Need You Now Page 2

  Rosa

  I was a really good thief. Which seemed a little unbelievable, considering my current residence, but I would never have gotten caught if my half-brother hadn’t turned me in to the cops, pissed that Marco kicked his ass.

  The minute after the social worker dropped me off at my Dad’s shitbox of a house, I’d started “earning my keep” as Dear Old Dad called it.

  Working my way up from shoplifting to pickpocketing to breaking and entering, and finally to grand theft auto.

  I wasn’t proud of myself, but when the choice was between stealing something or getting my teeth kicked out, I tended to go with keeping my teeth. But I’d learned a couple of interesting things while under my Dad’s thumb. Mainly, that ninety percent of being a good thief was about the person you’re trying to steal from. Picking a mark was the hardest part, but if you did it right, the actual stealing was easy. Candy from a baby and all that. And my problem at St. Jude’s Home for Court-Placed Juveniles was that there were no easy marks.

  The Pastor and The Wife were mean, sadistic assholes, but they were smart and really, really careful. It’s how they got away with what they got away with.

  But that key ring…that key ring felt like my way out.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen with all the locked cabinets, the sunlight was fighting its way through the blinds. Carissa was there, wearing jeans and pink T-shirt. She had a lot of girly clothes, like something left over from another life. Or like a costume she wore, because there was nothing girly about Carissa.

  She was Chinese and no one knew about her family or where she grew up. She’d been there the longest and she buried herself so deep inside of her head that the shit that happened didn’t seem to even touch her.

  Of course, we all knew better. Carissa was gonna blow one of these days. No joke. And I just hoped someone was around when it was over to help her pick up the pieces. I’d do it, but the second there was a distraction, I was hitting the road.

  Two goals. And nothing was getting in the way of them.

  We gave each other a quick nod and did what we did every morning, kept our heads down and got out of there as fast as we could.

  Tommy, a blond kid (and good-looking; I mean, I could see what Beth was thinking—but he was no Marco) came down and the energy crackled between him and Beth. They didn’t even have to look at each other and it was there, like another person in the room. It made all the hair on my arms stand up and I glanced over at The Wife to see if she noticed. But she didn’t seem to.

  Which was lucky for Tommy and Beth, but swear to God, that luck was going to run out.

  Because that was what luck did. Just when you thought you had tons of the stuff—it slipped right through your hands.

  The mornings were kind of nice because The Pastor wasn’t there. The Wife was creepy as hell and I had the sense that she kinda ran shit between her The Pastor, which meant she knew and maybe got off on the stuff he got up to in his office. But in the mornings he wasn’t around, and I felt like all the girls breathed a little easier. The boys, too, a little bit.

  The shit that went on his office was not gender specific.

  We packed our own lunches. Soft, mealy apples. Bologna sandwiches on white bread with butter. A bag of generic chips. Because of the baby I got a prenatal vitamin and a bran muffin.

  The weirdest thing about St. Jude’s—and there were so many weird things—was how silent it was. Standing in the kitchen next to Simon, Tommy’s roommate, a real smart guy who worked hard on keeping himself to himself, I could hear him breathe. On the other side of Simon, Tommy coughed and Beth nearly flinched, it was so loud.

  There were a million reasons we didn’t tell people what went on at St. Jude’s. Mostly because of what we heard happened to Carissa last year. And because there was this ever-present fear of making things worse. But the main reason was that she’d trained us to be silent. Even at school it was hard work to actually talk.

  More and more when I talked to Marco, I found it hard to tell him the truth about this place. Hard to actually talk to him.

  It was seriously messed up.

  “Bus is almost here,” The Wife said as she stood at the door, looking at her watch like we were all guests she couldn’t wait to have gone.

  St. Jude’s and the church next door were on the bus route that went right past a high school, and when we got sent to St. Jude’s, we all got pulled from our other schools and sent there.

  It wasn’t any better or any worse than the high schools we’d been at—except maybe Beth, who had that private-school smell about her, and Simon who’d undoubtedly been in accelerated programs since he was a baby—but it wasn’t where Marco was.

  Which, for me, meant it was terrible.

  Things eased up at school, but not enough that we could make our escape. I’d made the mistake of trying to hightail it my first day, but The Pastor gets attendance reports on us for every period. And by the time I got to my old high school, The Pastor was already there.

  I didn’t even get a glimpse of Marco.

  Once we were at the school, Tommy and Beth went off together. Simon headed for the computer lab. Carissa and I walked in toward the cafeteria. She peeled off at the library, but I kept going to the big orange doors of the cafeteria. Cracking my knuckles and loosening my wrists.

  The caf was always busy in the mornings. Student Council. Safe Spaces. Young Democrats. They all met early and often in the cafeteria. And there were people bent over signs they were making with their phones hanging out of their back pockets. There were people in hard debates, with their phones in their open bookbags. Almost always there were a few phones placed facedown on the edge of the table.

  It was basically a phone bonanza. And for someone like me, it was fish in a barrel.

  I made one circle, quick and quiet, head down so no one even noticed me and I grabbed my first phone out of a backpack, but it had a security code, so I put it back right away. Second one, from the back pocket of a girl arguing about trans rights, was the same, so I slipped it back into her pocket before she noticed. Third was the same. And, really, what were these kids trying to keep a secret?

  The fourth was the jackpot. Some kid tutoring other kids in math had his unlocked phone on the edge of the table and I swiped it without anyone noticing. I walked as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself to the cafeteria doors. I turned right down the hallway that led to the doors that lead into the backstage area for the theater.

  It was dark today, and once inside I called the number I knew by heart.

  It barely even rang before it was picked up.

  “Hello?”

  Oh, his voice. So strong and sweet at the same time, washed over me and I had to bite my lip not to cry.

  “Marco.”

  “Baby?” he said. “Is that you?”

  “Hi,” I said in a voice I tried to make sound strong and all right, but there was never a way to hide anything from Marco. He knew me better, sometimes, than I knew myself.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “The baby?”

  “Good. We’re good. What about you? Your ribs?”

  “It was weeks ago, Rosa. And I told you, your brother barely touched me.” That wasn’t entirely true. My brother had sucker punched him in the ribs before Marco kicked his ass and Marco, before the police came and got me, tried to hide it, but he had been hurting. “I want to hear about the baby. How was the doctor’s appointment?”

  “Good. She is kicking a lot. I feel her all the time.” I found out the sex at one of the first ultrasounds. Marco wanted it to be a surprise, but I figured we had enough surprises.

  He sucked in a little breath and I turned to face the darkest corner, where the ropes hung, to lift the curtain. Like I could hid myself and everything I was feeling in the dark.

  “What’s that feel like?” he asked.

  “Sometimes, it’s just like…a flutter. Like popcorn popping. And sometimes it’s so hard I can’t believe it.” I closed my eyes and
tried to imagine him. He was probably in his car in the back row of the parking lot because he was late again. “She’s very strong,” I told him. “The doctor says she’s the size of a cantaloupe.”

  “A cantaloupe?”

  “And she has eyelashes. And fingernails.”

  “What else?”

  “She sucks her thumb.”

  “Rosa—” His voice broke and there were times this seemed so hard. Too hard. Like there was no way we were going to see our way out of it. And I never cried. Never. Not when my mom died, not when my dad had shown his true, awful colors. But right now I wanted to sit down and cry.

  But then Marco cleared his throat and pulled us back onto our feet.

  “You got the form I sent you in the email?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you think you can get your dad to sign it?”

  “I’m working on it, Marco.”

  He was as invested as I was—probably more in ways I wouldn’t ever fully understand—in making sure my dad did not have custody.

  “You’re taking your vitamins?” he asked.

  “Of course.” I smiled at his stern daddy voice. Grateful, always grateful, that he knew how to pull us back from the brink.

  “And you’re getting enough to eat?”

  This part was hard, deciding how much to tell him. Sometimes I needed to get things off my chest and sometimes I needed to just be safe. But all the truths about St. Jude’s hurt him.

  And he was the last person I wanted to hurt.

  Things were tricky when you were almost seventeen and pregnant.

  “I love you, Marco,” I said, changing the subject to a truth I had no problem telling.

  “I love you too, Rosa. So much. So much…” He blew out a breath.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “It hurts, Rosa. I love you so much it hurts sometimes.”

  I rested my head against those ropes and I put my free hand on my belly, feeling our baby kick, and I knew exactly what he meant.

  It would be easy to think that a sixteen-year-old girl and an eighteen-year-old boy didn’t know what they were talking about when it came to love. You could chalk it up to being young, or hormones, or whatever.

  But love was love. And we had it.

  “Tell me the thing again,” I whispered. “Tell me the story.”

  “It’s not a story, babe. It’s real. It’s truth.”

  Yeah, I was losing my grip on that. It didn’t feel real in bed at St. Joke’s every night. Or in this school every day without him. It didn’t feel real with all the fear and the doubt. But his voice was so strong. His conviction so sure.

  “Just…tell me.” I put my head in the velvet of the curtain where it smelled musty and old.

  “The baby will be healthy. And we’ll name her…” He paused and I smiled, biting my lip. “Have you decided?”

  “What do you think of Ariella?” I asked.

  “I love it.”

  “You love all the names I come up with.”

  “You come up with good names, babe. What can I say?”

  “Ariella Lidia Zambrano.”

  “It’s got a nice ring to it,” he said. “My mom will love it.”

  “She’s been so good to us.”

  Outside the first bell rang and I had to get moving soon or get in further trouble. I played the being pregnant card a lot. I didn’t need to push any more.

  “Finish the story,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said and I could hear him smiling. “She’ll be healthy. And beautiful. And we will live close to my parents so they can help. We’ll go to the beach on the weekends and we’ll teach Ari how to swim and—”

  “Be kind. She’ll be kind. And smart. And she won’t know about my family.”

  “They won’t touch her. And they won’t touch you, either. We’ll keep her safe, babe. I promise. We’ll all be safe.”

  And stupid me…I believed him.

  4

  THEN

  * * *

  Rosa

  Something was different. I knew it the minute we walked in the door after school. In front of me Carissa stopped, like she’d hit a wall. Like she couldn’t take one more step into the poison of the old brick house with the cracked cement walkway.

  “We could run,” I said. Because I knew she was thinking it. We wouldn’t get far and the punishment would be severe, but we could do it. At least we’d have a few minutes of freedom; we’d show them that we weren’t just animals they could abuse because we’d done something stupid.

  We were people and we deserved some sunlight on our faces. We deserved to live without fear.

  Maybe we could go get a pizza.

  I’d really been craving pizza.

  Carissa looked over her shoulder at me and I saw it in her eyes. That will to rise up. To fight what had happened to us. And I felt the same thing rise in me, but at that exact moment the baby kicked and I was reminded of what really mattered.

  Marco with custody. Healthy baby.

  “I can’t,” I whispered.

  Carissa watched my hands as I touched my stomach, but she wasn’t like Beth. She wasn’t going to ask if she could touch my stomach. Carissa didn’t touch anyone.

  “Me neither,” she said and walked in the door.

  After school we did chores, and Tommy and Beth, the two lovebirds, looked particularly tortured as we took all the rugs out into the small yard and tossed them over the lines where we’d smack them with brooms, just like we did every week.

  “What happened?” I whispered to Simon as we stood side by side, beating the rug that no dust came out of.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t care.” He glanced down at me, his dark eyes piercing through his glasses. “If you’re smart, Rosa, you won’t either.”

  If I wanted to believe it was all in my imagination, dinner pretty much confirmed the worst. The Pastor sat at the head of the table, smug and tidy. His black hair flopped over his face as he leaned forward to eat, and when he sat back he swept it up and away, smiling as he did it. As if he had something he was really looking forward to.

  And, sure, all of that was creepy, but what was alarming was how they let Tommy eat. Usually Tommy was being punished for something. Trying to help one of us do our chores. Giving Beth food when she first arrived. Just being him—which meant being young and strong and handsome. Everything The Pastor wasn’t.

  And punishment at St. Jude’s took a lot of horrible forms. But for Tommy it meant that they didn’t feed him. Or they gave him a little. Half of what we ate and then he had to sit at the table, his stomach growling so much we could hear it.

  “Go ahead,” he would say when all of us would put down our forks, unable to eat while he sat there starving. “It’s okay.”

  And then he’d smile at us, and The Pastor would get pissed, and the night would go downhill. But tonight they let him fill his plate and he got seconds of carrots and the dread filled the house to the ceiling.

  My baby kicked, a tiny quiver against my belly like she could feel the tension and was wondering if everything was going to be all right. I pressed my hand against the place where she kicked and hoped it would be.

  I realized with a sudden sharpness that the distraction I needed to get out of this place, to do what I needed to get done, might happen tonight. That’s how dangerous everything felt. How precariously balanced.

  Healthy baby, Marco with custody. Those were the only two things that mattered.

  It was Beth and I cleaning up the dishes, Carissa clearing the table, bringing in stacks of dinner plates and setting them down on the counter without a sound.

  “What the hell is going on with you two?” I whispered. We were good at whispering at St. Jude’s; we were practically telepathic, that was how quiet we were.

  “Nothing.”

  Good god. Why lie?

  “Bullshit. They fed him and you didn’t eat barely anything.”

  “I’m fine,” Beth said, because that wa
s what she was used to saying.

  Carissa came in with the bowl of cooked carrots and a stack of plates scraped clean.

  “Here,” Carissa said, handing Beth a miniscule piece of folded-up paper. Tommy must have tucked it under his plate. The note-passing system at St. Joke’s was next-level.

  She opened the paper and tilted it so we could all read his tiny block letters.

  Tell R and C. Everyone needs to be careful.

  My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my eyes. Beth put the note in the garbage and I leaned over and dumped the water that had been in the bottom of the bowl of carrots over the note, pretty much destroying it.

  “Something happened today,” Beth whispered.

  “No shit,” I said.

  “At school Mendoza caught Tommy and I kissing.”

  Carissa put her hands over her face and I turned away to the sink, my head bowed. Honest to god, how could they be so stupid? Mendoza was the principal and he was an all-right guy, but he was going to have to report that to The Pastor. There were really clear rules about that stuff.

  “You should never have started shit with Tommy,” I said. “For real. This is gonna hurt us all.”

  Beth was quiet, so quiet I finally looked at her and once I saw her face, I understood. I mean, I’d understood before that, but the look on her face was one I had worn a million times. My father had warned me to stay away from Marco. He’d told me there would be consequences, and I’d believed him, I just wanted Marco more.

  And face-to-face with the consequences, I’d still choose Marco. I’d choose him over and over again. And Beth’s expression said the same damn thing.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I just…I really like him.”

  “I get it,” I said. “I know what it’s like to not be able to keep your hands off someone.”

  “Girls?” The Wife came into the doorway, her face in shadow because the light from the hallway was behind her. I thought, for probably the hundredth time, that her disguise was so complete. She looked nothing like a monster.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No problem,” I said, smiling at her over my shoulder. My hands back in the soapy water, like nothing at all was happening.