Page 5 of The Young & the Sinner

“Really?” I asked, my shoulders sagging in disappointment. I was so sure Mrs. Newman would say yes.

“Yeah. It’s sucks.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“Disappointed. But it’s not like I was putting all my hopes into making this story into a high school production. There might be a better opportunity elsewhere.”

I smiled. Lizzie was right. Seeing as there was barely two months left before school ended, we wouldn’t have been able to bring this production to life anyhow.

Lizzie and I were theater kids through and through. I worked mostly backstage, mainly with directing, while Lizzie was a screenwriter and actress.

She wrote Cato’s Rapture, a brilliant story about a man in his mid-thirties who struggled with drugs and relationships. It was hard to get the approval we need from Mrs. Newman, the head of the theater department, for us to do the show, mainly because she didn’t think the school would approve of high school students making a production that revolved heavily around drug use.

As if high school students were so naïve when it comes to topics such as this. We lived in Chicago, and the school was smack-dab in the middle of one of the richest neighborhoods in the city and one of the poorest. This meant we had all kind of kids attending from different backgrounds.

The rich kids that went to this school were a special kind of rich kid. They were the kind that had been expelled from some fancy private school before, and was therefore forcedto attend public school. That made them an exceptional kind of mean.

And the class disparity among the students here was almost comical, if the reality of the situation wasn’t so harsh. The rich students were in some sort of rivalry with the poor ones. I had always belonged in latter group, though I tended to keep to myself.

I didn’t care for school rivalry, being perfectly content living my life within the shadows. And most of the students usually left me alone, especially since I had never shown any reaction to the name-calling or any other bullying tactics they used to provoke a response from me. That, and the fact that Lizzie was a feisty redhead with a mean temper to match.

Despite the rivalry, there was one thing these students all had in common: drugs.

Specifically, the poor students were selling drugs to the rich students.

It wasn’t hard to figure out who was selling and who was using. That was the thing about kids my age. We did stupid things all the time.

“How are you and Max getting along, by the way?” Lizzie asked casually. I knew she liked Max since the first time she met him back in middle school. I always thought it was a silly adolescent crush that would go away with time, but it never seemed to happen.

If anything, her crush seemed to grow each year. I wasn’t sure I how I felt about that. Lizzie was only a year older than me, since she had to repeat kindergarten, which meant there was a fourteen-year age gap between them. Max wasn’t the kind of man who would pay attention to Lizzie, mostly because she was still in high school, but also because Max loved my mom for most of his life. I was always afraid Lizzie might get hurt in the end.

“It’s good. You know Max. He’s always there.”

“He’s a good man,” Lizzie said.

I nodded. There wasn’t a doubt about it.

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