Dance with Me

Twinkle, twinkle little star,
she thought. 
How I
wonder … what I am.
“Kasey!” Jack’s voice startled her out of her trance. “Look over there!”
Kasey sat up and looked at the brightly lit kiddie restaurant across the
street, Circus Baby’s Pizza World. A woman and two young children were
standing outside its red door. The woman was fumbling with her purse.
“Let’s go,” Jack whispered.
Kasey stood up and casually crossed the street with Jack, ducking into
the alley next to Circus Baby’s, close enough that she could hear the little
girl chattering to her mother.
“I think Circus Baby is pretty!” the little brown-haired girl said. She was
wearing a T-shirt decorated with Circus Baby’s Pizza World’s creepy-
looking mascots.
“She is pretty,” the mother said, looking a little dazed, probably because
she had spent too much time surrounded by the bright lights and loud noises
of the kiddie pizza emporium.
“Can I wear pigtails like Circus Baby?” the little girl asked, pulling two
handfuls of her hair up into bunches. She couldn’t be much older than three,
Kasey thought. Four, at the oldest.
“Sure you can,” the mother said. “Hold your brother’s hand while I find
my car keys.”
“Her hands are all sticky from candy,” the boy complained. He was early
elementary school age. Maybe seven.
“Mommy, I’m so sleepy,” the little girl said. “Can you carry my goody
bag?” She held up a little plastic bag with the name of the restaurant printed
on it.
The mother had found her keys. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll just put it here in
my purse.”
“Can you carry me? I’m too sleepy to walk.”

---

The mother smiled. “Okay, come here, big girl.” Her purse dangled from
her left forearm while she leaned over to pick up her daughter.
“Now!” Jack barked into Kasey’s ear.
Kasey pulled the ski mask over her face and dashed out from her hiding
place in the alley. She ran past the mother and grabbed her purse with a
swift, sure motion. She kept running as the woman yelled “Hey!” and the
little girl screamed.
As Kasey ran, she heard the little boy say, “I’ll catch the bad guy,
Mommy!”
“No,” the mother said firmly. “You stay here.”
If they said anything else, Kasey didn’t stick around to hear it. Kasey
knew she was fast, and she knew there was no way the mother could catch
her on foot, not with two little kids on her hands.
After Kasey had put some distance between herself and the crime scene,
she took off the ski mask and stuck it in her jacket pocket. She slowed to a
walk and carried the purse casually, as if it belonged to her. And now, she
supposed, it did.
She met the guys back at home, or at what passed for home. Kasey and
Jack and AJ stayed in an abandoned warehouse. There was no electricity—
they had to make do with flashlights and camping lanterns. But there was a
good roof, and the building was well insulated, which made it warmer than
being outside. They slept in sleeping bags and heated food on a little two-
burner cook stove, the kind people used on camping trips. Actually, living
in the warehouse was a kind of indoor camping. That was one way to see it,
Kasey thought.
She sat on one of the wooden crates they used as chairs, holding the
stolen purse in her lap.
“How much did we get?” Jack asked, leaning over her shoulder. He was
sharp-nosed and twitchy, like a rat.
“I like how you say ‘we’ even though it was me who took all the risks,”
Kasey said, unzipping the purse.
“That’s the code of the Thieves’ Den,” AJ said, sitting on the crate next
to her. He was big and bulky, the muscle of the group. “We share
everything.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “It’s like how coaches say there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’
Except it’s there’s no ‘I’ in ‘thief.’ ”

---

“Yeah, but actually there is an ‘I’ in ‘thief,’ ” Kasey said, laughing. She
pushed her long braids out of her face and peeked inside the purse. The first
thing she pulled out was the little girl’s goody bag. No wonder the kid had
screamed. She didn’t want to lose all the candy and plastic junk she had
“won” at the pizza place. Kasey stuffed the goody bag in her jacket pocket
and then found what they were all waiting for: the woman’s wallet.
“How much?” Jack said. He was trembling with anticipation.
“Hold your horses,” Kasey said, unfolding the wallet and taking out all
the bills. She counted. “It looks like … eighty-seven dollars.” It wasn’t
great, but it wasn’t terrible. People hardly ever carried cash anymore.
“What about cards?” AJ asked.
“I’m looking.” She glanced briefly at the woman’s driver’s license, then
looked away. She always felt bad when she thought of the victim as having
a face and a name, of them having to wait in line at the DMV for a new
license. She pulled out the plastic cards. “One gas credit card, one general
credit card.”
The gas card was of limited use since they didn’t have a car. Still, they
could use it in gas station food marts. And they could definitely get some
use out of the credit card before they had to ditch it. Kasey badly needed
some socks and a new pair of boots. The ones she was wearing were
battered and held together with duct tape, so her feet hurt all the time.
“We’ll try out the cards tomorrow,” Jack said. “In the meantime, eighty-
seven dollars split three ways is”—he made a big show of doing the math,
“writing” in the air like he was solving a problem on the board at school
—“Twenty-nine dollars each. I’ll take twenty of that now, Miss Kasey. I’m
gonna go out and see how much a person can party on twenty bucks. You
two coming with me?”
“I will,” AJ said. “Gimme a twenty, too, Kasey.” He held out his hand.
“I think I’ll stay here,” Kasey said. She wasn’t a partier like Jack and AJ.
Her mother had partied a lot, and Kasey had grown up knowing that her
mom’s tendency to blow through all her money in one carefree night meant
they had to have to live with the consequences until her next paycheck.
“Why?” Jack asked. “That’s no fun.”
“I’m tired.” Kasey put the wallet back into the stolen purse. “I was the
one who did all the running, remember?”
After the guys had gone out, Kasey lay on top of her sleeping bag and
dug through the plastic sack from Circus Baby’s Pizza World. She pulled

---

out a pair of cardboard glasses with flimsy plastic lenses. The cardboard
was decorated with a picture of some kind of weird robot ballerina. Kasey
put the glasses on briefly, but they made her feel strangely dizzy. And if
there was something she was supposed to be seeing, it was too dark to see
it. She put them in her jacket pocket for later.
Everything else in the bag was candy. Kasey and her fellow thieves ate
to survive. They had cheap fast-food burgers when they had a little money,
canned beef stew or ravioli shoplifted from convenience stores when they
were broke. It had been a long time since Kasey had eaten a piece of candy.
She found a red lollipop, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth,
enjoying the sweet artificial-cherry flavor and feeling like a little kid again.
A little kid. She had robbed a little kid. A saying came into Kasey’s
head: