Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
City buses make lousy getaway vehicles.
It had only been three blocks, but Danny Victorio already knew that putting his faith in the Metropolitan Transit Authority was a mistake. He started compiling a mental list of alternative methods of transportation, ranked in order from most to least desirable. First, hot-wire the Porsche that was always parked in front of the Black Garter Saloon, a gentleman’s club Danny would pass on his way to his Nonni’s house. Second, steal the keys to Ma’s Pontiac from her purse and squeal out the driveway, cranking up the stereo to full blast à la Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Third, flag down a yellow cab, toss the driver a twenty, and tell him there’d be twenty more if he hauled his ass across the Verrazano. Fourth, borrow a bike from one of the neighborhood kids, promising to return it before the streetlights flickered back on at seven. Fifth . . . walk? Ma was always trying to get him to exercise more, and how far could twenty-something miles really be? Sixth, hitchhike in a normal car. Seventh, hitchhike in a windowless van.
Last—and certainly dead-frickin’-least—take the S44 bus.
The thing about mental lists of potential transportation options, unfortunately, was that they only worked when you made them before embarking on an adventure. Which was how Danny Victorio found himself trapped in the back row of a Staten Island public bus, wedged between the fingerprint-smeared window and a snoring old lady, inchworming his way down Henderson Avenue in a vehicle that shuddered with every pump of the brakes like it was built out of tuna cans. Danny’s seatmate, apparently comatose, had found herself a pillow in the shoulder of his school uniform. She reeked of secondhand smoke and stale White Diamonds perfume, and with every bump in the street her hair tickled his ear like a cloud of whizzing gnats.
Danny Victorio did not like to be touched.
He hated it. It felt like tiny worms buried beneath his skin trying to chew their way up to the surface for air. It could be a finger or a fist or a slap to the face, and Danny would react the same way: with a reflexive flinch and retreat, like a dog who’d been kicked one too many times as a puppy. And swear to God, if it were any day but today, the day of his great escape, the day when it was absolutely critical that he stay completely invisible, he’d let out a holler so loud that the bus driver would screech on his brakes and the passengers would jerk up from their newspapers and the flock of Canada geese passing overhead would freeze in the sky like a watercolor painting and the Verrazano Bridge would slacken into the bay and the sleeping woman next to him would shift a half-friggin’ inch to her left, dammit.
But secret escapes call for stealth, which was why Danny chose instead to sit, still as a statue, silently gnawing the inside of his cheek and staring out the window. They start-stop-started down Henderson Avenue: dry cleaners, shoe repair shop, Blockbuster Video, “We Buy Gold” store. They passed rows of houses with chain-link fences and patched screen doors and garbage bins out front stuffed with grease-stained pizza boxes.
One more block, Danny silently told himself. One more block and they’d arrive at his first checkpoint of the journey: St. Peter’s Catholic School, better known by its student body as St. Pete’s Cellblock for Horny and/or Satanic Boys. Skip this stop and you’re one step closer to freedom. Skip this stop and you’ll never have to say another “Lord, have mercy” again. From the back of the bus, Danny watched a pair of his classmates in blue polos yank the pull cord and shuffle toward the exit. He tugged his Mets cap low over his forehead, slouched in his seat, and tucked as best he could behind the open pages of the Post being thumbed through by a man in the row in front of him.
“MANE SUSPECT: Lion Escapes from Bronx Zoo!”
An actual lion? Danny thought. Jesus. Guess he wasn’t the only one in New York who was making a break for it that day.
Danny peeked over the paper as the bus rolled to a stop. He watched the kids from his school shuffle down the stairs, failing to notice their missing classmate, the quiet boy with the shadow-black hair who used to live in a house on the South Shore and would get rides to school in his father’s police cruiser but now lived in a squatter’s firetrap on the North Shore and was traveling by city bus. Being invisible had its perks.
He watched them hurry up the path to the dreary brick building where they’d scramble to their seats just in time to beat the morning bell. It’d only be a few minutes until Father O’Dwyer would be reading down the names from his leather binder.
“Russo . . . Present. Sullivan . . . Present. Sweeney . . . Present. Toscano . . . Present. Victorio . . . Victorio? . . . Daniel Victorio?”
An empty desk would mean a detention slip, which meant that tomorrow after school Danny would be forced to copy scripture in perfect cursive. Ephesians 5:15–16—Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.
Danny pressed his hand to the key-scratched window as his school slipped from view like a photo in one of Sister Sarah’s god-awful vacation slideshows. He’d never taken the bus past Cassidy Place before, and he instantly wondered if he’d made a horrible mistake. How many stops were left? Would he even remember what the ferry terminal looked like? His parents had certainly never bothered taking him.
“That orange hunk‑a‑junk?” his father would scoff. “You think I wanna end up being fish food at the bottom of the Hudson?”
“Next stop, Jersey Street,” the driver muffled into the skritchy intercom, barely intelligible. “Jersey Street, next stop.”
Shit, Danny thought, taking in a deep breath, holding it, and plugging his nose. He’d never crossed Jersey Street, but he knew this was a mandatory precaution. If there was a boogeyman on Staten Island—and if there was a boogeyman, he absolutely would live on Staten Island—you could bet your ass he lived in some rat’s‑nest rental on Jersey Street. In the sixties or the eighties or whatever, a homicidal maniac known as Cropsey had escaped from Seaview Hospital, an old tuberculosis sanitarium near Blood Root Valley, and terrorized kids up and down the shore. He’d heard a million stories from his classmates, his older cousins, and, shit you not, his own mother about how Cropsey, a serial killer with a hook for a hand, would hunt children in the night, dragging them back to his crack den on Jersey Street to do God-knows-what. He watched nervously as the Jersey Street passengers boarded the bus, eyes flicking to each one’s hands.
“Ferry terminal, last stop,” the microphone voice bellowed. “Everybody off. Last stop.”
The snoring woman sprang to life with a snap like she hadn’t just caught a nap on a teenage boy’s shoulder for the better part of twenty blocks. Here goes nothing, Danny thought, slinging his JanSport off the floor, the black straps graffitied in white-out pen and silver Sharpie the names of the bands he pretended to listen to: Smashing Pumpkins, Korn, Nine Inch Nails. Immediately, he was swept up into the swarm of commuters making their way through the ferry terminal—pinstripe bankers and nylon receptionists, corduroy college students and Panama-shirt street vendors, line cooks and coat checks, small-claims lawyers and stenographers and guys who were just looking for a job, any job.
He kept checking over his shoulder, half expecting that at any moment a cop would come tap him on the back, one of his father’s friends, maybe, and say, “Nice try, son, but you’d better come with us.” He boarded the hulking rust-orange boat and hurried past the seated ladies making lunch plans and homeless guys on line for the bathroom, waiting to take their morning dumps. He passed the brown wooden seats and green-striped walls and trash cans stuffed with blue cardboard coffee cups.
He walked until there was nowhere else to go, until he’d shoved through the doors at the bow of the boat, the eight a.m. sun blinding white. He stretched out his arms ’til his hands felt the cool metal of the ferry’s railing. He squinted his eyes open and that was when he saw it. The water. The skyline. Lower Manhattan. The Woolworth Building and that one with the green pyramid roof, that pointy one and the one made of blue liquor-bottle glass. And the Twin Towers, lording over it all, jutting into the sky like two middle fingers aimed at every other city in the world.
Even though it was only a few miles from his home, Danny had never been to Manhattan.
“Why go to that shithole when you can get shot in Stapleton for free?” his father would say anytime someone started putting on airs about going into “the City,” which he would then point out was technically the same city they already fuggin’ lived in. “We got everything we need right here.”
Danny pried his gaze away from the skyline and unzipped his backpack, pulling out his banana-yellow Sony Walkman. He fished through the bottom of his bag in search of a tape, but upon retrieving one, he knotted his eyebrows with confusion. “ ‘The Me Nobody Knows,’ ” he read off the tape’s weathered cover. This wasn’t one he’d seen before. It was definitely from his uncle’s collection—he could tell from the initials RR written in Sharpie on the plastic case—but not one he’d ever listened to and certainly not one he remembered putting in his backpack that morning.
“Uncle Richie,” he murmured knowingly under his breath, a part-oath, part-admonition that had become all too common in the Victorio household whenever things went mysteriously missing, or were even more mysteriously discovered. “Well, let’s see what the old guy’s got for me today.”
Danny popped open the case and slid in the cassette, tugging the foam-wrapped headphones over his ears. The tape crackled to life. A voice, young and confident, broke through the static, singing about daybreak and stars fading and the premise of a new beginning.
Danny’s feet vibrated with the jolt of a thousand motors choking to life as the ferry’s props started to churn. The rank smell of diesel filled his nose, crowding out the cloying-sweet stench of New York Harbor. Old dudes who wrote books said the ocean smelled like seaweed and salty air and watermelon rinds, but they’d clearly never been to Staten Island. And what the hell did salt smell like anyway? The harbor smelled like sweat and mud and decaying bodies, probably. But beneath all that, something else hung in the air that morning—a hint of purpose, like the sharp tang of arrogance that comes with having somewhere important to be. And this morning, for the first morning in a long time, Danny did have somewhere important to be. Once they docked in Manhattan, he would take the uptown-bound 1/9 subway train to a place called Lincoln Center, where he had an appointment to audition for the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Goddamned Performing Arts.
Light sings all over the world.
Light sings . . .
