Page 1 of Unexpected Prejudice

Levi

13 years old

“By the time you reach three hundred, I’ll be out of there, okay?” Jessie said as he leaned over the passenger seat, one hand clutching the ski mask I had given him earlier, the other holding the pistol he had stolen from his foster family.

“Okay,” I mumbled, feeling tight with nerves. My hand gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles were turning white. God, this was a bad idea.

Three hundred seconds should be enough for our simple plan, but three hundred seconds could be disastrous. After all, it gives three hundred probabilities of something going wrong.

“Levi,” Jessie said my name, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, his big green eyes focused on me.

Jessie made me think of the sun. That was my first impression of him when we met almost two years ago on an old playground. I had gotten my ass kicked by one of the older kids that day when Jessie had come to my rescue with a mischievous smile spread over his bruised face and eyes that shone like kryptonite.

He was a foster kid—an orphan who’d never met his parents and tossed from one family to the next.

Babushka, my grandmother, always told me to stay away from those foster kids; said they were bad news. She had many prejudices and quirks that I disagreed with, but she was old and wasn’t from here, so I assumed that’s what made her say things that were often insults to others.

While some of the kids from the foster homes in my old neighborhood were mean, Jessie wasn’t like the others. He never picked on me for my height or told me to go back to Russia because of my accent, despite how hard I worked on it, and now you could barely detect it at all.

Even though he was almost a year older, Jessie was always nice to me. He played with me, brought me candies, and listened to me talk about my favorite books. He made me laugh so much that I forgot about my mom leaving me or when Babushka got drunk. And on the days I missed my dad, Jessie would take me on adventures. Those so-called adventures often got us into trouble, but I held them close to my heart.

I finally found my voice and asked, “What if we get caught, and they separate us?” The thought of being separated from him scared me more than anything else.

“We won’t. I’ve done it before,” he declared proudly, smirking with the familiar grin that often got him in trouble. Or out of it.

“Can you repeat the plan one more time?”

“I’ll go inside, do a quick scan, and then go to the cashier and ask for the money and a bag of chips.”

I paused and looked at him strangely. “A bag of chips?”

“Yeah, we’ll be hungry later, right?”

Typical Jessie. He was actually serious. Robbing a shop wasn’t a big deal for Jessie, apparently. Neither was stealing a car like the one we were currently sitting in. Jessie stole it last night, saying we’d need it to escape.

Did I know how to drive a car? Absolutely not. But Jessie had given me some lessons earlier this morning and promised me it was easy-peasy.

“Forget the chips,” I urged him.

“Okay, so… I ask for the money, take the cash and bang! I’m out of there.” He leaned back in his seat and pushed away the messy blond hair that had fallen into his eyes. It was more like a combination of brown and blond. It reminded me of cinnamon.

“And once I’m out of the shop,” he continued, “I jump in the car, and we drive far, far away from here.”

“How far?”

He winked, straightened in his seat and started to get out. “As far as we can, Babydoll.”

Babydoll. My heart beat faster whenever he called me that. I knew it meant nothing. Just a combination of words he liked. But for me? I couldn’t explain it. My whole tummy twisted into a knot whenever he called me his Babydoll. I hated being referred to as a doll, but not when Jessie said it.

He already had one leg out the door when I asked, “How far is far enough?”

He stopped and turned to look at me. To really look at me. “It doesn’t matter as long as we’re together, right?”

That was the plan. To get enough cash and leave this place behind. Him leaving the foster family that kept beating him up and me, well, I wouldn’t be leaving anyone behind. Babushka passed away last week. My dad died a few years back and my mom had a new family and wanted nothing to do with me.

Jessie was all I had.

Knowing it would be a matter of days before social services would come for me and throw me into the system, meaning Jessie and I would never see each other again, we’d decided to act now.