26.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18 / LATE AFTERNOON CHARLESTOWN HIGH SCHOOL PARKING LOT
“Xavier, wait up!” Tio calls out after summer school.
I stop in my tracks. Tio’s comedy act in school is the only good thing going so far this summer. Dad’s no closer to a job, and Jennie’s even further away. Last time I dialed her number, she’d changed it.
“What up?” I say when Tio catches up to me. He starts talking, cracking jokes about Miss Williams, making fun of the book we’re reading and all that. He’s a’right.
After a while, his voice gets quiet and serious like he’s telling a secret. “You were in Eliot again while back, right?” I nod; everybody knows. “You see a guy there we call Bubble? A little guy with an afro, squeaky voice, lots of tats, and cold blue eyes.”
I nod. In the two weeks while lawyers argued about giving me serious time or the bracelet, I met a lot of guys at Eliot, though I avoided bangers like Bubble. “I saw him.”
“He’s out now. You know why?” Before I can answer, Tio continues, his voice even lower. “’Everybody heard ’cause he snitched. We want after him, but you know, they watching.”
“So?”
“So you ain’t connected, maybe you do me a solid and sometime down the line—”
I look away, mind racing. I’ve been running away from this kind of thing all my life, like a monster’s chasing after me. I’ve seen the life eat up and spit out too many people. Like Dad.
“I get it,” Tio says, then shrugs. “I shouldn’t ask a son of snitch. I just thought—”
“Thought what.” Now my low tone matches his.
“Thought you might want to join us. What else you got?”
I size him up and take stock. He’s right: I got a dad who ain’t one, a mom who tries but fails, no girl, no team, nothing ’cept a bracelet around my ankle keeping me chained up. I nod.
“You play baseball, right?” Tio asks. Another nod. “You gonna need your bat.”
27.
FRIDAY, JUNE 20 / LATER AFTERNOON CHARLESTOWN APARTMENTS
“Xavier, what’s your problem?” Dad shouts across the kitchen table.
The real answer is “you,” but I don’t say it. I just pick at my food and listen to music. He reaches for my buds.
“What’s your problem?” I say, moving my head away. I glance at Mom. She’s a wreck.
“What’s my problem?” Dad stands and pounds the table with his left hand. “I tell you what my problem is, little man, it’s everybody here on the outs treating me like I was still in.”
Mom cuts in. “It’s not fair, Xavier, he did his time, and—” Dad shuts her up with a glare.
“I can’t even visit my own sons, ’cause I’m a felon.” Another table pound. “And my youngest son never even come to visit me.” Now it’s a Star Wars death ray glare right at me.
“You said you didn’t want me to visit,” I remind him. “Said you didn’t want me to see—”
The next pound knocks the salt shaker on the floor. “You think I want you to see me like this? I can’t do anything. Everything’s closed. I did ten years that I can’t get back, for what?”
“Why didn’t you do more?” I’m thinking about Tio, Bubble, and my baseball bat.
Dad leans in, fists on the table, and right in my face. “What you saying, little man?”
“You got less time ’cause you snitched. That’s all I’m saying.”
He shakes his head back and forth so fast. “I didn’t snitch on family. They had warrants on all of us. I would’ve done twenty if I hadn’t given somebody else, somebody they would’ve got anyway. Then he gave somebody up, so I didn’t need to testify—”
“Sounds like you’re making excuses. You need this.” I flip him The Red Badge of Courage.
He looks at the book and then throws it across the room.
“James, calm—” Mom starts.
“I did ten, not twenty,” Dad says. “You were five when the offer came. I thought if I took it, then I’d be out in time to watch my son grow up a little. But I guess that was a mistake.”
Now I pound the table. The pepper falls. “You’re good at those.”
28.
SATURDAY, JUNE 21 / EVENING CHARLESTOWN APARTMENTS
“Xavier, don’t do it.”
Marcus and I sit in front of the TV watching the Red Sox. Mom’s at work and Dad’s “out.” During a commercial, I told him about Tio, which means I guess I just snitched. Another round of like father, like son. Marcus passes me the blunt. I inhale deeply as the Red Sox score.
“Everybody thinks I’m a screw-up. Dad, Mom, Jennie, Coach, Mr. Big. Maybe you?”
“No, I just think stuff’s really hard for you right now.” He takes the blunt back.
“Sometimes I wish my dad never would’ve come home from prison and—”
Marcus cuts me off. “Don’t say that. I’d kill to have my dad back. You got yours.”
“No I didn’t,” I say. Getting this smoke in my system is making me feel light. “I got a stranger. For so long, I’d thought, maybe dreamed of how things would be when he got out, and nothing—and I mean nothing—is like how I thought. It’s worse.”
“X-man, that’s harsh,” Marcus says.
“I mean, Tio’s right, I got nothing.” I take the blunt back. “I just don’t care.”
“Man, listen to you.” Marcus grabs the remote and mutes it. “You got baseball next year, maybe college ball too. Maybe your dad will work everything out. You gotta have hope.”
“Just a setup for disappointment, is all this is,” I say, my life as clear as the blue sky over Fenway.
“All what is?” Marcus asks.
“My dad’s life,” I say. “I don’t want to be like him, but I know I am.”
“That ain’t no way to have hope,” Marcus says, shaking his head. He laughs. I don’t.
“If I tell Tio no, he’s gonna think I’m weak or a snitch like Dad,” I explain. “I want to be better than my dad, harder, tougher, meaner. But if I do? Either story, I ain’t no hero.”
Marcus laughs. “Just ’cause you’re not a hero, it don’t make you a villain, Xavier.”
29.
SUNDAY, JUNE 22 / EVENING CHARLESTOWN APARTMENTS
“Xavier, put that bat down!” Mom yells at me. Dad and I were into it again, about what I don’t remember. I got up from the table and returned with a baseball bat. Why should I crack Bubble’s skull, who ain’t done anything to me, and not hurt the person who ruined my life instead?
The veins on Dad’s skinny neck seem to be sticking up like two straws. “Little man, you’d better step lightly here.” He very slowly fixes his eyes toward the sink and his heater.
“You ain’t gonna do nothing!” I shout back. “You’re just a coward. You read that book yet? You learn anything? You learn anything about being a man? Being a father?”
“Just ’cause you busted up some coach don’t make you a man, son,” Dad says. The rare use of the word son jolts me. “A coward? I did ten long years in a federal pen. You think you’re so tough ’cause you spent a few weeks in a kiddie jail. You don’t know hard times, Xavier.”
He holds my stare for a few long seconds.
“You think this is easy?” he asks me, but he looks at mom. “Every positive step I take forward, I get two boots in the butt backward. I’m trying to be a man, but nobody’s treating me like one. I want to get a job, be a good father, raise my son right. But I don’t know how.”
“You ain’t taught me nothing except how to fail!” I grab the bat so tight it hurts.
“What you gon’ do?” Dad asks. “Smash my skull. Go ahead!”
“I might as well. You ain’t gonna fight back, just like when they took you away from us.”
Dad looks over at Mom, who’s crying. “He doesn’t know?” Dad asks Mom.
“I don’t know what?” I shout. “A real man would’ve fought back, but I guess you—”
“You know why I didn’t fight back
? Why I didn’t shoot off a couple of rounds?”
“Maybe you were too afraid to have a gun in your hand,” I say.
“When the police came, sirens blaring and screaming on a bullhorn to come out, I didn’t have a gun in my hands.” Dad’s voice catches, and I’m stunned to see tears forming. “I had you in my arms, Xavier. I had you.”
30.
MONDAY, JUNE 23 / MORNING CHARLESTOWN APARTMENTS
“Xavier, come out of your room!” Dad pounds on my door. “Let’s get going.”
I pull the pillow against my head to drown out the sound.
“You’re late for summer school!”
My head’s a mess. Tired, still ringing from our shouts last night, confused. I remember Dad in the Goodwill saying he was trying to teach me how not to be like him. It seems like every day I’m turning into him anyway. But who is he? The man who did ten hard years for a life of crime, or the one who held me in his arms?
“I’m kicking it down if you ain’t out here.”
I leap from bed and throw the first kick to show I’m up. “At least I got someplace to go!”
“You think I ain’t trying to get myself a real job?” He yells, still pounding. “Nobody wants me. How do you think it feels to be a grown man getting told that by everybody he meets?”
I know I’m supposed to yell, I want you Dad!, but I can’t do it. “I wish you never would have come back here and messed everything up!”
Silence. Seconds later, the door explodes into the room, ripped off the frame with just one kick. Dad stares at me. He reaches back like he wants to punch me.
“James!” Mom shouts. I hear her shoes click as she runs toward him. Dad just stands there staring at me. Mom pulls hard on his left arm and he follows her, too easy.
Everything I thought I wanted, I got, and now I don’t want it. What I thought life would be when Dad returned and what it’s become are nothing alike. I step out of my room. I hear quiet sobs from the kitchen. I glance at Mom at the table, hand on Dad’s shoulder. Real men cry too.
31.
TUESDAY, JUNE 24 / EVENING CHARLESTOWN APARTMENTS
“Xavier, where did you get these bills?”
Dad’s holding the wad of cash in his big right hand; it must feel refreshing. “I sold your gun.” I know better than to make eye contact ’cause I don’t want to tell him who I sold it to (Tio). Word on the street is once a snitch, always a snitch.
I feel him breathing down my neck. “Why in the hell did you do that?”
Now I can look up. “To protect you. If you get caught, you’re going back in. You gave up so much of your life already. If you’re gonna do wrong, then I got to make things right.”
“Is that so?”
“I got something else for you too.” I point at the kitchen table. “My PO let me walk around today and pick up job applications. I said they were for me, but I got them for you.”
“Is that so?” Why is he repeating himself?
“I know you’ve had a hard time and I thought—”
He walks to the table and eyes the applications, picks one up, and wads it into a ball. He throws it at me, slower than my change-up. “I just got done wearing a uniform for ten years, and I’ll be damned if I’m going wear another. Flipping burgers? Seriously? I used to be somebody.”
“Used to be,” I mumble. “I’m just trying to help after what you did for me.”
He wads up and tosses another application. “I see what’s going on here. Giving me money, telling me to get a job, acting all that, like you’re the real man of the house. Is that it?”
I shake my head while he trashes the remaining applications. “Listen, you’re still a little man until you done time in the big house like me. Two weeks in Eliot and a month in a bracelet don’t make you nothing! It certainly don’t make you the boss of me! You get me?”
He raises his hand but stops as I lean in, ready to take the blow like a real man.
32.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25 / MORNING CHARLESTOWN HIGH SCHOOL BASEBALL FIELD
“Xavier, you still got it,” Mr. Baldwin shouts as the ball smacks into his catcher’s mitt. He saw me before school and asked if I wanted to throw for a few minutes.
“Thanks, Coach,” I say. He doesn’t correct me like he did last time I called him that.
“I hope I’ll be your coach again, but that depends on you.” He tosses the ball back my way. I catch it with my right hand. I bounce it up and down before moving it into my left to blow smoke.
“I won’t let you down.” I hurl a red hot rocket his way.
“But zero tolerance on the field, and you’re going to have to keep your grades up on your own at school.”
The ball comes back to me. I know it’s not true, but it feels heavier after promising I won’t let him down. Everything feels heavier after telling him that, because of what Dad taught me: the people you love are always going to let you down. “I feel you, Coach.”
“How’s summer school going?”
Another rocket comes his way. “A’right.”
He hangs onto the ball. “I heard you’re making friends with Tio Hudson. Is that right?”
I can’t tell him the truth, which is exactly the opposite: I think I made an enemy in Tio since I didn’t do what he asked about Bubble. Seems like proof I’m always gonna let somebody down. “Not really, he’s just in summer school with me.”
“What defines you, Xavier, is the people you hang out with, understand?”
He finally throws the ball back. I drop it. Seems about right. Coach Baldwin says he wants me on his team, but what he don’t know is that red road uniform ain’t never gonna cover up the blue of Eliot and the one Dad wore in the federal pen.
“Throw me the ball, Xavier.”
I pick the ball up, set up to throw, and it sails over his head, out of control.
33.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25 / AFTERNOON CHARLESTOWN HIGH SCHOOL HALLWAY
“Xavier, just listen to me. Think about what you’re doing.”
I sit with Mr. Big in the hallway, outside of Miss Williams’s room. Something happened, but I’m blacking it out. It’s kind of like I did about Dad’s arrest. I was there; the sirens and screams in my dreams weren’t nightmares but memories. Maybe he could’ve gotten away, but he didn’t because he protected me. And how do I repay him? Everything is my fault. It’s on me.
“You can’t talk to a teacher that way,” Mr. Big says, softly. I don’t break my stare.
“I just don’t care,” I say it once and then ten more times. “I’m leaving. I’m done. Out.”
“Xavier, if you walk out that front door, we’ll need to suspend you,” he says, still soft, like talking quietly is going calm me down. I have The Red Badge of Courage in my hand.
“I don’t care,” I say. Except the truth is probably I care too much. I’m angry at Dad, but then I’m angry with myself for being angry with him. I’m the failure, not him. I’m a little man, not a real one. I’m nothing and gonna be nothing. I rip the cover off the book and throw it. “I don’t care.”
“If we suspend you from summer school, you’ll need to repeat tenth grade.”
I rip more pages from the book, and then I tear the ripped out pages into shreds.
“I’m just telling you your options,” Mr. Big says. He puts his hand on my shoulder just like Coach Baldwin used to do, just like I dreamed of my dad doing all those years, except he was inside and I was locked out of his life. And when he came home, it was like I was expecting him to be some hero, like he’d get everything back to normal, except better. Some hero. Marcus was wrong: I am the villain. “Xavier, you need to go back inside and apologize to Miss Williams for what you said.”
“No.” I get up and start toward the exit, still tearing pages, faster and harder.
“Don’t do this, Xavier,” he yells.
I rip the rest of the book in half and hurl it at him. “Don’t tell me what to do!”
Before he can say another word, my fi
sts shut his mouth.
34.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 16 / MORNING ELIOT JUVENILE DETENTION CENTER
“Horton, you have a visitor.”
It’s visiting time at Eliot. I’ve been here for two months and Mom comes every time; Dad still hasn’t showed for any. Tomorrow I leave—for Westborough, the state juvenile correctional facility. A real prison like Dad was in, but for kids. It’s not a matter of where I go, but how long. My lawyer thinks he can get it under a year. Whatever.
Mom comes into the mod, sits at the table, and yawns like any other Saturday morning. Except it’s not. Westborough’s not an easy haul from home, but I need her to visit. I don’t want to come home in a year a stranger. I need Dad to visit too, but I can’t ask him. I can’t take hearing no as the answer.
“How are you doing?” Mom asks. I shrug; there’s nothing to tell. Every day, it’s stand in line, tuck in your shirt, count off, quiet in the hall, do as you’re told. Inside, outside, it don’t seem to matter. “Xavier, we need to talk about something.”
“How’s Dad?” I ask. I never ask why he doesn’t come to visit. She shrugs.
“He’s trying, Xavier, really trying, but it’s hard, even for a strong man like your father.”
Strong, weak, courage, coward, snitch, hero, father, son: all words I’m still sorting through for my dad and me.
“What do we need to talk about?” I ask.
Mom looks around the room. “I heard from a girl named Jennie. And her parents.”
Sure, now she gets back in touch. Wonder if her folks found my old texts. “What about?”
Mom leans in toward me, like I was the only person in the world. “She’s pregnant and says you’re the dad. Is that true, Xavier? Is that really possible?”
My eyes drop and I can’t get a noise out as the words sink in. Mom asks more questions, but I’m still working on the first one. I nod. Then we sit in silence as tears run down Mom’s cheeks.
“So, what is it?” I finally ask. It. My child.
Mom pauses and wipes her tears. She puts her hand over her eyes like she was blinded, then looks at me straight and breathes deep. “A son.”
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