Savannah Girl: Street Smart

By Michael Roberts

Sarah looks her age and is therefore not allowed to drink or own property legally yet manages to do both with unexpected results. Adopting a sweet smile and angelic demeanor, she studies people in order to please them at the same time she is conning them. She usually succeeds in doing so. As the perfect employee, she flatters her bosses and her landlord while quietly cheating both as she accumulates seed money to become financially independent. Possible enemies along her path meet with strange disasters, never dreaming that sweet Sarah is behind their misfortunes. She is street savvy but out of her depth in emotional relationships, especially with handsome men. Through an unexpected friendship with an exotic dancer, Ann, and an uncertain alliance with a clever accounting firm manager, Beverly, Sarah strengthens her resolve to be something when she grows up, even though she is not sure what that something may be. Sarah never completely lets her guard down with friends, lovers, or employers because she nourishes a deeply held secret that holds the key to her financial success. That secret is perilously close to being revealed, and the Savannah Girl might go to prison for it—as an inmate, not a visitor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635682496

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Savannah Girl

Street Smart

Michael Roberts

Copyright © 2017 Michael Roberts

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2017

This is a work of fiction although several locations mentioned in this work are authentic, the characters and actions occurring in these locations are fictional.

ISBN 978-1-63568-248-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63568-249-6 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Special thanks to the Woman’s Book Club of Poquoson Va. For their insights and critiques.

You ladies Rock.

Prologue

Everyone wants a scapegoat. Someone to blame for one’s mistakes and misfortunes. This was perhaps the only thing in life my mother and I agreed on. We even shared the same scapegoat. ME.

Chapter 1

They had told me so many lies and made so many threats and promises which never materialized that I did not believe their latest one. I should have.

Mom and her latest BF/fiancé warned me they were going to leave but it didn’t seem like a real threat. It was. When I came home to an empty dirty house. All I could think of to say aloud was Well this sucks.

Yesterday, feeling rebellious, I had spent all day hanging out at the beach in Buckroe, flirting with some guys and taking a few hits of some herb they had. It was some bitter skunk weed but at least it was free.

It wasn’t any big deal, I just hadn’t wanted to go back to the house. It was a warm night and instead of being cooped up inside listening to everyone’s complaints. I had ended up going to sleep on the private part of the beach, wrapped in someone else’s striped beach blanket that had been left hanging out on the line to dry.

At least there it was quiet and I could spend time looking up at the stars wondering what I was going to do with my life. Some time that night I must have drifted off to sleep because I woke up with sunrise in my eyes. I never was a huge fan of breakfast but coffee is my drug of choice, so I walked to the Buckroe Diner, used the facilities and made myself what ‘Mommy Dearest’ would call presentable. Although having streaks of green in my hair from food coloring probably was not what she had in mind. Too bad I couldn’t dye my eyes green too. Having straight dark brown hair, without a hint of a curl or any kind of body to it and brown eyes wasn’t bad, but I just wanted something different. The fact that streaks of green drove mom crazy was simply an added bonus.

After ordering coffee I borrowed someone’s newspaper to check out the want ads in search of a job. Depressingly the only things listed were for truck drivers, medical technicians and construction workers who knew how to operate cranes and such. Just like the want ads yesterday and the day before that. I had tried registering with some temp agencies, but without my having a car the options were limited.

About mid-morning I figured I might as well go home. That’s when my world began to unravel. Everything and everyone was gone.

My first clue was when I walked up to the duplex and realized that both cars were missing. So were the curtains and blinds on the windows. When I went inside I saw my clothes thrown in the corner of what had once been my room.

In spite of all this my new reality had not yet sunk in and I was in full blown denial. I kept thinking that there was some mistake, then I looked in the kitchen and saw mom’s final farewell note taped to the fridge.

"Bill and I are leaving. You said you wanted to be on your own so now you are.

Love Mom

P.S. the rent is paid until the 30th."

At the bottom of the page was a phone number where I guessed she could be reached. Why would I want to do that?

All of my emotions kept flipping between anger and disbelief. Finally, sitting on the dirty floor with my back to the fridge I let my mind go blank. My thoughts were jumbled while I tried to make sense of everything.

Looking back, it was easy to see what was coming. I should have recognized the signs. But somewhere deep inside it hadn’t seemed real, I didn’t want to believe it really was.

Mom and I had never been close. All of my life mom blamed me for each and every bad thing that had happened in her world. For some of it there was more than just a grain of truth. However I’m not the one who got her pregnant and disowned by her family at 16, but mommy dearest never stopped blaming me for it.

I also took the blame whenever I would get sick as a kid and cause her to lose one of her crappy waitress jobs to stay home and supposedly take care of me. Usually that so called care consisted of her drinking in front of the TV while watching some drivel on afternoon soap operas.

My last really big blow up happened on my final week as a sophomore in high school. Some of the Hispanic girls were making smart ass remarks about my clothes, just loud enough so that I could ‘accidently’ overhear them. I was trying to keep my cool and simply let things slide but it was getting harder and harder to do. Finally the one with the biggest mouth wanted to make a show of how tough she was and decided to use me to make that point.

Bad move on her part.

I had already been having a rough day, it had started with mom screaming at me for finishing the milk in the fridge, (even though we had been out for three days.) She had slapped me so hard across my face that it had knocked me down to the kitchen floor. My teeth still hurt from this morning. So when this started I was already doing all I could to keep my temper in check. When this girl got in my face and began taunting me, saying that she heard all the boys were teaching me to be a ‘puta’ I could feel myself losing it. Then she decided to be a little more forceful and shove me up against a locker.

While I have to take shit and be pushed and slapped around at home, some wet back bitch was not going to push me around here. The girl was older and bigger than me, but when I finally exploded it really didn’t matter.

Growing up in a trailer park may not teach people good sportsmanship but you do learn how to fight. There was none of this girly-girl fight stuff of slapping someone and pulling their hair. I knew to never give a warning, my first punch was to her throat then I kicked her between the legs.

Guess I went a little berserk after that. The next thing I knew I was on top, holding her by the throat and punching her repeatedly in the mouth. When someone finally stopped me I knew that girl wouldn’t be so pretty anymore. It took two teachers to pull me off of her, the other kids were staring at the blood covering her face. Even then I managed to get in a couple of good kicks. The last time I saw her she was crying and curled up in a bloody little ball.

While sitting in the principal’s office I expected a long trip to the Juvenile Corrections Center, but the girl’s parents were illegals. They didn’t want to press charges and risk deportation themselves. Also, the police found a knife in the girl’s back pocket. The school didn’t want the bad press of violence and possible gang activity so things were just swept under the rug.

In Savannah this was how things worked.

That was my final parting with the formal education system. The next morning mom marched me down to take a G.E.D. She had already arranged for me to start a job at the local Circle-K convenience store starting immediately.

It turned out all right for me there and I ended up staying for over a year and a half, while mom went through a different job about every other month.

For my ‘sweet 16’ birthday mom got me a box of condoms with a note:

Don’t get knocked up or some bastard will ruin your life like you did mine.

Definitely felt the love on that one.

About a year ago mom’s dreams seemed to come true. He was a soldier stationed at Ft. Stewart getting ready to transfer to Virginia for his last year in the army. He was stupid enough to fall for a waitress with bleached hair and quickly fading looks. Mom thought all of her prayers had been answered.

Given a choice, I would have been happy to stay where I was in Savannah. At least there I had a full time job at Circle-K. But I was 17, and in the eyes of the state a ‘helpless minor’, so mom and I were stuck with each other for a few more weeks.

When Bill sent for her we only had one day to pack our stuff. We couldn’t be too obvious because as usual mom was behind on the rent and owed money to some of our neighbors.

Everything we had was thrown hurriedly in the back of mom’s broke-ass Buick, then we headed up I-95 towards mom’s dream man. The drive took over 10 hours at night, we had to go five miles under the speed limit the entire way because the car’s tag, like mom’s driving license, had long since expired. The entire trip consisted of mom telling me repeatedly how I had better not screw this up for her. This was mom’s one chance according to her, she was determined to make it work no matter what she had to do.

At one point I had fallen asleep for an hour or so in the Carolinas and mom never even noticed. She just kept going on and on, berating me for everything that had ever gone wrong in her life and swearing that this time it would be different. She had finally found someone who could possibly take care of her financially and that was the end of that.

One thing I didn’t mind about all of this was leaving school, it wasn’t as if I had any close friends there, and the chance to work was alright. Anyway formal educational and I had about come to a partings of the ways. School was not really hard to do, book stuff is easy for me. But I could never see the point of it.

One lesson that was taught to me early on was that money is all that matters in this world, and learning ‘differential equations’ was not putting any money in anyone’s pockets.

Money had always been an issue with us and I learned quickly that I needed to hide it very well or it would ‘mysteriously disappear’. Especially when mom wanted to go out drinking with her friends.

Working in a store was different from school, at least here there was a paycheck. Mom always took mine to pay for my ‘upkeep and expenses’, but also there were several ways a smart girl could make a little extra on the side. In fact there were a lot of ways and I quickly learned all of them I could.

Sometimes it was easy to ‘accidently’ over charge someone on their credit card, then refund the price on the item to myself in cash. From there it was simple to figure out how to skim a number from a card, then go to a different store to have that clerk do the transaction manually. Usually it was some guy trying to hit on me, occasionally it was someone who was also in on the scam and wanted something for themselves. Sometimes I did it on someone else’s shift that I really didn’t like. I always made sure not to do the same thing the same way, over and over again, so there was no pattern.

People who use credit cards are, for the most part, pretty oblivious as to what is going on. They think they’re smart but they’re not. Some guys were dumb enough to think that the reason a pretty girl was maintaining eye contact with a sweet little half smile was because she liked them. I was always careful to only pull this on out of towners heading to and from the beach. For the locals there were other schemes.

There was one guy in particular, he liked to be the big shot of his group and buy cigarettes, plus later booze, underage. When no one else was there it was fine, as long as he tipped me an extra $5.

But there was also a neighborhood guy who drove a truck and hated the store’s owner with a fiery passion. Never knew why and never wanted to know. The guy would come in about once a week to buy 80 gallons of diesel. The price in the system would be changed from $3.50 a gallon to .25 cents. I could change the price, ring up the sale and have it back to the regular price in less than 30 seconds. He would always come back in when he was done and give me a big smile plus a hundred dollar bill as a tip.

When I first started working there I found, and studied, the manual for the store’s register system explaining how everything operated. After watching the owner change the prices and get updates I knew the manager’s codes for all of the machines. It wasn’t long before I could change the prices for other things in the store by modifying their UPC bar codes, or simply making up what they called PLU numbers for a shortcut. I only did this on things that were popular and had a good enough retail price so that I could siphon some of the money off and no one would notice the difference. Yours truly was always careful not to go too far or get too greedy, but still the average I made was around $200 a week in ‘tips’.

Since mom took all of my paychecks it didn’t take her long to start wondering where I got the money for a soda or anything else. When confronted I tried to explain that sometimes guys would say to keep the change and tried to look innocent. I knew mommy dearest wasn’t buying that, so I began putting empty condom boxes, that I had found in the trash, inside of my dresser. That way mom could find them when she was snooping around. It worked like a charm. Mom thought I was a whore and was okay with that. While not exactly a virgin, there are some things that I will never do for money. No matter what.

There had been an old lady who lived a couple of trailers down from us who would watch me for free when I was little. She always told me that No one can make you cheap, but you.

It had taken a long time for that to sink in but it was finally starting to make sense to me. I could remember crying when that woman died. I cried and mom bitched because now she would have to pay for a sitter.

Usually I could either get along with, or just ignore, people who worked with me. However, sometimes I had to get rid of someone who was either being a little too nosey or a pain in the ass. The best way to do that was to have the boss do my dirty work for me.

One of the first things I learned how to do was change the internal clock of the register by changing the assigned time zones. That way when I rang something in the register the time stamp for the sale would show up as if it had been charged on someone else’s shift. That way when I sold cigarettes for cash it was easy to pocket the money and have the charge, plus the resulting cash shortage, show up on a different shift. I made extra money, the pack count for cigarettes always matched what they were supposed to be on my shift, and the person who had crossed me got all of the blame.

Cigarettes were the easiest since they were all at least five dollars a pack but I only did this when they were sold for cash, then I would ‘happen to have the exact change’ sitting by the ledge of the register to hand it back to the person.

I never went overboard with it, but when it was necessary that someone had to go then it was a simple matter to cause a cash shortage of around $20 once a week on one of the other cashier’s shifts. I would do that for a couple of weeks. Then just casually mention to another employee that I really hoped the other cashier was okay with her money problems, always making sure the boss could overhear it of course. Then it was a simple matter to make a bigger score of between $60–$80 dollars and by company policy that was a firing offense. Never did any more than that because then the police would be called in. It was just enough to get the other girl fired and out of the way.

Afterwards I would tell the boss how sad it was that the other cashier didn’t work out because she had seemed like a nice person. Not to mention also offering to work the extra hours until they found someone and could get her trained. Since no one wanted to pay time and a half for overtime, and I usually got between 38-40 hours as it was, the offer would be made to work for cash under the table, even if it was just for straight time wages, if it would help them out.

Without bragging I can