Rags to Riches

“Kenny! Kenny look at my new picture!” a young girl’s voice called after me. I would know that voice anywhere, since I’ve know the owner all her life. I turned around and saw my little sister coming up to me with a piece of paper in her outstretched hands. The pigtails her hair was always styled in were bouncing with every step she took towards me.

“What did you draw this time, Anna-bug?” I asked, patting the chair next to mine at the small kitchen table that was serving as my homework station for the night. She hoped up and put her new art piece on that table next to my confusing-as-hell math book.

“Well it’s not a drawing, abctially.”

“It’s act-u-al-ly,” I countered, chuckling.

“Whatber,” she said, shrugging, making me smirk at her mistakes. “It’s not a drawing cuz all my crayons are really small and I want to save those for something really special.”

“So what is your picture then?”

“Well look at it, silly. It’s right in front of you!”

“Okay, okay, calm down little girl,” I chuckled again, patting her on the head. I turned my attention to the paper Anna laid in front of me and tried to even figure out what it was. She had a very active imagination for a seven year old, and I could definitely see this in her newest picture. It just looked like a bunch of nature-colored swirls of some kind of 3D stuff glued on the paper, but I couldn’t even tell what the hell she made it out of. I reached out and brushed my fingertips against the material that was on the page. It was crunchy and brittle, and all I could think of was dead leaves. But then it clicked.

“Oh that is so cool, Anna! I love that! What made you think to do that?”

“Well like I said, my crayons are all nubby and I’m all outa paints. Then I looked outside and saw all those pretty colored leaves on the ground. So I was like Pocahontas and I painted with all the colors of the wind.”

“That is so awesome, honey! You’re so creative when it comes to art,” I gushed to my little sister. I really was pretty awed by this newest piece of hers. Sliding the paper back towards her, I said, “This one for sure goes up on the Anna’s best art wall. It’s great. Maybe it’s even good enough to deserve a new box of crayons or some new paints. Who knows? We’ll see,” I added, winking at her.

A huge smile lit up her small face and she lunged over at me to give me a hug and a really sloppy kiss on the cheek. “You’re the bestest brother ever, Kenny.” She jumped up from her seat, grabbed her new picture, and ran back down the hallway to her bedroom.

I smiled after her and shook my head at her excitement behind such a small comment. ’She must really be low on her art supplies, I thought, my mood turning slightly sour. She’s seven years old and we can’t even afford to keep her crayon supply up. That’s so sad.

I shook my head and tried to turn back to my homework that was already a few days late. Not only did I not understand what it was about, but I simply couldn’t focus to save my life. And soon enough, my mom came home and destroyed what was left of both my focus and my good mood.

She walked through the front door and blundered into the kitchen with two paper bags full of groceries. “Kenny, thank god,” she sighed loudly the second she saw me. She all but threw the bags on the counter as she said, “I can’t take being on my feet anymore today. Can you please put these away? You’re the best.” She didn’t even give me a chance to reply before sulking off to the living room and laying herself down on the couch.

I rolled my eyes and slammed my textbook shut, completely giving up on ever turning that homework in. I was putting the last of the groceries away when I heard her voice call out again. “Oh! Kenny?” she yelled back into the kitchen loudly.

I walked into the living room as she was about to yell for me again. “Yeah, mom?” I asked, standing at the side of the couch.

“Do you have any extra money this month that I could borrow? I think we might be falling behind on rent and if I’m going to be working more to fix that, I definitely need to get some kind of support for my feet, otherwise I’m gonna be absolutely no use around the house once I come home. And who even knows how much use I’ll be at work if my feet are hurting this much now.”

I made a loud groaning noise and put my fist against the bridge of my nose as I tried to figure out where all of our money has been going. The last thing I heard, we had a little bit of a rainy-day/emergency fund that we were trying to slowly add to as much as possible.

“What happened to what we were saving up?” I asked impatiently, putting my fists against my hips. “Didn’t we have like, over a hundred in that jar already?”

“Your dad used that to buy new work boots, basically for the same reason I need new work shoes. Work boots are just a lot more expensive so there’s not much left in that fund.”

“And you can’t wait until it builds back up?”

“Not if I want to be able to walk, Kenny. You don’t understand how much my – “

“No, it’s fine. I got it. I’ll figure something out. I’ve pulled money out of my ass before, I can do it again.”

“Kenneth Joseph Craig! Watch that attitude!” she scolded me as I turned to walk back into the kitchen. “Where are you going? We were talking about this.”

“I’m figuring it out Mom! I’ll be back before midnight. Just take a nap or something!”

At the front door, I shoved my feet in my best pair of boots and pulled on a thick jacket before leaving the house in a terrible mood. A few houses away from mine, I let out an angry yell and buried my hands in my coat pockets.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my mother and I love my father, but sometimes I just get so angry at them that I can’t even be in the same house. And this sort of thing happened way more often than it ever should have. We started saving up a good amount of money and get caught up on bills and it seems like we might be getting ourselves on the right track. But then something happens and we spiral back down into our trend of late bills and light groceries as a way to save on spending. And whenever that happens, it’s always up to me to figure things out.

They have to know what I do to get us money; how could they not? I go sulking off into the night and come back with a pocket full of money and oftentimes a face full of bruises. I’ve started to get smarter about how I do it, though. I used to just stick to our neighborhood and hope for the best, but soon enough I realized that the people in our area are in the same situations that we’re in and their all trying to get money and valuables from people as well. That’s where the bruises came from. You cross a boundary you didn’t know existed and you got beat up and all your shit stolen.

I’ve realized lately, though, that I can venture into some wealthier areas of the town and still look pretty inconspicuous. That’s probably another reason we’ve been on a good path for a while now; if I’m getting more money when I go out like this, then there’s more money to get us caught up with. That’s why this time I need to go farther than I ever have before. I hate doing this. Abso-fucking-lutely despise having to stoop to this kind of level. But it’s necessary to keep our family together. So this time has to be different; it has to get me enough money so that mom can get her shoes and we can get that emergency-fund back to what it was, or maybe even more than it was.

As the sky started darkening to an almost black, I found myself walking onto a very wealthy street, the large houses lining it all at least two story, fenced in, with huge front and back yards, some with pools or gazebos or other things like that. Any time I passed any house like these, I felt a hard twinge of jealously. ’How can people live in houses like this when there are people that live in houses like mine?’ I shook my head of those thoughts and kept walking.

I knew that it would be way too dangerous to try anything with so many people in so many houses around. Not to mention that there was probably an active neighborhood watch member roaming around, looking for trouble. I wasn’t going to be that trouble that night, so I kept walking until I got to the business area, where there were lots of alleyways to hide in and enough people still walking on the sidewalks to do what I needed to do without drawing a lot of attention to myself.

I stopped by a closed storefront and lit a cigarette, taking in all of the people I could see. I hated smoking, actually. The only time I ever smoked was when I did things like this because A) the nicotine helped calm my nerves and B) it gave me an excuse to stop walking and survey the area without looking suspicious. As I put my lighter back in my pocket, my hand brushed against something metal and cold. I took it out and noticed that it was my dad’s pocket knife. I couldn’t figure out why it was in my jacket, but it gave me a chilling idea.

’No. I couldn’t. Could I? That’s too dangerous. Too risky. I can’t do it. No way.’ I shook my thoughts away once again and put the pocket knife back in my pocket.

When I just about gave up on that area of the street, I saw a man in an expensive looking suit walk around a corner, coming right towards me. I quickly put out my cigarette and moved into the shadows of the alley I was right next to. I watched him come closer to where I was hiding and realized that he was quite a large man that I would have had a very hard time taking down by my strength alone. ’I have to use it. Fuck.’

As he passed the first wall of the alley, I reached out and pressed the blunt edge of my father’s knife against the man’s throat. The man, obviously startled, followed me immediately into the dark alley. I put on my most intimidating demeanor and said gruffly, “You have a wallet? Give it to me. A nice watch? That too. Whatever you got, might as well give it to me. Just to be safe, you know. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt over any of this.”

“I can tell that you don’t want to hurt me. That’s why you’re not using the sharp side of that blade of yours.” The man spoke as if nothing was bothering him in the world and didn’t struggle for a second against me. He simply stood there in front of me with the knife against his throat and his hands folded across his chest. His attitude pissed me off more than anything else.

“How do you know it’s not just a dull blade? Dull blades do more damage ya’know.”

“Oh I’m plenty aware of the dangers of dull blades. But I’m also plenty aware of what a dull blade feels like compared to the blunt end of a knife. I know which one you’re using right now and I understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. But if I were you, I’d take that knife off my throat and just stop this nonsense.”

“I highly doubt you know why I’m doing this. And even if you did, you would know that I can’t just let you go without getting anything from ya’.”

“You’re what – eighteen? Nineteen? You could get into a lot of trouble if I would report this.”

“Yeah but you don’t know who I am. You haven’t seen my face and you aren’t gonna. Plus, I’m seventeen, so I can’t get charged as an adult for a little theft charge. I’ve been in it with the law before. I’m not scared. Now just give me what you got and I’ll let you go with no harm.”

“You’ll let me go with no harm either way, because something tells me you’re close enough to being eighteen that if you so much as scratch me and I report this as an assault and a theft, you’ll be put away with the big boys this time around.”

My mind screamed alarms as it processed what that man said to me. He was completely right; my birthday was less than two months away and I couldn’t afford to be charged with anything big.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” The bastard had the nerve to laugh at that, pissing me off even more. But I couldn’t do anything about it. The more I pushed the guy, the more he pissed me off. He kept going anyways. “So you obviously need money. Family’s going through some hard times and you’re trying to be the man of the family and help them out. I respect that; I really do. And I obviously have a lot of money. So here’s what’s going to happen: you are going to pull your blade away and step back out of arm’s reach. When I turn around, I’m going to lay on the ground all the cash that I have in my wallet right now, which means it’s your lucky day, because I just went to the bank and withdrew quite a large amount of money not two hours ago. But I’m only giving you this money because I expect something in return. With the money, I’ll give you my business card. I want you to come work as an intern at my company, and since interns don’t get paid anyways, you will be simply working off what I’m giving you right now. Okay, you can go ahead and step back now.”

I hesitantly did as the man said and crooked my eyebrows as I thought about what he was saying. I tried mugging the guy and he willingly gives me his money, as well as tells me that he wants me to work for him. What the hell is this guy even thinking?

He turned around and did exactly as he said he would: he laid out at least a few hundred dollars and a small blue card on top of it all before turning his back and walking back to the sidewalk.

“Wait!” I heard myself calling after him.

“Yes?” he answered smugly, looking over his shoulder at me.

“How do you know that I’ll actually come and work for you? How do you know I won’t just take the money and never show my face around here ever again?”

He laughed and said, “Well I don’t. But I have faith that you’ll do the right thing. Good evening, son.”

I stared after the man until he disappeared out of my line of sight, and shook my head before walking towards the pile of money on the ground. Counting it, I tried to think of a world where I would ever walk around on a daily basis with that kind of money in my wallet, but I couldn’t even get close. Let alone just give it to someone with no guarantee of repayment – that just wasn’t my life and would never be anything like it.

I was about to throw the business card back on the ground, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. As much as I wanted to, I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. The man just gave me nearly six hundred dollars after I tried to mug him, when he could have just as easily called the police and got me arrested. I kind of owed it to him to do what he wanted me to do.

I shook my head and shoved the money and the card in my pocket, my hand tight around it my entire walk home. I couldn’t believe any of that actually just happened. At least now Mom could get a good pair of work shoes and the emergency fund can be replenished. And to hell if I’m not going to get Anna some good art supplies out of this money.