Painted Black by Debra R. Borys

Author:Debra R. Borys [Borys, Debra R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61469-000-9
Publisher: New Libri Press via Indie Author Project
Published: 2011-12-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

When Jo arrived home, she found a note Keisha had slipped under her door. The Sandwich Stop was expecting her that night. She crushed the paper and aimed the wad at the garbage can in the corner of the kitchen. She missed and it dropped out of sight behind the can.

Out of sight and out of mind. This was too hard. She had to stop telling herself this was just a story. Yeah, it was a story, but something about it—something about Chris, or Lexie, or both of them, was taking her somewhere she did not want to go.

She remembered what it was like to be a teen. Racing a jet ski down the Mississippi with a three foot wake breaking on the prow. The world just opening up before you. Fear and fearlessness co-existed without contradiction. Even kids on the street possessed a promise about to burst into blossom. Except for them the weeds, the God damned weeds, kept trying to choke them out. And some of them, she knew, were going to dry up and die.

Was that what had happened to Lexie?

There was no real reason to equate the girl’s life with Jo’s own. On the surface, a black girl from the south side of Chicago and a young Jo Sullivan raised in the corn fed Quad Cities of Iowa had little in common. Jo had been a wild teen, going out of her way to punish parents she felt had let her down. Especially her father. Some days Jo was all too aware of how the sins of the father were visited upon the children.

She’d tried escaping when she was seventeen, moving to Chicago to live with her Grandmother. She finished high school in the same neighborhood where Lexie and Chris now slept on the streets. Then she chose a college as far away from Iowa as she could find. But psychological garbage trailed in her wake every move she made. It seemed everything she did ended up being a reaction to the tragedy that had torn her family apart. She couldn’t erase her memory of the mourning parents of the murdered boy, but she could support organizations working to stop child abuse. She could write news stories that tried to expose and educate. And maybe that’s why she felt compelled to find Lexie Green, even if the girl was only a substitute for another nameless victim long since dead.

Jo took the DVD Marge Cumpton had given her off a pile of unopened mail on the counter. Lexie was supposed to be one of the kids on this video. She took it to the front room and grabbed the remote.

She didn’t expect it to answer any questions, but it made sense to watch it just in case. She inserted the disc and pressed Play. After a brief introduction of what the session intended to portray, the video jumped into the middle of a group session. Lexie was one of the first youths to speak.

“I guess I was maybe twelve when my mama kicked me out.

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