Blank Confession Read Free Page B

year.”
    â€œWhy?” Rawls asked.
    The kid shrugged. “I just go where I’m wanted.”
    Rawls nodded. Another kid whose parents didn’t have time for him.
    â€œYou know Jon Brande?” the kid asked.
    Rawls, keeping his face carefully expressionless, nodded. “I know Jon.”
    â€œHow good do you know him?”
    â€œWell enough.” Rawls had had a few run-ins with Jon, but had never been able to make an arrest. “Is that who you killed?”
    The kid suddenly became fascinated by his fingernails. “I met this kid named Mikey Martin my first day at school.”
    â€œA friend of Jon’s?”
    â€œNot exactly. Mikey’s okay. Only he’s one of these guys, he says whatever comes into his head, you know? Hismouth gets him in trouble.” He stared down at the steel ring on the table. “He can be real irritating sometimes.”
    â€œIs he a little Mexican kid?” Rawls asked, remembering. “Wears a suit?”
    â€œYeah. Only he’s not Mexican.”
    Rawls grunted, thinking of the smart-ass kid in the suit and tie who’d had the bottle of headache pills in his locker during the antidrug blitz at Wellstone High—the kid had sure
looked
Mexican.
    â€œI know who you mean,” he said.
    â€œWe got to be friends, sort of, me and Mikey. That’s how I met Jon.”

6. MIKEY
    Five hundred dollars.
    That was what Jon Brande said I owed for losing his bag.
    My big mouth said, “Is that retail, replacement cost, or just some number you made up?”
    I saw it coming and had a fraction of a second to regret what my mouth had done before Jon Brande’s fist smashed into it. My head snapped back and hit the side of the Dumpster, my glasses went flying off my head, and I sank down into a cushy heap of garbage. I was surrounded by torn-open trash bags. Bags I had pulled out of the Dumpster, ripped open, and rummaged through. It was disgusting—you can’t even believe the stuff that gets thrown in the trash in school. I found everything from I-don’t-want-to-think-about-it, to you-don’t-want-to-know—but I did not find Jon’s little brown bag.
    â€œFive hundred dollars,” Jon repeated.
    â€œI don’t have it,” my smashed-up mouth said.
    â€œGet it.” Jon turned his back and walked away. I managed to keep my big mouth shut. It took me ten minutes to find my glasses—they’d landed in the emptied Dumpster.
    Later, when I got home, I told my mom my mouth hadrun into a door. She gave me a look, like she knew it was no door, but she really didn’t want to know. My mom had run into a couple of doors herself back before my dad quit drinking. But for the past few years, everything had been cool at home, at least as far as my parents were concerned.
    Anyway, I still had this problem, which was that Jon Brande had decided that I owed him five hundred dollars, and I didn’t have it, or anything close to it. With nothing to lose, I talked to my sister.
    Marie was perched in front of her vanity staring at the mirror.
    â€œJon is going to kill me,” I said.
    She said, “So?”
    My sister. I don’t know what she saw in the mirror, but here’s what I saw: a light-skinned, freckled girl with African features, straightened hair dyed jet black (its natural color was more like chocolate brown with a little bit of red), too much black eye makeup, and dark red lipstick that always found its way onto her teeth. Not that she smiled much.
    I said, “So my funeral will probably be, like, next Friday.”
    â€œThat’s my hair straightening appointment,” she said.
    My sister. To her, life was a really boring movie. None of it real.
    â€œI was hoping you could, you know,
talk
to him?”
    She plucked an eyebrow hair. Her eyebrows were plucked to thin arcs, like they’d been sliced into her forehead with a razor.
    â€œHe said you stole his