Alana straightened her shoulders. “No, I’m not.”
She took the stairs more slowly this time, walking past the Styrofoam container in the trash can just inside the door. Cody turned as she walked in, and the smile he flashed her nearly broke her heart.
“We need to talk upstairs,” she said.
The smile dimmed a little, but he followed her up the stairs. When he crossed the floor to stand by the computer, she held out her hand. The smile flicked off, then back on. He gave her the phone, but the smile disappeared when he saw the seller page on Amazon.
Shoulders hunched, chin dropped, mouth compacting back to sullen. The movements were so small and so telling. To cover her own disappointment, she skimmed through the history on the phone’s browser. Three books uploaded to the library’s sale page. Two uploaded to Chalkart’s page. The two least expensive of the five books, she noted. Honor among thieves.
“Explain this,” she said.
“You said our taxpayer dollars paid for them. You gave me one.”
“Yes, and after you left, I deposited the book’s value into the library’s fund,” she said. “Money from sales should go to the library, to the community. Not to benefit one person.”
Or three little kids who don’t get enough to eat? She didn’t ask what he would use the money for. She knew. Food insecurity was a phrase she knew well, but only from program descriptions. Now food insecurity stood in front of her. See also: angular and bony and skeletal.
“I didn’t steal the books to buy food,” he said defiantly. “The kids get enough to eat if I don’t eat, and I don’t need to eat.”
The combination of bold-as-brass defiance and outright lies shocked her. “What did you steal them for?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“Language,” Mrs. Battle said, but it was halfhearted.
“Are you going to call Ridgeway?”
“Chief Ridgeway, and I haven’t decided,” she admitted.
Cody’s mouth clicked close when he simultaneously realized his fate had not in fact been decided and his attitude wasn’t doing him any favors. Alana gave him a short nod to indicate approval, then handed back the phone. “I expect the following to occur in the next ten minutes: you will close down Chalkart’s shop. You will transfer those books to the library’s account. You will continue to sort books. Understood?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Mrs. Battle inhaled sharply. Alana just lifted her eyebrows.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Better.”
“What about Ridg—Chief Ridgeway?”
“I’ll let you know when I’ve decided.”
Cody slunk off down the stairs just as the first mother and toddler group came through the front door. Later, after she’d reheated her congealed oatmeal for lunch, she went downstairs. Cody shot her a look seething with both fury and wariness under his tousled wreck of chestnut hair, so she didn’t bother with idle chatter. “If you didn’t intend to buy food with the money, what did you intend to buy with it?”
“Nothing.”
“You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone else.”
Silence.
“You’re not the kind of person who steals for the thrill of it.”
Silence.
“Are you buying drugs?”
He shot her a look full of bitter humor. “I’m not stupid. I’ve watched my brother fuck up his life. I can’t afford to do that. I fuck up, and Mom and the little kids end up on welfare, or in foster care.”
“What, then?”
She just sat there, watching him, knowing he couldn’t leave without her permission, hating that she used that to hold him, knowing Cody hated it, too. She breathed slowly and evenly, making peace with the anger and frustration simmering in the room.
“You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Try me.”
“I hate this place. I don’t fit in here. I hate football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, and track. I hate parties. I hate that my brothers are living in a trailer that’s got so many cracks in the walls snow blows in five months a year. I hate that my mom’s stretched so thin, and my dad’s gone, and people look at me like I’m a freak. But mostly I hate that there’s nothing I can do to change any of those things.”
His voice had risen through this speech, his hatred a palpable thing in the room, emotions battering at Alana. “I know what some of that is like, but not all of it.”
His gaze flicked scornfully over her. “What do you know about any of it?”
The story about slipping on the parquet and falling on her fanny during her coming-out ball wasn’t appropriate here. He was a child, not her friend, so all she said was, “I know what it’s like not to fit in. Tell me what you’d buy with your ill-gotten gains.”
“I was lying about not needing food. Or clothes.”
They would find a way to deal with that. “What would you buy for you.”
“Paint,” he said.