Crack. The sound of the lock on the door breaking off split the calm night air like a firecracker on the Fourth of July. We had been surveying this shop for well over a week and we didn’t think that the store owner of the shop we were robbing would wake up from her room in the back just from that little noise. Still, Bill gestured at me with his semi automatic pistol and then at the lock laying on the ground next to my lock cutters. The message was pretty clear. Screw anything up again, Jace, and you’re dead. We slowly crept into the front of the shop and looked around to make sure that everything was as still as Death. Then ‘it’ happened.
‘It’ was a woman, the shop owner of the store we were robbing, around five-foot-three, average build for a woman in her late thirties, and average looks. Apparently she had just gotten up to use the restroom, as she was just finishing turning off the faucet in the bathroom.
“What the hell is going on?” She asked.
She stopped as a barrel, Bill’s barrel, of a semi-automatic pistol was shoved in her face.
“Get everything in the cash register in a bag as fast as you can, NOW!” Bill shouted in her face. She stopped, a little stunned at being so rudely awakened, and then jumped to Bill’s request as she realized how close she was to her demise. She started bustling around behind the counter, opening up drawers, stuffing things in a bag. “Don’t even think about pressing that alarm under the counter. You do, and I’ll put a bullet straight through your head,” Bill snarled.
He was always doing that. Commanding things. Snarling out threats.
This didn’t seem to bother her at all. In fact, I thought I saw a little smirk before she turned around to shove more cash into the bag. No. That’s not possible. It’s too dark, even with the little light in the bathroom on, and my eyes are just playing tricks on me, I thought to myself. How could one smirk in the face of all of this? How could one smirk in the face of Death himself?
“So how much you boys need?” This comment from ‘it’ served to sharpen the ice in Bill’s eyes as he just shook his head and turned away.
“As much as you have,” I responded. “What’s your name?”
“Jace; you don’t talk to the victims!” Bill shouted at me.
She seemed not to care too much about the semi automatic pistol gripped tightly in Bill’s right hand. “Sarah. You’re... Jace, I’m assuming, by what your friend called you; or is that just a fake name?”
“My name’s Jason, but everyone in the orph- everyone just calls me Jace.” She didn’t seem phased by my slip up at all. She just continued to shove things into a bag.

Let me back up a little bit. My full name’s Jason, but everyone just calls me Jace. I don’t know what my last name is. I guess I don’t have one. I was abandoned as a little kid. Child Services said that they had an anonymous tip that there was a child that was abandoned in this rundown shack in the middle of the woods. They said that when they got to the shack, I was wandering all around. They said they couldn’t get me to talk at all. I would just wander. Then they said I just stopped for some reason and went and just sat down on this old, trashy sofa. I was only around three- or four-years old at the time. They could only guess, and I didn’t really care as to what my age was. They said that when I finally stopped wandering around and just sat on the sofa, my eyes were just... still. Like the stillness right before you take your last breath of life. Like the eyes of Death. I was put in a city orphanage, until around my teenage years. Something happened then that made me a ‘hopper’. This was just a term we used to describe those kids that went from foster home, to orphanage, to another foster home, to... nowhere. I just vanished. I wasn’t alone. I had met Bill at my last orphanage. His real name was Nick, but for some reason he liked to be called Bill. I also had her...

I shook my head as I came back to the present. Couldn’t afford to be reminiscing about memories that were better left in Death’s hands. You might end up just like them if you kept thinking about them; that is, you might end up dead. Sarah brought us two bags; one full of money. The other full of food. I looked at her with quickly covered surprise. I didn’t cover it quickly enough since she caught my look and smirked as she turned away. “What’s in the second bag?” Bill demanded.
“Food. You look like you could use it more than me,” Sarah replied. Bill only shouldered both bags and grunted as a response.
“Thank you,” I said to Sarah.
“Don’t mention it. I really hope you can have a better life. I used to be a foster kid too.”
“I hope my life turns out better,” I mumbled as I started to turn away.
“It will. Trust me.” Then Sarah gave me a full on smile. It reminded me so much of ‘her’. That smile killed me...

Her name was Sydney. I met her at my penultimate orphanage; I think it was called Colorado City Orphanage. It was my seventh day there, and this one guy, Kit who thought he owned everyone else, had just noticed our newest member. She was a girl of about my age, whatever that was, and had long, ginger-colored hair. Her eyes were some of the most amazing hazel-green eyes I’ve ever seen. We had a name for the girls that were in the orphanage, especially the really pretty ones; ‘firecracker’, which, in this case, fit pretty well with her hair and all. It wasn’t all this that captured my attention, though. It was that godforsaken smile that split her lips. I hated it. How could anyone in our situation ever smile. I was more of a ‘glass half empty’ kind of guy. Well, anyway, Kit walked over to her with this look in his eyes. It was this greedy look that he got with anyone new, especially the new girls. I had found this out the hard way and was only just starting to be able to sit down again without tearing open the scabs between-

Well, there’s no need to remember those times I thought to myself as Bill and I rode our bikes back to the vacant apartment complex we called home. Most of everything, like these bikes we were on, were either found as scrap or stolen. Other than the barely-used medicine bottles in the apartment we had claimed as our own, there wasn’t really much of anything to call ‘possessions’. A nomad probably lived better than us, I sometimes thought to myself. Everything we had was never new. Even the medicine bottles were a quarter of the way empty. I chuckled to myself at that thought as Bill and I strode into “our apartment”. She would have looked at the bottles and said they were three quarters of the way full. I went to my side where I kept the now half empty bottle of Scotch that I had stolen last week, as Bill shrugged off the two bags. I took a swig of Scotch, thinking how much I resented my life. How much I hated everything that defined me. I just wished it would all end. I took another swig as my mind started going back in time to those disgusting memories.

My second week at Colorado City Orphanage I finally talked to Sydney. It was kind of awkward at first. The whole week before I had shunned her somewhat like the plague. I mean, how could someone with the life that we had, have such a... bright and pure smile on their face all the time. It was unnatural.
It was an accident really. I was walking by Kit’s meal table, when he decided that he wanted dinner and a show. He stuck out his right foot, right as I passed him, and I went sprawling on the floor. My salad went all over my shirt, my hair, everywhere. He sat there, a challenge in his eyes and in his smirk. It was that smirk that almost made me want to get up and beat the ---- out of him. I knew that would probably never happen, though.
The only things similar between us were our untidy jet-black hair. Other than that, we were complete opposites. Whereas I was at the bottom of the food chain, skinny and weak, Kit was at the top. Big for someone who had been living in an orphanage, he weighed almost one and a half times more than me. His eyes, unlike my clear blue eyes, were a dead gray. Literally. They were gray. Dead and lifeless, like his heart.
After laying there and taking that humiliation for a little bit, I got up and scrambled away as dignified as I could with salad sticking to the front of my shirt. I got as far as the room two doors down from me as I went to change my shirt, before I heard the quiet sobbing. I was wondering who could be more upset than me at a time like this, especially since the room two doors down from mine was supposed to be vacant. I peeked in quickly, and my stomach did a little flip the moment I had taken a peek. I had wondered which room Sydney was going to be staying in, and I got my answer when I saw her on the bed quietly sobbing into her pillow. I knocked on her door, letting myself in. “What’re you crying about,” I asked, a little harsher than I had wanted it to sound. I was still pissed off at Kit. She hurriedly wiped her eyes with a grimace, and quickly tried to hide her face behind her hair. She took a few deep breaths, before she smoothed her hair back exposing her ever present smile. There was something new there, though. A poorly taken care of black eye. “What happened to your eye,” I asked her. She chose to ignore both of my questions, and instead asked, “What’s that in your hair?” S***. I thought I had gotten all of the salad off of my shirt and out of my hair. As I quickly fumbled to try and brush whatever sediments of salad still clung to my hair, I caught her smirking at my motions. It suddenly dawned on me, when I didn’t feel anything in my hair. “Just kidding,” she said with a little tinkle of a laugh. “There’s only dressing still in your hair, but you’ve got it all out now.”
“Thanks,” I replied in a depressed and angry voice. “What happened to your eye, anyways?”
“I tripped my first day coming into the room, and my eye smacked the door frame. What happened to you,” Sydney asked me.
“Nothing, I just heard that salad dressing helps moisturize your scalp. It’s something new that I’m trying,” I stated, sarcastically. This drew out the opposite effect of what I was hoping. I was wishing that she would scowl at me, or anything along those lines, but instead she laughed out loud. Not just a little giggle, but a full on laugh.
“Well, I hope it works,” Sydney responded, with sincerity lacing her every word, just as sarcasm had dripped from my previous statement.
“Really, Kit just tripped me up in the cafeteria,” I responded. I don’t know why, but I just felt like being open with her. I thought I had said something terrible, pronouncing her death sentence, the way she stiffened up at my words. I quickly went over what I said in my mind to see what could have offended her. The only thing I could think of was Kit’s name. I knew he was always... overbearing with the new kids, especially the girls. This made me even more pissed off at Kit. “Hey, what’s wrong? Where’d your smile just go,” I asked her, trying to lighten the mood. She took a little bit to respond, but when she did it was with her habitual smile. “Who’s Kit,” Sydney asked, a little hesitantly.
“Big -------. Black hair. Gray eyes. You can’t miss him,” I responded. Her smile became even brighter, though her next words were icy as Death’s cold fingers around your heart.
“Kit can go die in a ------- hole, for the love of God,” Sydney stated, even her voice devoid of all life, straight and monotonous. Just like her ginger hair. Her beautiful ginger colored hair. For some reason I couldn’t help but think of running my fingers through her hair. Her long, ginger, beautiful hai-
Luckily the blow from Kit to the back of my head had knocked me out just then. I didn’t want to witness what he did to Sydney. It was his last week in the orphanage before he turned 18. He was looking to have a good time. When I woke up on my last day at the orphanage, Sydney had dragged me into my room; I told you I was pretty skinny. When I had asked her what had happened, she didn’t respond, except to ask how my head was. Her smile never quite reached her eyes as they normally did. I didn’t want to push it. I knew what Kit was like when he was feeling any type of emotion. I had decided that I would just hop to another orphanage that night, and decided to bring Sydney. I couldn’t stand to leave her there, all broken.

Not all fractures are visible, I thought as I took another swig with another handful of pills from the medicine bottle. I chuckled to myself as I saw that it was already half empty, and thought that Sydney would have thought that it was half full. My mind started to wander to the past dregs of the dark corners of my memories. Those memories that shrouded Death from anyone that was dumb enough to look for him.

“Hey. Sydney. Psst,” I whispered, with a light knock on her door. It wasn’t long before the door slowly opened up just a crack. Then Sydney opened it up all the way and pulled me in. She had her usual smile back on her face, the one that actually reached all the way to her eyes. That smile was starting to rub off on me as my heart skipped a little beat seeing it in its rightful place. “Come on. Get your things, I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to,” I said in a rush. Sydney looked at me like I was just a little kid who had just said something funny.
“Why would we go? Where would we go,” was all I got as a response. It wasn’t condescending or anything, but it had its original ‘pep’ to it.
“As to ‘where’ we would go, anywhere and everywhere you would want to go. As for ‘why’, because there’s nothing worth staying here for,” I replied. “Especially after what happened earlier.” This made the corners of her smile slide a little bit down her face, but they were right back up in an instance.
“It wasn’t- What I mean is- It’s not like- At least we have a roof over our heads, and food here.” How could someone who had been... taken advantage of... stay so optimistic, I remember thinking.
“So you don’t want to come,” I asked Sydney. “Why is it that you have to be so optimistic all of the time?” She just stared at me a little blankly, with defeat in her eyes. That was a new element that I hadn’t seen before in them. Kit had broken her. It may not have shown on the outside, but looking into her eyes that night, I could tell. So that was it. I turned and walked out and never looked back. The door creaked shut as I heard a little mumbled, “Optimism is the only way to change life; the only way to defeat the sorrow, the sadness inside.” Death had already shattered the will of another one of his victims.

~

I hopped around city street to city street for a little bit, before I ended up in my last orphanage. I don’t remember the name of it. I didn’t really care too much what the name of it was. After being in so many already I really didn’t give a s*** anymore. That’s where I met Bill. He was just another ‘Kit’ and it really ate at my mind that I had to grovel around under his feet. He at least wasn’t like Kit, in that he didn’t walk around like he owned everyone. I started to like him more and more as my mind slowly became desensitized, as I started on the alcohol and drugs that he was always stealing and sharing with the rest of us. Pretty soon he decided he liked it more in the open. I was getting tired of the orphanage and decided to hop around with him. We started living the life of the thief. We, partners to Death. We asked only that Death repay us with money and the other necessities of life. No one can cheat Death.

~

I chuckled as the last pill in the medicine bottle was slowly washed down with the last throw of Scotch. For some reason I couldn’t get Sydney off my mind. Not because she was good looking or anything; trust me, she was. It was just that ------- smile she always wore around. I had thought about her a lot after I left Colorado City Orphanage, but my memories of her slowly got sequestered to the back of my mind. The part of my mind where Death lurked, biding his time. The last time I thought of Sydney was- ----, I couldn’t remember.
I was still chuckling to myself, as my eyes started to close in sleep. No. This was different. I could still see everything. Everything was just getting cloudier. Mistier. Darker. My eyes were wide open; still. Like the stillness of Death. My eyes had become windows, as Death’s breath fogged them over with the chill of a deep winter. I was starting to feel so cold. Like I was outside naked, bare --- during a snowstorm. It felt like I was trying to breathe through a snow flurry. Why was I naked? Finally. Death wrapped its blanket around me. Tucked me in so tightly that it was almost uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable.
Death had come to collect his dues.
I don’t know why, but I started to laugh at an inside joke. What was the joke? Oh, yeah. That ------- smile. It was funny, I could still see Sydney’s smile as I had this feeling like I was floating outside of my skin, out from under Death’s suffocating blanket. I could look down on myself. What was that noise?
“What do you want,” I mumbled to Bill as he kept calling my name and shaking me. Couldn’t he see I was having such a swell time. Even I could see my face. I was smiling under all the white froth bubbling around my lips. All that white froth. It looked like fresh snow. I laughed even harder at this. ----. That smile killed me. It really just-