Page 1 of Plum

PROLOGUE

ADAM

Iwas ten before I learned to take a punch. Long before then, I was well-versed in how to throw one. Chin down, hands up, knees bent. Aim beyond the guy’s face and punch through.

Where I grew up on Gilson Avenue—before we moved to the mansion on the bluffs—you learned early. Gilson was the worst street in the Cannery. Cannery was the worst neighborhood in Pyle, and unless you lived on the bluffs or downtown, Pyle used to be a rusted, gutted shithole. Now it’s all hipsters and tech companies. I had a lot to do with that. Back when I was coming up, though, Pyle was still decimated by the collapse of domestic steel.

On Gilson, if you wanted to walk to school or get yourself some chips from the corner store with no hassle, you did what the older boys did. The ones no one fucked with. You hit first. You hit harder. And you didn’t stop.

Despite the constant hunger gnawing at my belly, I was always a foot taller and thirty pounds heavier than the other kids my age, and I wasn’t stupid. I put a kid on the pavement every now and again, and mostly, I had no trouble.

Not until the mansion on the bluffs.

My mother came from money, but her folks cut her off when she turned up pregnant at seventeen by a biker with a drug habit. The biker didn’t hang around long after I was born, but the excommunication stuck until Mom found a way to make herself respectable again.

When I was ten, Mom managed to get herself knocked up by her boss, Thomas Gracy Wade. Thomas Wade owned a brokerage, a vintage gold cigar cutter he kept in his breast pocket, and half the men in Pyle.

He was a friendly guy.

Call me Thomas.

You’ve got a nice, fine grip there, son.

Hard to believe you’re the same age as my Eric. You’ve got a good seven, eight inches on him. Smart, too, aren’t you?

Mom got knocked up at a fortuitous time. The first Mrs. Thomas Gracy Wade had decided she’d had enough, and she did the rich-lady version of going to the corner store for cigarettes and never coming back. Thomas Wade needed a woman to take care of his son Eric, and my mother deftly presented herself as a solution, not a problem.

So, one late summer day, when Thomas Wade was at work, I packed our old Ford while Mom rested on the concrete stoop, hands on her huge belly with her legs crossed at her swollen ankles. Then, we drove up to the bluffs and moved ourselves into his life.

It was a different world. On Gilson Avenue, we had a one bedroom on the top floor of a four-story walk-up. My bed was a cot shoved under the eaves in the living room. There was a gap between the roof and the wall, so all kinds of shit flew in. Rain. Bees. Noise from the druggies and the working girls on the street below. I could never sleep. Still can’t, to this day.

We kept my clean clothes in a laundry basket and my dirty clothes in a plastic bag, and I tripped on those damn things every morning when I got out of bed.

We did have a second bedroom, and Mom always worked, but every extra penny went to her hair stylist, her gym membership, and the secondhand store. The other bedroom was for her used Gucci and Dior and Louboutin’s. We didn’t have food or cable or heat except on the bitterest days, but Mom had couture. She had a plan, and it wasn’t cheap. I can’t fault her. It worked.

At the mansion on the bluffs—thehouse, they called it—my bedroom was twice the size of our entire apartment. My shit looked like it’d been shrunk by that laser beam inCharlie and the Chocolate Factory.

When we pulled up at our new home, there was a smiling man in khaki pants to direct the unpacking of the car, and when the staff—as I was told to call them—were finished, he drove the car off, and I never saw it again. Mom waddled into the house, hugely pregnant since the pre-nup negotiations had stretched on forever, and my stepfather knows how to use time as a pressure tactic. She wandered from room to room, muttering under her breath whenever she found evidence of the former Mrs. Thomas Gracy Wade. The man in khaki pants hovered at her elbow, taking notes.

I followed her for a while until I caught sight of a boy my age out back, throwing horseshoes. He was maybe two pounds shy of fat, and even though the weather was mild, he’d already sweated through a good haircut and what looked to me like a grown man’s white collared shirt.

He looked overdressed and pissed off. I felt an instant sense of camaraderie.

I took off, joined the kid, and it went like it usually does between two boys, bored and unsupervised.

“You’re Adam?”

“Yeah. You Eric?”

“Yeah. Don’t touch my stuff.”

“I don’t want to touch your fucking stuff, asshole.”

Silence. Scuffing shoes in the grass.

“Want to play?”

“I never played horseshoes.”

---