, Tom, and I suffered broken ribs, cracked bones, fractured fingers, and so on, all just to survive, while Moruzzi watched on, smugly enjoying the show.
It was clear we functioned as a workforce for him. It was also clear he was never going to give us a chance to become anything more than his little pawns.
When Lawrence was seventeen and I was fifteen, he started to become antsy.
“We need an out from Moruzzi. What do we do?”
I was the first one to bring it up.
“We kill him.”
Ransom was right.
I had to get a head start on the speech if I wanted to know it by heart by the time Craig and Hera were wed.
I gathered the papers and skimmed the words, my pupils frantic, my heart pounding.
I wasn’t illiterate. I knew how to read. It was just hard to make sense of the words sometimes. It took me an excruciatingly long time to read a simple paragraph. What should have been seconds, usually required minutes for me, sometimes hours, and by the time I reached the end, I oftentimes forgot the content of the text I was reading.
For instance, I would read “light” as “might” or “white” as “what” and “sound” as “ground”. Words mixed together, blending into one another on the page, and I had to concentrate until my brain hurt to read one simple article.
Which was why I opted out of reading whenever possible.
Well, I didn’t have the luxury of escaping reading right now.
I read out loud. It was a trick Mrs. Archibald, one of my teachers, had taught me in second grade.
“Things will make more sense if you speak the words out loud.”
Turned out she was right, although my parents politely asked her not to butt into their business—and my education—when she gave them a call about my struggles with reading.
Now, fourteen years after Mrs. Archibald had been let go for overstepping (I never got over the guilt, and never forgave my parents for this), I stood up and paced my hotel room, trying my hand at reading the text typed out for me, no doubt by one of my father’s speechwriters.
“Dog…goom…g…” I rubbed at my forehead. Cold sweat formed over my skin. “Goo—good evening very…everything…eve…everyone.” I stopped. Closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. “Good evening, everyone.”
One sentence. That was a start.
See? It’s not so bad. Only forty more to go.
I had a decent memory. I could do it. I repeated the words out loud, inking them to my brain.