Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 107079 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107079 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
If I hadn’t been going to a dance exam.
If I hadn’t been nervous, and made my dad take a shortcut.
Everyone knew that the Torrisis were responsible, but the cops couldn’t prove anything. No one went to jail.
With my parents gone and no other relatives who could take me in, I wound up in a group home in a shitty area of the city. All the other kids were already involved in petty crime, or drifting towards it. As the lone kid from a nice neighborhood, I was an instant target. I found that out the first morning, when I dug my spoon into my oatmeal and found a dead cockroach.
I gave up on ballet. There was no money for lessons, plus who wants a ballerina who makes the audience cry out in horror—or pity—when they see her leg? For a few weeks, I had this forlorn hope that someone would adopt me, like in the movies, and I’d get a whole new family who loved me. I soon learned that people want to adopt adorable babies, not traumatized, scarred twelve-year-olds.
The de facto leader of the other kids was a boy called Wyatt. He alternated between beating me up to impress the others and pressuring me to get into shoplifting because, as a girl, I could hang out in the cosmetics aisle and fill my bag with valuable, easy-to-sell make-up. But I kept thinking of my mom and dad. Somehow, it felt even more important now to make them proud. So I said no, even when it meant Wyatt leaving me with black eyes or, once, a broken finger.
There’s something about living without affection—without anyone hugging you, without anyone asking how your day was or comforting you when you’re hurt—that hardens you, and not in a good way. I put up walls to keep everyone out and became silent and withdrawn at school.
Then, when I was fourteen, Wyatt started making noises about a different way I could work for him. There were men he could introduce me to, he said.
I ran out into the night, in the middle of a downpour. I wound up sobbing my heart out on the curb a few blocks from the group home. I just wanted my mom’s scent and my dad’s hugs. How is this my life?
I hit rock bottom. I hit it so hard that something inside me cracked, and what leaked out was a dark fury.
It was wrong. A gang snatched my family away from me and left me stranded in this place, and no one did anything about it. And now I was going to be forced into that same criminal world, and some guy would—would buy me…
The anger welled up inside me, and I let it fill me, power me. Being mad was better than being scared.
I slowly got to my feet, soaked to the bone but standing tall. And I walked further down the block, to a place I’d passed many times, a small building with a faded sign that said Master Sun’s Tang Soo Do. Classes were finished for the night, but I found Master Sun sweeping the mats. He was in his late fifties, but aside from his gunmetal-gray hair, you wouldn’t have known it. He had that lean toughness that comes from fighting your entire life. “I need you to teach me,” I told him.
“I’m sorry,” he said gently. “All my classes are full. Come back in September.”
I stepped closer. “I need you,” I said, my voice cracking, “to teach me.”
He looked at me more closely: at the fading bruises around my eyes and the fresh ones on my arms, and his mouth tightened. Then he nodded.
“I can’t pay,” I warned him.
He nodded again. “That’s okay.”
My chest seemed to open and lift: it was the first time anyone had shown kindness to me in years. “W—When can we start?”
He laid his broom against the wall. “Now.”
Master Sun trained me, and I discovered that martial arts, with its precision and speed and endless practice, wasn’t so different from dancing. My freakish balance helped, too. I trained every day, getting stronger and faster. After a year, I was good enough to break Wyatt’s arm when he cornered me in a hallway, and he left me alone after that. But I didn’t stop learning. That anger I’d unleashed needed to be let out, or it would consume me. So I sparred with Master Sun every night, all through my teens.
The guy who ran the group home had an old scooter, and as soon as I was old enough, I started delivering pizza so I could pay Master Sun. But he refused to take my money. “Save it,” he told me. “Use it to get out of this neighborhood.”
As the end of high school approached, people started to ask me what I wanted to do. I already knew: I wanted to stop the gangs. So I joined the Chicago Police Department.