The Right Hook of Devin Velma

by Jake Burt

  “Look.”

  He showed me the screen of his phone. His Twitter page was open. Devin pointed to the upper left-hand corner, where it said, “Following: 357.” Next to that, it said, “Followers: 0.”

  “Nobody knows you, I guess,” I said.

  “That’s the problem!” Devin shouted. That got his mom’s attention. She shot him her best “Don’t make me come over there” face. He grinned nervously and gave her a thumbs-up to calm her down.

  “That’s the problem,” he repeated in a whisper. “I’m following all the famous people I can think of, but nobody’s following back. If I could just get, like, one celebrity to follow me, then other people might, and I might get famous.”

  I snorted.

  “No, man. For real! That’s how I’m going to save my dad. That’s how we break the Curse, if there is one.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Devin scooted in closer. I could smell the orange soda he had been drinking.

  “See our moms over there? Know why they’re tearing their hair out?”

  I glanced. “Uh, forms?”

  “Money, dude. The doctors said my dad needs a procedure.”

  “A pacemaker and defibrillator, whatever those are.”

  “Yeah. To help his heart pump. Without them, the doctors think he has, like, six months to live. Max. And our crappy insurance won’t pay for them.”

  I winced. “Whoa. I’m sorry, Devin.”

  He sniffled, but then sat up straight, punching the arm of the chair as he growled. “But I’m going to save him.”

  I thought about reaching out to put a hand on his shoulder, but he seemed so tense I thought he’d scream if I touched him. Instead, I just asked, “How?”

  “My dad can’t work anymore. He can’t even lift ten pounds. Mom has to take care of him, and my sister doesn’t make enough money to help. So I’m gonna earn the money.”

  I instantly thought of my older brother, Marcus. When he was our age, he mowed lawns and weeded gardens. The money he earned was enough to save up for a computer before he went away to college.

  “How much do you need?”

  “Eighty-five thousand dollars, at least.”

  I nearly fell out of my chair. There wasn’t a lawn big enough in all of L.A. for that.

  “Do you know what the real Velma Curse is, Addi?” Devin asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You should come to the graveyard with us one Sunday. Try walking through all these huge monuments, with flowers and carvings and stones bigger than you. Some of the people in there even have mausoleums. Know what those are?”

  I shrugged. “A dead-guy thing?”

  “They’re entire buildings dedicated to dead guys. Think about it—a whole building, just for you.”

  “I bet the dead guy doesn’t care much.”

  Devin growled. “That’s not the point, man. The point is walking through all that, only to get to the row of lonely little stones with the name Velma on them. Every Sunday afternoon, Addi. It’s church and lunch and the graveyard with the Gs. My family has been doing that for years. My dad. My grandpa. My great-grandpa. All of them my age, walking through the monuments of people who lived for sixty years, for eighty years, for one hundred years, just so they can stare down at their dads’ graves. Well, that’s not gonna be me. I’m not losing my dad for a long, long time.”

  I nodded, then sighed. “But that much money? It’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not!” Devin insisted. “We can do it!”

  I shook my head and tried to reply, but he cut me off.

  “Remember the Gold Rush?”

  I was a kid in California. We all remembered our lessons about the Gold Rush.

  “Yeah, but unless you’ve found an old mine in your backyard, we’re not—”

  “Pssh, no. It’s this, Addi.” Devin held up his phone. “The internet. This is the new Gold Rush. Look. Tell me how many followers I’ve got now.”

  “Still zero.”

  “Damn it!”

  From across the room, Devin’s mom cleared her throat loudly. Devin rushed to make the sign of the cross, then kissed his necklace.

  “Devin,” I said, “you’re not going to get rich that way. You’ve got to, like, be a singer or an actor or a basketball player or president. Something like that. That takes tons of hard work and practice. Steph Curry shoots five hundred shots a day, and he does the same dribbling exercises—”

  “I don’t want to hear about your dumb Warriors right now, Addi. Besides, it’s totally possible. I’ll show you!”

  Devin furiously typed something on his phone, and in a couple of seconds he was showing me somebody else’s Twitter profile.

  “See the number next to followers?”

  I did. It was almost eight million.

  “This guy got that many followers just by playing video games and posting the videos online. That’s eight million people who know him, who listen to what he has to say, and who will buy anything he sells. Endorsement deals for days!”

  “How many followers does Klay Thompson have?”

  “Will you stop with the Warriors already? You’re in L.A. Be a Lakers fan like everyone else.”

  I backed away and glared at him. “Says the Clippers fan.”

  “Hey, my sister works for them. I’ve got family allegiances. That’s why I’m doing this, remember? And besides, I’m not a bajillion feet tall like you are. I’m not going to get rich by being in the NBA.”

  “Or the NFL, or the NHL, or Major League Baseball, or—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. And I don’t have time to learn a musical instrument.”

  I snickered. “Well, we all know you can’t sing. Remember the fifth-grade talent show?”

  It had been the highlight of the whole year. Devin had gone onstage to perform a rap that he had written—or, as he had announced it, a “debut of golden lyrics and diamond vocals.” He had on sunglasses, a hat turned backward, and just about every necklace he could steal out of his mom’s jewelry drawer. The best part was that he made Mr. Turnbow, the music teacher, introduce him as “Lil’ Swaggy D.” When the curtains opened, he basically started spitting on the microphone and jumping up and down, screaming a poem he had written for a sixth-grade girl he had a crush on. She got so embarrassed that she ran out of the auditorium. When Devin saw that, he stopped his routine, dropped his sunglasses an inch down his nose, and said into the mic, “She’s just stunned by the swag.” We all busted out laughing. Anyone else would have crawled off the stage. Devin made it seem like a triumph. The judges gave him the award for best solo act. Of course, it helped that I had agreed to be one of the judges; he had bugged me for weeks to join him onstage, but there was no chance.

  “Bro, I owned that,” Devin said, crossing his arms.

  “That’s true, that’s true,” I conceded. “But it’s not exactly top-of-the-charts stuff.”

  “So you see why I had to come up with another way. And I’ve found it. That video game guy? He posts clips of himself playing games on YouTube, and he tells people about them on Twitter. Then a bunch of people watch his videos, and he rakes in the cash. I did the math. A thousand views means seven or eight bucks. Ten thousand views? Eighty dollars. A million? Eight thousand dollars. And ten million? Ten million views, Addi, can get us there. It can end the Curse.”

  “Ten million views? That’s…”

  “Not as many as you’d think. This guy posts a video a week, and he gets five million views for each of them. Some guy from Korea makes dance videos and gets billions of views. And it can happen like that,” Devin said, snapping his fingers. “The new Gold Rush.”

  “But you’re not famous. How are you going to pull this off?”

  Devin shrugged. “My plan was supposed to have three phases. First, get an amazing video. The right one will hook people—you know, someone will watch it, then tell their friends about it, and it’ll spread.”

  “A viral video,” I whispered, thinking of th
e time Devin and I had sat around all afternoon, watching clips on YouTube of a kid shoving his finger into his brother Charlie’s mouth, and more of a poorly drawn duck bugging a guy for grapes.

  “Exactly. Get the right video, and you can get millions of people watching within weeks. Second, get Twitter followers so I can advertise my videos and rack up more views. Third, profit. But phase one didn’t go so well,” he muttered, scowling at me.

  “I said I was sorry. Like, a hundred times.”

  “Then prove it. Help me.”

  My first instinct was to say no; that afternoon had gone badly enough. But Devin was on the edge of his seat, hands wringing around his phone as he stared at me. His thick glasses made his eyes seem much bigger, and there was no missing the tears that welled there.

  “Fine.” I sighed. “What do you need from me?”

  “Yes!” Devin hissed. “First, I need you to promise not to tell our parents what we’re doing.”

  I crossed my arms. In all the books, movies, and TV shows I’d ever seen, “Don’t tell our parents” ranked right up there with “What could go wrong?” and “Well, it can’t get any worse” as the biggest jinxes.

  “C’mon, Addi. You remember what happened when I tried to make a lemonade stand in third grade.”

  “You wanted to put it on the side of the freeway in the middle of a traffic jam!”

  “It was ninety-seven degrees out! We would’ve made bank, Addi, if my mom hadn’t stopped us. But she put her foot down, so there’s no way she’ll let us try this. That’s why you have to swear you won’t tell.”

  I shook my head, but I swore.

  “Great! Next, sign up for Twitter and follow me. You can be, like, my first fan, and the first step in phase two!”

  “Um, what? No. Dude—I can barely take people following me in person.”

  “You don’t even have to look at it after you sign up. Think of it like writing your name on a wall, then walking away. You’ll never know how many people have seen it, or written their names below it, or anything. It’s just there, even though you don’t have to be.”

  “I know how Twitter works. I just don’t want to be on there.”

  “Please?”

  My shoulders slumped, and I twisted the blue-and-gold nylon of my jersey around in my hands. I knew that having an account on something like Twitter wasn’t like standing in front of the entire world, but something about it didn’t feel right. It was kind of like the lake at summer camp. I could watch fifty kids swimming in the muddy brown water, but that still didn’t mean I had made peace with the sharp sticks, snakes, and snapping turtles that could be in there. I guessed I had to decide which was worse: the burn in my belly at the thought of trying Twitter, or the ache in my heart at the thought of disappointing Devin.

  “I’ll … I’ll ask my mom and dad tonight,” I said.

  “But you won’t tell them why, right?”

  I nodded, and he smiled.

  “Thanks, Addi. I knew you’d come through for me. Now hush so I can get to thinking about a new phase one.”

  He patted my shoe and went back to peering at his phone. I squirmed silently in my seat. He thought he was getting his first follower, courtesy his best friend.

  If he had been thinking straight, he would’ve known exactly what a cop-out “I’ll ask my mom and dad” really was.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THAT STUPID DISHWASHER

  “Mom,” I asked as we drove away from the hospital that night, “can I use the computer when we get home?”

  She held up a finger, the nail still painted green from last week. That was one of the things she did for kids in her class. When it was someone’s birthday, she’d paint her nails the kid’s favorite color the night before.

  “Dad?”

  “Shhh. Your mother’s on the phone,” he whispered. I sat back and watched the meter run. Normally we would’ve taken the bus, but Dad had said it was worth taking his taxi to make sure we got to the hospital in time for Mr. Velma to wake up. I wasn’t so sure. I thought it was a rip-off that we couldn’t use it for free, but that was the new company policy, apparently. They’d made a lot of new company policies recently.

  “That’s right, Ms. Rhodes. He can’t come back until he’s nit-free and the school nurse checks him. I’ll make a homework folder for him tomorrow; you can pick it up at the front desk. Yes. Mmm-hmm. You have a good night, too, and sorry about Eric. Don’t forget to wash those pillowcases.”

  My mom set the phone down on the dashboard and shuddered.

  “Lice again, Mom?”

  “Fifth case this year. Fifth!” she mumbled, and she started scratching at her scalp. I kept my hair buzzed close, but I started itching, too. Couldn’t help it.

  “Mom, I was gonna ask—”

  “I heard you, yes. What do you need the computer for?”

  I paused. It’s not like I could lie; the computer was right there in the kitchen, big old clunky monitor out where everyone could see. They didn’t let me on unless they were in the room, either. “Too many creeps out there,” my dad said.

  I didn’t like my chances, but I had promised Devin to at least try.

  “I need to sign up for Twitter. Devin’s on there, and he needs me to follow him.”

  Dad reached up to grab the rearview mirror, angling it so that he could see me. Or, more likely, so that I could see his eyes. He glared at me, then took a deep breath like he was going to give a big speech.

  Mom beat him to it.

  “Are you serious, Addison? You’re twelve. You don’t need a Twitter account, and quite frankly, neither does Devin. There’s a reason you don’t even have a phone. I see my students with them, and they cause nothing but headaches. And don’t get me started on that whole ‘What if my baby needs to reach me because of an emergency?!’ nonsense. Trust your teacher, that’s what. We’ve been keeping kids safe without cell phones for hundreds of years. Why does little Johnny or Susie suddenly need to call every time they scrape a knee? Ridiculous!”

  “Yeah, but, Mom, I’m not asking for a phone. I just need to help Devin out. I’ll sign up, follow him, and then never check it again.”

  “Addison, sweetheart. You’re his friend in real life. You were there for him today when his father got out of surgery. You’re always there for him. That’s enough.”

  “K, Mom,” I said.

  “Good boy,” she replied, and she kissed her fingers and pressed them to the wire screen between the front seat and the back. Sheepishly, I kissed my hand and held it up to hers, just like we always did. I wondered if she’d be so quick to call me “good” if she knew I was using her to weasel my way out of helping Devin. At least this way, I had an excuse about why I hadn’t signed up.

  We dropped the taxi off at the company garage, then caught our usual bus home. By the time we got in the elevator to head up to our apartment, it was eight o’clock already. My stomach was rumbling so loud my parents could hear it.

  “You ate a snack at the hospital, right?” my dad asked.

  “Two,” my mom responded. “I gave him money, and he came back for more.”

  “What? I’m always hungry. I’m a growing boy!”

  “Don’t remind us. You’re on your third pair of shoes since the start of the school year!”

  And I needed another, I thought as I looked down at my sneakers. I had already had to replace the laces twice, and the heel of the left shoe was coming unglued. That was the price I paid for playing basketball every day on the blacktop. Well, that and all those scrapes on my elbows and knees.

  My shoes thumped on the carpet as we headed toward our apartment, and I tried to keep the heel from flapping too much. If the third pair had irritated my dad, the fourth would drive him ballistic.

  Kind of like the big brown envelope leaning up against our door.

  Before he even touched it, my mom clicked her tongue. “Just let it go until tomorrow morning, Matthew.”

  My dad had never been particularly good at
letting things go. He snatched the envelope up and swiped his finger underneath the seal. As soon as he pulled the first sheet of paper out, he was cursing under his breath.

  “Maybe wait until we’re inside to blow a gasket?” my mom said, unlocking the door and pushing my fuming father in.

  I followed him into the kitchen, trying to get a sense of what was in the envelope. I had only seen the top of the crisp white paper. It was stamped with the symbol of Los Angeles County, and it said: “From the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works.” The whole way, my father was grumbling. He didn’t even stop to put his bag down. He just tromped over to the phone, snatched it up, and started dialing.

  I paused at the huge hole in the floor, the one between the sink and the stove, and looked down. Ms. Culverson was in her kitchen making a pot of tea. She glanced up and saw me, and I blushed. I felt safe talking to our downstairs neighbor, but still got the prickles at the back of my neck, even so.

  “Sorry about the noise, Ms. Culverson,” I said. “My dad got some kind of note from the government.”

  “Hopefully a response to his letters about the landlord?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think so. He’s madder than that.”

  Ms. Culverson smiled. “Well, I’m sure it’ll all get worked out. In the meantime, I can’t say I mind the company, even if it is staring down at me from a messy hole in my ceiling. Here, Addi. Lemon cookie?”

  I looked up at my mom, who rolled her eyes but nodded. It’s not that she didn’t approve of Ms. Culverson and me talking through the hole, or even passing cookies. It was the hole itself that was the issue. I grabbed the cookie and shoved it in my mouth. I really was starving.

  “Thanks, Ms. Culverson,” I said, covering my mouth to make sure I didn’t spit crumbs. “And thanks, stupid dishwasher.”

  The stupid dishwasher—that’s where the hole came from. When we had first started renting the apartment, my mom had been thrilled that it had a working dishwasher. “Nothing worse than wiping the noses of twenty-six eight-year-olds, only to come home and have to wipe grease off dishes for an hour,” she had said. It didn’t matter to her that it was old, or that it made a ton of noise. It got the dishes clean.