The Way It Works by William Kowalski Page B

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.
    â€œBy the way,” says Yolanda. “I want to give you this.”
    She presses something into my hand.
    â€œWhat is it?” I say.
    â€œJust look at it,” she tells me.
    I open up my hand. It’s a tiny piece of paper, all folded up. I unfold it. I can’t believe my eyes.
    â€œIs this what I think it is?” I ask her.
    â€œYes, it is.”
    â€œYou saved it all this time?”
    â€œI sure did. Read it.”
    It’s the fortune from a fortune cookie.
    It’s the one Yolanda got on our first date, in this very restaurant. The one she wouldn’t show me that night.
    The fortune says:
    You will marry the man of your dreams.
    â€œI thought you didn’t believe in these things,” I say.
    â€œI never said that,” she tells me. “I just said they weren’t really a Chinese invention.”
    â€œHow come you didn’t show this to me before?”
    â€œBecause I didn’t want to jinx it. I wanted it to come true,” she says. “And it did.”
    I grab my wife close and hold her tight.
    We’re not rich. But we don’t care about being rich. We just care about being happy. We don’t have the money to go on a honeymoon right now. We don’t care about that either. We’ll spend tonight in a luxury hotel suite. We thought we would treat ourselves that much. Then it’s back to our regular lives. That’s okay. We love our lives just the way they are.
    When we check out of the hotel, we’ll go back to our new apartment. We just bought it a month ago. It’s not a fancy place, and it’s not very big.
    But it’s home.

The Way It Works is William Kowalski’s 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 Eddie’s 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
    â€œLook, man, real life is not always pretty. Sometimes you gotta do hard things. You have to protect what’s yours in this life. No one else will do that for you.”
    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. I’m twenty-three years old. I stock shelves at the supermarket downtown. I wear a tie to work every day, even though I don’t have to. I wear a long-sleeved shirt to cover my tattoos. But I can’t hide all of them. There’s one on my right hand that says BK in small black letters. That one I can’t hide. So I try to keep my right hand in my pocket when my boss is around.
    My boss is Mr. Enwright. He’s a fat, bald white guy who gets mad easy. But he’s 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 don’t 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