“Dude! We’ve just been sitting here,” Dwyer said, wiping at the buzz-cut stubble around his head. “Someone’s going to get suspicious.”
“No one’s going to get suspicious,” I told them. “We’ve scored beer here more times than I can count.”
“Whatever,” Guzzo said. “This is our last night out for months. Next week, it’s back to hell.”
“It’s not hell,” Dwyer said.
“Dude, I hate forced fun,” Guzzo continued. “Coach isn’t fooling anyone with his team-building shit. Basketball meetings every Friday and Saturday night mean one thing: no goddamn partying. That’s it.”
“Man,” Dwyer said, giving Guzzo that face that said You dumb or what? “You kill me. This is serious. When that scout from Duke shows up, you’re going to be the first in line, squeezing his palm. All stupid smiles and clean-cut.”
“No, he won’t,” I said. I bounced in between them and boxed Guzzo back into the Dumpster, keeping my ass low, legs spread. “I’ll get there first. ‘Hey, man,’ I’ll tell him. ‘People tell me I look good in blue.’ ” I flashed a big fake smile, and Dwyer laughed.
Guzzo pushed at me, and I held my ground, keeping him pinned, but he’s huge, and it didn’t take long for him to toss me aside. He swung around in front of me. Frowned. “Fuck that,” he said. “You know damn well English is going to be first in line, because everybody’s going to talk to him first.”
“Not if you step in there,” Dwyer told Guzzo. He bounced Guzzo with his shoulder and they went at it for a few seconds, trying to get position on each other, get a leg in front, and box the other one’s back. Dwyer’s tall but he’s all sticks, and Guzzo popped Dwyer’s leg with his knee and got in front. He grinned. “Whose house?” he said to me. I laughed. I started bobbing in front of him, like I was going to shake and move past him to some hoop behind him.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, dribbling my pretend basketball.
“Falcons all the way, baby!” Dwyer yelled from behind Guzzo. “Whose house? OUR house!” His cheeks were already so red his freckles seemed to gather all together.
Guzzo, squatting, his arms spread out, and keeping Dwyer behind him, nodded. “Hell, yeah,” he said. Then he stopped and stood up and let Dwyer rush past him. Dwyer came at me so quickly, I thought he was going to knock me over. He dipped, pivoted, and swung around me like he was going up for an easy layup behind me. Classic Dwyer. He loved banging in the paint like a giant pinball and fighting for the rim. Guzzo wasn’t as much of a fighter. He was just massive; people bounced off him more than he tried to send them flying.
Still, we laughed, but it was because it was all we thought about. It was all everybody was thinking about. It was mid-November. State rankings came out in two weeks. If we were number one, it was only going to get harder.
“Listen,” I said. “If this is our last big night, let’s make it worth it.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Guzzo said, slapping my hand in the air. He pulled a short key on a ring from his pocket and held it in the air like a cartoon superhero. “Shotgun, baby!” he yelled.
He was so loud, Dwyer looked around to see if anybody was watching us from the top of the alley.
“Seriously,” Guzzo continued. “How much are we going to get? I’m shotgunning like ten beers tonight.”
By “we,” Guzzo meant me, because I usually had more cash than either of them, so I almost always bought the beer, which pissed me off, but I knew they felt bad I paid for their fun more than they paid for mine. And fuck it, we were tight, and that was most important. I’d been friends with Guzzo forever, and when Dwyer had joined us in middle school, everything had only gotten better.
“I have this,” I said, patting my back pocket, knowing they could smell it on my breath. “And I don’t want to be wasted when I get to Jill’s, and you can’t be either. You promised me. Seriously.”
And that was the other reason I didn’t mind buying Guzzo beer. Jill was Guzzo’s cousin, and he kept promising he was going to put in a good word for me with her. I’d always liked her. Gearing up for the basketball season, I would go on these epic runs all around town, and I—okay, I admit it—I’d run by her house more than once. You know how it is. Sometimes you just want to cross paths with that one person, on the bus, on the street, wherever, just so you can nod, and say “Wassup,” and hope to hell that something more comes of it. Anyway, the last time I’d seen her, she was dragging her younger brother across the street. She’d been wearing these stupid gray sweatpants rolled at the waist, rolled at the ankles, too. She walked barefoot along the walkway. I waved to her, she waved back, and all I could think was, How does she make even a stupid pair of sweatpants look so good?
Everybody knew she threw mad parties, so I was psyched for the night. Everybody’d be hands-up dancing on the first floor, and I’d see if Jill was down with some alone time. And if not, that was cool too, because then I’d be ripping shots with Guz and Dwyer in the kitchen, like we did at most parties anyway.
“Well, let’s do this,” Guzzo said. “Jerry’s, beer, a couple slices at Mother’s, and we’re good. The party’s gonna be a shitshow—Frankie brought over a frigging trunkful.” Frankie was another one of Guzzo’s cousins, and this was another reason being friends with Guzzo was a good thing. He had an army of cousins around the city, and if you were in the shit and you were tight with Guzzo, you didn’t have to look far for help.
Basically, we always got started at Jerry’s, because it was the dirtiest little corner store I knew, and the easiest place for us to get beer. Guzzo had lifted a bottle once. I had too. But we didn’t try that anymore. And we never bought it ourselves. The clerks behind the counter would never risk selling to underage dudes. But one night I asked a guy on the sidewalk outside if he’d buy us a twelve-pack of tall boys, he agreed, and that had become our weekly routine. It was the safest plan anyway, and we always seemed to find someone who’d buy the beer for us.
The only problem was always this: Whoever we found to buy us the beer would only do it if we paid him extra. There weren’t any Good Samaritan beer angels floating around waiting to gift us our weekly Friday buzz. So beer cost double for us, but whatever, we were seventeen. And I made mint at my summer job and it gave me play money for the year. Plus, Ma was a frigging workhorse, always doing the night shift at Uline so she could get paid more. It meant the money I made was just for me, and whatever I wanted to spend on Willy. But mostly, it went for beer and Friday night dinners at the back window of Mother’s Pizza.
We had to hang around for a while, but soon after it was actually dark out, I left Guzzo and Dwyer in the alley and leaned up against the brick wall down the block from Jerry’s until I saw a guy making his way up Fourth Street toward us. I recognized him; he’d helped us out before. He was a skinny white dude, who was a little strung out. I told myself that the guy looked like he could use my money to buy himself some food, but he’s going to buy more beer anyway. And while I’m fucking judging the guy like that, I’m also digging in my pocket for the money I’m about to give him to buy me and the guys our beer at five thirty in the goddamn afternoon. See what I mean? Who’s the sane one now? I’m thinking all this, but on the outside, I was all smiles and handshakes—All-American.
And I was about to hand him my money when the front door to Jerry’s whacked open and a cop pushed a younger guy out in front of him. It was only a matter of seconds before the cop had thrown the guy to the sidewalk and pressed him face-first into the concrete. I was barely twenty feet away. The guy on the ground was black and he looked like he was around my age, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was looking at me. He was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Did he go to our school? All I could really see was the cop over him, shouting. The cop was white and it took me a second to recognize him, because his face was angled down the whole time, but then, when he raised his head for a second, I realized right away it was Guzzo’s older brother, Paul.
Holy shit! Paul
! Paul was hitting the other guy, again, and again, smashing his face into the sidewalk. The blood kept coming. I wanted to move; my gut wanted me to rush to help Paul. But I knew enough to know that you stayed out of police business, plus Paul didn’t need my help because he was pummeling the guy. So I just stood there, sorta frozen, just watching, transfixed. With one knee and a forearm pinning the guy beneath him, Paul bent low and said something into the guy’s ear. I couldn’t look away; I didn’t even want to. I didn’t know what the hell was going on and my own pulse jackhammered through me. I heard sirens coming up the street, and I swear I would have stayed staring if it hadn’t been for the cop car that pulled up onto the sidewalk between us. When car doors swung open, I turned and ducked back down the alley to find Guzzo and Dwyer.
They were waiting near the back and I ran toward them.
“Oh shit,” Guzzo said.
Another cop car raced past the entrance to the alley behind me.
“Oh shit,” Guzzo said again.
“We have to get out of here now,” I hissed.
“What the hell happened?” Guzzo asked.
I looked up at the chain-link fence behind us. It was higher than a basketball rim, maybe fifteen feet. But climbable. On the other side were the tracks to the commuter rail. “Dude,” I said, putting my hands on the fence. “It’s your brother. He busted some guy in the store. It’s fucking ugly and we need to get the hell out of here. Now!”
I started to climb.
“The tracks?” Dwyer asked. “Are you crazy?”
When I got to the top, I looked both ways. No trains. Still, it was probably a high traffic time, so that wouldn’t last for long. I dropped one leg on the other side of the fence, swung myself over, and began to climb down.
“What the fuck, man?” Guzzo shouted.
“No one saw me,” I said when I hit the ground. “If we get out of here right now, maybe nobody will, and we can all just pretend like we weren’t here. Like it didn’t happen.”
“What happened?” Guzzo asked, one hand on the fence, but hesitating. “Is Paul okay?”
“Yeah, man,” I said. “But he just beat the piss out of some kid on the sidewalk and we don’t want to be around to have to answer any questions—it was fucking ugly. Now get over here before a train comes.”
They hauled ass over the fence, and we ran along the pebble embankment of the railway until we came to the Fourth Street bridge, and then we slid down the embankment to the fence along Fourth Street and climbed over that one. I heard a whistle in the distance, but we all made it over and away from the tracks in plenty of time.
“Paul?” Guzzo said again, his voice cracking.
“It was bad,” I admitted.
“What the hell do you think the kid did?” Guzzo asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever he did, your brother just put him in the hospital for it.”
“You know what?” Dwyer said. “Let’s just get a slice and chill. Seriously.”
It was a good plan, but when we got there, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had seen. I swear I thought about the guy on the ground, but mostly I thought about Paul, because Paul was Guzzo’s older brother, and after my own father died, Paul had basically been my older brother too. And I couldn’t shake that look of rage I’d seen on the face of a man I knew and thought of as family.
Saturday
Custody. That’s the one word I kept hearing over and over again as I drifted in and out of a painkiller coma, which by the way, might’ve been the best sleep I’d had in I don’t even know how long. And that’s with a broken nose and a few fractured ribs.
Custody. They brought me into the hospital, handcuffs still on, blood still pouring from my nose like a faucet with rusty pipes. My head pounding. Every breath hurt. My jacket, the one my brother gave me, now torn.
Custody. The doctors sent me through X-rays, administered pain drugs, fiddled with my nose until it was set back in its original place, even though they made sure to tell me that it would never look the same. That it would always look broken. But once it healed I would, at least, be able to breathe normally. They applied ice packs to my ribs, which were super uncomfortable because after a while the cold makes your skin feel like it’s burning. But after that, it all goes numb.
Custody. A police officer—not the one who did this to me, but a different one, the one who fingerprinted me—stood outside the hospital room on guard, making sure I didn’t run. As if I could. As if I were a real criminal. As if I were a criminal at all. He stood watch at the door until my parents arrived.
Custody. The police officer explained to my folks that I had been caught stealing. Not only that, but that I had also been charged with resisting arrest and public nuisance. There was no point trying to explain. I could barely breathe. I could barely keep my eyes open. The officer read the citations and explained that even though they were all misdemeanors, I had been processed and would still have to appear in court. Then, because I’m a minor, my folks had to fill out paperwork so that I could be signed over and returned to their custody. After that, the police officer left.
The next morning, when I woke up from it all, there was my mother, sitting in a chair on the other side of my hospital room, staring out the window.
“Ma,” I said, instantly wincing. I could feel the gauze taped to my face, to my nose. It’s that same tight feeling my skin gets after swimming, after the chlorine has turned me into cardboard. I cleared my throat and called out for her again.
She whipped toward me, sprang from the chair, and dashed over to my bedside as if I was about to deliver my last words.
“Rashad,” she said, her voice full of all the motherly stuff. Worry and love and hope and fear. “Oh, baby,” she repeated, rubbing her hand on my forehead gently, her voice cracking. “How you feelin’?”
The truth was, I was feeling two ways. Physically, I obviously didn’t feel great, that’s for sure. But not terrible. Not like I thought I’d feel. But maybe that was the drugs doing their thing. I did feel some soreness, though. My breathing was weird and uncomfortable. Every breath felt like a hundred tiny needles sticking me in the chest. And that was breathing through my mouth. Breathing through my nose wasn’t an option. Not yet, at least. But I was okay. Hell, I was alive. And so the other stuff—well, the alternative was way worse.
The other way I was feeling was just . . . confused. I mean, I hadn’t done anything. Nothing at all. So why was I hooked up to all these machines, lying in this uncomfortable bed? Why was I arrested? Why was my mother waiting there for me to wake up, dried tears crusted on her face, prayer on her breath?
“I’m okay,” I said.
She sat on the side of the bed. “Listen, I need you to tell me what happened, Rashad. And I need you to be honest with me, okay?” But before I could answer, my father came into the room, making a not-so-grand entrance. He had two cups of coffee, and even though one was for my mother, my dad’s face looked like he could’ve used them both. And maybe a third. But him being tired didn’t stop him from preaching.
“He up?” my dad asked my mom, handing her a cup. He hadn’t even looked at me yet. If he had, just for a second, he would’ve noticed my eyes were open, a sure sign of me being awake. My mother nodded, almost as if she were giving him the green light to acknowledge me.
“Rashad.” He said my name the same way he said it every other day when he was waking me up for school. As if nothing was wrong. As if he wasn’t broken up by the sight of me lying in bed, black and blue and taped and bandaged and tubed and connected to machines monitoring whether or not I was actually still breathing.
“Hmm,” I grunted.
“Help me out here, son,” he said in his normal voice, which was his asshole voice. “I need to know what the hell you were thinking, shoplifting. Shoplifting? And from Jerry’s of all places?” Dad had that disappointed look on his face—the same face he used to give me before I joined ROTC, the same face he made whenever he talked about Spoony.<
br />
“I didn’t steal nothin’,” I said, suddenly feeling too tired to explain, even though I just woke up.
“Well then, why did the cops say you did?” Dad replied, narrowing his eyes and taking a sip of his coffee. A slurp.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Dad scoffed. “Really, Rashad? You don’t know?”
I felt a cough coming on and did everything I could to pinch it back, knowing that if I let it out, my entire body would feel like it was being hit by a million tiny hammers on the inside. I managed to get it down to a single, closed-mouth grunt, and guess what? It didn’t matter. Every bone still seemed to tremble, and my head suddenly felt full of helium.
“No, I don’t know,” I repeated after getting through the cough.
“Look, baby, just tell us what happened,” my mother said, calming my father down as usual. “From the beginning.”
I started the story but didn’t get very far before the nurse came in, interrupting everything with breakfast.
“Good morning,” she said in a singsongy way after a light knock on the door. My mother greeted her pleasantly. My father forced a hello.
“Got you some oatmeal, and some orange juice, and a little bit of fruit cocktail.” The nurse set the food on the tray by my bed. “Is everything else okay?”
“What’s your name, hon?” my mother asked.
“Clarissa.”
“Clarissa, everything is fine, thank you,” Ma said. “But do you think we can raise the back of the bed up just a little, so he’s not lying so flat?”
“Of course,” Clarissa said, sliding the tray away and coming to my side. She pulled out a remote that was wedged between the mattress and the frame. With the push of a button, the bed started to reposition, which meant my body started to reposition, which meant . . . ooooouch!
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