Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski

Author:Helene Stapinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780375506901
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

I was glad Julie came back to Jersey City, because Stephen was my favorite cousin on the Polish side. We goofed around a lot. Once, we put toothpicks in Aunt Julie’s hair. They stood up like antennae. Aunt Julie didn’t even know they were there, since her hair was so high off her scalp.

Stephen and I saw Star Wars together. For us, seeing that movie was like the day JFK got shot. Everyone we knew remembered exactly where it had happened and who they were with at the time. Daddy came with us to see it, but he stood in the back of the theater through most of the movie and smoked. He preferred movies about real things and real people. Science fiction was not for him. “Garbage,” he said, scowling.

But Stephen and I loved Star Wars. We even had fake light sabers, which we used to clobber each other over the head. I liked boys better than girls, because they didn’t cry when you hit them over the head. They were more fun. Hitting each other, climbing poles and trees—when you could find one in Jersey City—was much more entertaining than playing with dolls.

I calculated that I had no fewer than ten cousins at OLC at one time, all from Daddy’s side of the family, most of them boys: Stephen, George, Mark, Andrew, Victor, Phillip, Scott, Melissa, and two Michaels.

Our cousin George once told Stephen that if he ever needed anyone beaten up, he would do it for him, since Stephen no longer had a father. Not having a father could be a problem in a tough place like Jersey City. And George knew about it firsthand.

George always seemed much older than the rest of us, as if he thought that shooting bottle caps or playing TV tag were pointless, silly exercises. He participated, but reluctantly.

He was a distant—fourth—cousin and we weren’t particularly close. If you saw him on the street, George would look just like any other kid. He was polite, always said thank-you, and always put his toys away at the end of the day if he came to play at your house. He was short, and blended into the background with dark hair and thick glasses. People called them Barney Google glasses, after a cartoon that used to run in the Sunday funnies.

To me, Stephen, and the other kids, there was something unusual about George. Behind those glasses, he had a light in his brown eyes that was missing from most of the other kids’ eyes. George seemed smarter, or wiser. You would think that it was just his glasses that made him look wiser. But there were other kids at OLC with glasses—like me—and we didn’t have that same George quality. There was a vibe hovering around him, as if the air around his body were charged. More than anyone I knew, George had that crooked, reluctant Jersey City smile.

I knew why. And it wasn’t just that he had no father.

We all knew George’s story, though we never talked to him about it.

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