Before the Devil Breaks You

This was what Henry ran from. This was what the jokes masked. It wasn’t callousness. It was pain and loss so great he could only let it in a little at a time, filtered through the safety of melody and rhythm.

“Why would somebody put that here?” Memphis said. “It doesn’t look like the others. The others are hopeful. This…” He shuddered. “This is a nightmare.”
“Hey! Come see what I found,” Jericho called.
Sam turned to Memphis. “See, when somebody says that to me in a dirty, creepy hole of a cellar, my first inclination is to run.”

Jericho glared. “It’s more complicated than black and white, good and evil. Don’t forget: Jake Marlowe saved my life once upon a time.”
“And for that you owe him your blind loyalty?”
“Okay. You two crazy kids,” Sam said, laughing nervously. “Tell me the truth: What have you both got against fun? Was it a childhood trauma? There is no prohibition against fun. Yet.”

A guard waited at the front gate. He frowned. “Only Miss Knight is expected.”
“Oh, but I’m her sister and her chaperone,” Evie bluffed, putting a hand to her chest as if the idea of Theta going into the Hollywood viper pit unaccompanied was unthinkable. “And this lovely lady is her secretary, Miss Ling Chan, and this is her personal seamstress, Miss Mabel Rose.”
“I’ve made all of Miss Knight’s costumes for the Follies,” Mabel said, falling right in. “I love to sew.”
The guard eyed Ling suspiciously. “And I love to… secretary.”

“You see him?” Sam asked as they peeked around a noisy boiler.
“Huh-uh. And I don’t like basements. Nothing good happens in basements. That’s where one-toothed murderers always live,” Evie whispered. “In basements.”
“Well, my mother used to put pickled herring in our basement,” Sam said, inching forward.
“See what I mean? If it’s not ghosts and one-toothed murderers, it’s pickled herring.”

He opened the door and held out the rose. “Welcome.”
“Aww, Freddy, you shouldn’t have,” Sam said, taking the rose and threading it through the buttonhole of his coat. “This is so sudden! I don’t know what to say. Oh, okay. You’ve won me over, you big brute. The answer is yes.”
With that, Sam jumped into Jericho’s arms.

But nothing was braver than letting somebody really know you, warts and all. Nothing was braver than trying to love and be loved.

“Well, maybe you can give him a noodge?”
“A what?”
“A noodge. A little prodding,” Sam explained. “I’m getting antsy here.”
“Fine. I’ll send him an urgent letter.” At the door, she wrinkled her nose. “Noodge? Is that a real word?”
“It’s Yiddish. Like… Ikh hob dikh lib.”
Evie narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “What does that mean?”
Sam smiled. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you.”

“But I got my own kind of smarts, from the streets, and when I go after something, well, just try’n shake me off. I’m an odd fella, but I know I’m an odd fella. What I can’t figure out is why you gotta make yourself crackers trying to be somebody you can’t ever be instead of just letting yourself be the one and only Evie O’Neill.”

One minute, they were a group; the next, they were a mob. And that was what scared him about the dead things inside the fog: They were the blood-fever of those wild nights on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. They were the dark corners of the refuge where the priests didn’t bother looking.

We wish you love. And dreams. And hope.
We wish we could keep you from making the same mistakes.
We wish we could extinguish your hate.
We wish we could walk among you just to be close to the living.
Sometimes, we do.