One Good Hustle - By Billie Livingston Page 0,2

a lifetime.” Jill would kill to be a black chick. Pam Grier.

“Do you want to stay on here for a while?” Ruby says.

I take a breath and look her in the eyes for as long as I can stand it.

“All right,” she says. “We need to set up an appointment with a worker at Social Services. And someone needs to check in on your mother. I’ll get Lou to take me over there when he gets off work tomorrow.”

When she catches my expression, Ruby gives me a tough sort of chuckle. “We just want to notify Social Services of the situation. If Lou and I are on the record as your temporary guardians, they’ll send support cheques so we can afford to feed you.”

Anyone can weasel her way around a social worker. But wait till Ruby gets a load of Marlene. And vice versa. I open my mouth to protest but there’s no point. It’s her own fault—Marlene’s got it coming.

TWO

THIS IS THE LAST DAY of grade 11. One more year and I’m finished. Forever. I’m pretty sure my dad is a high-school dropout. Maybe it didn’t matter as much forty years ago. But nowadays, “high-school dropout” sounds lame. And kind of skeevy.

I stare up at the clock. 2:15.

A monitor walks up and down the aisles, watching us. Not our regular English teacher. She taps the desk of one girl, two rows over: Eyes on your own paper.

I’m sitting here in room 221 doing my final English exam and all I can think of is Ruby and Lou descending on Marlene.

I wrote down the phone number for Ruby this morning.

“We’ll just look in on her, make sure she’s all right,” she said. Ruby was stern but energetic about it all.

Being looked in on goes against everything Marlene stands for. Unless it’s a guy. If Lou was going over on his own, Marlene would be all for it.

Lou’s shift is the early one: 5:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. He works as a guard at Oakalla Prison Farm here in Burnaby. Jill’s dad is the opposite of my dad in just about every way you can think of. They’re both quiet, but that’s where the similarity ends. Lou is so tall he has to duck his head to come into a room; Sam claims he’s 5-foot-10 but he says a lot of things. Lou wears a close-cropped beard, I think to hide his pockmarks; Sam’s got no facial hair, I think so a potential mark will believe Sam’s got nothing to hide. Jill gets her jollies when people mistake her for Lou’s girlfriend instead of his daughter. Nobody would ever mistake Sam and me for a couple.

Wait till Marlene gets a gander at giant Lou. She’s probably staring at him right now. It’s hard to know with Marlene if she’ll get scared, or turned on.

At two-thirty I’m out the door. I love these final exam days. You just get up and walk out when you’re done. And English exams—I mean, for chrissake, if you have two brain cells to rub together, how can you not pass an English test? Mind you, I probably wouldn’t have said that a few weeks ago when I kept walking into things. Forgetting what I was saying and where I was going. Wondering if Marlene would still be breathing when I got home.

It got so bad that Mr. Walters, my Trades Math teacher, asked if he could speak to me after class. It’s a bit embarrassing that I take Trades Math, but when things started to get hairy at home I didn’t want to take the chance of failing geometry or trigonometry or whatever else they were selling. I just wanted a class that would show me how to think on my feet, keep my funds in order. Sam would approve, I figured. My dad is a practical sort of guy.

Mr. Walters, who is also one of the school’s two guidance counsellors, waited until the classroom was empty before he got serious with me.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

Without those student bodies filling up space, the words echoed off all Walters’ little chalk numbers on the blackboard. He’d been talking about taxes, I think. Or the way compound interest is calculated daily—something useful, but I couldn’t concentrate. Walters had a very concerned expression on his face and his long eyebrows pricked up like antennae.

I waited for some smart-assed response to come out of me.

Nothing. Blank. So I shrugged.

“I know I should be grateful for small mercies,” he said, “but