Kiss and Tell by Fern Michaels Read Free Book Online

wish for. We had rules, we had school, and we had playtimes. And books, of course. The three of us were readers, and to this day, Tressie and I read constantly. Mostly trash, I’m sorry to say. Billy liked to read about the world, about government, how to build things, educational things. He was obsessed even back then with money and what a person could do if they were wealthy. He promised Tressie and me that someday we’d live in mansions with swimming pools and have so much money that we wouldn’t know what to do with it all. Of course, we didn’t really believe him, but it was fun to pretend, and Billy could weave the most exciting stories about what our lives would be like in the future. We wanted to believe, and maybe we did for a while.
    â€œSomehow or other the three of us banded together. We were so tuned in to one another we knew what the other was thinking before they could give voice to the thought.
    â€œBilly was two years older than I and four years older than Tressie, so that made him our leader if you will. He looked out for us and made sure none of the other kids bullied us or anything like that. Not that they did, but he still took care of us; he was our protector in every sense of the word. We felt safe with him, we really did. We seemed to know instinctively that as long as we were with him, nothing bad was going to happen to us.
    â€œJust before Billy’s eighteenth birthday, he said he was going to leave and strike out on his own. He asked me to go with him. He had no intention of taking Tressie. I suppose that was because she was just thirteen and . . . she wasn’t . . . quick, if you know what I mean. I wanted to go with him, but not without Tressie, and he agreed to take the two of us. We left after breakfast on the day before he turned eighteen. We didn’t have much to take with us, just a few clothes, our rosaries, and our catechism books. Billy left his behind, but Tressie and I took ours. Billy stole the money Sister Helen had gotten from the bank to pay the workmen, and that’s all we had. It was the first time that any of us had ever held any money in our hands.
    â€œWe lived wherever we could, washed up in gas-station rest-rooms. It wasn’t much of a life, and Tressie and I wanted to go back, but then Billy got the idea to try panhandling. We were quite successful ; he was the older brother taking care of his two little sisters. People gave generously. We moved around a lot so no one would turn us in to the authorities. We lived in a number of different cities as we slowly worked our way south and east toward New York City.
    â€œEventually, we found a ratty apartment in Scranton that had a real bathtub. We thought we had died and gone to heaven. By day we panhandled and by night we were burglars. We broke into businesses, homes, stole whatever we could carry. Then we’d fence it. Billy kept our money, gave us an allowance, and bought us decent clothes. We eventually got a better apartment and learned to cook to save on money. This went on for three years.
    â€œI was eighteen when Billy said he wanted to move to New York since the pickings were better there than in Scranton. When we got there, however, we only stayed in Manhattan long enough to get bus money to take us on to Washington, D.C. Billy said that staying in New York could get us caught and that Tressie would be sent back to the orphanage. Actually, we moved to Virginia and worked, if you want to call it that, in the District. Billy bought us scooters—secondhand, of course—tinkered with them, and that’s how we traveled back and forth.
    â€œThen, a year and a half later, Billy said he’d go ahead of us to New York, get the lay of the land, and make arrangements for Tressie and me to follow. Tressie was of age by then, and he said no one would be looking for us. He left money for us and told us to lie low till he got back. There was a pay phone out on the street, and