Asking for Trouble by Rosalind James

killer. I didn’t want to write about it, I wanted to doit. And I still do. I get into it, and
I think it’s been a few minutes, and it’s been an hour. People say I work hard,
but I don’t feel like I work hard. I feel like I work . . . easy.”
    “So it wasn’t just trying to be successful? Wanting to make
it?”
    “Well, that too. That was part of it. I needed to get enough
so I knew that whatever happened, I’d be all right.” That he’d always have a
place to sleep, a place of his own. That he’d never be hungry.
    “But you give away a lot, too,” she said. “I’m guessing.”
    “Believing that I’d be all right, that happened quite a few
years ago. Time to, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Give back.”
    He could see the questions hovering on the tip of her
tongue, see her searching his face. And he could see the moment when she
decided not to ask them, because Alyssa’s own face was an open book. “I’d like
to enjoy what I do as much as you do,” she said instead. “I’ve had jobs that
were OK, but I’ve never had a job I loved.”
    “It’ll happen. You just have to find something that matters
enough. You’ve got the passion, you just have to . . . match it,” he finished
lamely, wishing he were better at talking.
    “Well, you know what they say,” she said more cheerfully. “Every
wrong job is one more thing that you know you weren’t meant to do. I have a
whole list of things I know I wasn’t meant to do, starting with McDonald’s and
moving right along.”
    “That’s right. I remember that that was your first job.” His
second Kincaid Christmas, and Alyssa bicycling in to work almost every day,
because she’d turned sixteen. She was about the only person he’d ever seen who
looked good in that uniform. Especially the baseball cap. She’d sure looked
cute in that baseball cap.
    “Yep. Not the worst one, but sure not the best. The worst,
actually,” she decided, twirling another French fry that Joe was pretty sure
she wasn’t going to eat, “was the latest one, even though it paid the best.
That was the only one where I’d wake up and dread going to work. How about you? What was your first job?”
    “Stocking shelves at the Nellis Exchange. The Base Exchange.
The store.”
    “Grocery store?”
    “Everything store. A BX has everything.”
    “Did you get that through your dad? He was in the Air Force,
right?”
    “Sort of. Through a friend of his.”

 
    It had been the year he’d turned sixteen, at the start of
the summer after his sophomore year. He’d been living with Mr. Wilson for a few
months, and his life had already got so much better, it was like a dream. No
more bunk beds in rooms shared with budding psychopaths. Packing a lunch every
day, a lunch that was enough, because
he was allowed to get in the cupboards and the fridge, even to do his own food
shopping. Having a ride to and from school instead of an hour-long trip on the
bus, doing his homework at a desk in the quiet, secure space of his own room
instead of trying to solve math equations on a jolting bus before he got back
to the house and there was no way. Being able to put his few possessions into
the drawers and start to believe that maybe, this time, they’d stay there a
while.
    And then it got even better, because Conrad came back.
    Conrad had been his dad’s buddy, but Joe hadn’t seen him for
a couple years, not since all the trouble had started. Conrad had been posted
to Kadena in Okinawa, about as far away as you could get, and Joe had only
found out he was back at Nellis when he’d run into him at the BX with Mr.
Wilson, when they were doing the grocery shopping on Joe’s military dependent
ID.
    Catching up had taken more time than that, because it wasn’t
something you could explain easily, not in the ice cream aisle. Not anytime,
not if you were Joe.
    Conrad had come by that evening and picked him up, taken him
for pizza. Had watched him eat a whole pie, and then had looked