I Will Save You

by Matt De La Peña

  I looked at them.

  I nodded.

  Making People Pay

  “I already fought them,” I told Devon, pointing at the duct tape on my face.

  “It’s not enough. Just because they have money doesn’t mean they can come up to my best friend like that. There are consequences.”

  “How’d you know?” I said again.

  He turned and looked at me. “Because I know, man. I heard them talking. Or I heard you talking when you were sleepwalking.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Or I heard your little girlfriend talking to her friends. Who cares. The point is, I know. And now, Special, it’s time to make people pay.”

  He set off jogging toward them, holding the gun at his side, and when he got close enough he showed it and shouted: “Everybody down!”

  I followed after Devon, watching all the college guys look up and watching their eyes grow big when they saw the gun.

  “I said sit your ass down!”

  All six of them quickly sat on the sand and looked at each other and back at Devon. The guy I head-butted had a big bandage on his nose.

  Devon walked closer and aimed the gun at the head of the smaller one, the guy who started the whole thing. “You. Come on over here. Now.”

  The guy pointed at himself like he was asking a question. He looked at his friends and then slowly rose, his hands shoulder high and trembling.

  I grabbed Devon’s arm, but he brushed me away.

  “Let’s go, rich boy,” Devon said. “I want you to sit right here in front of me. That’s it. Easy now.”

  The guy got up slowly and walked toward Devon, and Devon pointed with the gun where he wanted him to sit. The guy sat. “You think life is so easy,” Devon said to all of them. “Sitting in your frat house, drinking your beer, laughing at everybody doing work-study jobs. But things aren’t always funny, are they? Like tonight.”

  Devon looked at the guy in front of him and pressed the gun up to his cheek. “You messed with the wrong kid last weekend, didn’t you, dude?”

  The guy looked at the gun out of the corner of his eye and cowered and said: “I’m sorry.”

  “You wanted to order people around. Say stuff to their innocent girlfriends.”

  “I’m sorry,” the guy said again, his whole body starting to tremble. “Please, just let me go.”

  “You wanted to hit somebody just ’cause he’s poor and you’re rich. You wanted him to know how much better you are. Isn’t that right?”

  “No, I swear. I was just drunk and acting stupid.”

  “You think you can do anything you want because you have money. But not tonight, huh?” Devon nudged the guy with the gun and cocked it and the guy closed his eyes.

  A couple tears fell down his bright red face and he coughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I swear to God.”

  Devon looked at the rest of the guys and said: “Look at your little punk friend. Crying like a baby. Mommy and Daddy can’t buy his way out of this one, can they?”

  “Let him go,” I said, grabbing Devon’s arm again. “They get it now.”

  Devon brushed me off and swung his foot into the guy’s ribs. A retching sound coming from his mouth and him falling onto his stomach in the sand. Devon spit on his back. One of the other guys went to get up, but Devon pointed the gun at him and he sat back down.

  Devon started laughing like a crazy person.

  “Let’s just go,” I said.

  He looked at me and pointed the gun at his own head and said: “You know what’s the difference between us and these rich assholes?” He laughed some more and spit in front of his wet shoes.

  I didn’t say anything.

  One of the guys sitting down said: “We’ll leave. We’ll never come back here.”

  Devon turned back to them. “The difference is you guys actually believe your lives are meaningful.” He put the gun up to one of his eyeballs. “But it’s all an illusion.”

  “You’re right, man,” one of the guys said.

  “Me and Kidd here,” Devon said. “We already know how meaningless we are. The world has already shown us. You could learn a lot from poor kids like me and him.”

  Devon pulled the gun from his own head with a big smile and reached into his pocket for a knife. He flipped open the blade and held it up to the guys, said: “You see this?”

  They all nodded.

  “I wanna show you what it means when you know you’re nothing.”

  “Please! We’ll just leave!”

  “Let’s go,” I told Devon.

  He turned to me, smiling. There was nothing in his eyes. It made me feel sick to my stomach.

  He looked back at the guys and ripped open his shirt sleeve with the knife and then stabbed himself in the shoulder, the blood flowing down his arm, into his dangling hand. He pulled the knife out and laughed.

  “Jesus,” one of the guys said.

  I stared at the gushing blood.

  “I know about myself,” Devon said, wiping the blood on his face. “I’m nobody. One day you rich punks will learn the same thing about yourselves.”

  The guys were so scared. They wouldn’t even look at Devon.

  “By the way,” Devon said. “If you go to the police about our little meeting tonight, I’ll hunt you down. You hear me?”

  They nodded.

  “And I’ll kill you.”

  He motioned for me to follow him, and we took off running down the beach together, Devon laughing and me watching the gun waving all around in front of me with his steps and his blood drips hitting the sand.

  • • •

  Devon Pulls the Trigger

  When we got close to the campsite stairs Devon grabbed my arm and stopped running. We both bent over to catch our breath. Neither of us said anything for over a minute. The only sound was Devon laughing.

  “How amazing was that?” he finally said.

  “It wasn’t,” I said.

  “What are you talking about? We put those punks in their place, man. We restored order.”

  I shook my head, still breathing hard. “I already fought them. Didn’t you see his bandage?”

  “That was just a superficial wound,” Devon said. “We needed to hurt the guy on the inside. You see how he was crying like that? In front of his boys? That kind of wound doesn’t go away.”

  Right then Devon stood upright and shoved the gun against his own head again.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m proving what I said to them. How we have nothing. I’m living it.”

  “It’s not true,” I said. “I have something.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that? Name one thing.”

  I thought of Olivia and her ski cap and our walk together. If I could see her even one more time, I thought. That would be something.

  “I didn’t think so,” Devon said, cocking the gun.

  “Don’t,” I said. I tried knocking it out of his hand, but he turned and kicked me away. Then he slashed me in the shoulder with his knife.

  He put the gun back to his head, said: “I need you to see this, Special.”

  “What are you doing?” I yelled, grabbing my shoulder.

  “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t pull this trigger.”

  I tried to think what I could say. What would make him realize. But I didn’t think fast enough.

  “See?” Devon said. “Now I want you to watch. And I want you to remember this for the rest of your meaningless life.”

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

  He pulled the trigger.

  I yelled as the gun went off.

  A puff of dark smoke lifting in the air.

  But nothing happened. Devon was still standing there. And when he opened his eyes he started laughing like a crazy person, like it was the funniest thing in the world.

  “It’s a fake gun,” he said between laughs. “It’s not even real.”

  “What?” I said.

 
“It’s fake. I stole it from this prop shop on 101. Right next to a music store.”

  I kneeled in the sand ’cause my legs felt wobbly.

  “We made that guy cry over a fake gun, Special. Isn’t that amazing?”

  I didn’t say anything. Just looked at the sand and shook my head. I didn’t know what to think or feel.

  “What we told him, though,” Devon said. “That part was real.”

  “What you told him,” I said.

  “We gave him something important to consider.”

  Devon tossed the fake gun and it landed in the sand right in front of me. “Take it,” he said. “Feel free to use it on anyone you think needs a dose of reality.”

  I looked up and watched him walking away, toward the steps. As he climbed them, two at a time, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I thought how Devon’s death drive was way worse than before. When he escaped from his group home at the start of summer, to find me, the world became less safe. Not just for himself but everybody.

  I knew right that second Devon would end up either dead or in jail. Those were the only possibilities.

  After he got to the top stair and disappeared into the campsites, I looked down at the gun in front of me. I picked it up to feel how heavy it was. I’d never held a gun before, not even a fake one. I looked real close and saw Devon’s bloody fingerprints all over it. And then I looked at my own hand, which was bloody, too.

  When he slashed me in the shoulder he must’ve cut deeper than I thought. ’Cause blood was flowing down my arm.

  I stood up and threw the fake gun into the ocean, as far as I could.

  Then I sat in the sand, holding my bloody shoulder, my whole body trembling ’cause I was so mad and confused and fighting off the pain. I stared at the ocean, trying to think what I could do about Devon.

  And thinking how I had to make sure I didn’t end up dead right along with him.

  They gave me and Mr. Red three days to fix the fence on the cliff, but it only took us two. First of all, they didn’t supply us with enough material. And second, Mr. Red told me if we finished a day early he had a surprise trip we could do.

  We worked as hard as possible, knocking out most of the old fence, hauling it to the dump, digging new ditches along the edge of the cliff, sinking wood posts, sealing everything with the cement Mr. Red mixed himself in his rusted wheelbarrow.

  We barely talked.

  My shoulder where Devon cut me hurt some, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I just duct-taped it so no blood would show through my shirt. Mr. Red had told me that some police came through the campsites the night before, asking questions. He said somebody had pulled a gun on some college kids up the beach. They told Mr. Red to call the station if he heard anything.

  He didn’t seem like he suspected me or Devon or anything. He was just mentioning it. But I still decided to avoid Devon for a while.

  I didn’t even need to worry, though. In the week since the fake gun Devon hadn’t come around even once.

  During the second day Mr. Red was working so hard he took off his sombrero and hung it on a tree branch. I stared at it while I held one of the fence posts and Mr. Red poured cement. There were two holes in the front of the sombrero and the rim was partly rubbed off and you could tell it probably started out way lighter. It was the most beat-up hat I’d ever seen. I wanted to ask Mr. Red why he didn’t just buy a new one, but I decided not to bother him.

  At the end of that day I held up the last post we had and he secured it and taped everything off, and then we both stood back and looked at all the work we’d done.

  “A shame, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head.

  “What?” I said.

  He pointed at the part where the old fence still stood, right at his favorite place to check out waves. “Only twenty more feet and we could’ve fixed the whole thing.”

  “Couldn’t they get us more materials?”

  “They could. But they won’t. Management’s cheap like that. Said the job was to replace the faulty parts and leave the rest as is. They didn’t believe me when I said the whole thing was faulty.”

  I rubbed the cut on my shoulder.

  Mr. Red shook his head. “Lucky I keep this part sort of hidden.”

  “I know.”

  “Only thing standing between some kid and falling forty feet down the cliff is whether or not he’s stupid enough to test it.”

  I looked at the old part of the fence, and for the first time in my life I had that vertigo thing people talk about. Where your stomach hurts just imagining yourself falling.

  Mr. Red shot me a look. “You all right, big guy?”

  I nodded and went down on one knee and acted like I had to redo my shoelace.

  Mr. Red grabbed his sombrero off the tree limb and stuck it back on his head. “Good news is we finished early.”

  “We’re really not working tomorrow?”

  He kicked at the old part of the fence and watched it sway back and forth. “Nope,” he said. “I’m taking you on a field trip.”

  Mr. Red’s Surprise

  The next morning me and Mr. Red were driving in his truck, and he was explaining to me how many hours people work during their lifetime.

  As he talked I looked out the window, at all the other cars. Everybody staring straight ahead, barely blinking. I thought how I was now a person who worked, too. And then I wondered if I’d ever considered myself like that before. An actual person. Like everybody else.

  “That’s why it’s so important to like what you do, big guy. You’re gonna spend a ton of hours doing it.” Mr. Red sped up a little to pass a big rig, one of his hands on the steering wheel, the other flipping the radio dial to a sports station.

  Maybe it was being outside of Horizons. Or maybe it was meeting Olivia. Or maybe it was Mr. Red’s talk about jobs. But for the first time I found myself wondering what would happen with me in the future.

  “Money should be the last thing people think about,” Mr. Red went on. “I know dozens of folks who end up doing something they hate just because they like the numbers on their paycheck.”

  I nodded when he looked at me.

  “A guy can buy a lot of stuff, Kidd, but he can’t buy back all the hours he’s spent doing a job he hates.”

  “Do you like our job, Mr. Red?”

  “I like where our job is. We work at the beach, man. We breathe in the Pacific Ocean all day.”

  “The beach is the best smell,” I said.

  “People should work to live, not live to work. Know what I mean?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  He changed the radio station back to music and kept driving.

  Ten minutes later we went off the freeway and turned into a huge parking lot with a sign that said WORLD FAMOUS SAN DIEGO ZOO.

  As Mr. Red looked for a spot he told me: “One day, Kidd, you’re gonna do much better than a maintenance job at the campsites.”

  “I am?”

  He nodded. “It’s the reason I brought you down here today.”

  Mr. Red bought us tickets and we walked in together.

  I wondered if anybody we passed thought he was the dad and I was the son. Then I thought what that would be like. And if I would’ve turned out different from how I am.

  Mr. Red.

  My dad.

  The only problem was, his hair was shaggy and blond and mine was short and brown. And his skin was way lighter. So we didn’t really look related.

  Mr. Red handed me a zoo map and said: “Wherever you wanna go.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “What about what you wanna see?”

  “Already seen it. This trip’s about my partner.”

  I looked at him and then looked at the map. Then I looked at him again.

  He laughed, said: “Look, you can either pick a place on the map and figure out how we get there, or we can just wander around. Totally up to you.”

  I looked on the map, then pointed to th
e center and said: “Maybe the monkeys?”

  “Lead the way.”

  Over the next few hours I led us through almost the entire zoo. We watched the monkeys swing from one tree limb to another, sometimes whacking each other on the back of the head. We looked at the elephants and hippos and giraffes and zebras. We looked at polar bears, which seemed soft enough to be stuffed animals you could play with. We went in the reptile part and looked at alligators and giant turtles and coiled snakes and colorful lizards.

  We bought sandwiches and Cokes and ate on a bench near the koalas. We went on the Skyfari, a ride the zoo has that takes people over the whole place, and when you look down, at all the heads of people walking by, they look like ants.

  I asked Mr. Red a million questions, and for a while he tried to answer them. But eventually he told me it might be better to just take everything in and think about it later.

  So I tried that.

  I stared at all the animals and the people watching them through binoculars or taking pictures. I saw a kid tossing sticks into the baboon enclosure. A mom holding her little baby up to a flamingo, and the baby crying. I went by myself in the petting zoo, where baby sheep and goats ate food pellets right out of people’s hands. I watched workers drive by in miniature zoo carts.

  I saw a squirrel running up and down a tree, and I thought how it was free, even though it was just as much of an animal as the ones in cages. Which seemed weird. But I quickly put it out of my head like Mr. Red said and just watched.

  That was when Mr. Red checked his watch and said there was someone he wanted me to meet.

  Another Girl Mr. Red Knows

  We walked into this part called the Tiger River Trail, down this narrow cement walkway where fog came up from the ground. The walls were made to look muddy with roots sticking out. And it was colder.

  Mr. Red hopped off the walkway and waved for me to follow him up to this big wooden fence that said EMPLOYEES ONLY where he knocked.

  We stood waiting.

  “Are we supposed to be here?” I said.

  “Doubt it,” he said. “But you gotta trust me.”

  The fence stayed closed.