Quad Squad
Page 31
Fuck Everyone
Fuck Mike. Fuck Jerry. Fuck all of them. Fuck Malik. It’s like, if you can’t be there when your homie is getting beat on, then what the fuck kind of friend are you?
After the party Tim had to get twenty-two stitches from something cutting him on the leg, he didn’t even know what, maybe even his own knife, it was hard to tell what the fuck was going on in the hallway at the end, plus major stitches on his head, he was in the hospital for like three days, but the worst of it was the concussions. He had the worst fucking headache for about a century it felt like and they wouldn’t give him any pills that did anything and they kept testing his vision which was doubled some of the time, which made him fucking sick. And the whole time they wouldn’t answer his basic questions, his mom and dad kept coming and trying to be nice but also pissed off at him for getting into a fight and his dad said that even if the other guy is being a jerk you don’t do that, meaning basically the knife, which Tim had used in self defense, and Tim was like are you kidding me, thinking it not saying, are you kidding me, you always told me that you stand up for yourself, you don’t let some asshole pick on a woman, you said that, and now you get mad at me for doing exactly what you said, okay, fine, I see how it is, but not saying any of that, just lying there in the bed burning with pissed-offedness. And nobody would answer for him, none of the doctors would tell him the main thing, which was would this make him not be able to enlist, they kept saying they’d have to wait and see, and other doctor bullshit that just meant: shut up, kid.
Nobody was saying anything on text just how are you doing and only Jerry came to visit and only once and all he would talk about was how he and Sabrina had apparently done it or something, he wouldn’t exactly say, but then Sabrina had been moved out of town, which was like, duh, what do you expect her parents to do when their daughter is fucking freaking out and doing it with random guys, thinking all that, not saying it, because obviously this was Tim’s best friend and he didn’t want to be a dick about it even if that’s exactly what Jerry deserved.
But nobody else even visited or said anything and Tim got the feeling that a lot of shit had gone down at the party and after, but nobody was saying anything and he did not, he did not want to go asking everybody, to be that guy who was like, oh, tell me who said what, and are people mad at me and all that girl shit. Like, fuck it. If you want to be my friend, have my back, otherwise get the fuck out my way.
Fucking Vinh was the only one who got it, even though he was a major psycho asshole, he and some of his guys had found out that Tim was getting whaled on at the party and they had jumped the other guys and gotten them off Tim and basically saved his ass and even called the cops and the ambulance, like why would Vinh ever call a cop, and Tim totally owed them, but he wasn’t even friends with those guys, those guys were all kind of psycho and into hard drugs and stuff like that, a couple of them were probably dealers.
And then when Tim was back at school everyone was being weird, like Tim had no reason whatsoever to talk to Mike ever again, and he needed to talk to Malik to figure out where he had been, but for some reason none of them was hanging out. And the girls weren’t hanging out with him, or even with each other, which was like, what the fuck happened?
He saw Vinh a couple of times and Tim kind of nodded and one time said, “Hey, thanks,” and Vinh said, “Yeah, I got you,” but not much more than that, and Tim didn’t exactly love being in Vinh’s debt but that was kind of how it had played out.
Then of course there was that Jonathan motherfucker. Tim hadn’t seen him at all at school and he wasn’t sure if the guy even went to their school, and he wasn’t about to ask anyone, but he kept asking himself what he would do if he saw the guy now. And what would Jonathan do? Where was this going, exactly?
Nowhere good.