Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

“No!” I suddenly screamed. My voice came out shrill and childish. I flew toward them, gripping my book bag by its strap. A stupid weapon, my only weapon. “Get away from her, get away from her!” I uttered the word I knew Lonnie could never say. “Help! Help me, someone, they’re hurting her! Help! Get away from her!”

I waded into them, swinging my book bag, and they suddenly fell back. Abruptly their ugly faces turned confused and surprised. Like magic, they were only boys again, just teasing boys who always push you as far as they can, especially if the playground teacher isn’t around.

“Look out, it’s Wonder Woman!” one yelled, and a man who had come to the door of the 7-Eleven across the parking lot laughed out loud. They grabbed the bike and ran away, shouting insults at one another—You pussy! You wimp! You sissy!—as they ran. No one came to help as I took Lonnie’s hands and dragged her to her feet. The knee of her sweatpants was torn, and her backpack was muddy. There was mud on the side of her face, too.

“Are you hurt?” I asked her as she stood. I tried to hug her. She slapped my hands angrily away.

“They got my damn bike! Shit! Shit, shit, shit, why didn’t you grab the bike while it was laying there!” Her eyes blazed as she turned on me. I fell back in surprise before her anger.

“I was worried about you! The bike wasn’t that important!”

“That’s easy for you to say. A bike isn’t the only damn thing you’ve got!” She lifted her sleeve to wipe mud off her face. She might have wiped away tears as well. I stared at her, speechless. I thought I had been brave, almost heroic. She seemed to think I had been stupid. She glanced up from examining a bleeding scrape on her knee and knew she’d hurt me. She tried to explain. “Look, it’s like this. If we had gotten the bike, we would have won. Now I got all bruised up and I lost, too. So they’ll tease me with the bike again. I got to fight them all over again tomorrow.”

“I think it’s dumb to fight for that bike at all,” I said quietly. “You could really get hurt. The bike isn’t worth it.”

“Yeah,” she said sarcastically. “That’s what they teach us girls. Don’t get into fights over stuff. It’s not worth getting hurt over. So guys keep taking stuff from us, knowing we won’t fight. Those guys, if I don’t fight them to get my bike back, then they’ll take something else from me. And something more. They’ll keep on taking stuff from me until I have to fight back. Only by then it’ll be too late, because I’ll never have learned to fight, so whatever it is that I finally fight for, they’ll just take it from me anyway.”

Her logic was torturous, and I shied away from her conclusion.

“Like Carl,” she added bitterly. “I didn’t fight him at first. He moved in. He eats our food and uses our phone and leaves the house a mess. He took my home. He took my mom. Shit. He even took my bike and gave it to those guys. Now he thinks he can take anything he wants and I won’t fight. He’s probably right, too.”

“I know I probably can’t beat those boys,” she admitted a few minutes later as we walked slowly down the darkening street. “But I can make it cost them something to pick on me. They can hit me and knock me down, but they know I’m going to fight back, hit back. So maybe they’ll go find an easier target. I know, everyone says that if you avoid a bully or ignore him, he’ll go away. But that’s bullshit. They don’t. They just grow up and become your mom’s boyfriend. Dead cat.”

I don’t know how she saw it in the dark. Black fur in a black gutter, but she saw it. She opened her pack and took out her spray can and inscribed his neon orange memorial on the pavement. She scooped up his body carefully and set it at the base of a No Parking sign. “Still warm,” she said regretfully as she wiped her hands down her shirt. “Poor kitty.” Crouched over the body, it was like she spoke to the cat. “Carl gave them my bike. That’s like he gave them permission to pick on me, take stuff from me. Like I don’t matter any more than a dead cat in the gutter. Run over me and just keep going.” She smoothed the cat’s rumpled fur a last time. “God, I hate Carl,” she said quietly.

More conversationally, she added, “You know what really pisses me off? That Carl gave them my bike and some money for picking up his dope. He never gives me nothing for picking up his junk. I just have to do it. So that if someone gets caught with it, it’s me. He told my mom, if I get caught, they won’t do much, because I’m a kid.”

“But doesn’t your mom . . .” I began.

“Long as my mom gets her junk, she’ll believe whatever he says,” Lonnie said sadly. “Since Carl moved in, it’s like I’m mostly invisible. She doesn’t even yell at me anymore. The only time she talks to me is when I bring the junk home. She always thanks me. That’s the only reason I do it.” Her eyes swung to mine. “And I still talk to her . Carl’s always telling me to shut up, but I don’t. I tell her about my cats, I told her about you.” In a quieter voice she added, “I tell her she shouldn’t be tricking just to get money for junk. That’s how I fight him. Maybe I won’t win, but no one can say I didn’t fight.” She gave her one-shouldered shrug. “I won’t stop, either. Long as I keep fighting, he can’t say he won.”

When I got in, Mom was waiting for me. Her face was white. “I damn near called the cops,” she hissed at me. “You didn’t call me; I came straight home, there’s no sign of you . . .” Then she burst into tears.

I was stupid. I told her where I’d been and what had happened. When I was done, she just sat there on the couch with her face in her hands. She spoke through her fingers. “God, Mandy. You have no concept . . . look. Sweetie. You can’t get involved in this. You just can’t. Drugs and prostitution and abuse and . . . No. Mandy, you have to stay away from her. You must.”

“I can’t.” I was telling the truth. “I can’t just abandon her. Then she’d have no one! I have you, but she doesn’t have anyone but a bunch of stray cats.”

Mom got up and walked into her room without a word. That really shook me up. For a minute I thought that was it, that she was so mad she wasn’t even going to talk to me anymore. Then she came back with a little red tube in her hand.

“This is not a toy,” she told me severely, as if I had asked to play with it. “This is a serious weapon. Pepper spray. You point it like this, push this catch down, and then spray it. It will make anyone back off long enough for you to run away. Don’t stick around and try to fight, just get away. And use it only if you are really in danger. Never for a joke, never as a threat. If you have to, use it. Other than that, don’t even tell anyone you have it.”

“There’s two,” I said out loud as I took them.

“Give the other one to Lonnie,” she said. She walked to the window and peered out through the curtains. She talked to the night. “Show her how to use it. But after that, you are not allowed to see her anymore. Do you understand? This is as much as we can do for her. No more.”

I couldn’t argue with that voice, but I wondered if I would obey her. “Mom,” I asked quietly, “if you had been there tonight, if you had been me . . . would you have used it on those boys?”

“No. Boys your age are just . . . Well, maybe, yes. Yes.” She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Mandy, I don’t know; I wasn’t there, and you weren’t the one being threatened . . . If Lonnie had just walked away, if she hadn’t challenged them . . .” Her voice trailed away. She didn’t know either. How could I know when to fight back if my own mom didn’t know? In a quieter voice she added, “I have to get us into a better place. I have to.”