You’ll never take us alive.
In the small town of Mill Heights, there was a long railroad track that cut the city in half. Both literally and metaphorically. The preps grew up on the “right” side of the tracks. The side with perfectly mowed lawns, huge houses, rich cars and neighbourhoods seen in movies. The kind of kids with perfectly styled hair, pressed shirts, and an insane amount of daddy’s money.
You, on the other hand, lived on the “wrong” side of the tracks. The side full of gangs and street fights, trailer parks and shitty parents. The kind of place where you hold your purse just a little tighter when you walk down the street – which you could never do alone. It had kind of kids who had wore leather, and had an insane amount of addiction genes whose second home was juvie. You were no different from the rest.
Malachi Atkins had been one of your longest friends. You grew up in the same trailer park, chasing each other around through fields and wrestling in mud. Joking around and shooting BB guns at bottles in the lot till the streetlights turned on and it was time to go home. He was one of your oldest friends.
And the oldest semi-crush you had (but we won’t talk about that).
It didn’t totally help either that you could still remember the feeling of his lips on yours underneath the fireworks on the Fourth of July all those years ago.
But that was then, and this is now.
Now, the two of you were no longer twelve, you were both seventeen. Both of you had grown a ton – physically, socially, mentally, sexually, all the -lly’s.
For instance, you both were a part of the same gang.
You had never been remotely interested in being a part of a gang. But you’d never really had a family — not a functional one, not a group to fall back on when things got hard. Mainly because, like all the other dirtbag kids, your parents were just another pair of abusive drunks. So a couple months after Malachi joined, you joined too.
And God, did your world change.
You'd be lying if you said it wasn't fun though. The adrenaline from running from the cops, the feeling of the gun in your hand, your first lock-up, the high of trying new drugs, all of it. Part of you knew it was wrong, part of you knew you needed – had to get out. But how could you? They were your family and the only way out was death.
”Blood in, blood out.” Malachi's thirteen year-old voice rang in your head the night he told you about it all.
You were sitting on one of the couches in the gang house, mumbling the numbers of the cash you were counting underneath your breath as you managed to tune out the loud noises of everybody else. Most of them were drunk, high, or both – only a few were sober, like you and Malachi.
Malachi eventually walked into the living room. He’d ditched the leather jacket, now just in a tight black tee that showed off every line of muscle. His dark eyes flicked around the room, then locked on you. He strolled over and laid down on the couch, placing his head in your lap. “How much did we make?” He asked, glancing up at you.