Grudgeless. Chapter 1

This is a first draft, so even though I've put a lot of work into it, it is NOT a product and is just a written work that I'm exploring. I hope you enjoy it. (This isn't well written, either. I put it up around midnight. My apologies.)

"Grudgeless" is written about a fifteen year old girl who lived in Detroit, MI. She was the girlfriend of a notorious gang leader, until she screwed up. Angered by her inability to perform like he expects, her boyfriend turns her in to the police for her "transgressions". When forced to choose between a life sentence and a rehabilitation camp for troubled teens, she chooses the latter, only hoping to escape into the real world.

While at La Casa De La Sanacion, she realizes something different about this place. These delinquents have turned around. They also know a secret that she doesn't. They're living on a touch-portal. Old objects in the hills and around the house can take you back in time, transporting you as far back as the object's birth. What they do with this is completely up to them, but it has its pitfalls. Where do you draw the line on when you stay back, and when you go, and how do you know when one more is more than enough?

Chapter one, the introduction. 

                   CLAWS

         “TIFF!” Darcy yelled as she ran around the dark corner, her jacket flapping angrily underneath her arms as it caught the wind. “Tiff, you have to run!”
         In a split second Tiffany took the advice and sprinted down the alley in the cold November wind, sloshing through slush gathered in puddles on the bricks. She jumped over strewn wooden boxes and pulled random things down after her to block the only way to follow her. The police were after her, it was one in the morning, her boyfriend Todd was on the other end of a drug shipment, and there was nowhere for her to go unless she wanted to lead the police directly to the den.
         “Police!” men behind her yelled out. “Police! Stop running!” She heard their footsteps behind her in a run, and she knew that she was going to have to do the exact thing she had always been told not to. She was going back to the den. Darcy was several yards in front of her, running on her spindly long legs. She too seemed to be heading back toward the den, and she knew there was no other place for her to go. Unless…
         She waited until they crossed the main road, where she bolted out into the middle of the street. Cars whizzed past her and she kept her feet under control to keep from being hit. Even at one in the morning in Detroit, Michigan, there were still people driving in large amounts. She turned around to look through her blonde hair after she finished crossing the street, her heart pounding loudly in her chest from both the adrenaline and the fact that she had almost just become a stain on the front of someone’s Buick. They didn’t stop and neither did she, as she took a sharp turn onto a street she knew oh too well.
         The police never learned, but Tiffany always went to the same spot, although the reaching would be different, she always ended up going to her childhood home, where she, her mother, and her sisters used to live before they were separated. Before the police could follow her around the turn, Tiff reached the metal rail that covered a kind of tunnel which was dug down and led to a window, so that the people who were working in the basement would have some kind of light. She swung her legs over, and landed as quietly as she could six feet below the sidewalk’s edge.
         The feet pounded by, and she waited for them to pass before pulling out her phone.
         Todd, she texted quickly with her chilled fingers. Got chased. Am not waiting near the Doorway anymore. I’ll b droppin by the den ASAP. –Tiff She leaned against the window behind her for a second before standing up and sliding her phone back into her jeans pocket. She pulled the leather jacket taut around her, feeling out the lump on her back, and found the hood of the jacket underneath the first before she readjusted her waistband and grabbed the freezing iron bars. Her manicured nails pressed into her palms as she pulled herself up, climbing over it and stepping across to the other side. She did a double take to make sure nobody had seen her, and was relieved when she realized the only one who had was Crazy Eddy and Crazy Eddy didn’t tell on anybody. He just sat there and smiled at her dopily, waving in an absentminded way. She waved back before popping her hood up over her long corn silk hair and shoving her hands into her jacket pockets. She clung to the shadows almost like a magnet, and made her way back to the den, tracing back alleys and praying that she wouldn’t bump into the cops looking for her.
         Todd was going to be so upset. The thought ran through her mind multiple times as she trudged in the freezing air. She huffed out once and saw the cloud in front of her before she walked into it. Her face felt tingly and stiff, but it didn’t matter. Soon she would be back in the den, and the heat of Todd’s anger would probably melt away any cold that she could have possibly been feeling.
         Tiffany had been dating Todd for over a year now. Although everyone referred to him as Mince, he would always be Todd to her. Although he was eighteen compared to her fifteen, it didn’t matter too much in comparison; that was the least of their crimes. Two months ago, she had killed someone under Todd’s orders, and a month before that, they’d shot up a block of a rival gang. She was the only white one in the group, but she may as well have been one of them. Spray painting “Ugly White Plight” on her private school’s lockers may as well have dyed her skin permanently. That’s how the other girls felt it.
         In only ten minutes she was there. She climbed in the punched out window of the abandoned house on Third Street and flew down the stairs into the basement, where she came upon the familiar locked door. She pulled a necklace up from around her neck and plugged the key attachment into the rusty old thing, hearing it pop open with a rusty rub as she slipped it off and relocked it behind her through the mail slot. She stepped down the hallway, her sneakers silent as she came to a group of young men sitting in front of her. Darcy was already there, her black hair hanging across her eyes, the trademark sign of hers that she had been crying.
         “So?” Todd said coldly.
         “I have a lot of explaining to do, huh?” Tiff said as she gave him a slight smile.
         “Damn straight,” he uttered, his angry expression never changing.
         “We were there and the cops showed up. There was nothing we could do. Is it really a genius idea to be caught packing this kind of heat and this much heroin?” Tiff stripped off her leather jacket and pulled off the hoodie, reaching behind her back and pulling out an automatic weapon. She then went into her bundled up hoodie on the floor and pulled out several large water bottles of liquid heroin. “I didn’t want to get locked up.”
         “Of course Whitey didn’t want to get locked up,” said an infuriated boy named Vince from the back of the room. “Whitey doesn’t ever want to get in trouble.” He seemed to snarl at her.
         “Watch it. I’m yelling at her,” Todd said. That immediately worried her. Usually, Todd didn’t stand for Vince’s rough talk to her, especially about race. But now it didn’t seem to matter.
         “So because you didn’t want to spend time in jail, you deprived me of over half of a million dollars? Is that how it is?”
         Tiff didn’t look up, but stared directly at her shoes, tracing the laces with her eyes.
         “Well?” Todd said with an angry scowl.
         “I’m sorry, Todd,” she said, the apology oozing off of her voice.
         “Don’t call me Todd,” he spat back. “Do you not understand how mad I am?! We lost two very important clients! All because you’re afraid of some police! You’re a stupid child. Why’d you even join us? We trusted you ONCE with something important, and you BLEW IT! Why can’t you just go back to live with your whore family?! YOU DON’T BELONG WITH US! All you’ve ever done is screwed everything else up!” He was standing up, yelling over her where she sat. His eyes were wide and he was breathing hard, and she knew that they were done. She had no reason to be respectful anymore, so she blew up back at him, her hands firmly on her hips and a loud yell coming from deep inside her.
         “That’s not what you said when you took me with you to kill four people two months ago! That’s not what you said when we were making out on that couch two nights ago! I joined you because you asked me to! YOU asked ME! Don’t you get that you idiot!? My ‘whore family’ is locked up because I decided to choose you over them. I’m sorry I ever did. I’m done.” With those words, Tiff’s voice quieted down. “I’ll get my stuff and move out of your apartment. I’ll find someplace else to go.”
         “Where else do you have? Do you think anybody else wants someone like you?”
         “I have my Social Services lady, Wright or whatever. It’s still registered that I live with my aunt even though she died in the last shooting. I still go to that God forsaken private school. I’ll do what I please.”
         “Then get out of my sight,” said the boy who had once gone by Todd to her. “And take this. Look out for yourself now, Tiff, because we sure as hell aren’t anymore.” He tossed her a loaded pistol. He knew where she had to cross to get home, and truthfully, it wasn’t very pretty.
         Vince, MK, Darcy, and Ripper escorted her out after she scooped her jackets from the ground and put them on, walking her to the front door. All of them were quiet, because they knew how little it had taken. Darcy had run also, but she hadn’t been holding the goods. She looked at her friend, the muscular black girl with the cropped black hair and the dark eyes that had little pools of black mascara gathered on her cheeks under them. Tiff knew that if it had been Darcy with the gun and the drugs, it would be she walking her friend out. Everyone around her besides Vince seemed saddened as they walked up the stairs and to the door. They unbolted it and Tiff turned to them.
         “G’bye Tiff,” Darcy said as she wrapped her into a hug. “Remember that if somebody tries to get you on the way home, just shoot them. Shoot them really fast and don’t think twice about it.”
         “Okay,” she said, the tears now flowing.
         MK was next, fist bumping her and then flashing the gang sign, the two fingers crossed on top of a fist. She flashed it back and smiled. “Don’t get shot up by no Bloods now,” he said. “Once a Claw, always a Claw.” She smiled thankfully at him, and looked to Vince.
         Vince stood next to them, rolling his eyes. “Just leave,” he said.
         “Not before she says goodbye to me,” Ripper said. He was almost seven feet tall, and he pulled Tiff right into his torso. “Goodbye kid,” he said unhappily. “Pull the hammer and then the trigger.”
         “Duh,” she said as she turned around. She stepped out into the cold and began her trudge across town.
                             ©
         The apartment where she was supposed to live according to the record was two miles away from the gang’s den. That wasn’t a long distance, except for the fact that it was smack in the middle of Blood territory. She was the only white girl who’d ever lived in that neighborhood, and everyone knew that she was a Claw. That is, that she’d been a Claw. The trudging walk over wasn’t all that scary, since she kept her gun outside of her jacket and ready to fire.
         She kept her path underneath the streetlights, until she came to a patch where there was no light whatsoever. The moon shone down on the ground and reflected off of the frozen, icy sludge on the ground. Tiff kept her head up, scanning the hiding holes she knew that the Bloods would use. Unlike the Claws who actually had some class, the Bloods would hide and then attack you. As soon as she reached her porch, she let down her guard. She took the steps up to the door and turned the knob, before she was suddenly jerked back by her hood. She spun around quickly and was immediately faced by a man in his twenties. She didn’t even have to ask.
         Tiff cranked back her hammer and fired three steady shots, before tossing the gun down onto his chest and rushing up the stairs then into her deceased Aunt’s apartment. She slammed it behind her and went to her bed, where all of her things from before her gangster life had been. The room was painted the same faded blue, and her clothing from when she had been poor and Todd, Mince, hadn’t bought her nice clothing. She stripped out of the designer clothes she had on and went to the shower, checking and praying that the water hadn’t been shut off.
         She forced the knob up and almost could have punched the faucet when not even a drip came out. But she wouldn’t. She wasn’t a baby like Todd had said she was, and now she had to prove it. Heck, she’d just killed another man. He was lying outside of the doorstep with Todd’s gun in his lap. Tomorrow would be an interesting morning. She slid into the cottony, cheap pajamas she had used constantly before she’d been Todd’s girl and climbed into her bed. The entire apartment was still warmed by the heating of the other apartment complexes, and she for once felt useless as she buried her face into her pillow. What was she going to do now? She had no earthly idea anymore. Todd had always told her what to do.
         She missed him.