Nice to Matter
lincoln crisler
© 2012 Lincoln Crisler. All rights reserved.
Cover art © 2012 Michael Louis Dixon.
Open Source Background Photo by Joe Mabel
None of this material may be used, reproduced or transmitted, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or the use of any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author, except for excerpts used for review and/or promotional purposes.
I'm writing this for two reasons. One, because tomorrow I'll be a different person, and I want to put who Natasha Fox was yesterday on paper before that happens. Two, because I don't plan on trusting anyone ever again, but everyone needs to get things out sometimes. Punchdrunk said I should keep a blog, but I don't want this shit online. It's for me. So I'll keep it right here. I'm not going online with this raggedy-ass netbook anymore, so I know it'll be safe, even from hackers.
The reason I don't want a real confidant anymore is also the biggest reason I need one. I was James' sidekick for four years. Last week, we were both invited to join the Hero Corps. Our most recent adventure together was large-scale enough to attract the big boys' attention. We'd taken an honest-to-God supervillain down hard. Well, the media made it look like James—Top Cop—did all the work, but I made damn sure he gave me credit without going into too much detail. There's a time when I would have let him have all the glory—a time when I did—but he taught me a very important lesson: you can't count on anyone forever.
It was the last lesson James taught me. The first lesson was...well, everything. Top Cop saved me from my pimp four years ago. He'd gotten his powers about a year before that, and made regular patrols of the city at night. He'd been in the news often, though whether his existence was a hoax was a matter of some debate at the time. Well, the civilian populace had it's doubts. The bad guys, though, they knew. Even I knew he was real, and I wasn't a criminal. Tomorrow I'll be a full-fledged super heroine. Then, I was just a sixteen-year old girl doing what I had to do.
I'd been working for Big Dom for around six months at the time. I ran away from home because it sucked. I was the dumbest smart girl on the planet. I didn't want to go back home and tell my parents that it was too hard to go to school during the day and bag groceries in the evening while bouncing around from friend's house to friend's house, a couple days at a time before their parents got suspicious. Big Dom was chillin' in a Plexiglas bus shelter the night I blew off work and went for a long walk around downtown, waiting for his girls. He had a big class ring on his finger, and a fat cigar sticking out of his thick, bristly beard. He didn't look like a pimp. He just waved me over to his bench, offered me some malt liquor from the bottle between his legs and listened to me. By the time the sky began to lighten, I'd caught my first good buzz and smoked my first five cigarettes.
I figured it out when the first of his working girls sashayed into the shelter, makeup blurred and hair askew. She gave me a sideways glance, pursed her lips, then lit up a smoke and handed Dom a stack of cash from her purse. He didn't bother counting it. Instead, he shoved it into his pocket and came back up with a phone. He made a call, and by the time three or four other girls had trickled into the shelter, a fully-loaded Escalade had pulled up to the curb. It was pretty obvious by that point that Dom was a pimp, but I didn't really care. He hadn't tried to touch me. I don't think he'd even looked at me that way. All of his girls were much older than me, in their early twenties. Plus, I could handle myself and I needed somewhere to stay, at least until my reappearance at one of my friends' homes would seem normal to their parents.