Chapter 4
By the time New Years had come and gone, a brand new century, she had long since found herself settled in the run-down rooming house that the local newsgirls lived in, not quite one of them, but no longer a complete outsider. She didn't get along especially well with the girl's leader, a bull headed girl who went by Jaguar and had the fangs and claws to go with the name, or her underlings, but several of the other girls who were more or less in the same vague "fringe" category had taken it upon themselves to befriend her.
She did, from time to time, still sell with Race, comfortable enough with the guy to tease him about his cigar, and to be the one he'd take out when he'd won big at the tracks. She wasn't his girl, per se, but as close as those things tended to get among newsies. She might have made things more official, or at least, she might have tried to get him to do so if it wasn't for the fact that on rare occasion, she fell back on older methods of making ends meet, especially when headlines were bad. She never felt it was really fair to let him in if she didn't intend to be faithful, and she couldn't quite afford to make that sort of commitment.
She knew it frustrated him a little, but it was a subject they didn't talk about. It was a subject no one talked about, not only on her part, but a number of the other girls as well. It was simply that they all had a harder time of it, the boys were just somehow better at it, and the girls had a hard time fighting the reputation that they were no better than women who worked the streets and bars. It didn't help that several of them did both things, for the sake of not starving, or being left to sleep in the cold.
The woman who ran the rooming house the girls lived in was a crotchety old widow named Mrs. Bulger, and she offered them bunks and breakfast at only five cents more a week than the boys paid. Granted, breakfast was coffee and toast, which they could get on the streets for free from the nuns most days, but it didn't matter, especially in the winter, when they could all gather around the large coal stove in the dining room, huddled in the warm before heading out to pick up their papers.
Life had taken on a simple routine, and there were actually days when she barely noticed that her family was gone. She got caught up in all of the petty squabbles, and infighting that came with living in a house full of girls ranging in age from five to a few that were pushing twenty. She tried to stay out of most fights, but she gained a reputation for being fairly feisty in defence of her friends.
And then there was Cowboy. The boy's leader had, true to his word, made sure she was settled, made a point of keeping an eye on her, but the moment she was safe under Racetrack's wing, he'd left her be, spending his time, as she later learned he always did, with his partner, David, and David's little brother Les, and their very pretty sister, Sarah, who was, officially, Jack's girl. The fact that he was taken didn't stop most of the girls who sold in the area from being in love with him. And she was no exception. For her, he was more than just a handsome face, powerful in his own right, the leader of a union and everything. He'd given her back a family, and a small bit of hope, in spite of everything.
Still, he was taken, and she was kind of taken, and Race was a good guy. She liked him, a lot. Some day, she might even fall in love with him, she wasn't sure. And she knew she was foolish to cast her eyes at anyone else, lest she lose him. It didn't stop her, though, she couldn't stop herself from wanting him, the same way she'd wanted the butcher's boy, what felt like years ago, back at home.
And what good was unrequited love if not a driving force to distract herself from it? She spent her time, instead, trying to learn how to read, with the help of one of the other newsgirls, a quiet, mousy girl named Lia. In exchange, she was teaching the other girl how to knit and sew, skills that came in very handy when it came time to mend old and worn out clothing, or hand-me-downs from other girls. She was sure that Lia had to exercise as much patience with her butchering of the alphabet as she did with the girl’s crooked stitches, but both of them were making progress. She could at least decypher the headlines most days, which didn’t help all that much. Outside of the turning of the century, that winter there wasn’t much in the way of exciting news. She’d never been one for lying, but she discovered she had a knack for it, making things up, pulling lies out of thin air. It became a skill she found herself using in daily life, as well, and while several months earlier, she would have been horrified with herself, it had become the least of the things she did that would have horrified her mother.
It wasn't the best life, but it was a decent one, and she was beginning to think that nothing horrible was going to happen to her again, maybe she could just accept that everything was going to be alright. Maybe everything would be just fine. It was a pleasant daydream, one she clung to. She’d found a place for herself, not a perfect one, but enough. She finally accepted that it was possible she might be happy again.
Nothing was going to happen. Of course not.