All American Boys

by Jason Reynolds

  I bopped down the magazine aisle toward the back of the store, where the chips were. Right by the drinks. Grab your chips, then turn around and hit the fridge for a soda or a beer. Boom. I looked at the chip selection. Like I said, Jerry’s had everything. All the stank-breath flavors. Barbecue, sour cream and onion, salt and vinegar, cheddar ranch, flaming hot, and I tried to figure out which would be the one that could be most easily beaten by a stick of gum. But plain wasn’t an option. Seriously, who eats plain chips?

  While I was trying to figure this out—decisions, decisions—the other person in the store, a white lady who looked like she’d left her office job early—navy-blue skirt, matching blazer, white sneakers—seemed to be dealing with the same dilemma, but with the beer right behind me. And I couldn’t blame her. Jerry’s had every kind of beer you could think of. At least it seemed that way to me. I didn’t really pay her too much mind, though. I figured she was just somebody who probably had a long week at work, and wanted to crack a cold brew to get her weekend started. My mother did that sometimes. She’d pop the cap off a beer and pour it in a wineglass so she could feel better about all the burping, as if there’s a classy way to belch. This lady looked like the type who would do something like that. The type of lady who would treat herself to beer and nachos when her kids were gone to their father’s for the weekend.

  Now, here’s what happened. Pay attention.

  I finally picked out my bag of chips—barbecue, tasty, and easily beatable by mint. That settled, I reached in my back pocket for my cell phone to let Spoony know I was on my way. Damn. Left it in my ROTC uniform. So I set my duffel bag on the floor, squatted down to unzip it, the bag of chips tucked under my arm. At the moment the duffel was open, the lady with the beer stepped backward, accidentally bumping me, knocking me off balance. Actually, she didn’t really bump me. She tripped over me. I thrust one hand down on the floor to save myself from a nasty face-plant, sending the bag of chips up the aisle, while she toppled over, slowly, trying to catch her balance, but failing and falling half on me and half on the floor. The bottle she was holding shattered, sudsy beer splattering everywhere.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” the lady cried.

  And before I could get myself together, and tell her that it was okay and that I was okay, and to make sure she was okay, the guy who worked at Jerry’s who everyone knew wasn’t Jerry, shouted, “Hey!” making it clear things were not okay. At first, I thought he was yelling at the lady on some you-broke-it-you-bought-it mess, and I was about to tell him to chill out, but then I realized that he was looking at my open duffel and the bag of chips lying in the aisle. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “Me?” I put my finger to my chest, confused.

  The cop perked up, slipping between me and the clerk to get a better look. But he wasn’t looking at me at all. Not at first. He was looking at the lady, who was now on one knee dusting off her hands.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?” the officer asked, concerned.

  “Yes, yes, I’m—”

  And before she could finish her sentence, the sentence that would’ve explained that she had tripped and fell over me, the cop cut her off. “Did he do something to you?”

  Again, “Me?” What the hell was he talking about? I zipped my duffel bag halfway because I knew that I would have to leave the store very soon.

  “No, no, I—” The lady was now standing, clearly perplexed by the question.

  “Yeah, he was trying to steal those chips!” the clerk interrupted, shouting over the cop’s shoulder. Then, fixing his scowl back on me, he said, “Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you were trying to do? Isn’t that what you put in your bag?”

  Whaaaaa? What was going on? He was accusing me of things that hadn’t even happened! Like, he couldn’t have been talking to me. I wanted to turn around to check and make sure there wasn’t some other kid standing behind me, stuffing chips in his backpack or something, but I knew there wasn’t. I knew this asshole was talking to . . . at . . . about . . . me. It felt like some kind of bad prank.

  “In my bag? Man, ain’t nobody stealing nothing,” I explained, getting back to my feet. My hands were already up, a reflex from seeing a cop coming toward me. I glanced over at the lady, who was now slowly moving away, toward the cookies and snack cake aisle. “I was just trying to get my phone out my bag when she fell over me—” I tried to explain, but the policeman shut me down quick.

  “Shut up,” he barked, coming closer.

  “Wait, wait, I—”

  “I said shut up!” he roared, now rushing me, grabbing me by the arm. “Did you not hear me? You deaf or something?” He led me toward the door while walkie-talkie-ing that he needed backup. Backup? For what? For who?

  “No, you don’t understand,” I pleaded, unsure of what was happening. “I have money right here!” With my free hand, I reached into my pocket to grab the dollar I had designated to pay for those stupid chips. But before I could even get my fingers on the money, the cop had me knotted up in a submission hold, my arms twisted behind me, pain searing up to my shoulders. He shoved me through the door and slammed me to the ground. Face-first. Hurt so bad the pain was a color—white, a crunching sound in my ear as bones in my nose cracked. After he slapped the cuffs on me, the metal cutting into my wrists, he yanked at my shirt and pants, searching me. I let out a wail, a sound that came from somewhere deep inside. One I had never made before, coming from a feeling I had never felt before.

  My initial reaction to the terrible pain was to move. Not to try to escape, or resist, but just . . . move. It’s like when you stub your toe. The first thing you do is throw yourself on the bed or jump around. It was that same reflex. I just needed to move to hopefully calm the pain. But moving wasn’t a good idea because every time I flipped and flapped on the pavement, with every natural jerk, the cuffs seemed to tighten, and worse, I caught another blow. A fist in the kidney. A knee in the back. A forearm to the back of the neck.

  “Oh, you wanna resist? You wanna resist?” the cop kept saying, pounding me. He asked as if he expected me to answer. But I couldn’t. And if I could’ve, I would’ve told him that I didn’t want to resist. Plus, I was already in cuffs. I was already . . . stuck. The people on the street watching, their faint murmurs of “Leave him alone” becoming white noise—they knew I didn’t want to resist. I really, really didn’t. I just wanted him to stop beating me. I just wanted to live. Each blow earthquaked my insides, crushing parts of me I had never seen, parts of me I never knew were there. “Fuckin’ thugs can’t just do what you’re told. Need to learn how to respect authority. And I’m gonna teach you,” he taunted, almost whispering in my ear.

  There was blood pooling in my mouth—tasted like metal. There were tears pooling in my eyes. I could see someone looking at me, quickly fading into a watery blur. Everything was sideways. Wrong. My ears were clogged, plugged by the pressure. All I could make out was the washed-out grunts of the man leaning over me, hurting me, telling me to stop fighting, even though I wasn’t fighting, and then the piercing sound of sirens pulling up.

  My brain exploded into a million thoughts and only one thought at the same time—

  please

  don’t

  kill me.

  On Friday nights there were always only two things on my mind: getting the hell out of the house and finding the party. But before I could get my buzz on with Guzzo and Dwyer, I had to take care of Willy. Ma used to want me to stay home with him, but thank God that didn’t last long, because the Cambis, our family friends a few blocks away, came to the rescue and invited Willy for their spaghetti-and-movie nights. So Friday afternoons I just needed to get his bag packed and get him over there. He could do it all himself—he was in seventh grade, for God’s sake—but Ma hammered me with: “Quinn, you need to take some responsibility.” If she wasn’t actually in my face, or over my shoulder, across the room, sour-frowning as she said it, then she was a voice in my head making sure I knew she was there.

/>   As usual, Willy beat me home. He left the door open. He was too old to act like a frigging wild animal, but he was the baby of the family and we still treated him like one. He was in the living room with the PlayStation. His life’s major achievement was the mastery of all games and how quickly he beat them. His latest was the new version of Grand Theft Auto. Ma hated the game, but when Willy agreed to play soccer, the deal he cut, the little prince, was that he could play GTA as often as he wanted. Whatever. Willy was all charm. He got what he wanted. Whenever he smiled I was sure he put tears in Mrs. Cambi’s eyes, which was why they adopted him every Friday night.

  “Fuck yeah!” Willy yelled, because he knew it was me walking into the living room, not Ma. On the screen, he blasted someone away with a handgun. He’d stolen a cop car and was cruising through the streets. I knew this part. Soon he’d find the helicopter and go blow up more shit in his virtual world. I hated to admit it, but the game kind of freaked me out.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Turn that down. People’ll think I’m beating you or something. You packed?”

  He bobbed his head to the soundtrack and ignored me.

  “Willy.”

  “Will, now. It sounds tougher.”

  “Tough Will, I will kick your ass if you don’t get your bag packed now.”

  “No, you won’t.” He still had his back to me and I snuck up behind him slowly. “No, you won’t, because if you do, I’ll tell Ma, and she will kick your ass!”

  “Maybe,” I said, pretzeling his arm behind his head. “But it will be worth it!”

  He whined and kicked at my shins, but I lifted him from the floor by the TV and dragged him like that across the room until we were by the couch, where I dropped him face-first. I got a knee on his back. “You had enough?” His face reddened. “Enough?” I pressed harder. He wasn’t in pain, smooshed into the cushions of the couch like that. He was just pissed he couldn’t free himself. He wanted me to hurt him—he was that stubborn. If I hurt him, he could hurt me with a week’s deep shit with Ma.

  Thing is, I tackled him once, two years earlier. He was in fifth grade and I was in tenth. I misjudged the distance and as we fell, his head hit the corner of the coffee table. I called the ambulance myself. I got him to the hospital myself. He needed stitches. It was after dinner, so Ma was already at work. I didn’t want to call her. I didn’t want to bother her. I just wanted to take care of my brother and fix everything before she came home the next morning. But they called her as soon as we got to the hospital, and when she got there, she gave me the third degree right there in front of everybody. Hell of a bawling. I didn’t blame her. We all have our roles to play since Dad died.

  Plus, now it was a story Willy’d bring up at the kitchen table if he wanted to get out of what I told him he needed to do. For example:

  “Eat your green beans.”

  “Why?”

  “You have to. It’s healthy.”

  “What if I don’t? You going to smash my face again? You’re not my dad.”

  No. I wasn’t a stand-in for Dad. Nobody could be that. When the IED got him in Afghanistan, he became an instant saint in Springfield. I wasn’t him. I’d never be him. But I was still supposed to try. That was my role: the dutiful son, the All-American boy with an All-American fifteen-foot deadeye jump shot and an All-American 3.5 GPA.

  But sometimes trying to get Willy ready and out the door was an All-American pain in the ass. I got my knee off his back and lifted him from the couch. “Come on, Will,” I said. “Please. I gotta get going. Get your bag packed.”

  He made a big production of catching his breath and calming down and then he stomped off to our room. As soon as I heard him banging drawers and looking for his uniform for his soccer game, I went to the kitchen for my own bit of packing. That was another part of the Friday night routine: I always swiped a flaskful of Ma’s bourbon. She needed it to fall asleep when she got back from her shift over at the Uline Warehouse—twelve hours straight, so who could blame her? I took it to ignite my Friday night buzz. Me, Guzzo, and Dwyer. We got our drink on to get our party on—weekend warriors to the end.

  But I always stole the booze without Willy knowing either, and I got the flask in my jacket pocket while he searched for his shin pads in our room. He couldn’t see me taking the booze. His eyes were Ma’s eyes were the eyes of all the jackholes in Springfield who looked at me and thought of Dad.

  Apparently, I had his eyes. His build. His “All-American” looks. All-American? What the hell was that? I hated that shit. What did it even mean?

  I doubled back into the living room and turned off the game and the TV. I checked the house and the lights and all that. Responsible. That’s me. “Ready?” I yelled.

  “Yeah,” Willy said.

  “You good, Tough Will?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I thought you wanted to be called that—”

  “Asshole.”

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  Once we were outside and I locked up and we were heading down the sidewalk, I threw my arm over his shoulder. He didn’t shrug it off, which surprised me, but I was glad for it. I wasn’t his dad or any dad, but I did love being a brother, and I did love the little pain in my ass.

  But I didn’t love having to walk him to the Cambis’. Take some responsibility! Ma never said that to him. He could walk his own damn self! He was twelve, not five. It wasn’t far, either, but Ma and the Cambis were paranoid about the two-block stretch between our houses. Supposedly, the neighborhood was going to shit, and supposedly Sal Cambi got chased by a few kids all the way home one day after school and Mrs. Cambi had to threaten to call the police to get them off her front porch. Frankly, I’d seen Sal acting like an ass so many times with Willy, he probably said something and was so dumb about it that he didn’t realize it’d get him chased in the first place. The kid was an idiot sometimes, but whatever, I was glad he was friends with Willy, because the Cambis were nice as hell—they fed Willy every Friday night and made him part of their family, and all that kindness got me off the hook from babysitting so I could hang out, like everybody else I knew did.

  Everyone in this neighborhood lives in multifamily buildings. We live on the second floor of ours, above old Mr. and Mrs. Langone, for a good rent, Ma says, but the Cambis own their entire building, which, they said, was why they stayed. Otherwise they would have moved a long time ago.

  I didn’t have to be a parent worrying about rent and electric bills and all that shit to know that when you live in a neighborhood where they don’t fix the streetlights very often, where cops set up one of those elevated lookout stations around the corner and patrol the streets a lot more than they used to when I was little, the neighborhood was on the decline. But I loved the West Side. I’d lived here my whole life. What the hell did people really mean when they said the West Side was on the decline? What’d that say about the people who lived here, like me, or all the damn people who were moving here now?

  When we got to the Cambis, Willy sprinted up the front steps. I hung back. He rang the bell and Mrs. Cambi answered the door. Willy dashed past her and Mrs. Cambi waved to me from the doorway. She wore slippers. I stayed right where I was on the sidewalk, not wanting to get too close. Not wanting to get roped into staying longer than I had to. Just wanting to get the hell out and get the party started for the night.

  But Mrs. Cambi beckoned me, like usual. “You know you’re always welcome too.” She leaned against the frame and held the door open. I could smell the sizzling garlic and onions from the street. I didn’t remember the last time Ma had cooked for us.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m good. I have things to do.”

  “Busy man. Of course you do.”

  “And I wouldn’t want to crash Willy’s time with his friends.”

  “It’s never crashing when either of you are at our place, Quinn. You know that.”

  “Thanks again, Mrs. Cambi.”

  “Regina. Call me Regina. Mrs. Camb
i was Joe’s mother.” She smiled, and it was that smile I saw too often. That proud pity for Saint Springfield’s two sons. “You’re a good kid, Quinn,” she told me.

  I nodded and made my way.

  That stuff just pissed me off. The world was shitty, and I didn’t care if that sounded melodramatic. It was. Yeah, yeah, I was a good kid. A model kid. My dad had been the model man: the guy who, when he was on leave, stood there behind the table at St. Mary’s soup kitchen in his pressed Class A blues serving ladle after ladle of chicken soup he’d helped make. Yeah, yeah, model man when he lived, model man after he died. The model man and the model family he left behind.

  My dad got blown up in Afghanistan, and Ma and everybody we knew and plenty of people we didn’t know but knew his name, all reminded me—he sacrificed for all of us. He sacrificed for the good of our country. He died in the name of freedom. He died to prove to the wackos of the world who didn’t believe in democracy, liberal economy, civil rights, and all that shit, that we were right and they were wrong. But for me, my dad was dead, so the frigging wackos won. And, seriously, who are the frigging wackos, anyway? I sure as hell didn’t feel sane all the time.

  Dwyer and Guzzo had been texting me since I got home, and I knew they were waiting for me in the alley near Jerry’s corner store. When I was a block away, I took a quick swig of bourbon and stuffed the flask in my ass pocket, so they’d know I had it. So they’d know I wanted to get the party started too, but I’d had shit to do. I took a swig because I was taking responsibility!

  By the time I got to them they were pissed, and they looked like a couple of old ladies bent over and gossiping. Dwyer with his hands thrust in his pockets, shuffling back and forth on his two feet, his skinny arms and legs all fidgety, trying to hide his big-ass head beneath a green hoodie, and typical Guzzo. Guy’s built like a bear, but he stood there, with his hands on his hips, thumbs forward, kicking at the edge of the Dumpster like he was checking a tire for air. He threw his hand up when he noticed me. “What the hell?” he said.