Read Nina, the Bandit Queen for Free Online

identity?”
    “Yes!” Nina pumped her fist.
    JannaRose spread her fingers over her mouth. “That’s awful. How can you prove you’re the you the possible replacement cheque was issued to, and not —”
    Nina sighed.
    “— the you that stole your own identity and used it to cash the cheque? If it was two people, you and an identity thief, then it would be your word against theirs. But,” JannaRose said, “if there’s just one of you, and you stole you own identity, then it’s your word against yourself. And who’s going to believe you?”
    As screwups went, the only thing this one had going for it was that it was one Nina had never heard of before. It wasn’t like she and D.S. and the girls would get evicted for not paying the rent if the cheques didn’t start coming soon. They already didn’t pay rent. And nobody was going to bother evicting them, since the bulldozer was about to knock the house down to make way for apartment buildings. For all she knew, it had happened while she was away phoning the welfare department.
    The last time she got an actual cheque and had turned it into actual cash, she’d taken snippets of the money and hidden them around the house to keep D.S. from finding it in one lump sum and spending it on god knows what. Last night she’d been up till all hours looking for some of those hiding places, figuring maybe she hadn’t found them all, since she was sure she’d hidden more money than she’d been able to track down so far, which was none. Not being able to find even fifty cents made her start to panic — her chest got tight, her ears filled with a buzzy, tingling sound. She searched the whole house twice more before giving up. If she hadn’t given up, she was going to start ripping out the baseboards. That would have been poke-your-own-eyes-out insanity, because she knew she hadn’t done anything like rip the baseboards off to hide it in the first place. Still, the feeling weighed on her that when she got home, she was going to turn the place inside out again.
    Walking home from the towers, she squinted at their rooflines. She couldn’t hear any bees, although maybe it was impossible right down there. It could be they had to travel a ways before they started making the noise that sounded like a sheet being torn in half. Or it could be there weren’t any at the moment. Neither she nor JannaRose bought for one minute the idea some people had that there weren’t any at all, that they were one of those urban myths. She and JannaRose mostly heard them when they lay in bed at night, unable to sleep. D.S. used to say he didn’t believe they existed, because why would anybody fire high-powered rounds over SuEz and not aim them anywhere else in the city? If bullets were flying over the rest of town, there would be big complaints. Nobody else would stand for it. The police would be all over the place. Although most of the people in Nina’s house said afterwards that they didn’t remember, she knew full well a lot of them heard them when Frank showed up the night after he got out of jail. That’s why they’d all gone outside and stared into the black sky: those ripping noises. More bees at one time than she’d ever heard. Maybe it had gotten blotted out of their memories by the shock of realizing it was the last time any of them ever laid eyes on her brother.
    She slumped along, wondering if, even though you couldn’t hear bee noises this close to the towers, you wouldn’t at least hear some other noises associated with them that maybe didn’t carry as far as her house. Then she turned around so suddenly that JannaRose almost crashed head-on into her.
    “Why would anybody steal the water?” The question came right out of the blue and wiped out everything else she’d been thinking.
    “What water?” JannaRose said.
    “The pool water.”
    “What pool?”
    “The high school pool. What fuckin’ pool did you think?”
    “Somebody stole the water?”
    Nina tried to collect