Mick and michelle, p.1
Mick & Michelle, page 1
Mick & Michelle
By Nina Rossing
Life is good for fifteen-year-old Mick Mullins—at least on the surface. He’s the perfect son to his supportive parents and plans to follow in their footsteps and become a police officer. He has plenty of friends in the neighborhood and even gets along with his sister. But buried beneath the golden boy is a girl named Michelle, and she desperately wants to step into the light. Mick knows revealing she is really Michelle might ruin some of the most important relationships in her life, but she must take that chance, and she can’t wait much longer. Her body is developing into a man’s, and she can’t bear to let that happen—even though she worries about the repercussions of her decision.
But every choice comes with risks as well as rewards. Mick is Grandpa’s favorite—and the only male grandchild. Will her ailing Grandpa be able to handle learning about Michelle? Michelle is forced to make an impossible choice: her beloved Grandpa’s life or the one she knows she must live.
Table of Contents
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Acknowledgments
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Copyright
Chapter 1
I SPOT a cute guy, third one today, by the newsstand. Flicking through the mop of dark, shiny curls with his left hand, he picks a wallet off an old lady with his right one. The mauve purse is small enough to be swallowed by his paws but not large enough to contain a fortune. My grandma had a similar one for her keys and pocket change, only hers was silky black with Asian embroidery. These days, my sister keeps it like a treasure under her pillow. In this guy’s hands, that purse will end up discarded in a trash can.
I follow Thieving Curly down to the subway. I stand close enough on the platform to notice he has a bit of fuzz on his cheeks that partly hides the trail of small red zits on the left side of his face. Despite the facial hair, he comes off as young and sweet. Maybe younger than me, even. The innocence must be part of his trick. If you look like someone’s best and most trustworthy friend, no one will think badly of you. His jeans have factory-made rips, and the red plaid woodcutter’s shirt sports supposedly sun-bleached and worn patches on the elbows. His unassuming outfit is perfect for blending in, perfect for hiding petty crimes against poor old ladies.
Hopping on to the same train, I don’t lose track of Curly as I squeeze past a girl with the kind of hair I wish I had: deep auburn, wavy, and smelling of coconut. Her bangs are retro short, cut high up on her forehead. Large freckles stand in perfect contrast to her thin, nearly invisible red lips and the clear blue eyes. If I looked like her, then maybe Curly, or all the other cute guys, would look at me. Curly could sweep his eyes over me, and appreciation would reveal itself in a twitch of his eyes, a shift in his legs, how he’d put his hands in his pockets and throw me a smile.
I shake off the rosy dream, the stupid but tempting narrative that belongs in one of the romance novels littering my sister’s bedroom, and I sit down next to him. Peering at him from the corner of my eye, I open my backpack and take out my crumpled notepad. I catch him looking at it as I gaze out the window, ignoring my own reflection. It’s me, but never me staring back. Not really.
Quickly, I wrestle a pen out of my pocket and scribble a message on the bottom half of the lined page. After ripping it out, I shove it onto Curly’s lap, and the quick movement startles him enough to make him grab the paper. Let’s hope he’s not illiterate. The message should look clear enough for the thieving little shit. As he reads, his teeth grind like he’s sharpening them.
That old lady, she’s my neighbor. Her son is in jail. She goes to see him once every month. You stole her money so now she can’t go. I suggest you leave the purse on your seat and get off at the next stop. The decent thing, you know?
The train slows, the whirring hum turning into a screech as we approach the next stop. He bounces his knee, up and down, up and down, with my note crumpling in his hand. As soon as the doors glide open, he scoots off his seat and dives out of the train. On the seat, the mauve purse lies, looking pristine and undamaged. His body heat spreads inside my hand as I close my fingers over it and slip it into my backpack.
When the doors shut, he turns to look in my direction. I flip him off and wink at him. Unless he’s slow, my added smirk must tell him he’s been had. Serves him right. Hook, line, and sinker, he bought my piece of crap. I’m good. A regular cop in the making. One day, maybe I’ll be the one to arrest him.
I like him for falling for my trick, but the pickpocketing came so easy to him that he’ll likely pick someone else’s pocket by the time he reaches the daylight again.
I don’t see his reaction to my con. My train is already off to its next stop. I have his loot in my backpack, and I have his curls on my mind.
Chapter 2
I JUMP off at the next station and navigate the pre-rush crowd to get back to the opposite platform and take the train back two stops.
With the last day of school done, I have a long summer ahead. Junior year looms an eternity away. My real life, somewhere in the future, seems almost unreachable. When will I look at myself and not worry about a thing? I long for one particular change, but not the one my body has in store for me unless I do something radical. This summer I must act before it’s too late, before control slips out of my hands. I need my hopes and dreams, and I need some allies.
I walk by the precinct as I planned to before Curly interrupted me, and I drop off the purse with Cliff Martinelli, who tells me another bad Paddy joke as he registers the details I give him. A white lie spills out of my mouth, making me uncomfortable, when I say I found the purse, that I didn’t see who dropped it. I should have given it back to the old lady straightaway, but Curly distracted me. I’m too easily distracted these days.
“You joining the force any time soon, then?” Cliff asks as I lift my backpack, ready to wait for Ma outside before heading home. “You’re a right little community watchdog already,” he says with a short bark and a smile rounding off his guffaw. “The streets of Queens would be safer with the likes of you around, kid,” he adds, nodding.
I shrug but smile from the compliment. “I’m still in school,” I tell him. Same answer as every time. Cliff is an old fixture in my life. Only his receding hairline and graying sideburns are different from when I was a little kid. One day when he asks me that question, I’ll tell him my time has finally come. Wow. I need that plan to become reality. A cop future is the one goal I can forget everything else with. Almost everything.
“Your mom should come back in just a few,” Cliff shouts after me as I push open the doors and wander back into the bustling city. Instead of Ma, it’s Dad I see when I bounce down the stairs, wishing that I wore a skirt instead so my legs wouldn’t feel so sticky against my butt-ugly, washed-out charcoal combats. I avoid shorts—they’d put my hairy legs on display. I really don’t want to face the comments if I shave them. Not yet, anyway.
Dad looks more suave in his uniform than his partner, Rookie Ryan. His graying mustache and the muffin top around his waist are the only giveaways that Dad’s at least twenty years older than his sidekick, who’s not actually a rookie anymore. I had a tiny crush on Rookie Ryan last year, until I spotted him picking his nose and discarding the snot on his baton. So gross. I wonder if his girlfriend knows. I almost feel sorry for any troublemakers getting into contact with that baton, not that Ryan is the kind who resorts to that easy way out. Dad has likely taught him well.
“Walk home with me?” Dad says. “I’ll just sign out first,” he adds when I give no response right away. I think he’s been waiting for me to turn him down since I reached the dreaded puberty, but I disprove his theory on kids alienating themselves from their parents every time. Trotting next to him has always been okay, whether he’s in uniform or not.
“Your ma got caught up chasing some graffiti kids,” he says when he reappears a few minutes later, out of uniform and back into his habitual pale denims and white T-shirt, completing the outfit with pilot sunglasses that make him look cool in that ancient universal way. You know, for an old guy.
“Some kids from your school, probably,” he continues. “Not Diana again, I hope.” Diana still turns unusually mute for someone otherwise loudmouthed whenever she comes by the house, or when she meets my dad in the street. Especially after Dad joked about her arrest by dangling ha
“Di is on her way to the airport. She’s been banished to the Dominican Republic all summer to paint the houses of all her relatives. The Diaz family took Ma’s punishment suggestion to heart.” Good thing Di doesn’t bear any grudges against me after the ruckus she caused.
At school today, after the last assembly before summer started, I told her I’d miss her and to wear sunblock so she won’t turn into a dry old prune staying outdoors for weeks. Diego laughed his ass off when she lunged at me. She laughed too, though. It surprised me that Diego wasn’t the least bit angry for being shipped off with his sister like that, even though he’s done nothing wrong. Like me, he much prefers life on the legal side. That, and he knows the family next door to his abuela has three gorgeous teenage daughters. Diego plans to have made out with all of them by summer’s end.
“Right. The Dominican.” Dad says. “One potential girlfriend of yours safely out of the way, ha-ha.” I give him an offended face.
“Okay, okay. Your poor friend. And yeah, that graffiti stunt boiled down to just a minor offense. She can still come to our house. But you know… if your friends are trouble, you get into trouble. Eventually.”
“As if.”
“You’re bad by association now, kiddo, but Cliff told me you handed over more loot. Voluntarily, no less. I’ll see to it that you get a sentence reduction on that.” He chuckles, smacks my shoulder, and drags me toward him, then lets go right before I crash into him. He jokes too much about my tendency to do the right thing, but when both your parents are police officers, it’s kind of difficult to feel any attraction toward delinquency. Catching the bad guys is a different matter. I crave that as a career, absolutely.
We head to the trains, and our section is so stuffy and congested I wait until we’re off at our stop to tell him about the purse—the complete, unabridged, and unedited version. He laughs when I explain the note I gave Curly, but he also tells me I should have alerted people to the theft as it happened. That old lady probably needed her purse. “God knows, maybe she even has a son in prison,” Dad says, struggling to maintain a stern voice. I know he’s right, though. I let that sudden impulse to follow Curly overwhelm me. Lost my senses over a cute guy, like any lovesick weirdo. Not good.
As we walk down the street next to each other, it strikes me that the nagging feeling I’ve been having lately is also down to him, because I look too much like my father. I’m the same height as him but skinnier. I adjust my walk so I don’t mirror his familiar swagger. I wish I didn’t have his hair, down to the identical whorl slightly to the right at the back of our heads. His hair is darker than mine, so dark auburn it looks black when wet, but thin and limp, always flyaway, so no good for keeping long. Buzz cut material, and that looks fine enough on him. My hair is quite short by convenience only. I would have liked to have my mother’s hair, which is thick and robust, a haystack in the mornings, and she uses a straightening iron to control it. If I tried that iron on my hair, I think it’d just melt away and disappear.
“How does summer feel so far?” Dad says and waves at Mrs. McAtee, who used to babysit him when he was little. I don’t think Dad has fond memories of her, because she never babysat me or Ash. No one outside the family was ever allowed to babysit us. “Any plans?” he adds after I fail to reply in the three seconds it takes him to grow impatient.
“Deliver papers and go busking,” I say. I was supposed to wait tables at Pepito’s Italian, but they went bust two weeks ago. I haven’t found anything else. The paper route job stopped last week, because I foolishly resigned when I got the gig with Pepito’s. As for busking… well, that’s more of a wild idea than a realistic plan.
“Busking? You only know three songs.”
“Five songs, and people move around, so they won’t catch on to my limited repertoire. Besides, I can always learn a couple more songs.”
“And what will you do if I, or your ma, come and catch you soliciting funds?”
“I can outrun you easily, Dad. The both of you. Rookie Ryan too.”
“Yeah, yeah. Smart-mouth. We have an alternative plan for you this summer. Busking is not a part of it. Tell you over dinner.”
“What? Why not right away? Are you finally paying for Wizarding Summer School now that I’ve grown out of it?”
“Wait and see.”
Chapter 3
ASH IS slouched in her favorite chair, immersed in a fashion magazine, when Dad and I burst through the door and shout “Freeze! You’re busted!” When we keel over laughing our asses off, she barely makes an effort to roll her eyes at us.
“Ashling Mary, I hope you didn’t wear that outfit at work?” Dad stops his laughter short.
“Of course I didn’t. There’s a dress code. Scrubs, Dad.”
“Good thing or you’d give the old geezers a heart attack wandering around like that. Put some clothes on. I don’t care that it’s warmer than hell outside,” he says, shaking his head as he moves into the kitchen, avoiding any further stares at his scandalously scantily clad daughter.
Ash’s pink top has flashy sequins scattered over the chest, and her shorts blaze bright yellow and are cut so far up her legs they barely cover anything. Her ginger-caramel hair, so ridiculously textbook Irish, floats over her left shoulder in a thick braid, and as usual she brushes the ends over her cheek as she reads her glossy mag.
My sister is hot, and she knows it. In an ideal world, I would look like her. Maybe I’d want more of a tan, but otherwise, she’s the ultimate standard. There’s no way I’ll ever match her, but a dreamer can dream.
She ditched two boyfriends her senior year because they didn’t match her standards. And by standards, she told our parents they had no plans for their future and that she wanted to focus on college. What she really meant was that the first one, Domenico, turned out lousy in bed, and that the other one, Kai with the gorgeous eyes, got the boot because he said he didn’t want to deprive Ash of her virginity. He clearly didn’t believe her when she told him her virginity flew out the window her sophomore year with Preben, the Danish exchange student.
Kai with the eyes pestered me in the halls, looking for an opportunity to get back with her, and since I felt this one-sided unrequited vibe in his presence, plus was a lowly sophomore, I let him do that for a couple of weeks. As he got more frantic in his pursuit of Ash and in his demands that I assist him on his quest, my fascination turned into annoyance. The guy couldn’t take no for an answer, and I didn’t know how to convey it, but thankfully he gave up when Ash, fed up by his lovely eyes and spooky habit of following her home, twenty steps behind her, threatened to knock him down while she wielded Grandpa’s old baseball bat.
“Ash? That was an order,” Dad barks from the kitchen.
In ten weeks, Ash leaves for Pennsylvania, and I hate the thought of her taking all her stuff with her and leaving me with nothing. I need to say something to her before summer ends. Finding the right words that will make her understand, and the perfect time, is hard. I know everything about her, and she thinks she knows everything about me. But her insistence on us being psychic with each other is all wrong. Like Jon Snow, she knows nothing. Yet.
“What are you staring at?” she yells at me. I’m the doofus kid brother who’s annoyed her again.
“Your fly is open,” I say. “Nice lace.” When she reaches to check and finds she’s been had, I stick my tongue out like a proper little pest and run up the stairs, Ash chasing me.
“I’ll tell Ma you’re a pervert,” she shouts. There’s nothing like a big sis to bring out the mischief in me. I hope she doesn’t think I’m a pervert when she learns the truth.
Ma comes through the door a while later, sweaty and flushed. As usual she couldn’t resist jogging home from work despite spending time on duty running after the graffiti kids’ asses. She wants a new personal best in the next New York Marathon, and since officer participation is sponsored by NYPD, she loves it when she has to chase Woodside’s criminal population on foot.
“Dinner ready?” she says, gasping for breath but smiling.
