Victory Storm "Love Hurricane"

“You must report it to authorities, make an injunction and send him behind bars” the young girl got excited, repeating in detail the words she had heard on TV the night before.

“Forget about watching Law&Order with me next time” her mother guessed, before moving closer to the boy. “You must be Lucas, mustn’t you? My name is Elizabeth Madis and I’m Kira’s mother.”

Lucas nodded shyly before that smiling woman, whose green eyes were sweet and brave. Kira was right: she had the same eyes as her mother, but they didn’t look like each other in anything else. Kira’s straight, jet black hair where in contrast with her mother’s caramel and wavy ones.

“Kira says that your dad hit you. Is it true?” she asked him gently.

“Yes, it’s true. His cheek was all red” Kira intruded, getting a dirty look from her mother.

“It happens” Lucas whispered uneasy. He couldn’t even think about what his father would say if he got to know about that conversation.

“I understand. Where is he now?”

“At home. He was angry.”

“What about your mother?”

Lucas took several moments before answering. “She isn’t here anymore.”

“I’m so sorry, darling” the woman immediately comforted him, caressing his face. “Can you remember your home address? If you want, we’ll take you there. My car is parked outside the gate.”

Lucas smiled grateful. Someone had come to rescue him.

He stared at that woman again: she looked like an angel to him.

“Your rucksack must be very heavy, Lucas. Give it to me, so I’ll put it on the back seat” the woman offered.

The young boy turned and Elisabeth made the rucksack slip down his shoulders, but in so doing, she also pulled his jacket and t-shirt up.

“Oh, your rucksack is caught in your clothes. Wait, I’ll set you free” Elizabeth lied and bent to the boy, who was unaware of having just uncovered a long violet mark, running from one hip to the other. The mark of the lash he had got three days before.

Elizabeth's narrow eyes and her tightened and white lips made Kira draw back, since she knew that look usually foretold some terrible scolding, but when her mother got up, she was smiling again unexpectedly, making her daughter feel bewildered.

“Let’s go home, but what about having a good ice-cream or a slice of cake at Chocoly’s first?” the woman exclaimed cheerfully, making Kira jump with joy, because she had got to known that place on the day of their arrival, when her mother had bought her the biggest ice-cream in the world, full of candies and biscuits.

Lucas knew that place too, but he had never got inside.

When they got to the car, Elizabeth immediately drove to that place, where she let the two children throw themselves on the sweets, getting drunk of candies, biscuits, muffins and cream, while she withdrew in the most secluded place in the café, to make some urgent calls about what she had just seen on the boy’s back.

Lucas ate like a horse under the careful and happy eyes of the woman, who accused him of being too short and thin for his age.

When the time to go home came, Lucas got into the car reluctantly and gave his address to Elizabeth, who immediately set the navigator up, because she couldn’t master Princeton’s streets very well yet.

“Did your father want you to walk eight kilometers?” Elizabeth burst out nervously when she looked at the navigator’s directions.

Lucas kept silent, wondering if eight kilometers were a long way.

Luckily Kira was able to entertain him, so their trip home passed by cheerfully.

Unfortunately, however, as soon as his father’s huge villa turned out outside the car window, every sign of smile disappeared from Lucas’s face.

When the gate got opened, the child started trembling, wondering how his father would react if he knew what he had done.

“Children, wait for me here!” Elizabeth ordered, getting out of the car and walking to the front door which had just been thrown open, to let Darren Scott's powerful shape come out.

“Mr. Scott, I suppose.”

“I am. Who are you?”

“My name is Elizabeth Madis. I found your son alone at school, at the end of lessons. I caught Lucas and brought him home.”

“Well, now just go away.”

“No, I’m not!”

“You aren’t? What do you want? Money? I haven’t asked you to bring him home! He could walk here, as far as I’m concerned!”

“Don’t you feel ashamed? It’s almost eight kilometers! How could you force him to walk such a long way and what’s more, all alone!”

“And who are you to tell me what I can or can’t do to my son?”

“I’m a social worker and I’ll warn you, there are sufficient grounds to take your son’s custody away from you once and for all: child neglect, physical and probably psychological violence, besides, the child looks undernourished…even if you don’t seem to live poorly!”

“How can you dare come to my house and abuse me?” the man burst out, pouncing on the woman and stopping a few inches from her face.

“You’re drunk” the woman guessed from the stinking breathing getting to her face.

“Go away or I’ll call the police and make you lose your job. I’ll have you banished from this town forever,” he threatened her.

“You can't frighten me. Just know that I’m going to send the health service to you in a few days and also one of my colleagues to check that there aren’t any more marks of violence on Lucas, or I’ll have you thrown in jail. Is it clear?” she went on undeterred and decided to get her way.

“Get out of my house!” he shouted at her, frightening Lucas too, who caught his rucksack quickly and rushed out of the car, to run home and make that quarrel end.

“See you soon, Mr. Scott” Elizabeth told him with a veiled threat, then she got back into the car and drove away.

When the car drove out of the huge estate, Darren walked back home, where he found his son scared and sobbing.

“You’ve brought home a social worker, silly bastard!” the man thundered furiously against his son.

“I didn’t know it” the child could just whisper, ready to pay the consequences.

“Does that bitch really think she can challenge and threaten me…in my town? She’ll pay dearly for that! And as far as you are concerned, I won’t be able to beat you in the next days, but be sure you’re going to pay too for what you have done! Clear off to your bedroom now! Forget dinner tonight, so you’ll learn not to bring that dregs to my house.”

Lucas didn’t let him say it twice.

He rushed to his bedroom like a shot, grateful to Kira and her mother, who had offered him that special and gluttony snack. His stomach was still full, so he plunged under the sheets, praying that the morning would come soon.

He wished to meet Kira again, his special friend, that hurricane with a heart-shaped mouth and wood-green eyes, who had turned his day upside down and who would change his life soon, as he knew in the bottom of his heart.

KIRA

Princeton, Kentucky, July 12

,2014

“I can't stand this situation any more! I don't care at all whether Darren Scott is the city boss! Yes, I understood...Yes...yes...Absolutely not! I'm not absolutely going to give up...I don't care if this war has gone on for four years! I'm tired of letting that monster spoil a young boy's childhood! I know he has already threatened to have me fired...He has been trying for ages, but luckily I'm too good at my job, so he couldn't get the Major's authorization...I understand...Yes...Okay, but I can't stand this state of things any more! Lucas is once more in my kitchen, he's hurt and my daughter is treating him! He had a wound on his lip last month, while he has a deep cut in his left eyebrow today!” Elizabeth Madis kept shouting on the phone. She was locked into her study, sure that the two young people in her kitchen couldn't hear her, but unfortunately her anger and her frustration seemed ready to break down the walls. She had been discussing with her boss for some years, about the measures they could take towards the powerful Darren Scott, but it seemed that all the people living in Princeton had family members working for him or renting a house in one of his crumbling blocks of flats. Everybody owed Darren Scott something, so they all feared consequences. Even the head of the Police.

In spite of that, Elizabeth had never given up: she was famous because she always got the best results in her job and for her incredible sixth sense which made her discover what was rotten in every family in town. After four years, she was still trying to obtain justice for that miserable child that she often had to put up and heal, together with her daughter Kira, who had never left Lucas alone since she met him.

Even if Kira was still very young, she had taken her best friend's troubles upon herself and she was very busy in looking for a plaster at that moment, so she wasn't listening to her mother's phone call, which she already knew by heart.

“You'll probably get a scar. Just sit down and go on pressing the gauze,” she ordered Lucas, feeling annoyed and nervous inside because she hadn't been able to prevent that new violence on the boy.

“It's hurting!” Lucas moaned, sitting on the stool in front of the kitchen counter, where all kinds of medicine, gauze, cotton and plaster were spread.

“Just hang on and sit comfortably! I can't get there,” Kira went on, snorting and trying to put the largest plaster she had been able to find on the boy's eyebrow.

“It's not my fault if you're small,” Lucas teased her as he found Kira's threatening look funny: when she screwed up her eyes, she looked like a character of Japanese mangas.

“You're just three inches taller than me and by the way, I wish to remind you that you were a real shorty last year,” Kira immediately underlined. She had realized lately that all her class mates had grown a lot and she was the shortest one now, while she used to be the tallest one in the past. Even her best friends Jane and Roxanne were a few inches taller than her by then.

“I'd better take up basket once more,” she thought, feeling vexed because she hadn't grown at all in the last two years.

“Take off your t-shirt now. It's stained with blood,” she ordered him soon after, thinking about the great amount of blood pouring out of his wound when she had gone and visited him that holiday afternoon. She had had to hold herself back and avoid feeling sick, after she had flung at Lucas's father, calling him “alcohol-addicted butcher” and “Jack the Ripper.” Just her mother's arrival had been able to save them from the furious anger of that man, who was in an alcoholic haze.

“But what shall I wear then?” Lucas got nervous and felt uneasy for being half naked, especially because the marks of his father's violence where still clearly visible on his shoulder blades.

“My mum and I bought a t-shirt for you at the market yesterday. Mum wanted to give it to you for your new school term, but I'm going to do it now! I chose it myself!” Kira exclaimed enthusiastically, making Lucas blush to his ears, but she simply ignored him and, taking him by his arm as she always did, she took him to her parents' bedroom, where her mother had hidden the present in her husband's socks drawer.

When they got into the room, Kira and Lucas locked themselves inside.

“Here you are!”

“Thanks” he muttered feeling moved and unwrapping it.

There was a blue t-shirt inside, with Super Mario's mushroom in its centre, like in Kira's Nintendo, and his name, Lucas, was printed under it.

“As soon as I saw it, I thought about you, because we always play Nintendo when we spend a Sunday together. You really love Super Mario Bross and jumping on the mushrooms in the game.”

“I usually jump on them, while you crash into them and are killed,” Lucas reminded her: he considered Kira like a genius at school, but an absolute duffer at video-games.

As an answer, Kira stuck out her tongue at him and Lucas smiled happily.

“So, how does it fit me?” he asked her, changing subject of conversation before Kira started listing the fields where she had no trouble in beating him.

She hated judging carelessly and not judiciously, so she placed her hands on her hips with her usual lofty air and started looking at him attentively.

The t-shirt fitted him wonderfully and Kira couldn't avoid noticing his muscles, which weren't there some time before. She had always kept silent about that, but she had realized that she was always the looser when they wrestled with their pillows now, or when they pushed each other on the sofa or played basketball in the courtyard. Even if Lucas was always quite thin, there wasn't much left of the nine-year-old boy that Kira had met four years before.

Time had gone by and Lucas was getting stronger, he was growing and becoming more and more defiant and brave. He didn't fear his father's blows any more, he had learnt how to take them without shedding any tear.

Kira stared at him for a long while and was spellbound by his face as it always happened. She had got to love it, even if his look was often different because of his father's blows.

His hazel eyes were always bright under his heap of messy, brown hair, in spite of a melancholic shadow which Kira had seen too often in his gaze.

Knowing that her friend was suffering made her feel very miserable, so she always tried to make him feel better and happy when they spent some time together.

She had even burst out crying in her mother's arms one night, thinking about Lucas.

“You're still too young to carry such a burden, but as you are considerate enough as to realize it, so just try to make him smile as much as possible! Kira, if you wish to help Lucas, you mustn't cry, you have to be strong for him!” her mother had told her that day. She hadn't understood very well what her mother meant by her words then, but she had been trying hard to be always cheerful and caring towards her best friend since that moment.

And now, after some years, she could see a very different Lucas in front of herself: much taller, stronger and very good looking.

“So?” Lucas spurred her, feeling nervous. He wasn't absolutely used to Kira's silence, she was the most biting pontificating girl in their school.

Thanks to her, nobody had ever dared teasing him, even when they had discovered that he found school hard because of slight dyslexia, which the school speech therapist and psychologist hadn't been able to certificate because the boy's father had hushed it up, as soon as they had started talking about back-up teachers and facilitated tests to help his son face his handicap in a better way.

That word, handicap, was exactly the one which had stirred up a mess, sending the speech therapist to hospital with a broken nose.

That day the powerful Darren Scott hadn't been able to get off very easily and had been forced to pay a lot of money in order to avoid being formally denounced

“You're very handsome,” Kira stated keeping her eyes on the t-shirt.

“Handsome?” the boy repeated amused and uneasy, as he wasn't used to such compliments.

Kira immediately regretted using that word.

“Jane says you are handsome,” she underlined, very ashamed since she had just revealed her friend's secret.

“Jane? Jane Hartwood?”

“Yes. I believe she would like to pair off with you,” Kira whispered, keeping cursing herself and wondering how the hell she could have told Lucas those things.

“Really?” Lucas asked her, turning suddenly serious.

That change in his voice deeply annoyed Kira, who felt suddenly very irritated and angry.

“You don't like her, do you? Lucas, don't tell me you want to pair off with her too! You want to kiss her and...” she squealed in a shrill and raving voice.

“No, I don't! I'm just curious. I didn't think Jane liked me,” Lucas stopped her.

“If that's the question, Roxy is crazy for you too,” Kira was going to reply, but a poisonous feeling of jealousy shut her lips.