“What happened to you?” His face is bloody and his nose is swollen to the size of a small water balloon. You can’t pretend not to notice something so obvious.
“It’s nothing,” he says in an effort to brush off the unbrushable.
“Be real, Alex,” I say. “You got beat up.”
“It happens,” he says with a shrug.
“Who did it?”
“You don’t know him.”
I don’t have time to be offended by his blow-off because the door chimes open and a girl with an afghan bunched up in her arms and a chewed-up thermos slides in like she’s lost.
“We’re closed,” I say warily.
“I’m here for an interview,” she says in a voice so soft that I cup my hand around my ear to catch her sound waves. “Is Zefi here?”
Zefi jets to the front and introduces us to Peg. She’s cute and small and supersmart. You can tell that kind of thing right away, not because she’s Chinese (because I’ve known plenty of Chinese people who aren’t that smart) and not because she’s wearing thick-rimmed glasses (because there are plenty of blind idiots out there), but by the bright look in her eyes.
“Would you like some coffee?” I ask her.
She nods, the afghan tripping her as she walks toward the register.
“You can drop all that stuff in here.” I point to the empty display basket on the floor in front of the counter.
“I’ve never been here before,” she says. “I pass by it every day. I guess I just don’t notice it anymore.” She rips open three packets of sugar like I do and pours them into her steamy cup, stirs, and slides the cup onto the counter without a taste. “But now it’s on my radar.”
Alex shuffles behind the register for a cup of coffee and extends a “Hey” and a nod in Peg’s direction.
“What happened to you?” Peg asks just like I did, and I snigger into my cup.
“He says we don’t know the guy,” I say, which gets Peg chuckling.
“Light hair, blue eyes, and crazy.” Alex huffs. “Satisfied?”
“Sounds like a bad day.” I grab the nail file from the radiator, but the heat’s kicked on with the cool evening air and the file is burning hot. I think I hear it sizzle against my skin before I quickly drop it back in its place.
Jarrid and Zefi emerge from the back and head behind the counter for coffee. Jarrid’s hands run along my waist as he squeezes by toward the pot and my whole body tingles.
“You’re next, Peg,” Zefi says, scribbling.
“Beware, he’s out for the sensational,” Jarrid adds.
Zefi looks up from his notebook, at which point I see that his nose is swollen.
“You too?” I ask.
“Just a random guy,” Zefi says.
“A random guy named Alex, right?” Jarrid says. “Best friends have to duke it out sometimes. It’s inevitable. Nothing to be ashamed of.” He rests his hands on my hips and I feel my mind go blank. “Charlotte’s an expert when it comes to taking care of beat-up boys,” he says with a quick squeeze.
Zefi sets his coffee on the counter and motions Peg to the back.
Jarrid slips from behind me to study Alex’s nose, which is trickling blood. “Zefi’s got an impressive hook,” he says.
When the door chimes open, I don’t have a chance to stretch up from the huddle at the counter before I am startled stiff by a voice so deep and forceful that I’m breathless.
“Coffees in the trash! Now!”
Everyone turns to me for a reasonable explanation as they approach the trash can, but I am just as dumbstruck as they are.
“It’s the Rose Avenue Burglar,” Zefi whispers loud enough for the burglar to hear.
The masked man in black displays a gun bulging from inside his leather jacket, and my heart jumps.
“Everyone at the counter! Hands where I can see them!”
Jarrid shuffles behind me and rests his hands on my shoulders, his body heat warming my back. Alex pulls his hands out of his pockets and Peg is perfectly still, hands at her side. But Zefi is scribbling madly in his yellow pad.
“Hands on the counter!” The burglar knocks the pen and legal pad out of Zefi’s hands and I watch the pen roll under the freezer box.
Alex is mumbling some long-winded expletive under his breath, and right as I’m about to tell him to shut up, Jarrid squeezes my shoulders firmly.
“Keep quiet.” His whisper is barely audible, his breath hot on my neck. God, I wish we were back at the lamppost.
The burglar motions everyone behind the counter and slaps his fists next to the register. I run my fingers over the dollar bill taped to its side and a sadness washes over me. The gun always wins.
“Open it,” he growls, pointing the gun at me.
I push the long, red button at the bottom and the drawer chimes open.
The Rose Avenue Burglar stretches over the counter, grabs fistfuls of bills, and drops them into a black plastic bag. He digs in the till for more and knows to lift up the inset tray for the bigger bills underneath. Peg, who is at the farthest edge of the counter, inches around toward him. I hear the scratch of the wicker display basket where she’d dropped her blanket and thermos. While the burglar rattles the till until there isn’t a penny left and finishes his job with a victory wave of his gun, Peg is making me nervous.
“Don’t chase after me or I’ll shoot. If you call the police in the next five minutes, I’ll come back.” He turns to me. “I’ll come back and kill your parents.” I may not know the burglar but he knows me, and that rattles me to the core.
As he backs away, he loses his footing and slaps his hands onto the counter for balance. His gun is wedged under the weight of his left hand and pointed through the window at Rose Avenue. Peg has dropped below the counter and out of view, and when I stretch up, I see her pulling at the blanket that she’s wrapped around his ankles. I search my space, the space I know better than any other on the planet, for something to help her. Lotto tickets, gummy worms, packets of aspirin. There is nothing.
And then I see it sizzling on the radiator. The burglar is almost free of the blanket, one hand still leaning on the counter but the other swinging the gun at Peg. I swipe the nail file, gritting my teeth from the heat, and jam its metal tip into the top of the burglar’s hand until it breaks the skin. Once the file’s in deep enough, I turn it the way a killer turns a knife in his victim’s heart. He snarls and flings my hand away, but not before the cut is deep and jagged. He kicks himself free of the blanket, twists open the door, and sprints away without the money. The door chimes shut as it always does, indiscriminately.
Everyone runs to the window to watch the burglar escape except for me and Peg, the latter of whom has crept back behind the counter and is crouched on the floor, her hands wrapped tightly around her knees.
“Are you okay, Peg?”
“That was out of control!” Zefi spins from behind the window, fishes under the freezer for his pencil and legal pad, and begins jotting notes. “You’re a hero, Peg!”
But she’s not looking very heroic. Her breathing is heavy and she’s teary eyed.
“Zefi’s right, you know,” I whisper.
“I’m the only child my parents have left.”
Her words are scratchy and broken, except for the word “left” that rings loud and clear and that hints of a devastation I can never know. I put my arm around her shoulders and squeeze. It’s another world here, scrunched up on the floor behind the counter. I find a 2012 lotto ticket that must have slipped out of a customer’s hand and the aquamarine marbles from a seventh-grade birthday party that I’d kept in my pocket for good luck until I lost them. I reach under the shelf and roll forward a couple of the dusty marbles. I pry Peg’s hands from her knees and drop them in.
“We can all use some good luck,” I say. “Especially when we’re the only on
es our parents have.”
She nods with a faint smile, her eyes bright like stars. “Lots of responsibility,” she says, rolling the marbles in her palm. “We’re the only future they’ve got.”
“You just fought a man with a gun. I think you’ll do just fine future-wise.”
“You fought the burglar too.”
I’d almost forgotten about the nail file. “But it’s my store. It’s different.” I say.
“Maybe it’s just human nature,” Peg says. “To stand up for what’s right.”
“More like superhuman nature, I think.”
Peg guffaws over her tears and pushes up her glasses. But I’m half-serious. If it were human nature to fight back, we would have been five to overpower the burglar, not two. If it were human nature, Margo Price and her dad wouldn’t get away with what they do.
“I guess anyone can be superhuman,” Peg says. “We just need a good reason.”
“Like a gun in your face?” I say. “That’s exactly when the stand-up people curl up and put their superhuman nature on hold.”
“Maybe,” she sniffles with a faint smile.
In the quiet of the night, in this little corner of our store, I am both relieved and crushed. I wait until the sirens reach a deafening pitch, until the red and blue lights flash into the store I’d always thought untouchable, before pulling myself from the floor. And when I do, Jarrid winks at me with his warm, brown eyes and helps me up.
12. ALEX
Wednesday
“Peg and Charlotte were like Wonder Women in there.” Jarrid stretches toward me, pulling his arm out of the shoulder strap of the seat belt.
When the cop driving, the one in a particularly bad mood, finally takes his eyes off us in the rearview mirror, I dare to look at Jarrid and nod in agreement, although since meeting Mammy, “kicking ass” takes on a whole new meaning.
“What happened, boy?”
Dad always warned that when a policeman speaks to you, you straighten up and listen, so I lean into the grill that separates Jarrid and me from the two officers in the front seat and prepare to listen. I poke my fingers through the woven metal and take a look at the military-grade equipment they’ve got in place of a typical layman’s dashboard. Two computers, at least two CBs. Instead of a console filled with antibacterial gel and tissues, this one has antennae and a mouse pad.
“Excuse me, sir?” I say.
“Your face.” He enunciates each syllable like I’m deaf or stupid or both. “What-ha-ppened-to-it?”
“It’s nothing, sir.”
“In my book, ‘nothing’ means something illegal”—he pauses to look me up and down— “or something humiliating.” He acts like he’s waiting for me to actually tell him which one it is, but instead I unpoke my fingers and drop back into the seat. When Dad told me to straighten up and listen to authority, I don’t think he’d have meant this jackass.
“Don’t be nervous,” Jarrid whispers. “We didn’t do anything wrong. This trip to the station is pure police protocol.”
But he doesn’t know a thing about my day. For all I know, there’s a policeman parked at my house this very minute, just waiting to haul my sorry ass in for breaking and entering. For all I know, Todd and his Mammy are at the station right now filing a complaint against me. Or a restraining order.
The driver takes a sharp curve and I grab for the handle, but there’s just a smooth, empty space where it should be, and I topple onto Jarrid. We lurch into a parking spot and Officer Jackass tells us to stay where we are, not to move a muscle. It’s as if we’re criminals and not witnesses to a crime, which makes me doubly worried because I’ve seen enough movies to know that the whole innocent-before-proven-guilty thing is bullshit.
Under the blaring parking-lot lights, I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror and cringe at what I see. Both eyes are black and my nose is an oblong version of a clown’s. No wonder Officer Jackass is asking about it. They open our doors and I wriggle out, trying to overcome the ache in my ribs, which could be a sign of internal bleeding.
I’m rounding the back of the car when another car screeches in behind us, the front fender coming within inches of my knee, but I refuse to react. Zefi and the Supergirls get out.
“Lincoln by night,” Charlotte and Peg giggle. Even the two officers flanking them are laughing. But Zefi’s too busy scanning the lot to laugh. Or maybe it’s this afternoon’s punch in the nose that physically won’t allow for smiles. I haven’t tried to smile since Todd’s grandmother’s house, which I guess is the one advantage of riding with Officer Jackass. I certainly wasn’t tempted.
We push into the station crammed with men and women packing real guns in their holsters. I watch Zefi take in his surroundings as if we were at the Museum of Modern Art, and I inch toward him while the front-desk guy gets our contact information.
‘What if Todd and Mammy are here?”
“Not a chance,” he says. “We have an agreement.”
“Agreements don’t mean shit with people like them,” I say, and when I do, I feel something rocklike roll onto my tongue. I spit the nib of white into my hand and study it while I run a finger along the smooth ridges in my mouth until I hit a jagged spot. It’s my front tooth, my front tooth! I don’t have anything against old people, I really don’t. They’re too frail to engender ill will. But there’s something about this shard of a tooth in the palm of my hand that makes me want to take the dainty little weapons that Mammy calls fingers and squeeze them until the pinkies break.
“This way.” Officer Jackass pushes me forward to a backless bench next to Charlotte.
“Pretty cool what Peg did,” Charlotte says. “Even though the blanket didn’t stop him.”
“Yeah,” I say. But I really couldn’t care less about her thoughts on Peg or anyone else. It’s not because Charlotte doesn’t seem like a cool girl, because she does. She’s pretty in that I’m-not-trying kind of way, which is refreshing after a place like Greenbriar. But Mammy has made me wary of all members of the opposite sex.
“I can’t imagine taking the risk to wrap a blanket around the legs of a guy with a gun.”
A blanket around his legs? Big effing deal! I don’t justify Charlotte’s words with a response. If she knew the half of what went down today, people wouldn’t be praising Peg and her multicolor dream blanket; they’d be praising me simply for surviving.
A new guy in brown pleated pants whisks in front of us, smiling. He’s got on his holster, but given the love handles and woman’s butt, I don’t think he’s “in the field” on a day-to-day basis. A short tie covered in daisies peeks out from behind the holster straps, which reflects just enough green and bright yellow under his chin to make him look like he’s going to vomit. He’s got rings under his eyes that are as purple as mine, and the wax-paper edge of the coffee cup in his hand is tattered like he’s refilled it about a hundred times today alone.
“I heah y’all are heroes, that y’all left ouah criminal injud,” he says. “Come oun with me.”
I don’t know whether that’s a southern drawl or one perpetuated by exhaustion. What is certain, however, is that I’m not the only one having trouble following. It’s only when he flaps his tired hands together that we stand and file into the small coffee-colored room with no windows. We settle into the five seats arranged there and watch him wriggle his way onto the rickety desk in the middle.
“Jesus H. Chrahst, what a motley crew.” His eyes run across the group and I brace myself for the what-happened-to-you question. I watch his gaze pass from Charlotte to Jarrid and then to me, and I wait.
“Mah heavens, boy, somebody tuhned yoah day upsaade daown.”
“I know,” I say.
“Ahm Detective Roberts and ahm in chauhge of this Rose Avenue Buhglah conundrum.”
Between the southern/exhaustion drawl, the daisy tie, and the love handles,
I’m trying not to laugh out loud because laughing during an investigation would be absurd. So absurd that I wonder if Mammy’s hits to the head may have left me partially brain dead. I look down at Detective Roberts’s feet and can’t believe what I see: penny loafers.
“The Rose Avenue Buhglah is an amateur. But I tell you, he’s given us heah at the station the runaround. Sometahms those amateurs are the hahdest becaws theyah ain’t no pattuhn to folla. What cayin y’all tell meh?”
“He’s about my height,” Jarrid says.
“I gave him a deep cut in his left hand,” Charlotte adds.
“Blue eyes. I could see dark hair sticking out from below his ski mask,” Zefi says, reading his notes.
“Would ya recognahze the vawyce if you huhd it agayan?”
“I don’t know,” I say because I’m the only one, along with Super Peg, who hasn’t said anything.
“He had a slight accent,” Peg says.
“That theah’s a helpful detail.” Detective Roberts takes a sip of his coffee, scans the room again, and stops to stare at my face.
“Ah hope yah at least hit back, son,” he says, opening a new folder. “Motive,” he continues. “Y’all know anyone with a motive? Somebuddeh who doesn’t lahke business on Rose Avenue?
“No one,” Charlotte says.
“Othuh stowah ownahs?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Zefi says.
“Don’t fawgit the insurance muney receyved when a place is compromahsed.”
“Are you telling me my parents are suspects?” Charlotte asks.
“Ahm not tellin’ y’all that.” The smile he’s had on his face since meeting us has faded with these last words. “Y’all walk up Rose Avenue ev’ryday. Y’all know all the comins and goins. Specially you, Miz Miller. You must have seen somethin!”
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