Page 12 of If Looks Could Kill
“What’s your name, young man?” I asked the lad as I handed him my penny.
“Oscar,” he told me. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m Tabitha,” I told him, holding out my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Oscar.”
He shook my hand, then pocketed my penny. I had a feeling that if I’d had a bracelet on, he would’ve somehow pocketed that, too. On the Bowery, children of the streets are trained not so much in their ABCs as in light-fingered thievery.
“Tell me, Oscar,” I said, “do you go to school around here?”
He crowed with laughter, as if I’d made a hilarious joke. “Naw,” he gasped. “Why go to school when all they do there is whup you?”
Or so the headlines would suggest. I gave him my most stern, maternal face. “Most don’t,” I said. “A bright young man like you should be in school.”
“No, thanks.” He gestured broadly to his person and his pouch of newspapers. “As you can see, Miss Meddlesome, I’m a working man.”
If he didn’t strike me as so funny, I’d have tweaked him on the nose. “All right, then, Mr. Working Man,” I retorted, “come to the Five Points Mission School in the evenings. We teach night classes there for working children. That way you can still do your work and learn your ‘reading, writing, and ’rithmetic.’?”
“Pass,” said the young scalawag. “But thanks.” Oscar studied my uniform, and his eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Is this a setup? All this about school. You trying to religion me?”
I laughed. “Not today,” I told him, “but definitely tomorrow.”
He puzzled over this for a moment, then grinned. “You’ll have to find me first.”
He tipped his tweed cap toward me, the gallant little rogue, then moved on toward a group of pedestrians crossing the street. “Bloodstained shirts found in the Bennetts’ closet!” he bellowed. “And a billy club covered in blood!”
I turned back to see Pearl glowering at me with both arms crossed over her chest.
“What?” I demanded.
“?‘Not today,’?” she mimicked, “?‘but definitely tomorrow’?”
“It’s dinnertime,” I said. “Aren’t we off the clock yet?”
“?‘He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.’?”
Psalms as weapons? I ask you!
“Yet it says nothing,” I pointed out, “about whether or not he stops for dinner.”
“You think you’re so clever,” she said, “but all you are is flippant and disrespectful.”
That stung, but I wouldn’t let it go unanswered. “How am I disrespectful?” I said. “I’m just having fun. You’re the one who insists everythingmust be so strict and righteous andholyall the time. You suck the joy out of everything.”
Bright red spots formed on Pearl’s cheeks. “So I should be like you?” she said. “Spreading ‘joy’ with offensive jokes about the Lord pausing his saving work so he could sit down tofood?”
People were starting to gawk at us, two young Hallelujah Lasses sparring like cats on a street corner. “You can be any way you want to be,” I told her. “I’m not trying to offend.”
“Yet you make it look so easy.”
“Jesus ate,” I said.
Not my snappiest comeback.
She glared at me. If looks could kill, we’d both be corpses on the pavement.
“You’re ‘off the clock’ when it comes to saving that boy’s soul,” she went on. “But not when it comes to persuading him to go to school.”
“You’re an outrageous stick-in-the-mud,” I told her. “You judge everything I say.”
