Chinese pop music to blues and rock and roll. Everyone is having such a good time that no one cares what they dance to. They just want to get down with their funky selves.
âBy the way,â says Yolanda. âI want to give you this.â
She presses something into my hand.
âWhat is it?â I say.
âJust look at it,â she tells me.
I open up my hand. Itâs a tiny piece of paper, all folded up. I unfold it. I canât believe my eyes.
âIs this what I think it is?â I ask her.
âYes, it is.â
âYou saved it all this time?â
âI sure did. Read it.â
Itâs the fortune from a fortune cookie.
Itâs the one Yolanda got on our first date, in this very restaurant. The one she wouldnât show me that night.
The fortune says:
You will marry the man of your dreams.
âI thought you didnât believe in these things,â I say.
âI never said that,â she tells me. âI just said they werenât really a Chinese invention.â
âHow come you didnât show this to me before?â
âBecause I didnât want to jinx it. I wanted it to come true,â she says. âAnd it did.â
I grab my wife close and hold her tight.
Weâre not rich. But we donât care about being rich. We just care about being happy. We donât have the money to go on a honeymoon right now. We donât care about that either. Weâll spend tonight in a luxury hotel suite. We thought we would treat ourselves that much. Then itâs back to our regular lives. Thatâs okay. We love our lives just the way they are.
When we check out of the hotel, weâll go back to our new apartment. We just bought it a month ago. Itâs not a fancy place, and itâs not very big.
But itâs home.
The Way It Works is William Kowalskiâs second title in the Rapid Reads series. The Barrio Kings was published in Spring 2010. Kowalski is the award-winning author of four previous novels, including the international bestseller Eddieâs Bastard . He lives on the South Shore of Nova Scotia with his wife and children.
The following is an excerpt from
another exciting Rapid Reads novel,
The Barrio Kings by William Kowalski.
978-1-55469-244-6 $9.95 pb
âLook, man, real life is not always pretty. Sometimes you gotta do hard things. You have to protect whatâs yours in this life. No one else will do that for you.â
Rosario Gomez gave up gang life after his brother was killed in a street fight. Now all he wants to do is finish night school, be a good father and work hard enough at his job at the supermarket to get promoted. But when an old friend from the barrio shows up, Rosario realizes he was fooling himself if he thought he could ignore his violent past.
CHAPTER ONE
M y name is Rosario Gomez. Iâm twenty-three years old. I stock shelves at the supermarket downtown. I wear a tie to work every day, even though I donât have to. I wear a long-sleeved shirt to cover my tattoos. But I canât hide all of them. Thereâs one on my right hand that says BK in small black letters. That one I canât hide. So I try to keep my right hand in my pocket when my boss is around.
My boss is Mr. Enwright. Heâs a fat, bald white guy who gets mad easy. But heâs okay. Some of the other workers here call him Mr. Enwrong. I do not do that. Not to his face, and not behind his back. I need this job too bad. Enwright told me that once I get my ged he will promote me to assistant manager. That would be the most important job anyone in my family has ever had.
I was not always this straight. I came up rough. My neighborhood was on the news almost every night, and the news was never good. It was the kind of barrio nice people donât visit. There was nothing there for them. There was nothing there for me either. There was only survival, and I had to fight for that.
I dropped out of school to run with a gang
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