by Ginger Scott
“I got it at the dollar store. I think it’s probably pretty old.” Lauren shrugs then offers me another piece.
“I’m good,” I say, spitting out the small bit that made it into my mouth.
We walk one of the full blocks in silence, and I start to wonder if she’s just seeing me home safely or if she’s one of those nosey girls who likes to stir up drama. I’m about to ask, bluntly, when she reaches her arm across my chest and halts my step to cross the intersection—just in time to keep me from getting my toes run over by a car.
“Damn, girl. You are pissed off if you didn’t see that!” She lifts her arm like a bridge guard rail, and I breathe out a heavy sigh.
“Thanks, and…sorry,” I say, looking her in the eyes again.
Lauren is beautiful. Her hair looks like ribbons and her skin is like velvet. She wears makeup like a movie star, and her skinny jeans, short boots and half shirt look like one of those outfits I’ve seen in magazines asking who wore it best.
Lauren. Lauren wears it best.
“So DJ, the one they were making fun of? He’s my cousin. And Lotus, he’s the tall quiet guy who should learn to keep his damn hands to himself, he’s my brother. I hang out at the courts because my friends all have crushes on my brother, but that is the only reason I’m there.”
She slows down our pace as we cross the street, and it makes it impossible not to meet her questioning stare.
I shrug without words.
“You said you’re new here. And for whatever reason, I like you. So let me give you some advice,” she stops at the corner, and I take an extra step before turning to face her, my ball hugged against my hip with my palm.
“You don’t belong there.”
My face pinches enough that I feel it. I was expecting her to give me some tip about the guys being assholes or about not liking her brother because he’s a player or some advice about Tristan or that Paul guy. Standing here—looking pretty much eye-to-eye into the face of a girl who, other than the clothing and the makeup, looks a lot like me—hearing I don’t belong just doesn’t seem to register.
“Why not?” I challenge her.
She laughs and begins to walk again.
“You live up here?” She nods down the street, and I respond with a nod back, waiting for her to explain her open-ended warning to me.
“Tristan’s house is that way, too.” She smirks, which irritates me.
“So.”
My response irritates me more. I start dribbling through my legs in an effort to ignore what I know she’s insinuating. Eventually, she breaks into laughter again. My mouth tightens and I slowly draw in air through my nose, a trick I learned online to keep my heartrate in check when I feel the need for an emotional explosion brewing. I’m not like her friends; I didn’t go to the courts for a boy. I went there for me—because I’ve been searching for a place.
“I’m good. I’ve got it from here. You can go.” I’m insistent that she leave, but she’s insistent to stay, the sound of her boots keeping up with my stride. After we pass a few more houses, she reaches in, snagging the ball from me mid-dribble. Her hands are quick, and now I’m left with nothing to do with mine. It makes me uneasy, so I push them in my pockets. I miss the tinny sound of my music from the phone speaker.
Lauren starts to dribble, but she has to watch the ball. I’m intensely calculating the timing to get my ball back when she switches hands, moving it to the other side of her body. I open my mouth in frustration, but she shuts me up fast with her words.
“You like him,” she says, her focus still on the ball.
I know who she means, and it starts to occur to me that she’s doing all of this to make some point about Tristan being hers, or that he’s off limits or whatever. I know the drill.
“I don’t date.” It’s not a lie. And it’s not because my dad is strict, or because I’m not allowed. I don’t want to date because I have too many things I want to do for me. And after three high schools and a broken family, I’ve accumulated enough personal to-dos without adding a crush in the mix.
“Okay,” she says, pushing the ball down harder until it kicks up above her head and she catches it at her chest. Her nails are glossed and long, the tips white like I tried to do to mine once. She clearly doesn’t play at the courts. If she did, her hands would look wrecked like mine.
“That’s me,” I say as my house comes into view. Lauren rolls the ball from her hand into mine.
“Tristan lives on the other corner,” she says. I lift by brow in sync with both shoulders, and her eyes hover on me for a few long seconds, like a test to see if I really don’t care.
“Most of those guys out there…they will cut you open just to prove they’re better than you.” My head tilts slightly as I hold her stare. Her lips fall into a flat line, and her long, thick lashes blink slowly, her eyes opening right back up on mine. She shrugs.
“That’s what I meant—you don’t belong out there.” Her head shakes slowly, for emphasis I assume, and her eyes remain serious, even when they dim.
“Nobody’s cutting me open, and the next time I go out there, they’re going to pass me the ball.” I say the words mostly to show off, but a little as a mantra to myself. I’ve gotten good at pushing myself beyond barriers. The last two years have been constant lessons in living life the creative way—whether its borrowing from one debt to cover another or finding ways to stay relevant on the college scouting website without having a steady place to show off my skills.
Lauren hums, and her eyes crinkle slightly at the corners during a short stretch of silence between us.
“Just leave when the lights go out,” she says, holding her phone out toward me in her open palm. I hover on her smirk for a second or two, then look down at her palm.
“Put your number in and then I’ll text you mine,” she says.
I take the phone from her and add my number to her contacts, feeling a little bit like I passed some sort of test and earned her approval. I hand the phone back to her and wait while she opens her messages to send me a text. Her lips twitch when she reads my contact details: RILEY DOES NOT DATE.
“You know, putting it in print doesn’t make it fact, but I hear you. When you have trouble with that, though, don’t get mad at me when I shove your own words in your face,” she says, taking a screenshot and sending it to me in a message. I have had zero boyfriends, and two awkward kisses, both on dares. If I had money to bet her right now, I would. Again, not that I’d ever need to pay up.
“Oh, hey Tristan!” Her eyes jet over my shoulder and the ball slips from my hands while I stumble to regrip it. There wasn’t time to take in the slow breath, so my heart jets a hundred miles per hour, only to sink the second I turn around to an empty sidewalk and street.
“You might not date, but you crush hard, girl,” she giggles. I roll my eyes as I glance back at her.
“You scared me. That’s all,” I say. I lie. That’s a stupid, fricking lie. Gah!
“Mmmm hmmmm. Okay,” she smirks, bending her fingers around her phone as she holds it up to wave goodbye. “I believe I’ll be attending South tomorrow, so I’ll find you for lunch.”
I nod, my chest a giddy mess over maybe making a friend and getting caught up over some cute boy, who is still probably an asshole, with hot abs and a decent shot.
Decent. Not great. Not bad. Actually…pretty good.
“I don’t date,” I whisper as I move toward my front door. I save Lauren’s screenshot as my wallpaper before unlocking the door and moving inside.
Chapter Three
Tristan
* * *
Friday is tomorrow, and Joker and I are only halfway to getting Dub two grand. I’m only halfway there. Joker hasn’t done shit to help with this, and it’s his mouth that started it. All he can talk about is how freaked out he is that he hasn’t been initiated yet. I don’t think he really wants it to happen. He won’t say it, but I sense it—the hope he has as his window shrinks and it still hasn’t happene
d.
Today’s his birthday. It’s coming today. Unless Dub finds out that we’re nowhere close to making his cash flow. He won’t though, because he knows I’ll find a way to get it done. I always get it done. I should write that down on this scholarship application Ms. Beaumont sent to me in homeroom yesterday.
SPECIAL SKILLS: GOOD AT HUSTLING.
I’m supposed to bring back the filled-in application to her at lunch today so we can enter it into the computer. I should have stopped this before it got this far. All I could complete is my name and address. It got to the part about parents, and I just had to sit back and stare at it, imagining the words I could jot down.
Father started a gang that makes national news for being the leading cause of death for boys under the age of eighteen in Miller. Mother will forever be in recovery for heroin habit and is now addicted to God.
I roll the application up in my hands, twisting it tightly, hoping it will disappear. Either way, I’m going to have to break the news to my counselor that college is not a part of my plan. She just seems like the kind of person who pushes back and fights to “save us kids.”
My usual spot along the wall right outside our school is full today—young smokers getting their fix barely off campus grounds. They think they’re rebels because of it. I wonder what they’d do if I pulled out my piece and asked them to move.
I don’t pack at school. Too many metal detectors and resource officers wandering the hallways. Besides, my rep is enough to keep people away from me. When my dad was killed, Dub stepped in to fill the role. I’m marked—literally. People know what the black X is on my wrist. It means I’m blood to Dub, no matter what our real DNA is, and that’s like being royalty in Miller.
I lean against the main gate they close when school’s in session. It’s a fucking fire hazard, locking us in like this, but nobody points that out. The padlocks were in response to the time some guys from The Tribe rushed our cafeteria last year and stabbed some freshman in the chest. They were coming for one of ours, but they got some kid who was just trying to eat his goddamned lunch instead. He wore the wrong color that day.
It’s this senseless shit I don’t understand. And maybe it’s all senseless.
I hear the out-of-place music blaring before my eyes lock in on the familiar, battered truck. Some country song is blasting so loud it’s buzzing her windows as she hits the curb of the school parking lot and stops at the guard to show him her pass.
I was a dick to Riley when she showed up at the courts, and my better-self kicks at my insides a little as she drives through. That place isn’t a place for her, though. I traded an ounce for three hundred bucks to some guy tweaking on a bike he stole about ten minutes before she showed up. I dealt another ounce an hour after she left, and I made a grand when the lights went out. That’s when the bigger customers come, the ones who are packing. She was there to play basketball, but that’s not the same game everyone’s there for.
“Hey, isn’t that the girl from yesterday?” Joker’s mouth is full when he slides in next to me. His chewing literally makes me shrink my shoulders, convulse, and move to the side.
“What? I didn’t finish my English muffin this morning, man.”
His words are laced with a smacking sound, the bread now like glue around his teeth and gums. Disgusting! I angle my head toward him and sigh, but I’m hit with the funniest thing I’ve ever seen the moment my eyes fully take him in.
“Yo, you are getting your ass kicked today if you walk around in that thing. And not by me or the boys, I’m talking like…everybody is going to kick your ass!” I cup my mouth, laughing under my fingers.
Joker’s shoulders sag as he looks down at the brown, fitted sweater with fat wooden buttons dotting up his chest. An oversized collar hangs open, showing the wrinkled neck of the T-shirt he has on underneath. He looks like a grandpa.
“My mom got it for me. It’s couture.” He shoves his hands in the sweater’s side pockets, the weight of a backpack pulling down the shoulders of the knit as it rests heavily on his back.
“It’s geriatric,” I say.
My friend furrows his brow and tells me to fuck off. I let him have his peace for now because I know he’s going to catch hell when the others see him. Joker’s mom almost died last year from an infection she got in the county hospital. She was in there for a heart condition. He probably hates that sweater, but she got it for him. I get it. I’ll lay off.
“That girl from yesterday is staring at you now. You must have really pissed her off.” I twist to follow Joker’s line of sight and confirm he’s right. She’s pulling her backpack straps tight on her shoulders while she looks at me with laser beams. Her long hair is pulled back on the top with the ends slung over one shoulder. She looks like she’s dressed for a fishing trip—long basketball shorts that stop just above her knees, shoes without socks and a T-shirt that she practically swims in. As mean as people are going to be to Joker today about his sweater, I don’t think it will compare to the nasty shade she’s going to get from most of the girls in this school.
“I can’t help how she feels,” I finally answer my friend, abandoning the gate and turning away from Riley’s death stare. Joker chokes out a laugh at my cold response. I should have been cold right from the start. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t feel so crappy now. There wouldn’t be this tug that makes me turn around one last time before we walk through the main doors—just to make sure the heat I feel on my skin is coming from her laser eyes.
Check. It is.
I leave Joker where the hallways split, and he heads to his homeroom while I go to mine. He’s in a class filled with problems. It’s a struggle to keep him out of in-school suspension. The principal won’t kick him out because he goes to church with both of our moms, which is the only reason Joker’s still here. There’s a guy named Roman in his class who we’ve had a lot of problems with. He’s Tribe, even though he doesn’t show it or say anything. We can just tell by the way he’s always trying to push Joker into a fight. It’s all about provoking people. It’s not a fight between two guys that anyone craves—they want the war. It gives both sides something to do when there’s a person to focus the hate on.
We hate them, and they hate us.
Even though we’re all really just the fuckin’ same. The media and the cops, our governor and those kinds of people, they all like to use race in the headlines. Both of our gangs are mostly Latino, and they like to play up the turf war—like only one of us is superior. But if we all lined up, we’re all just forgotten and angry souls, and we’re brown and white and pink and broken. We don’t even know why we’re angry most of the time. Someone told us to be mad at the other guy, not to date that girl because she comes from their side, or to take over this corner because that belongs to us.
Sometimes I wonder why we want any of it. We’re fighting over shit and living in poverty. What good does any of it do? I guess it lets us survive until the next day. That’s the good it does. None of us can get out, so we fight to make sure we keep us all in.
“Mr. Lopez, please come see me.” I stop halfway into my seat, dropping my backpack to the floor, my rolled-up and empty scholarship form still in my hand.
“Yeah,” I mumble when I reach the edge of Mr. Pedrona’s desk. He was my homeroom teacher last year, too. They moved him up to seniors because they thought he would fit better with more mature kids. He ignores us just the same way he did when we were juniors. His light went out when he got assigned to South.
He slides a pink hall pass across his desk, and I notice my name on it.
“You’re getting moved.” He glances up at me above the rims of his glasses, then relaxes back into his chair and continues reading the news on his phone.
“Why?” I slide the form closer and eventually pick it up. It reads: MISS FORTE.
There is literally zero additional information. I turn the slip around and hold it up until Mr. Pedrona looks up at it. His eyes flit up to me and he shrugs.
“
Just go to her class. You’re being moved.” Someone sniggers behind me, and I turn around in time to see some dude named David, that I barely know, duck his head and clear his throat. I begin to walk back to my desk, but juke toward David as I pass and he flinches. It’s temporarily satisfying.
Nobody else pays attention as I lift my bag and slump out into the hallway. I could just keep walking out the front doors and go back home, but my mom would be upset. I’d only have to show up and report to Miss Forte’s class tomorrow, so I zigzag my way around the halls to the area I think her classroom is in. I’ve seen her a few times, but I’m not even really sure what her subject is. Whatever it is, it’s giving me an extra-credit dose of karma right now. I wait just long enough for Riley to pull the door open, distracted by her own pink slip as she walks inside.
Seeing her this close up, her clothes don’t seem as baggy as they did from far away. She’s wearing the same shorts she wore out on the courts, but she has these low socks on with running shoes that make her legs look even longer somehow. I start to convince myself that she’s taller than me, and I’m slightly intimidated by it when I walk into the classroom myself and end up shoulder to shoulder with her.
Now I’m intimidated by a bunch of other things, and her height—and her spectacular legs—are the least of it. She’s still giving me lasers. Crystal blue ice.
“Riley…Tristan. Good timing. We’re just picking our seats for the month. There are a few in the front still open, so go ahead.”
A larger woman with thick black glasses and tightly curled hair, pulled up into a pile on top of her head, takes our papers and ushers us to the seats. By a few, Miss Forte meant: three. There are three seats in the middle of the front row, and Riley and I have the same idea—both automatically putting one in-between us.
I can feel Riley looking at me as we both sit down, so I glance her direction in time to watch her mouth contort into a sneer as she swings her bag around her body and rests it in the chair between us, as if she’s building a wall. Fine with me. If it wouldn’t look weird, I’d pile mine on top.