Tell Me I'm A Bad Man
Changes and Conflicts
Mikey’s point of view.
After Gerard left, I went to sleep. For what felt like five minutes. Out of nowhere, I felt the whole bed start to shake, violently bouncing me on it.
“What is this, the Exorcist?” I thought.
“No, someone said. Apparently I can’t tell the difference between talking and thinking. Hmm, I’ll have to work on that.
I reluctantly opened my eyes and saw Jordyn standing on my bed. Well, not really standing. More like jumping and narrowly avoiding landing on me and cracking all my bones. Her hair was flying everywhere, and I was flopping involuntarily like a dead fish. Great way to wake up.
“Stop,” I mumbled, reaching for my glasses. When I put them on, I looked at the clock. It said 6:13. “What are you doing? It’s 6:13 in the freaking morning.”
“Gerard said to tell you to get your lazy ass out of bed. And call you a bum. But I thought that name calling is too mean for so early,” Jordyn replied, still jumping on my bed.
“How is this nicer?” I asked.
“Oh, well I guess it isn’t for you. But it’s really fun for me,” she said, landing on the bed and almost smacking my face.
“Why do I have to get up?” I said, dreading actually getting up off the soft bed.
“Because people are leaving and you have to get dressed, go downstairs, and say goodbye to them. You’re their new leader, remember?” she said, taking my glasses off my face and putting them on. “How does this look?”
“I can’t see you. I don’t have my glasses,” I answered, wishing she’d leave me alone.
“Wow, you’re really blind. I can’t see anything with these on. And they’re smudgy. You really have to clean them more often,” she said.
I heard the door to my room open. “Morning, sunshine,” a familiar voice said sarcastically. “Get up. You have work to do.”
“Don’t you mean we have work to do?” I asked, putting my glasses back on and realizing that they really were smudged up with fingerprints.
My brother laughed. “Yes. But everyone wants to meet you. They think you’re cool.”
“What do I actually have to do?” I asked him, sitting up.
“Say goodbye to them, shake their hands, possibly sign some autographs, kiss some babies, you know, the usual,” he said, about half serious.
“Well, I’m not kissing anything, shaking anything and I will not do anything until you go get me coffee,” I stated.
“Get your own,” Gerard countered.
“No. You want me to function at six in the freakin' morning, you’re getting me coffee. That’s how I work,” I explained.
“Fine. Jordyn, can you please stop checking your nails and get Mikey some coffee?” Gerard said impatiently.
“He said you have to get the coffee,” she said defiantly.
He gave her a look and she left the room. I heard the door slam behind her as she went to go find me some coffee.
“Get up,” he ordered. I shook my head. “Come on, Mikey. Your coffee is coming. Stop being retarded.”
My wrist started throbbing intensely at that moment. I looked at it, and the sword was still there. I held it up so Gerard could see it. “Isn’t this supposed to be gone by now?” I asked.
Checking his own wrist, he saw that his was just a black outline of a pale red sword. Mine was still as black as last night, and the red outline was still there too. I looked at my brother for answers, but he had the same puzzled look as I did. “Um, maybe it just takes longer for it to go away when you first get branded, or something.”
“Well, what happened to you?” I asked him. He shrugged.
Just then, the door burst open. Peace and PJ came in holding 2 mugs of coffee each. “Good morning, Krusty Krew!” PJ said as they came over to give us the coffee. I recognize that from Spongebob Squarepants.
PJ handed one of the mugs to Gerard. “Thanks,” he mumbled into it. “Ooh, this is good.”
Peace just looked back and forth between the two cups she was holding. “I can’t remember which is for you and which is for me,” she told me apologetically.
“Gimme them,” PJ demanded, taking them both. I watched as she looked into first one, then the other. “This is yours, Peace; that’s where the Skittle you dropped went.” She gave me the other one and gave Peace hers back.
“Huh,” Peace said. “I was wondering where that Skittle went.”
I took a sip of my coffee and made a face. “What, too strong?” Peace asked smugly.
I shook my head. “Not strong enough.”
“Excuse him, he has an insane caffeine addiction,” Gerard told them.
I walked over to him and took his coffee to taste. “Too weak,” I declared it.
“Wow,” Jordyn said, showing up out of nowhere. “No one around here is more insanely addicted to coffee than Gerard. That’s gotta be unhealthy.”
“Um, you’re a nurse, shouldn’t you know?” PJ said to her.
Jordyn shrugged. “Probably. I’m hungry though. Mikey, what do you want for breakfast?”
“Uh, waffles and stronger coffee,” I answered.
“Good. Make me some waffles too,” she replied.
They all left, and I got dressed, still tired from my lack of caffeine. I went out into my living room and was immediately dragged away by my impatient relative. “Come on, we have no time for breakfast or your strange coffee habits right now,” Gerard told me. “You have people to meet.”
“But-“ I began protesting as I was ungracefully shoved out the door into the elegant hallway. “Gee, where are we going?”
“The lobby,” he answered. “People are leaving, and you have diplomatic duties to fulfill.”
He led me all the way down to the lobby, pulling me by the neck the whole way. When we got close to the lobby, he let go of me and allowed me to walk on my own. “Now be nice. You don’t have to know all their names, there are thousands of them here, but just, don’t be retarded,” he hissed at me.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the crowd from where we stood on the big staircase. I felt very self conscious. “Your new leader, Mikey would like to say a few words.”
I looked at him and tried to hide my anger. “I know, I know,” he whispered. “But you’ll learn to expect this kind of stuff. Say something now, hate me later.”
I took a deep breath and looked at everyone staring up at me. My wrist hurt and I couldn’t think of anything to say. Suddenly, I heard a little voice at the back of my head. It sounded like me, and I didn’t know what was happening. My mouth started moving, forming the words as the voice told me them.
“Thank you for coming here,” I heard myself say. “Now the prophecy is fulfilled. As the book said, The Black Parade can now do things that we never thought possible. I am looking forward to making this come true with all of you.”
The voice kept going on, but I wasn’t paying attention to it. It was saying things that sounded like the leader should say, things my brother says to them. But I’m not my brother, so I just kept talking, making things up as I went along. “It kind of sucks that everyone has to leave. But I’ll have plenty of chances to get to know all of you. If you ever want to come back to visit or just hang out or whatever, I’m here to talk to anyone who needs me. This is going to be cool, and I’ll try to be the best leader dude I can be.”
Applause broke out, startling both me and Gerard. He gave me a look that clearly said “WTF?!” but didn’t say anything. I just smiled out at the crowd, and everyone smiled back. I saw Toro over at the door, gesturing wildly for me to come. So I did. People stopped me to say hi, introduce themselves, or hug me as I went through the throng of people who were somehow my instant loyal supporters. It was like, just add water, and four thousand people love me. Well, maybe three thousand nine hundred ninety nine. I could feel my brother’s jealousy as he followed me, not getting hugs.
When I got to the door, people started filing out, talking to me and telling me how excited they were that I had joined them. “Gerard,” one woman said. “Your brother is such a charismatic speaker. That’s a good quality to have in a leader.”
Now, I did not consider myself charismatic. In fact, I suck at public speaking. I have a bad habit of saying whatever I was thinking and that was exactly what I had done before.
Once everyone had left, I checked my watch and it was eleven in the morning. “Gee, lead me to coffee, please,” I said. I saw the expression on his face and my mind flashed back to when we were little kids. It was that “you got the bigger half of the cookie so now I’m mad” face.
“What?” I asked him. “You’re mad that everyone loves me, aren’t you? Or is it just because they seem to like me more than you?”
“No,” he replied. “That’s to be expected. You’ve just been inducted, so of course they love you. But I’m just wondering why you used the word ‘sucks’ in your speech? Leaders aren’t supposed to do that, you know.”
“Whatever. So is it just the people who live here then?” I wondered.
“There are a few people left. They’re helping clean everything up. We’re going to help them,” he informed me.
“But I’m hungry,” I protested, earning myself a death glare. “Fine.”
I saw a girl walk through the lobby then. It was weird though, she didn’t look old enough to be a member. She was holding a broom and heading for the door that led to the under ground hallway.
“Is she a member?” I asked Gerard. “She looks too young.”
“No. She’s the daughter of one of our members. I think she’s about 10,” he told me.
When the girl saw us, she came over to where we were standing. “Hi, Mr. Way. And Mr. Way,” she said. “My name’s Jepha.”
“Hi, Jepha,” I said. “You don’t have to call me Mr. Way. Just call me Mikey.”
She laughed. “Mikey’s a cool name.”
“Jepha? Jepha Louise, where are you?” someone said. I couldn’t see them.
“Mom, I’m right here,” Jepha answered.
I saw a woman come out of the door to the underground hallway. She was kind of short, with black hair and green eyes. “Oh, hello, Gerard, Michael,” she said when she saw us.
“Sakura. We were just talking to Jepha,” Gerard said to her.
“Hi, Michael. I’m Sakura, Jepha’s mother,” Sakura told me. “I hope she wasn’t bothering you guys or anything, she was supposed to be coming down to help me clean up the coliseum.”
“We’ll help you,” Gerard offered. I nodded. Wee followed them down to the room, and the walk seemed shorter than it did last night. There were no lights except for Sakura’s flashlight.
We finally got to the coliseum to clean it up. It was relatively clean, judging by the fact that four thousand people had been in it last night.
When we were cleaning the room, I found a pile of Skittles behind the throne that Frank had been sitting in. They must have been in his pocket and fallen out or something.
When we had finished, it was already time for lunch and we were all hungry. The four of us went up to the kitchen, where we found Kelly and Ray making themselves lunch.
“Hey, people,” Kelly said without turning around. “Want food?”
We got lunch and all sat down to eat it. Jepha talked the whole time, telling us about school. She didn’t have many friends, so she wrote and drew a lot. A lot of kids at school thought she was weird, but she didn’t mind because she couldn’t find anything normal about them either. Jepha seemed happy to be at the mansion, even more astonished at all the crazy details then I was when I first came. She had been here before, but she didn’t remember it because she had been little the last time she came.
When we had all finished, Sakura came up to me and Gerard. “Um, I have something to talk to you two about. Can we go somewhere private?” she asked us. Gerard led us to a library that I hadn’t known was even there.
The library was huge, rows and rows of shelves of books. Some of them old and leather bound others brand new. There was a big oak desk with papers all over it. The words “The Conductor” were engraved in a nameplate. Gerard sat behind it, gesturing for me and Sakura to sit down in the two chairs facing the desk.
“So, Sakura, what can we help you with?” He asked her.
“Well, as you know Gerard, I’ve never been rich. I’ve been having a lot of financial problems lately, and I was hoping maybe the Parade could help me out a bit,” she said, looking down at her hands.
“So what are you asking for?” Gerard said in a business-like manner.
“Well, let me tell you some stuff about me first,” she began. “I had Jepha when I was seventeen. I felt alone, with no support from my family and nowhere to go. We were living on the streets of New York City. It was hard to even find food for us to survive on. But then I met some people from the Black Parade. They told me that if I joined I would have something to live for. Someone to help me. Something to believe in. Someone to guide me. So, after hearing that, I decided to join. By that time, Jepha was six, and I could finally put her into school. She couldn’t go before that because you have to have an address to go to school. Jepha was a year behind in school, but she skipped a grade so she would be caught up. We had a place to live, a one bedroom apartment in a very poor part of the city. I had two part time jobs, and we were doing better. But then I got sick.
“I got the flu, and had to miss work for almost three weeks,” she continued. “I wasn’t making any money, and I couldn’t even go to a doctor. One of my jobs fired me because I couldn’t come to work. So I was down to one part time job to support both me and Jepha. That was a month ago. For the past month we’ve been getting by on my tiny salary and some kind of miracle. So now I have something to propose.”
“Go on,” I said, interested. Her life sounded like a dramatic TV show and I wanted to hear more.
Sakura took a deep breath. “Well, see my rent keeps going up, but my salary never does. We can’t afford the apartment anymore. So I was hoping maybe you guys could help me find a place to live. Or a better job or anything at all that could help us. I’m really desperate.”
“Mikey,” Gerard said softly. “I want you to help Sakura. I can, but I want you to. I have to go now. Come find me if you need anything.”
And with that, he left. I was left to face this, my first job in the Parade. I didn’t know what to do. So I moved to Gerard’s chair that he had just left.
“Well, Sakura,” I began, trying to sound like I knew what I was doing. “At this point, and in this situation, there is really only pone logical solution.”
She looked at me expectantly. I wasn’t totally sure if I should do it, but I had already made my decision. “Sakura, you and Jepha will come here. You’ll stay with us in The Overlook. There are plenty of rooms here, and you would be much better off.”
“Um, well, I wasn’t expecting this,” she stammered. “I-I don’t know what to say. I’m grateful for the offer, but I really can’t. Jepha has her school, and I would have to find a job here.”
“Well, you could find a job here. You’ve got references from within the Parade. And Jepha said herself that she doesn’t like her school,” I reminded her. “We could find someone to home school her. Leave that up to me.”
Sakura looked at me, astonished. “Mikey, thank you so much for your help. But I really can’t take it. I don’t want to be too much of a burden on everyone here. You really don’t have to do this.”
“Well, I like doing things I’m not supposed to,” I said. “You and your daughter will be much better off if you come here.”
She took a deep breath. “Well then, if it is really okay, I would love to move in here,” Sakura replied.
“Good,” I said, feeling proud of myself. “I’ll arrange it.”
“Thank you so much! Wait until I tell Jepha. She’ll be so excited,” Sakura said.
We both went outside, and as soon as she was gone, Gerard came up to me. “Well? What did you decide on?” he asked me.
“She and Jepha are coming to live in the Overlook with everyone else,” I told him.
Gerard’s mouth fell open. “Well,” he said, eyeing me strangely. “I can see that both of us working together to run this Parade is gonna be more difficult than I thought.”
Yeah, I thought. How can a parade run if both conductors can’t agree on a song?
After Gerard left, I went to sleep. For what felt like five minutes. Out of nowhere, I felt the whole bed start to shake, violently bouncing me on it.
“What is this, the Exorcist?” I thought.
“No, someone said. Apparently I can’t tell the difference between talking and thinking. Hmm, I’ll have to work on that.
I reluctantly opened my eyes and saw Jordyn standing on my bed. Well, not really standing. More like jumping and narrowly avoiding landing on me and cracking all my bones. Her hair was flying everywhere, and I was flopping involuntarily like a dead fish. Great way to wake up.
“Stop,” I mumbled, reaching for my glasses. When I put them on, I looked at the clock. It said 6:13. “What are you doing? It’s 6:13 in the freaking morning.”
“Gerard said to tell you to get your lazy ass out of bed. And call you a bum. But I thought that name calling is too mean for so early,” Jordyn replied, still jumping on my bed.
“How is this nicer?” I asked.
“Oh, well I guess it isn’t for you. But it’s really fun for me,” she said, landing on the bed and almost smacking my face.
“Why do I have to get up?” I said, dreading actually getting up off the soft bed.
“Because people are leaving and you have to get dressed, go downstairs, and say goodbye to them. You’re their new leader, remember?” she said, taking my glasses off my face and putting them on. “How does this look?”
“I can’t see you. I don’t have my glasses,” I answered, wishing she’d leave me alone.
“Wow, you’re really blind. I can’t see anything with these on. And they’re smudgy. You really have to clean them more often,” she said.
I heard the door to my room open. “Morning, sunshine,” a familiar voice said sarcastically. “Get up. You have work to do.”
“Don’t you mean we have work to do?” I asked, putting my glasses back on and realizing that they really were smudged up with fingerprints.
My brother laughed. “Yes. But everyone wants to meet you. They think you’re cool.”
“What do I actually have to do?” I asked him, sitting up.
“Say goodbye to them, shake their hands, possibly sign some autographs, kiss some babies, you know, the usual,” he said, about half serious.
“Well, I’m not kissing anything, shaking anything and I will not do anything until you go get me coffee,” I stated.
“Get your own,” Gerard countered.
“No. You want me to function at six in the freakin' morning, you’re getting me coffee. That’s how I work,” I explained.
“Fine. Jordyn, can you please stop checking your nails and get Mikey some coffee?” Gerard said impatiently.
“He said you have to get the coffee,” she said defiantly.
He gave her a look and she left the room. I heard the door slam behind her as she went to go find me some coffee.
“Get up,” he ordered. I shook my head. “Come on, Mikey. Your coffee is coming. Stop being retarded.”
My wrist started throbbing intensely at that moment. I looked at it, and the sword was still there. I held it up so Gerard could see it. “Isn’t this supposed to be gone by now?” I asked.
Checking his own wrist, he saw that his was just a black outline of a pale red sword. Mine was still as black as last night, and the red outline was still there too. I looked at my brother for answers, but he had the same puzzled look as I did. “Um, maybe it just takes longer for it to go away when you first get branded, or something.”
“Well, what happened to you?” I asked him. He shrugged.
Just then, the door burst open. Peace and PJ came in holding 2 mugs of coffee each. “Good morning, Krusty Krew!” PJ said as they came over to give us the coffee. I recognize that from Spongebob Squarepants.
PJ handed one of the mugs to Gerard. “Thanks,” he mumbled into it. “Ooh, this is good.”
Peace just looked back and forth between the two cups she was holding. “I can’t remember which is for you and which is for me,” she told me apologetically.
“Gimme them,” PJ demanded, taking them both. I watched as she looked into first one, then the other. “This is yours, Peace; that’s where the Skittle you dropped went.” She gave me the other one and gave Peace hers back.
“Huh,” Peace said. “I was wondering where that Skittle went.”
I took a sip of my coffee and made a face. “What, too strong?” Peace asked smugly.
I shook my head. “Not strong enough.”
“Excuse him, he has an insane caffeine addiction,” Gerard told them.
I walked over to him and took his coffee to taste. “Too weak,” I declared it.
“Wow,” Jordyn said, showing up out of nowhere. “No one around here is more insanely addicted to coffee than Gerard. That’s gotta be unhealthy.”
“Um, you’re a nurse, shouldn’t you know?” PJ said to her.
Jordyn shrugged. “Probably. I’m hungry though. Mikey, what do you want for breakfast?”
“Uh, waffles and stronger coffee,” I answered.
“Good. Make me some waffles too,” she replied.
They all left, and I got dressed, still tired from my lack of caffeine. I went out into my living room and was immediately dragged away by my impatient relative. “Come on, we have no time for breakfast or your strange coffee habits right now,” Gerard told me. “You have people to meet.”
“But-“ I began protesting as I was ungracefully shoved out the door into the elegant hallway. “Gee, where are we going?”
“The lobby,” he answered. “People are leaving, and you have diplomatic duties to fulfill.”
He led me all the way down to the lobby, pulling me by the neck the whole way. When we got close to the lobby, he let go of me and allowed me to walk on my own. “Now be nice. You don’t have to know all their names, there are thousands of them here, but just, don’t be retarded,” he hissed at me.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the crowd from where we stood on the big staircase. I felt very self conscious. “Your new leader, Mikey would like to say a few words.”
I looked at him and tried to hide my anger. “I know, I know,” he whispered. “But you’ll learn to expect this kind of stuff. Say something now, hate me later.”
I took a deep breath and looked at everyone staring up at me. My wrist hurt and I couldn’t think of anything to say. Suddenly, I heard a little voice at the back of my head. It sounded like me, and I didn’t know what was happening. My mouth started moving, forming the words as the voice told me them.
“Thank you for coming here,” I heard myself say. “Now the prophecy is fulfilled. As the book said, The Black Parade can now do things that we never thought possible. I am looking forward to making this come true with all of you.”
The voice kept going on, but I wasn’t paying attention to it. It was saying things that sounded like the leader should say, things my brother says to them. But I’m not my brother, so I just kept talking, making things up as I went along. “It kind of sucks that everyone has to leave. But I’ll have plenty of chances to get to know all of you. If you ever want to come back to visit or just hang out or whatever, I’m here to talk to anyone who needs me. This is going to be cool, and I’ll try to be the best leader dude I can be.”
Applause broke out, startling both me and Gerard. He gave me a look that clearly said “WTF?!” but didn’t say anything. I just smiled out at the crowd, and everyone smiled back. I saw Toro over at the door, gesturing wildly for me to come. So I did. People stopped me to say hi, introduce themselves, or hug me as I went through the throng of people who were somehow my instant loyal supporters. It was like, just add water, and four thousand people love me. Well, maybe three thousand nine hundred ninety nine. I could feel my brother’s jealousy as he followed me, not getting hugs.
When I got to the door, people started filing out, talking to me and telling me how excited they were that I had joined them. “Gerard,” one woman said. “Your brother is such a charismatic speaker. That’s a good quality to have in a leader.”
Now, I did not consider myself charismatic. In fact, I suck at public speaking. I have a bad habit of saying whatever I was thinking and that was exactly what I had done before.
Once everyone had left, I checked my watch and it was eleven in the morning. “Gee, lead me to coffee, please,” I said. I saw the expression on his face and my mind flashed back to when we were little kids. It was that “you got the bigger half of the cookie so now I’m mad” face.
“What?” I asked him. “You’re mad that everyone loves me, aren’t you? Or is it just because they seem to like me more than you?”
“No,” he replied. “That’s to be expected. You’ve just been inducted, so of course they love you. But I’m just wondering why you used the word ‘sucks’ in your speech? Leaders aren’t supposed to do that, you know.”
“Whatever. So is it just the people who live here then?” I wondered.
“There are a few people left. They’re helping clean everything up. We’re going to help them,” he informed me.
“But I’m hungry,” I protested, earning myself a death glare. “Fine.”
I saw a girl walk through the lobby then. It was weird though, she didn’t look old enough to be a member. She was holding a broom and heading for the door that led to the under ground hallway.
“Is she a member?” I asked Gerard. “She looks too young.”
“No. She’s the daughter of one of our members. I think she’s about 10,” he told me.
When the girl saw us, she came over to where we were standing. “Hi, Mr. Way. And Mr. Way,” she said. “My name’s Jepha.”
“Hi, Jepha,” I said. “You don’t have to call me Mr. Way. Just call me Mikey.”
She laughed. “Mikey’s a cool name.”
“Jepha? Jepha Louise, where are you?” someone said. I couldn’t see them.
“Mom, I’m right here,” Jepha answered.
I saw a woman come out of the door to the underground hallway. She was kind of short, with black hair and green eyes. “Oh, hello, Gerard, Michael,” she said when she saw us.
“Sakura. We were just talking to Jepha,” Gerard said to her.
“Hi, Michael. I’m Sakura, Jepha’s mother,” Sakura told me. “I hope she wasn’t bothering you guys or anything, she was supposed to be coming down to help me clean up the coliseum.”
“We’ll help you,” Gerard offered. I nodded. Wee followed them down to the room, and the walk seemed shorter than it did last night. There were no lights except for Sakura’s flashlight.
We finally got to the coliseum to clean it up. It was relatively clean, judging by the fact that four thousand people had been in it last night.
When we were cleaning the room, I found a pile of Skittles behind the throne that Frank had been sitting in. They must have been in his pocket and fallen out or something.
When we had finished, it was already time for lunch and we were all hungry. The four of us went up to the kitchen, where we found Kelly and Ray making themselves lunch.
“Hey, people,” Kelly said without turning around. “Want food?”
We got lunch and all sat down to eat it. Jepha talked the whole time, telling us about school. She didn’t have many friends, so she wrote and drew a lot. A lot of kids at school thought she was weird, but she didn’t mind because she couldn’t find anything normal about them either. Jepha seemed happy to be at the mansion, even more astonished at all the crazy details then I was when I first came. She had been here before, but she didn’t remember it because she had been little the last time she came.
When we had all finished, Sakura came up to me and Gerard. “Um, I have something to talk to you two about. Can we go somewhere private?” she asked us. Gerard led us to a library that I hadn’t known was even there.
The library was huge, rows and rows of shelves of books. Some of them old and leather bound others brand new. There was a big oak desk with papers all over it. The words “The Conductor” were engraved in a nameplate. Gerard sat behind it, gesturing for me and Sakura to sit down in the two chairs facing the desk.
“So, Sakura, what can we help you with?” He asked her.
“Well, as you know Gerard, I’ve never been rich. I’ve been having a lot of financial problems lately, and I was hoping maybe the Parade could help me out a bit,” she said, looking down at her hands.
“So what are you asking for?” Gerard said in a business-like manner.
“Well, let me tell you some stuff about me first,” she began. “I had Jepha when I was seventeen. I felt alone, with no support from my family and nowhere to go. We were living on the streets of New York City. It was hard to even find food for us to survive on. But then I met some people from the Black Parade. They told me that if I joined I would have something to live for. Someone to help me. Something to believe in. Someone to guide me. So, after hearing that, I decided to join. By that time, Jepha was six, and I could finally put her into school. She couldn’t go before that because you have to have an address to go to school. Jepha was a year behind in school, but she skipped a grade so she would be caught up. We had a place to live, a one bedroom apartment in a very poor part of the city. I had two part time jobs, and we were doing better. But then I got sick.
“I got the flu, and had to miss work for almost three weeks,” she continued. “I wasn’t making any money, and I couldn’t even go to a doctor. One of my jobs fired me because I couldn’t come to work. So I was down to one part time job to support both me and Jepha. That was a month ago. For the past month we’ve been getting by on my tiny salary and some kind of miracle. So now I have something to propose.”
“Go on,” I said, interested. Her life sounded like a dramatic TV show and I wanted to hear more.
Sakura took a deep breath. “Well, see my rent keeps going up, but my salary never does. We can’t afford the apartment anymore. So I was hoping maybe you guys could help me find a place to live. Or a better job or anything at all that could help us. I’m really desperate.”
“Mikey,” Gerard said softly. “I want you to help Sakura. I can, but I want you to. I have to go now. Come find me if you need anything.”
And with that, he left. I was left to face this, my first job in the Parade. I didn’t know what to do. So I moved to Gerard’s chair that he had just left.
“Well, Sakura,” I began, trying to sound like I knew what I was doing. “At this point, and in this situation, there is really only pone logical solution.”
She looked at me expectantly. I wasn’t totally sure if I should do it, but I had already made my decision. “Sakura, you and Jepha will come here. You’ll stay with us in The Overlook. There are plenty of rooms here, and you would be much better off.”
“Um, well, I wasn’t expecting this,” she stammered. “I-I don’t know what to say. I’m grateful for the offer, but I really can’t. Jepha has her school, and I would have to find a job here.”
“Well, you could find a job here. You’ve got references from within the Parade. And Jepha said herself that she doesn’t like her school,” I reminded her. “We could find someone to home school her. Leave that up to me.”
Sakura looked at me, astonished. “Mikey, thank you so much for your help. But I really can’t take it. I don’t want to be too much of a burden on everyone here. You really don’t have to do this.”
“Well, I like doing things I’m not supposed to,” I said. “You and your daughter will be much better off if you come here.”
She took a deep breath. “Well then, if it is really okay, I would love to move in here,” Sakura replied.
“Good,” I said, feeling proud of myself. “I’ll arrange it.”
“Thank you so much! Wait until I tell Jepha. She’ll be so excited,” Sakura said.
We both went outside, and as soon as she was gone, Gerard came up to me. “Well? What did you decide on?” he asked me.
“She and Jepha are coming to live in the Overlook with everyone else,” I told him.
Gerard’s mouth fell open. “Well,” he said, eyeing me strangely. “I can see that both of us working together to run this Parade is gonna be more difficult than I thought.”
Yeah, I thought. How can a parade run if both conductors can’t agree on a song?