Sammy

by Laura Gianino

About the Author: Laura Gianino lives in Brooklyn and works in publishing in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Crab Fat Magazine, and others.

Excerpt

It helps when you’ve got nothing to lose.

At least that’s what she told us at the time—me and Jimmy and Bill—with that look in her eyes that she got sometimes.

“We ain’t crooks!” Jimmy appealed to each of us, but we looked away; at the headlights on the street behind us, the uneven cobbled walk that was always tripping us up, the beat up out-of-order public bathrooms we’d sometimes seen bad-looking people going in and out of. Even we knew better than to go in there. 

“Well, you ain’t no murderers either,” Karen snapped back, “but that’s what’ll become of ya if we don’t do it.”

Boy, did we know it. We’d worried about the blood on our hands for days. We were in a bind and time was running out.

Jimmy rolled the baseball toward me, though our game of catch had ended hours before. The lights over McGolrick Park didn’t go on at night anymore and we’d stopped hoping they’d fix ’em. So, when it was too dark to see the ball, we dragged our bats in the mud and sat in the grass near the street lamps that lit up Russell Street. The grass was wet with melted snow, but we were already dirty and so we didn’t care. 

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