I never said I couldn't cry.

I know all those things everybody thinks about me. That I'm a womanizer, that I'm tough, that you could put a knife through my chest and twist it, twist it, twist it, and I still wouldn't cry out. I'd just look you in the face a smirk because, apparently, I'm also immortal.

None of those things are true. I've never been with a woman, and I have no planning to be. I don't like girls. The whores that run up and down the street in their heavy make-up and strange clothes while I sell my evening papers…they scare me. Especially when they try to get me to want them, to pay for them.

Let me get one thing straight, I would never pay to go to bed with a woman.

Most newsboys would tell you the story about how their father was the one that ruined them. Snitch's dad killed his mother and his unborn sibling, and gave Snitch five dark scars on his stomach. Jack's dad killed his mother and ran, was caught in the road, a babbling, insane mess. Specs never knew his father, except for one bleak moment with the bastard tried to kill him.

My story is different.

My mother never liked me. My mother was one of the prostitutes that scares me so badly. She couldn't believe she'd caught pregnant, and she didn't like doctors, so she was forced to keep me. She wasn't very good at it, being only 16 years older than I was. She didn't know what to do with me, and I was often left at home, alone, to fend for myself, while she went out and spent the night in eleven different beds, seventeen on a 'good' night. I learned how to steal and scrounge, and ended up teaching myself how to read. I did have help from one of my mother's 'clients' though. He was a schoolteacher, and a pretty good guy except for the fact that he liked whores. I named myself after him, James Conlon, because my mother never named me. To her, I was just 'the bastard', or 'the kid', or 'you fucked-up piece of shit!'.

I was seven when I left her. Because I couldn't take her crap anymore. She went out to work one night, and I left her, ran across Brooklyn. I knew about the Newsboy Lodging House from James, who went there occasionally in an attempt to get some of the boys back in school. I went straight there. The young man that ran it, who everybody called Whitey for his wide eyes, told me I could stay there for as long as I liked, as long as I sold papes with the other boys and was able to pay the meager rent. I agreed, whole-heartedly.

I never liked women after that. Boys were a different story, especially a brown-eyed Manhattan boy…

I cry at night, sometimes.

They tell me I'm never going to die. Not true. If I wanted, I could go out to the Brooklyn Bridge right now, and jump off into the water, and die there. I wouldn't mind.

Because it's better than the crying.

I won't though, because the boys here have been talking, and they say Cowboy's miserable too.

I think he cries at night.

I hope it means he'll come back to me.

And if he does, I'll refuse him at first, then I won't be able to hold back my tears, and I'll welcome him back to me with open arms.

I never said I couldn't cry.

But I also never said crying was a bad thing.

***AUTHOR'S NOTE***

Um. Random story. ^^;; That's all. Um, bye?