Pt. 3 of 4 
Anthony Tinoco

She wasn’t always horrible. Sometimes the cruelness came from someplace else. Once, when Anthony was ten and Samuel six, she came home with hamburgers wrapped in warm paper, the kind that left grease stains on the bag. They sat around the kitchen table, wiping their fingers on napkins and trading bites.

After, Sammy had brought out the cards. The three of them leaned in, elbows on the table, the deck shuffling back and forth between hands. Sammy laughed loud when he won and Anthony demanded a rematch. The pile of cards grew messy, sliding off to the sides as they played hand after hand. 

When he lost a second time, the anger came so hard it wiped everything else clean. One second he was staring at the cards, the next his hand was in Samuel’s hair, slamming his face against the table. Once Anthony came back to himself, Sammy was screaming and his nose was broken. Blood spilled across the deck in a pattern Anthony couldn’t stop looking at.

He never understood where it came from, that sudden rush that made his body act before his mind could catch up. It was like being hijacked by something bigger and meaner than him, something that lived in him but wasn’t him. 

The beating came after, and he didn’t fight it, because he knew he deserved it. By morning he couldn’t stand straight or make it to school. He stayed home instead, limping from chair to chair, the unfinished, bloody game still laid out on the table.

That same year he smoked weed for the first time with Jamie and Joey, coughing until his ribs hurt while they laughed so hard they could barely breathe. Not long after, just past his eleventh birthday, he started running errands for a man named Tomas. The jobs were small, but never harmless. Slipping envelopes into waiting hands, carrying bags he wasn’t supposed to open, standing lookout while others handled business inside. A few times Jamie came along, on the days he was willing to ditch school, and the two of them moved through alleys and backstreets with the thrill of knowing whose work they carried. For it, Anthony started to see a little money in his pocket.

Sammy had stopped speaking altogether. At first, he would still whisper to Anthony after they had gone to bed, voices low in the darkened room once the lights were out. But over time, even those whispers dried up. When someone spoke to him, he only gave a small shrug, a quick nod, or just stared back. 

Marco was sixteen and had more or less moved out, staying with a girlfriend older than their mother. The woman wore her bruises openly, on her face, handprints on her arms and throat. Marco scared him, but that fear lived alongside something closer to awe. There was a charge about him, a danger that made rooms go quiet when he walked in. He never seemed unsure, not even in front of men twice his age. Anthony felt swallowed up beside him, but following him was also the only time he didn't feel weak.

Marco hadn’t been around in three months when he pulled up in a car that was clearly stolen. He leaned out the window and asked if Anthony wanted to come along and shoot a real gun. Anthony bolted for the apartment, yanked open the closet door, and dragged Sammy out by the wrist. The bones jutted under skin stretched too thin, his arm birdlike in Anthony’s grip. 

They drove across town to the industrial edge, where the road thinned out into rust and ruin. Marco parked in front of an abandoned warehouse, its windows blown out, walls scrawled over with graffiti and weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt. Marco pulled out the gun like it was nothing, metal dull under the fractured light. He showed Anthony how to hold it, how to line the sights, how the safety worked. 

Anthony raised it and squeezed the trigger. The blast tore through the warehouse, a deafening crack that made his ears ring and sent pigeons bursting out of the rafters. The metal jumped in his hands, slamming back against his grip, and his arms shook with the force. A chunk of plaster burst from the far wall, dust drifting down in a pale cloud.

He fired again. Another hole. Another shock through his arms, sharper than anything he’d felt before. Smoke and gunpowder embraced him, bitter and electric, filling his nose and mouth. His palms burned from the metal biting into them. It wasn’t like throwing a punch or shouting louder than the next kid. This wasn’t something anyone could shrug off or laugh at. In his grip was a thing that ended arguments, that made people listen, that cut straight through size and age. Holding it, he understood why men carried themselves the way they did when one was tucked at their waist.

When it was Samuel’s turn, he wouldn’t even touch the gun. He kept shaking his head, hiding his hands behind his back, eyes wide as if the thing might go off just from being near him. Anthony’s excitement curdled into irritation, and he slapped Sammy across the face for being such a coward. 

At twelve he heard one of Marco’s friends brag about a pill that made everything slow and sweet, that dulled bruises and made the world easy to stand. Not long after, he bought some from Tomas, the kind with a name too long to pronounce, so he just called them oxy like everyone else.

He waited until his mother had been gone long enough to know she wouldn’t be back for a while. In his room with the door shut, he shook two tablets into his hand. They looked harmless, no bigger than candy, chalk-dry against his tongue. He swallowed them with water from the tap and lay back on the floor, staring at the ceiling while the minutes dragged. He took a third one for good measure, and waited. 

The first rush wasn’t the leaden fog his mom forced on him. Those pills had been chains, meant to pin him down and make him quiet for whatever came after. Now, the warmth spread. The oxy didn’t trap him, it lifted him.  

He lay on the floor, arms and legs stretched wide, the glass of water tipped over beside him. After a while, he couldn’t tell where he ended and the floor began. The ceiling swayed above him. His jaw slackened, breath slipping in and out without effort. He laughed, softly and at nothing at all, the sound drifting out of him like a balloon escaping a knot. Sleep was deep, dark, and without dreams.

When he opened them again, Sammy sat on the floor beside him, two chipped toy cars in hand. He rolled them up Anthony’s arm, across his chest, down the line of his leg, using him like a road. Sammy’s lips moved as though making the crash and engine noises. 

Thirteen was an eventful year. Tomas’ errands turned into better-paying jobs, real work that put him closer to important men. That was when he first met Victor, though nobody called him that. To everyone, he was just Vic. 

It was also the year he started experimenting. Somebody passed him a pill at a party and told him to chew it, and the Ecstasy lit him up in a way that made colors pulse and music feel like water running through his skin. Coke came next, a high he liked even better. Meth followed but he decided fast that it wasn’t his thing. It was too harsh and frantic, like being skinned from the inside.

But it wasn’t the drugs that landed him in juvie. It was a night that started with cheap liquor and ended with blood on his knuckles. He and a few boys had stumbled out of a bar they were too young to be in, looking for something to do, and settled on the first unlucky man who walked their way. They jumped him, fists and boots swinging, the laughter mean and sloppy with drink.

Anthony hadn't been angry. If anything, he found it fun. The man’s cries struck him as comical, high-pitched, like a dog yelping after being kicked. What amused him most was the sight of it, an older, heavier man on the pavement, folded up beneath a handful of kids who barely came up to his chest. 

He never asked himself if the man deserved it. Everyone carried something rotten inside them. Maybe this one had hit his wife, maybe he had touched a kid. Anthony was only speeding up what life would have done anyway. If not him, then someone else. If not today, then tomorrow. It was ridiculous how easy it felt. No guilt, no pause.

The sirens hit and everyone scattered. Anthony tried, but he was drunker than the rest and slow on his feet. The cops took him down in the street. He didn’t give up any names. He kept his mouth shut through every question and threat. For that, the others called him solid. The court called him a problem. He got a year in juvie.

Marco had always said juvie was the last place you wanted to end up. A cage full of angry kids, guards who didn’t give a shit, food barely worth chewing. Anthony found all of that true. And he loved it. In there, he was someone. He walked in wiry, scarred, and already mean, and the other boys picked up on it quick. They tested him the first week, shoves in the corridor, muttered names under their breath. He swung back with a grin, and when the blood dried on his knuckles the challenges slowed. Some kept their distance after that. Others fell in behind him, looking for protection or permission. Fear and respect blurred together, and Anthony thrived on both. He was no longer the skinny kid with broken English. He was the one other boys measured themselves against. 

There was another reason he didn’t mind the lock-up. In juvie, nobody touched him. Locked in, he was finally out of reach. At home the visits to his mother’s room had slowed, though never stopped entirely, and by now he was old enough that he could have fought the men off if he wanted to. But he never used that strength there. He stayed still and quiet, the same way he had when he was smaller. Part of it was her voice in his head. She sneered that the reason he never fought was because he liked it. That all the years she had carried the shame of what happened to him had been wasted, because in the end he turned out a little faggot who enjoyed it anyway. 

He would replay it over and over, what he could have done, what he hadn't done, and the answer was always the same. She was right. He could have fought them off if he wanted to. It sank into him slowly, the way rust spreads until it eats through the metal. The longer he carried it, the less it felt like her lie and the more it seemed like his own truth. 

He had decided it was better not to think about it at all. Lately, the men came for him less anyway. Now that Samuel had grown into the right age, their focus had shifted. 

Released at fourteen, Anthony was reluctant to go back home. Instead, he started to stay out later, avoiding the apartment whenever he could. It was easier to keep moving and fill the silence with trouble. When he could, he crashed on a friend’s couch. Sometimes he stayed out in the stairwell outside their apartment, head tipped back against the cold wall, just listening to the building breathe. Other nights, when he had no plan, he drifted through the dark streets and stopped only when his legs ached too much to keep going. He barely slept. Even when his body begged for rest, he fought it, afraid of what waited for him behind his eyelids. On the nights he did give in, he’d jolt awake, heart pounding, convinced for a moment he was back in her room, hearing grunts and moans looming over him. When he could, he went days without real sleep, drifting instead in a haze, pushing himself until his thoughts fused into a formless stream. Though when it got bad enough, when his hands shook and his chest ached from the weight of staying awake, he’d take whatever he could get his hands on to force himself under. It was just blackness then, empty and cold, the closest thing to peace he knew.

Jamie was released a couple of months later, locked up for a shorter stint on another charge. When Jamie walked free, they all gathered at Joey’s grandmother’s place, a crowd of old friends and boys they had met in juvie, a makeshift celebration with liquor and coke. Joey’s grandmother was the one who had raised him. She was old, walked slow, and spoke even slower. Anthony never asked why she was the one caring for Joey, but he knew she was kinder than most. That night she retreated to her bedroom early, closing the door and leaving them to their noise. 

The boys spread through the living room and kitchen, their laughter spilling into arguments and back again, voices carrying over the sound of an old stereo Joey had dug out from a shelf. Someone set up cards on the table, half the deck missing, while others lined out white powder on a mirror propped between beer bottles. Every so often one of them would stagger into the hallway to puke in the sink or collapse against the wall, only to stumble back in grinning.

On his way home, Anthony didn’t go back to the apartment. Instead, he let himself get picked up by a man three times his age and traded the only thing he had for a pizza and a motel bed. The man wasn’t gentle, but he wasn’t cruel either. When it was done, he ate until his stomach ached and stretched out on the bed, his body sinking into a mattress softer than the one waiting for him at home.

It happened again a few weeks later, with a different man. And then again. Some were quiet and nervous, looking over their shoulders like they were the ones in danger, rushing through it and shoving bills into his hand before bolting for the door. Others lingered and wanted to talk, asking questions he didn’t bother to answer truthfully. A few were rough, hands leaving marks he carried under his clothes as he staggered home, while others stroked his hair and called him nice things, as though that made any of it cleaner. He didn’t prefer one type over another, they all gave him something. The rough ones reminded him he could take it. The soft ones who treated him like glass gave him the best joke of all, pretending to be nice men while still unbuckling their belts.

He couldn’t say for sure why he kept doing it. It was the food. The beds. The silence of those rooms, no shouting through the walls, no doors slamming or locking at odd hours. It was the choice itself, the way it felt like stepping forward instead of being dragged. It was better to walk into it with his eyes open than to wait for it to come find him. At least when he handed himself over, he knew what he was signing up for.

He knew it was dirty, that was why he didn’t tell anyone. But it wasn’t the typical kind of dirty. That was women on the sidewalks in ripped skirts and fishnets, leaning into car windows while some guy kept the engine running, the whole block watching them get passed around like loose change. 

What he did wasn’t that. His trades were tucked away and hidden. No one saw him get in a car. No one pointed or whispered. What he did was on his terms. He picked when to go, who to follow, what he wanted in return. He asked for money, other times for drugs. A few times he didn't ask for anything at all. He walked in on his own and walked out the same way. It meant he wasn’t powerless. It meant that he wasn’t the kid lying still in his mother’s room, waiting for it to end.