Dime Read Online Free

me.” She shook her head and took another fry.
    I sneezed. Then I sneezed again. I had nowhere to wipe my nose. I used my hoodie sleeve. I wanted her to offer me that coat again.
    â€œYou sick,” L.A. informed me.
    I was. I wanted to go home and crawl back to bed, but Janelle took my sheets for Sienna. She said she would get money from welfare for new sheets, but I had a feeling it would be a while, and then what about a blanket? I was skinny, and I got cold fast.
    â€œYou should come by me. My boyfriend cool. We got heat. You not warm enough where you at, is you?”
    â€œI can’t leave,” I coughed. “They’ll put me as a runaway.”
    â€œYou think anybody care? That lady ain’t going to notice you missing until next Christmas.”
    It was strange. It was nine or ten years since I’d been living with Janelle, but I knew what L.A. said was true. I’d been there the longest, but Janelle liked me the least. Not when I first came, and I was small. But by the time a few years had passed, after Vonna had moved from a crib to a bed and when Ms. McClenny let me bring home Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I asked for us to read it together, Janelle called me a show-off and told me not to bring any books around anymore.
    Foster mothers can be complicated. A lot of them don’t like you when you get older. Denise and Jenny both told me that, even before Denise went home to her aunt and before Jenny left Janelle’s for a group home. It wasn’t just Janelle, they told me. It was all of them. You going to see, they’d both said, at different times. Soon as you get a little bigger, you going to see. They were each only at Janelle’s for a few months, but they were older than Jywon, practically grown, and they knew things. They were right: Even before Janelle began drinking, she stopped being nice to me. The drinking just made the not nice turn into nasty.
    â€œYou coming or not?” L.A. asked.
    I followed her home. It’s no use wishing I hadn’t. Because I did.
    *  *  *
    â€œThis her,” L.A. said. “Dime girl.”
    Her boyfriend was tall and dark and looked like a cross between Chris Brown and Kanye. A perfect cross. He smiled down at me. “Hello, Beautiful.” Nobody ever called me beautiful in my entire life. I was so surprised it took me a minute. And then I sneezed when I was trying to say hi back.
    He had a gold letter D on his front tooth. “God bless you,” he told me.
    For the first time I heard the meaning behind those words. I felt like God had just blessed me. And I wasn’t even sure I believed in God. My legs and belly felt shaky in front of his brown eyes, which angled downward a little at the outside edges. He had a scar cutting his right eyebrow in half. It’s hard to describe, but he looked like a gangster puppy dog.
    â€œGet this girl some hot food,” he told L.A. She turned on the stove and pulled out a bowl and a spoon. “Sit down, Dime,” he told me. “Make yourself at home.” He was pointing to the couch. I sat on it. It was black and felt like the way I imagined real leather would feel. Opposite the couch, mounted up on the wall, was a huge TV. Huge. I sneezed again.
    He settled into a thick, brick-colored armchair across from me. He put his feet up on the glass coffee table. He was wearing some kind of soft-skinned slippers. They looked so warm. “L.A. been telling me about you.”
    I wasn’t sure what that meant.
    â€œShe been saying you in a bad situation where you been staying.”
    I hadn’t told L.A. anything about Janelle calling me selfish so much lately or keeping me out of school for babysitting or errands while she drank and hit me and twice threatened to cut me or me having to slap away Jywon all the time. So I wasn’t too sure how she knew it was a bad situation. But then again, I guess a thirteen-year-old girl sitting at a bus