“Where is your mother?”
“Dead,” Cole said, without any emotion at all. “She was a junkie and a whore, and she died when I was five. And good riddance to the bitch. She’d already poisoned herself. Poisoned me. She drank, smoked crack, did god knows what when she was pregnant with me, and then gave birth to a scrawny, screaming baby who was as much an addict as she was.”
I sat frozen, completely clueless as to how to respond to something like that. What I wanted to do was stand up and hug him. What I did instead, was simply give him space.
“Fuck,” he said after he ran his hands over his head and sucked in air. “I didn’t mean to get off on all that. Point is, my grandmother took care of me practically from the day I was born. Made me work, made me think, made me something better than I would have been. So when early-onset Alzheimer’s started to kick in, I knew I’d be the one to take care of her and my aunt even though I was only eleven.”
“Not an easy thing for a kid,” I said.
“No, not easy. And damned near impossible if you want to come by the money legitimately. But if you’re not too picky, then there’s always the gangs. And since the gangs are there—right under your nose from the first moment you set foot in the world—they already feel like home. Hell, I was practically part of the Dragons from the moment I slid out of the womb, but when I was eleven I made it official.”
“The Dragons? That was the name of the gang?”
He nodded.
“That’s why you have a dragon tattoo.”
“No. I have the tattoo because I got out.” He turned so that I had a better look at his back. “The gang sign was a small dragon on the right shoulder. See it?”
I peered, then found an outline of a dragon hidden inside the bolder, wilder artwork of the beautiful creature that covered Cole’s back.
“This one’s mine. I drew it. I designed it. I hired the artist to do the needlework. And the most important part was covering up that mark. Making my own symbol.”
“It’s wonderful,” I said, feeling absurdly proud that he had not only done that, but that he’d thought of it. “You took something horrible and made it beautiful.”
“I tried,” he said. “But the horrible still creeps in around the edges. I’m getting ahead of myself,” he said, before I could ask what he meant. “I was talking about the gang. We were into everything, but drugs mostly. That and guarding our turf and all the bullshit that goes along with that life. Even then I knew it was bullshit,” he said, meeting my eyes. “But I also knew it was the only option I had.”
“It must have been so hard.” I could picture him, so young, his innocence stripped from him. Tears pricked my eyes, and I brutally brushed them away.
“Wasn’t easy,” he said. “But I didn’t mean for this to be a lesson in gang culture.”
“You wanted to tell me about Anita,” I prompted.
“She was my rite of passage,” he said, in the kind of flat voice that made me want to pull him close and hold him tight.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that no one gets a cut of any real income without being fully inducted. And no one is inducted until they’ve popped their cherry. More than that, though. One night wasn’t enough. No, you had to be fully initiated. And that’s where Anita came in.”
“She was your first.”
“In so many ways.” His voice was raw. Hateful. “She liked pain. Serious pain. Giving and receiving. Cigarette burns. Wire pulled tight around your cock. Knives. Straws jammed up your urethra. God knows what up your ass. She was a sadistic, masochistic bitch, and she tied every single goddamn orgasm to one of her fucked up games.”