Lucretia and the Kroons Read Online Free Page B

afternoon.”
    Loochie crossed her arms. Where was Sunny anyway? It seemed like it had been more than a couple of minutes already.
    “We’re old enough,” Loochie said quickly, just in case Louis wanted to cause trouble by convincing their mother the two girls shouldn’t be left by themselves. What better way to get out of his suspicious lunch date than to convince their mom that Loochie and Sunny needed a chaperone?
    Louis put up one open hand. “Relax,” he said. “I’m not trying to spoil your party.”
    She almost believed him. She waited to see what he’d say next.
    He looked past her now, out the window. “I’m just impressed that you guys aren’t worried.”
    “About what?” Loochie asked a bit defensively. She’d been allowed to stay in the apartment alone since she was seven. Since Louis moved out and Mom didn’t get home from work until six o’clock, Loochie was in the apartment by herself all the time and she’d yet to get herself killed.
    “The Kroons,” Louis said quietly. “I’m impressed you’re not worried about
them
.”
    “What is a Kroons?” she asked.
    Louis grinned and immediately Loochie regretted asking. The glee on her brother’s face suggested that Louis was about to enjoy himself at her expense.
    “You’re too young to remember what the eighties were like,” Louis began.
    This was true, considering that Loochie hadn’t been born until 1992.
    “They called it the Crack Era. You know what crack is?”
    “A drug?” she said, and wished she hadn’t posed it as a question.
    Louis shook his big round head. “Weed is a drug,” he said. “Tobacco is a drug.”
    Loochie’s eyes went wide and she looked down at her pocket. “It is?”
    But Louis wasn’t listening. “Crack was a
plague
,” he said. “The whole country got hit by it in the eighties. Queens was no exception.” Louis looked at the ceiling as if he werewatching images of the era scroll by up there.
    “The people who smoked crack, the addicts, they were called
crackheads
. Man were they rough. Crackheads didn’t care about eating or sleeping, they didn’t wash, and they didn’t change their clothes. Hell, they barely had any clothes because they were too busy selling everything they had just to buy more crack.”
    “So they were naked?” Loochie asked. She imagined the sidewalk below, the streets of Flushing, overrun by naked, unwashed men and women. In her imagination they tackled any normal person who walked by and tore away everything, purses, jewelry, cell phones. Did they have cell phones back then? Loochie didn’t know enough ancient history to be sure.
    “They were monsters,” Louis said with some satisfaction. He spoke like a veteran recalling war. “We had a family of crackheads in this building,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant because he seemed to know that would only scare her more.
    “In our building?” Loochie asked.
    “Not just in our building,” he said. “Right above us.”
    Loochie reeled back with open horror. “In Sunny’s place?”
    Louis chuckled, satisfied with the reaction. “On the sixth floor: 6D. Why do you think everyone is so afraid of that place? The Kroons. That was the family name. Mother, father, five sons, and a daughter. Every single one was a crackhead. I never took the elevator when I was young because one or two of those Kroons would ride the elevator, day and night, just looking for a kid to get on the elevator alone. They’d rob him for whatever he had. Sometimes they did worse.”
    Now Louis looked at Loochie directly. Loochie looked over his shoulder, for her mother. She wished her mother would appear and make Louis shut up, but she wouldn’t let herself call out for the help. She’d feel too much like a baby if she did. So she sat quietly.
    Louis looked across the living room, at the television, which was off. He was reflected in the dark screen but the image was warped. His head was even bigger and lopsided and grotesque. Loochie could