Marked
Norah McClintock
orca currents
Copyright © Norah McClintock 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McClintock, Norah
Marked / written by Norah McClintock.
(Orca currents)
ISBN 978-1-55143-994-5 (bound)--ISBN 978-1-55143-992-1 (pbk.)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS8575.C62M37 2008 jC813’.54 C2007-907390-5
Summary: When Colin accepts a summer job he doesn’t expect to become a criminal suspect.
First published in the United States, 2008
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007942397
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover design by Teresa Bubela
Cover photography by Getty Images
Orca Book Publishers Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 5626, Station B PO Box 468
Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA
V8R 6S4 98240-0468
www.orcabook.com
Printed and bound in Canada.
11 10 09 08 • 4 3 2 1
To the boys cleaning up graffiti at Main and Gerrard.
chapter one
It all started when I ran into Dave Marsh, a youth worker who was assigned to me the last time I was in trouble. I kind of got the shakes when I saw him. He is one of those dead-serious guys who can look you in the eye and know that you’re hiding something from him. He can also tell what it is you don’t want him to know. I saw him coming out of a store down the block, and I immediately turned to walk in the other direction. I wasn’t afraid of him or anything. It’s just that, well, I didn’t want to talk to him, given how most of our conversations had gone in the past.
I was half-turned around when I heard his booming voice call my name, “Colin Watson.”
It was as if he had called out “Freeze!” Because that’s what I did. I froze. Then I took a deep breath and turned to face him.
The next thing I knew, he was looking me over like he was a drill sergeant and I was some messed-up grunt recruit. Or maybe he was checking me out for stolen goods. But all I had in my hand was a small bag from an art supply store.
“Are you trying to avoid me, Colin?” he said.
See what I mean? He nailed it just like that.
“No, I just—” I didn’t know what to say. I never know what to say when I get surprised like that. Dave used to tell me that this was my saving grace—the fact that I’m not quick on my feet. I’m not a bad liar—it’s more like I can’t come up with a lie in the first place. Dave said that meant I wasn’t cut out to be a bad guy. Maybe that was supposed to make me feel better. But, mostly, it made me feel like an idiot.
“Still drawing, I see,” he said, looking at the bag from the art supply store and at the pencil sticking out of my shirt pocket. He never missed a thing.
“A little sketching, yeah,” I said with a shrug. I like to draw. I like it a lot. The past year I’d even had a half-decent art teacher who said nice things about my stuff and gave me lots of tips and pointers. She said I had a good eye. It was the best compliment I’d ever received.
“You got a job lined up for the summer?” Every youth worker I ever met was big on kids having jobs. Jobs teach responsibility. They’re a positive way to spend your spare time. They give you money so maybe you won’t go out and shoplift like I used to.
“I’m looking,” I said. It was sort of true. I was looking. But I hadn’t put in any applications yet. I didn’t want to work at a fast-food joint or be a clerk in some stupid store. I wanted to do something interesting. Preferably something outdoors.
His sharp eyes drilled into me. Here it comes, I thought. He’s going to give me a lecture about getting out there with my résumé.
But guess what? He didn’t.
“I heard about someone who is hiring kids for the summer. It made me think of you. In fact, I was planning to look up your phone number on Monday when I got into the office so that I could call you and tell you about it.”
I was so surprised that I almost fell over. I mean, I hadn’t seen this guy in eight or nine months. And it wasn’t like we were friends or anything. I was just another screwed-up kid, and it had been his job to straighten me out. But here he was, telling me that he had been thinking of calling me and doing me a favor, when he wasn’t being paid to help me anymore.
“It’s sort of in your interest area,” he said. “It’s art-related—although not everyone would agree. A couple of the utility companies have been hiring kids to clean up graffiti on utility poles. It pays minimum wage, but it’s an outside job. The thing is—”
Here it comes, I thought. The catch.
“There’s minimum supervision involved,” he said. “Which means it isn’t right for most of the kids I work with.”
And this is where he surprised me again—big-time.
“That’s why I thought of you, Colin. I’ve been hearing good things about you.”
He had?
“If you want, I can get you the information and even put in a good word for you. You can earn some money and study the urban-art landscape at the same time.”
I was so stunned that all I could say was, “Uh, sure.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll call you on Monday with the details.”
Monday morning I woke up to the sound of the phone. It was Dave Marsh. He told me where to take my résumé, who to talk to, even what to say. He said he’d already talked to the man in charge.
“He’s expecting your call, Colin,” he said. “He’s looking for reliable kids, and he’s definitely interested in meeting you.”
Then he scared me a little.
“As far as I can tell, this job is yours, Colin—unless you do something to mess it up.”
chapter two
The man in charge was named Ray Mehivic. He was sitting behind a big metal desk. His office was at the back of what looked like a huge garage in one of those industrial parks that’s filled with warehouses and small factories. He was talking on the phone when I arrived, but he waved me in. I stood in front of his desk while he finished his phone call.
“You’re Colin, right?” he said, hanging up the phone. “Keeping your act clean these days, I hope.”
What?
He laughed.
I didn’t.
He grinned. “Relax, kid,” he said. “I’m not going to give you a hard time. I’m a big believer in second chances. I know how hard they are to come by. So I try to provide them. I try to help out, you know what I mean? And Dave Marsh thinks you’re an okay kid. When he heard I was hiring, he put in a good word for you.” He looked me over. “He said you were fourteen.”
“I’ll be fifteen at the end of the summer,” I said.
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Ray said, leaning back in his swivel chair. “But people can change, am I right?” He stuck out a beefy hand. “Show me what you’ve got.”
It took me a moment to realize that he wanted to see my résumé. I never thought I would say this, but I was glad we had to write a résumé in careers class at school. I handed it to him. It took him forever to read it.
“You got a bike, something to get around?”
he said at last.
I nodded.
“You know what the job is?”
I nodded again, but he explained it to me in detail anyway.
“So,” he said when he had finished, “are you interested?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir,” he said, smiling like I’d made a joke. “Okay, Colin. You’re on. Be here tomorrow morning, six thirty, to pick up your supplies and get your route.”
Six thirty?
“In the morning?” I said.
“Yeah, in the morning,” Ray said. “The route you’re on, it’s a nice neighborhood— lots of doctors and lawyers. Plus a lot of aggressive tagging. We like to get that cleaned up before the residents roll their Beamers out of their garages, you hear what I’m saying?”
I sure did. People who live in big houses don’t want to start their day looking at graffiti. I bet graffiti in their neighborhoods made them nervous. It probably made them think of gangs.
“You got a problem with the hours or the job, now’s the time to speak up, kid.”
I told him I didn’t have any problems. I turned to go.
“Hey, kid.”
I wheeled around.
Something flashed in my eyes. It was a camera.
“For your ID,” Ray said. “If the cops see you and get the wrong idea, they can call me.”
Cops? If there was one thing I wanted more than anything else, it was to get through the summer without having anything to do with the cops.
Six AM comes fast when you stay up past midnight playing computer games. If it wasn’t for my mom, who has to leave for work at six, I never would have got up. She didn’t just hammer on my door. No, she came right on in and shook me awake.
“I left you a lunch. It’s in the fridge,” she said. She was smiling. She had been thrilled when I told her I had a job. That meant I wouldn’t be pestering her for money all summer. “What time do you think you’ll be home?”
My job started at six thirty and went to three, including a half hour for lunch. I was supposed to report back to the garage with my work sheet at the end of the day.
“Probably three thirty,” I said.
“I’ll call you when I finish my shift,” my mom said. “You can tell me how it went.”
After she left, I almost rolled over and went back to sleep. But my mom’s happy face swam in front of my eyes. My mom had it tough. She had me when she was just seventeen. She and my dad got married, but then my dad got sick. He died when I was eight. My mom worked two jobs for a long time. She cut back to one when I started getting into trouble. She thought if she was home more, that would make a difference. It did. It made me want to stay clear of the apartment as much as possible. The last time I got into trouble, I thought her heart would break. When she came down to the police station, she had the same look on her face as she did the night she woke me up to tell me my dad was gone.
That’s when she decided she needed help too. She got some kind of grant, and now, in addition to working, she was studying to be a dental hygienist. She had six months to go. She said things would be better for us once she got a decent job. She was really excited about it. She said as soon as she got established, she’d get art lessons for me if I promised to stay out of trouble. And, I don’t know, with her being happy and with the new art teacher telling me I had a good eye, I wanted things to be okay for a change. I didn’t want any more trouble. So I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed.
I got to the garage right on time. Ray was already there, sitting behind his desk with the phone in one hand, a mug of coffee in another and half a cruller on a paper napkin in front of him. He covered the mouthpiece with one hand and told me to see someone named Stike.
Stike turned out to be a large husky guy in coveralls and work boots. He was checking out the girl-in-a-bikini picture that one of the newspapers ran every day.
“You the new cleanup guy?” he said, looking up from the newspaper like he hoped I’d say no so he could go back to staring at the girl.
I nodded.
He sighed, put down the newspaper and heaved himself off the creaky chair. The concrete floor of the garage seemed to tremble as if Godzilla was marching across it. When he reached the floor-to-ceiling metal shelves on the far side, he started pulling down spray bottles.
“You use this to get the graffiti off the poles,” he said, handing me a bottle and a bunch of rags. “Don’t monkey around with this stuff,” he said. “You fool around and get this in your eyes, you’ll need one of those seeing-eye dogs to get around.”
He handed me a second spray bottle. “After you get the graffiti off, wait a few minutes until the surface is dry and then spray this on. This makes it easier to get the graffiti off the next time.”
“The next time?” I said.
“You don’t think taggers are going to give up just because you clean up after them, do you?” he said.
I’d never really thought about it.
“If it’s a utility pole or control box, it comes off,” Stike said. “I don’t care if they’re pieces or burners—if they’re on electric or phone company property, they’re gone. Anything on city or private property, that’s someone else’s problem. You got that? The utility companies are not paying you to take care of someone else’s problem.”
“Pieces?” I said.
“The so-called fancy crap they put up,” Stike said. “Piece is supposed to be short for masterpiece—talk about hyping your own garbage. Burners are the same thing but bigger and with more detail. But you won’t get many of those. The poles and boxes are too small. The crews that do pieces hit walls, garage doors, that kind of surface.”
He turned and pulled a clipboard from the wall.
“Here’s your route,” he said, pulling off some sheets of paper that were stapled together. He handed them to me and waited while I flipped through them before he said, “You recognize those streets?”
“Kind of,” I said, although I didn’t really.
Stike looked at me the way Dave Marsh used to. He trudged over to another shelf and pulled down a battered city map book.
“You can read maps, right?” he said.
I nodded.
He thrust the book at me.
“Don’t lose it,” he said. “It’s company property. You go to the locations on your work sheet. You clean up whatever you see on utility company property. You check off the location and record the time you were there. At the end of the day, you come back here and turn in your work sheet.”
There were a lot of locations on the sheets.
“There’s graffiti at all these places?” I asked.
Stike gave me a look. “You think the boss is going to pay you by the hour to go out there and hope you find something useful to do?” he said. “Look what it says at the top of this page—work order. That means everywhere you go, you work.”
“How do you know there’s graffiti at all of these places?”
Stike shook his head. “You haven’t heard? The utility companies run a campaign every summer. They set up a hotline. Someone sees graffiti on utility company property, they phone it in. The company promises to get rid of it within forty-eight hours. The idea is that if they wipe it out as fast as it goes up, these knuckleheads will give up and move their act somewhere else.”
In other words, make it a problem for someone besides the utility companies and preferably in not-so-nice neighborhoods.
“Do I keep at it until I finish?” I said.
“You keep at it until the end of your shift. Whatever you don’t finish goes to the top of tomorrow’s work order. At the end of the day, I go out and see what you did. You do a lousy job, you’re fired. You do a sloppy job, you’re fired. You take too long at each site or do too little work, you’re fired. Some locations will need more work than others—that’s a given. All Ray asks is you do a good job as efficiently as possible. You got it?”
I had it. I turned to leave.
“Hey, kid,” Stike said. �
�Don’t forget your ID.”
He handed me a photo ID. I had a stunned look on my face in the picture. The id was in a plastic holder and had a clip on it so that I could attach it to my belt.
“Just in case,” Stike said.
I packed my supplies into the milk crate I’d fastened to the back of my bike the night before and got ready to leave.
“One more thing,” Stike called as I mounted up. “Keep your eyes open.”
“Huh?” Keep them open for what? What did he mean?
“We had a kid last year who ran into some trouble. Some crew didn’t appreciate his cleanup. They waited for him one morning and jumped him. Kid ended up in the hospital.” He grinned at me as if he were telling me about some fond memory. “Watch the watchers,” he said. “If you think you’re attracting some of the wrong attention, you let me know. Crews don’t scare Stike.”
I had the feeling that not much scared Stike. But the thought of getting jumped by a gang sure scared me. I began to wonder if Dave Marsh had done me a favor after all.
chapter three
I leaned my bike against the boulder that marked the entrance to the neighborhood where I was supposed to work. I couldn’t imagine living in a neighborhood like that. The houses were all big—not as big as in the richest part of the city, where the houses cost millions of dollars and all had tennis courts and indoor swimming pools. But they were a lot bigger than the houses in my neighborhood and had yards that were either fenced in or surrounded by hedges. People who lived here didn’t have much to worry about, except taggers who ruined how neat and pretty everything was. It must be nice to live in a neighborhood where that was the worst thing that ever happened.
I looked around to see if anyone was watching me. I kept thinking about the kid who had ended up in hospital. I didn’t want that to happen to me. But I didn’t see anyone at all. Then I thought about it. Nobody would come after me today, I decided. I hadn’t done anything yet. They wouldn’t be on the lookout until they saw that someone had erased their tags. It wasn’t today I had to worry about—it was tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
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