Justin

by LJ Alonge

  To Mom, for dropping me off at the library on the way to work—LA

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Penguin Random House LLC. Cover illustration copyright © 2016 by Raul Allen. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-101-99562-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-399-54275-6 (library binding)

  `ISBN 978-1-101-99563-1 (eBook)

  Version_1

  Contents

  COVER

  DEDICATION

  COPYRIGHT

  TITLE PAGE

  1: ALL-AMERICAN BEEF

  2: GEORGE AND LENNY 2.0

  3: IN WHICH I DO AN ADEQUATE JUDAS IMPRESSION

  4: PROOF THAT I AM NOT, IN FACT, PURE EVIL

  5: THE FUGITIVE (STARRING JUSTIN SHAW)

  6: A PART OF MY LIFE YOU PROBABLY WON'T BELIEVE

  7: THERE ARE SURPRISES AND THEN THERE ARE SURPRISES

  8: HOW TO START YOUR OWN DREAM TEAM

  9: THE LAKE

  10: POP

  11: AN UPDATE ON OMAR

  12: ALL-STARS

  13: HERE GOES NOTHING

  CHAPTER 1

  ALL-AMERICAN BEEF

  When Frank’s raging like he is right now, you just have to let him get it out of his system. If you tell him to cool it, you’ll only make things worse. We’re walking down Telegraph, and every time we stop at a corner, he tries to knock over a trash can. They’re the old steel ones that sound like a car wreck when they hit the sidewalk. Frank’s still waiting on his growth spurt; he needs a running start and hard kick to get the cans over. The one he knocks over now rolls halfway into the street, emptying its Styrofoam guts in the bike lane before settling in the gutter.

  “Nice one,” I say, hoping it’s the last.

  “Shut up,” he says. “You ain’t helping.”

  “Trash can didn’t do nothing to me.”

  He wipes his hands, the way people do when they’re proud of their work.

  “Feel better?” I ask.

  “Like a champ,” he says.

  The problem is money. We have none, we never have any, but today’s the last straw. We’ve been to a pizza place and a wing place and a sub place. They looked at both of my wrinkled dollars like they were covered in slime and pointed their snooty fingers over our heads, to the door. We left as Frank insulted their food, his stomach growling noisily the whole time. We just tried to eat and run at this Korean place, but they threw us out after the salads. I’ve still got the taste of ranch dressing stuck in my mouth.

  “You know what I’m gonna do with my first million?” Frank says, trying to work another can into the street.

  “Invest in the stock market.”

  “No. That’s some nerdy shit you would do. You’d probably throw it all away on books. No—what I would do is buy a restaurant. That way, I could have them deliver food to my house for free every day. Grilled cheese every day. Free.”

  A million dollars and he’d eat grilled cheese every day. That’s Frank in a nutshell.

  “Sounds good,” I tell him. “But what are we doing in the meantime?”

  He sighs. “Don’t know.”

  After some thought I say, “I’d probably build a couple schools,” thinking it’s the right thing to say, but by then Frank’s lost interest. So we’re standing on the corner, sulking, when a group of kids walks past us, laughing, pushing, their hands stuffed into the bottom of a greasy paper bag.

  “Where’d y’all get that?” Frank asks.

  “Up the street,” one of the kids says. There’s a mush of fries in the back of his mouth. “Want some?”

  My mom says nobody but con artists and churchfolk give you things for no reason. This kid looks tricky. He’s a heavyweight whose lips shine with grease. Just watching him chew makes me uneasy.

  “Yeah,” Frank says, reaching out his hand. “Lemme grab a couple.”

  “No problem,” the kid says, pouring the fries onto the sidewalk. “Eat up.”

  A soggy knot of fries goes spilling out between us. A dark puddle of oil forms around the edges. It’s not that funny, but the kids are laughing so hard, they keep falling over each other.

  “Eat!” Grease Lips repeats.

  Instead, Frank steps on the pile. Potato mush covers his shoes. He’s got his jaw clenched and his fists balled up. The guys keep laughing. Frank’s not afraid of a fight, but with his size, it’s hard to take him seriously. Plus there’s six of them. They keep talking. They can’t believe we fell for it. They want to know if we enjoy being such huge pussies. They’re gasping for air. I’m six feet four inches, but you can tell right away I’m no fighter. I breathe a secret sigh of relief when Frank eventually turns and stomps off.

  “I woulda fought them,” Frank says. Now he’s kicking random things—a fire hydrant, a newspaper stand, bikes. “But I got probation.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “Remember when I used to carry a pocket knife?”

  “Yup.”

  He makes a couple of showy stabbing motions. “It had a switch so you could just flip it open fast.” The truth is, Frank’s never seriously hurt anyone. He just really likes to hear himself talk.

  I slow down as we pass Benny’s Taco Truck, this being one of the few times there’s no line. Frank says he knows people who’ve worked there, and from the stories they tell, it’s a one-way ticket to the ER. It’s a terrible day to be out wandering—it must be a thousand degrees out. Even the dealers and junkies are sticking to the shade, but here we are, about to be burned alive on a two-dollar lunch mission. I’m feeling dizzy, so I say we should stop in the donut shop, the one with air-conditioning.

  “Sure,” Frank says, rolling his eyes, “maybe they’ll sell us some bread crusts.”

  By the time we pass McDonald’s, I’ve had it. Two bucks there goes about as far as it’ll get you anywhere. I start walking between the cars in the parking lot, careful not to touch their burning doors.

  “Gross,” Frank says, but then he remembers the money’s in my pocket and follows.

  Inside, I close my eyes and wait for the air-conditioning to close in around me. I lift my shirt up a little so the air hits my stomach. To my surprise, it’s warm. There must be forty, fifty people in here, whole families crowded into a single booth. Ms. Mayfair has her wheelchair stationed right over an air vent. Mr. Chalmers is sitting near the window, playing chess with his buddies, all of them stripped down to tank tops, fanning themselves with old newspapers. Little Chucky Jackson is going from table to table, doing a little jig as he asks for ice.

  In a booth in the far corner is Pop.

  “Shit,” I say.

  When I was a kid, when he was still living with us, people used to say we looked alike: same skinny face and high cheekbones and bug eyes. Same dark skin. Even now I know the resemblance is still there. When people look at us, they can tell he’s my dad. But right now he’s looking worse than ever
. He’s in a dirty wifebeater and these ratty black jeans that he obviously skimmed off a much bigger guy. Bits of twig are stuck in his Afro. When he runs his hand through his hair, it just stays in place like it’s glued in. It’s almost a miracle that I don’t die of embarrassment on the spot.

  “We gotta leave,” I tell Frank.

  “No can do,” Frank says. “Already put in my order.”

  “Then cancel the freaking order.”

  “You just can’t go around making and canceling orders, Justin.” He winks at the cashier, a cutie with tiny beads of sweat above her lip. “It’s a bad look. And unclassy.”

  Frank almost never goes to school, but when he gets around a girl, he starts laying the SAT words on thick. “Unclassy? Frank, unclassy ain’t a word.”

  “Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t. What I do know is that this young lady is waiting for you to acquire some nutrition.”

  The cashier’s giving me a look. Every girl has that look, the one that tells you they’ll bite your head off if you say anything remotely smart-ass. One eyebrow cocked up, mouth in a pinch. It always gets me all tight in the chest.

  “Chicken sandwich,” I say. I pull out my couple of crumpled dollars and carefully smooth them out. “And some waters. But hurry up, please.”

  She’s repeating our order when a kind of grumbling sound starts up behind me. Like someone’s clearing his throat.

  “Justin,” Frank says, looking behind us.

  “Don’t look,” I hiss.

  But the throat clearing’s getting louder, and now the cashier is giving me the look again. Like it’s me making the sound. What does she want me to do? I’ve got no control over Pop. Whenever he sees me in public, he goes out of his way to talk to me or challenge me to a game of one-on-one like the old days. And whenever I see him, I hide or walk the other way or pretend I don’t hear him calling.

  I close my eyes and wait a few seconds to see if he’ll get the hint that I don’t want to talk to him. But of course he just gets louder. I turn around, and there he is, with a wide, satisfied smile on his face, one hand helping to prop him up against the ketchup dispenser. A hearty stream of ketchup squirts out onto the counter.

  “Where I’m from,” he says, swaying, “a boy says hello when he sees his father.”

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Wassup, Mr. Shaw,” Frank says.

  “Good,” Pop says. “Very good.”

  Pop’s two buddies frown at each other to show how impressed they are with him, the type of man who commands respect from his son. They’re winos, like him. A part of me is happy that Pop is at least in better shape than them, with their plaid shorts and combat boots and wild beards. Their teeth like candy corn. They look at us, tipping their imaginary caps.

  “He’s embarrassed by me,” Pop says to them. “That’s why he’s acting all shy.”

  “I ain’t embarrassed,” I say.

  “You look it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then gimme a hug.”

  He looks shrunken and skinny, like my arms might wrap around him a few times. He opens his arms wide. Hair sprouts thickly from his armpits. Pop sleeps on the streets now. I couldn’t tell you exactly where. When Mom kicked him out, she said he’d be staying at a Motel 6 down the street, but I knew better. I used to imagine him foraging behind churches or the Dunkin’ Donuts, up to his neck in trash. I’d imagine him waiting outside of drive-thrus, asking people to add a taco or burger to their order. For a while every hobo I saw started to look like him.

  “No,” I say.

  “Too good for a hug?”

  “You’re drunk,” I say.

  “I’m a man,” Pop says. “I can have a drink whenever and wherever I please, thankyouverymuch.”

  No one’s making a sound, not even loud-ass Frank. It’s the heavy kind of silence that comes right before a fight. Everyone’s stopped eating, their hands frozen in midair. Even the dude on the frier comes out to watch. I’m wishing I was just about anywhere else in the world, somewhere far away, out in Middle Earth maybe.

  “How about a little game of one-on-one?” Pop says. He does a crossover with an imaginary ball. “Like we used to.”

  “How about you stink!” I say, pushing past him. It’s the meanest thing I can think of.

  CHAPTER 2

  GEORGE AND LENNY 2.0

  Frank and I walk down Telegraph, moving slow when we pass under the shade of an awning or tree. Everybody’s got their Saturday hustle going. A rusted truck puffs out black smoke as it pulls up on Fifty-Second; three guys in cowboy hats jump out and start arranging big boxes of strawberries at the intersection. There’s a young homeless guy out on an island in the middle of the street holding up a NEED MONEY FOR WEED sign. At the gas station, a group of kids are setting up a car wash and laughing; mostly they spray the water on one another and then get mad when someone takes it too far. An old-school Impala—purple and black with orange flames on the side—comes roaring out of the station. I watch it run a red light and pull onto the I-980 on-ramp.

  We’re on our way to Bushrod—Frank and I go there every day to play ball. I’m no good, a mess of arms and legs, uncoordinated like you wouldn’t believe. Everybody knows me as Frank’s tall friend, the kid who dribbles the ball off his foot. Frank thinks it’s pretty funny, but I’d always pictured this summer as the summer things would change. I grew seven inches in the spring. Now people notice me. They take long looks out of the corners of their eyes. I stand there and pretend not to notice, hoping they stare a little longer. You go your whole life in the shadows, not being noticed by anybody, and all of a sudden it’s like you’ve won American Idol. I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t feel good.

  But at Bushrod I’m a nobody. A zero. No one picks me to play, no one notices when I come or go. What I do is, I sit on the grass and I watch. And I learn: how the coolest kids never raise their voices when they talk. How they always slouch a little to the side, like half their body is heavier than the other. How they spit every couple of minutes and roll their shirtsleeves up just above their tattoos. How they break shit to remind everyone of how bad they are. From the grass I watch and listen, and when I get home at night, I download it all into a black notebook like a spy.

  We stop a couple of blocks away from the park and sit down under the shade of an oak tree to eat our food. “How much you want to bet,” Frank says, “I can bag the next girl that walks by?” When there’s nothing left to talk about, when Frank and I have gotten tired of clowning each other or run out of ways to spend our future millions, we talk about girls. We’ve laid waste to whole afternoons analyzing the way a girl chews gum. I wonder if these girls know that even the coldest glance, the look you’d give a roach skittering across the kitchen, can send us into orbit.

  “You know you’re gonna win,” I say.

  “We ain’t started and you giving up?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Frank starts primping. He’s got cool hair that he gels down, action-movie good looks, and some crazy charisma to top it off. It leaves girls hypnotized. They’re drawn to him like squirrels to nuts, raccoons to trash. I’ve seen him Pepe Le Pew his way through whole crews of ladies.

  Secretly, I’m hoping for a monster to walk by, a freak show with black nail polish and purple contacts. That’ll show him. But the first girl that walks toward us is this goody-goody from school. She’s always talking about the recital she was late for or the new instrument she’s being forced to play or the college courses she’s studying for. Right now she’s carrying a stack of books in her arms.

  “All yours, buddy,” Frank says, pushing me into her.

  “Hey!” I say.

  “Hey,” she says. The leaves throw crooked shadows over our faces. I think she’s smiling, but I’m not sure.

  “Weird seeing you around!”

  “Yeah.” She
looks down at her books. Each one is dictionary thick. “Just left the library.”

  “And I’m just standing here! Weird! Like fate, almost. Us seeing each other. Here! On the street!”

  The guys at the park tell stories about their girls. All of them have two or three that love them to death. You wonder with all the time they spend at the park how they could possibly keep all the girls happy. Anyway, there’s supposedly a way to talk to girls that drives them crazy—like you don’t care about them at all. Then you’ve got to talk about how good they look, how you wish you could get a taste. I’ve got pages of notes on this.

  “Real hot today!” I say.

  “Yup,” she says.

  “Good thing you’re heading home! I bet you’re hot!”

  “Yup.”

  “As in temperature! But also beauty, too!”

  Behind me I hear Frank slapping his forehead. “Yo,” he says, “how would you like to go out with my friend here?”

  She laughs, then starts snapping her fingers. “I know you.”

  “From class,” I say. “History.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Yeah, that. I knew you looked familiar.”

  “My man Justin,” Frank jumps in. “He’s got a face you can’t forget.”

  “Well, no,” she says to me, “I mean, yes, I remember you from class. But it’s just that—there’s a guy that looks just like you outside the Marriott, throwing up in the fountain.”

  CHAPTER 3

  IN WHICH I DO AN ADEQUATE JUDAS IMPRESSION

  I forgot to mention: Today’s the day I’m supposed to throw a brick through the window at Q Mart. Frank’s dragging his feet a little, raking his fingers across the gates as he walks. It’s cooler now; there’s even a little breeze coming off the bay. People are starting to come out and sit on their stoops and porches, like they’re out to cheer me on.

  “Come on,” I say. “We gotta get there before everyone leaves.”