A Brief Author's Note: Hey there! I won't take too much of your time; I just wanted to let you know something quick: This story comes to me in sporadic pieces. So far, it has neither an extended plot nor a theme. It doesn't even really have a genre yet, since I don't know what the main character will be doing yet. I wrote two chapters (this chapter and the first) and am now waiting (impatiently) for my muse to strike again. Basically, I know how the story starts and how it ends, but nothing in between. So, thanks for looking! I anticipate the second real chapter to be up by the end of the month. I hope you like it :) I really do too.

Cassidy

Prologue

By the time he was twelve years old, Cassidy Kingsley had already made two unpopular decisions. The first was that he wanted to live as far away, literally and metaphorically, from his birthplace as possible. The second was that he wanted to be a policeman when he grew up.

Cassidy lived with his mother and two sisters on a fifth story walk-up in the inner ring of Saint Paul, Minnesota. His mother worked at the local Burger King fifty-two hours a week, and his oldest sister, Mary, had recently dropped out of high school to join her. Two year old Angie mostly sat in her high chair and cried all day, missing her mother. She sounded like a cat being stepped on, and Cassidy took to wearing earplugs whenever he was home.

St. Paul was known for two things: Its churches and its crime. Cassidy rarely saw evidence of the first, but was intimately familiar with the latter. The neighborhood they lived in was a mess. Gang activity was low, but break-ins were common, as were muggings and rape. Cassidy could already recall by age twelve three times he’d come home from school to see the door already open.

Like most kids on his block, Cassidy was a little tougher than people expected him to be at that age. He never cried, and he never begged. As he grew up, his expression became steadily stonier; he talked less to his classmates than to the local beggar dog. He rarely voiced his dearest ambition – to become a policeman – because of how the first people to hear it had reacted.

His mother had just laughed, peeling off her Burger King uniform in the darkness of her room. He stood in the hallway, clenching his fists as she carried on. Finally, she leaned her head out the door and looked at him.

“Babe, they don’t take your kind of kid in the damn police force.”

He’d told his math teacher.

“The police? With all their nosing around and minding our business for us, you still want to join them? You won’t understand this until you’re older, but can you say ‘Stockholm Syndrome’?”

His best friend at the time had hit him in the jaw. His father had been taken in by a policeman four years ago for armed robbery. Cassidy had remained unswayed. He lay on the pavement, blood dripping from his now-vacant molar cavity, watching as the other boy walked out of his life forever. He’d found somewhere else to sit at lunch the next day.

So Cassidy made his decision. He made it sitting at the plastic kitchen table, earplugs faithfully blocking the insane catlike calls of his two-year-old sister, fingering the darkening bruise on his jaw with one hand and spreading peanut butter methodically on a piece of bread with the other.

He was going to be a policeman when he grew up. He had to get out of this place.