That Was Then, This is Now

by S.E. Hinton

Mark and me went down to the bar/pool hall about two or three blocks from where we lived with the sole intention of making some money. We’d done that before. I was a really good pool player, especially for being just sixteen years old, and, what’s more, I look like a baby-faced kid who wouldn’t know one ball from another. This, and the way Mark set me up, helped me hustle a lot of pool games. The bad deal is, it’s against the law to be in this pool hall if you’re under age, because of the adjoining bar. The good deal is, the bartender and owner was a good friend of mine, being the older brother of this chick I used to like. When this chick and me broke up, I still stayed friends with her brother, which is unusual in cases like that. Charlie, the bartender, was just twenty-two, but he had a tough reputation and kept order real good. We lived in kind of a rough part of town and some pretty wild things went on in Charlie’s Bar. I looked around for a plainclothes cop when we went in—I can always tell a cop—but didn’t find one, so I went up to the bar and hopped on a barstool