Losing Streak (The Lane) by Kristine Wyllys

depths I kept my beast caged in, and my beast didn’t react well to fear. Fear only made it angrier than it already was.
    So I couldn’t tell her about Brandon, about this dangerous, life-scarred boy I’d found myself sneaking off to see between work and her. I couldn’t tell her about the way he made me forget or how when I smiled with him that smile was almost genuine.
    I couldn’t tell her that I stopped breaking apart when I was alone because I found another way to when I was with him. And while it was still as violent and I still got lost in it, I no longer felt like I was wrecked and bleeding when it was over. Because with him I didn’t have to
be
anything. I was just Rosie. Not a big sister or a caretaker or the poor townie girl who served up drinks in a too-small shirt. And I didn’t even know who I was beyond those things, but with Brandon I felt like maybe I could finally figure it out and even if I couldn’t, it’d be okay. Because with him, I was finally something other than those roles.
    Mama wouldn’t be happy. She’d want to be happy. She’d probably even pretend to be, but it would kill her and she didn’t need anything to help with that. She certainly didn’t need it from me, the daughter she depended on to keep her alive. She had dreams for that daughter, ones that included better than she’d had, better than she could give her flesh and blood. She wanted more for me than just the love she’d known. She wanted the stability she hadn’t.
    So I kept quiet. And Brandon never questioned why I talked so much and so often about my people but never made any mention of him meeting them. Maybe he recognized a poor girl’s reluctance to bring home a poor boy.
    People who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and people from the wrong side of the tracks shouldn’t date in their neighborhood. You were supposed to get out, escape this side of the tracks and make a life on the other side. You weren’t supposed to stay.
    It was easy, though, so easy, to forget that with him. What he lacked in a plan, he made up for in bed. Not my bed, though. Never in my bed. I didn’t want to risk bringing him around Jackson, who I couldn’t be sure wouldn’t say something in front of Mama. Not that I even had a bed anymore to bring Jackson home to. I’d had to sell it to the guy who’d moved in to the apartment below mine. Twenty-five dollars didn’t buy a lot, but it paid part of a prescription.
    But it wasn’t just the sex with Brandon and the fact that he had a bed to sleep in when I didn’t. It was more than that. It was those quiet moments afterward, before I drifted off to sleep, when his rough fingers danced along the side of my neck and his breath was heavy in my ear and everything else faded away. I couldn’t hear his neighbors or feel the weight of tomorrow pressing down on me. The only thing that existed was that moment. There was only him and me, and the only weight I felt was his pressed against my back. And his weight never threatened to bury me.
    * * *
    Mama was sick again.
    She tried to hide it when she heard Jackson and me come in. Well, she tried to hide it from Jackson. But there was no mistaking the painful retching sounds we could hear through the thin walls seconds after she excused herself on shaky legs. At first, Jackson attempted to act as though he hadn’t noticed. But after the fourth or fifth time, even he had a hard time pretending. After the sixth go, he started to shift uncomfortably in his seat, as if he wanted to get up and flee.
    He wasn’t good with this, didn’t know how to handle a mama who huddled over a dingy toilet as she fought to keep down the little food she could mostly stomach. It was why I always came alone on the days when the one thing that was supposed to make her better raged war on her already frail body. Jackson couldn’t handle it and Mama didn’t want him to. Not her baby. Not the boy who looked so much like the daddy he’d never gotten a