The man outside the door sighed again.
“I’ll leave my number, then.Tell her to call me as soon as she gets home.”
The mail slot squeaked and a folded piece of lined paper peeked through.
“Sure,” Adrien said, taking the note.He tacked the paper to the fridge with a Mickey Mouse magnet, placing it alongside the many other late notices hung up beside it.
The man on the other side of the door still hadn’t left.
“You got any idea when she’ll be able to pay?”he asked.Adrien shrugged to himself and warily edged back towards the entryway.He had no idea when his mother would manage to catch up on her variety of debts.There was at least one person at their door every week asking for owed money.
“No, sorry,” Adrien told him.“I’m only ten so I don’t know about that stuff.”
Again, this was a lie.Chances were, Adrien knew way more about overdue bills, eviction notices, blackmail, and loan sharks than any ten-year-old had any right to know.
“Ten,” the man mumbled and then his footsteps creaked down the hall of the apartment building, signaling his departure.
As soon as he was gone, the door to the bedroom creaked open.Adrien spotted a little brown eye in the slat of light that poured in from the kitchen.
“Hey Peanut,” Adrien greeted his sister Jessica with a sigh.“Sorry, did that scare you?”
Behind her, he could hear David’s sobs fading into whimpers.
The four-year-old shook her head no, dark hair flying in messy clumps around her head.She was clutching a book to her chest, readjusting it in her grip.
“It jus’ woke me up,” she said, looking down at the book in her hands.“Um.Hey, Jelly—could you read me this?”
She held out the book to Adrien.It was black with a Japanese woodblock print on the front.It was one of very few reminders that they had of their father after Joyce had purged their household of her late husband’s belongings—they often read it in secret to feel closer to him and their heritage.
“Yao Bikuni and Other Japanese Fairytales?”he read the title, taking the book from her.“I dunno, Peanut, the endings are sometimes kind of sad.”
Jessica huffed and tugged on the scratchy throw blanket draped over her shoulders.“I don’tcare!Jus’ change the endings, like when you read meCharlotte’s Web.”
Adrien sighed, glancing over his shoulder at his forgotten math homework.It was getting late.He’d spent all night cooking, cleaning, and looking after his little siblings and had only just gotten around to his schoolwork when the guy started banging on the door.
“Okay,” he agreed, putting on his warmest, bravest grin.Another half-hour awake wouldn’t hurt.“Go climb into bed.”
Jessica squealed in joy and clambered onto the mattress on the floor that she shared with their mother.She gathered up the deformed Scooby Doo stuffed animal that Adrien had sewn her for Christmas, grasping it to her chest.On the other side of the room, David was sitting up in his crib, sniffling and rubbing at his eyes.Adrien leaned down into the toddler’s bed to give him a kiss on the forehead.
“Scary,” David whimpered before twisting his blanket up in his tiny fists.Little patches of red had broken out on his chubby cheeks.
“Sorry you got scared, Toast,” Adrien told him.“But he’s not coming back anymore.You can go back to sleep.”
It wasn’t like either Jessica or David had anything to be worried about—they hadn’t had the misfortune of inheriting their father’s “condition” as his mother so crudely liked to put it.No one would be busting down the door to be paid to protectthemfrom hunters anytime soon—Adrien was a different story.
“‘Kay,” David agreed, lying back down.He closed his eyes for all of three seconds before cracking one open.“Story?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna read you guys a story.”Adrien smiled, clicking on the desk lamp in the corner of the room.He settled onto the mattress, flipping open the book.“This one’s called ‘Yao Bikuni’, it means something like ‘the eight-thousand-year-old priestess’—or maybe eight hundred?Anyway, she was pretty old.”
He cleared his throat: “‘Once upon a time—’.”
“In Japanese!”Jessica insisted.“Mukashi mukashi!”
“All right,” Adrien acquiesced.“Mukashi mukashi, aru tokoro ni, there was a little girl who lived in Wakasa Province.She was very beautiful, but very spoiled, and every time her father would return home, she would ask him: ‘Otou-san, have you brought me a gift?’
“One day, a fisherman who lived nearby—”
“Hey Jelly?”Jessica interrupted.
