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“The crying!” Ilya says, his voice deadly serious, his little eyebrows pulling together in a fierce line. “Bad guys are bullies. When they hit you, they’re looking for the tears. If you scream, they win the game. If you cry, they get the happy prize. So you lock it inside.”
He is holding my face in a downpour, teaching me how to survive torture like he knows all about it.
“You just sit there,” Ilya orders, tapping my cheek with his index finger. “You make your face like a rock. You wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“For me!”
He grins, the rain running directly into his mouth.
“When I’m big, I’m gonna be a prince,” he declares proudly. “A giant prince with a gold sword and a huge castle with a million guards. And a prince needs a knight to kill the monsters. You’re going to be my knight.”
“I’m twelve.”
“Knights start when they’re twelve! That’s in the history books!” He pokes my chest hard. “So you have to be tough. You can’t let the bad guys break you, because I need a knight who’s whole. If you’re broken, who’s gonna carry my gold sword?”
Something deep inside my chest, something that has been cracked and bleeding since the day my father sold me, snaps into a brand-new shape.
“Your knight,” I repeat.
“My knight!” he beams. “And I don’t ever leave my people behind. That’s a prince rule. Number one rule in the whole book.”
He stands on his tiptoes, leans up, and presses a sticky kiss directly to the tip of my nose.
“Be strong,” he whispers. “Don’t let them have the prize. I’m coming to get you.”
He steps back and holds out his right hand, his smallest finger extended toward me through the rain.
“Pinky promise. You can’t break it. If you break a pinky promise, ten thousand needles poke your tongue.”
I hook my little finger around his.
“Ilya!” A voice booms down the avenue.
“ILYA! Where the hell are you?”
Ilya flinches, looking over his shoulder toward the street corner.
“Ugh. The pipihead found me.” He turns back to me, squeezing my pinky one last time. “Remember! You’re mine! You’re my knight! Don’t let them win!”
He lets go, spins on his heels, and takes off sprinting down the sidewalk, splashing through puddles and shouting at the top of his lungs:
“I WASN’T SNEAKING OUT, I WAS RESCUING A CITIZEN!”
I watch his shorts disappear around the brick corner.
I sit on the low wall for twenty minutes as the rain eventually slows to a miserable drizzle.
I look down at my lap.
The crumpled bag of raspberry candy is still in my left hand. When they drag me back that evening and the belt cracks against my skin, I don’t make a sound.
I bite the inside of my cheek until it bleeds. I keep my face like iron.
I don’t give them the prize.
I will wait for my prince.
