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Custody. at’s the one word I kept hearing over and over again as I dried 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. ey 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. e doctors sent me through X-rays, administered pain drugs,
ddled 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. at it would always look broken. But once it healed I would, at least, be able to breathe normally. ey applied ice packs to my ribs, which were super uncomfortable because aer a while the cold makes your skin feel like it’s burning. But aer that, it all goes numb.
Custody. A police officer—not the one who did this to me, but a different one, the one who ngerprinted 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. e 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. ere was no point trying to explain. I could barely breathe. I could barely keep my eyes open. e 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. en, because I’m a minor, my folks had to ll out paperwork so that I could be signed over and returned to their custody. Aer that, the police officer le.
e 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 aer swimming, aer 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’?”
e 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.
e 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, shopliing. Shopliing? 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.
“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 aer 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 aer 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.” e 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 ne, 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 at?”
“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!
“Is that good?” Clarissa asked. I just nodded, which was hard to do because now my chin was smashed into my chest. I had literally been folded up.
She moved the food tray back so that it was close enough for me to reach, and aer telling us that the doctor would be in shortly, she le, and my mother helped me situate myself on the bed so that I could look and feel normal. As normal as possible. Normal enough for my father to get back to business.
“So walk me through this, son. You got to the store . . .”
“I got to the store, just to get gum and chips. I picked the bag of chips I wanted, and then I bent down and dug in my bag to try to get my phone so I could call Spoony. is lady didn’t see me squatting behind her, and tripped over me. en I lost my balance, and the bag of chips went ying. e cop assumed I had done something to the lady, which I didn’t. e dude who works the register looks up and thinks I’m trying to put the chips in my bag, but I wasn’t. en the cop rushed me and yoked me up all crazy.” I paused, then added, “And that’s it.”
My mother sat quietly and my father paced back and forth, from the door to the window. Ma was clearly horri ed. But Dad, he had on that Son, you aren’t telling me everything look. It was clear that to him, I had to have done something wrong to bring this on.
“Were your pants sagging?” Dad interrogated, now back over by the door. “Were my pants sagging?” I repeated, shocked by the question. “What
does that have to do with anything?”
“Oh, it matters. If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck . . .”
My mother glared at him. “David! is is your son we’re talking about.
e boy’s never even been suspended.”
“But they don’t know that,” Dad said. “What they see is what he presents.
And it sounds like he presented himself as just another—”
“Another what?” Ma cut in again, this time her voice spiking to that Don’t start level. Dad swallowed the rest of his statement.
“Well, they said you resisted arrest,” he continued in another direction. “If you didn’t do anything wrong, why would you resist arrest?” His voice began to rise. “And how many times have I told you and Spoony, I mean, since y’all were young we’ve been going over this. Never ght back. Never talk back. Keep your hands up. Keep your mouth shut. Just do what they ask you to do, and you’ll be ne.”
at was another one of those way-too-familiar songs Spoony and I were forced to sing when we were kids. Every time Dad said it, it was always the same. Just like the army talk. But this one was even worse, because it had a rhythm to it, like a poem, or a chant. Never ght back. Never talk back. Keep your hands up. Keep your mouth shut. Just do what they ask you to do, and you’ll be ne.
“I know, I know. And I did all that,” I said, running through the scenario in my head again. “I didn’t ght back; I couldn’t. And I didn’t say jack besides trying to explain that I hadn’t done nothing wrong, but before I could even get a word out, he was all over me.”
“You couldn’t have,” Dad said, matter-of-fact. He looked at me as if he didn’t know me and shook his head. As if he was disappointed. As if I asked for this. at really pissed me off. at really, really got me going, because I was being blamed for something I didn’t do, not just by that stupid store clerk and that asshole cop, but also by my father. A burning sensation rose in my chest and stomach, the fractured ribs sizzling. My eyes began to water with frustration.
“I did.” My voice shattered in my throat and came out pitchy and emotional. “You don’t gotta believe me. But I did.” I turned my head away.
You know who did believe me? My brother Spoony. He showed up a few minutes later, aer working an overnight shi at UPS and catching a quick nap. And let me tell you, when he arrived, he was full of re.
First was the obligatory mother hug. Spoony ran over to our mom and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Made sure she was all right. en came the “Dad.” at’s all Spoony said to him. Just an acknowledgment of his presence. It’s not that he was bee ng with our father or that they didn’t get along—I take that back. ey really didn’t get along. ey just couldn’t see eye to eye on most things. Dad was all about discipline and believed that if you work hard, good things happen to you no matter what. Of course, part
of working hard, to him, was looking the part, dressing the part, and speaking the part, which Spoony didn’t really vibe with.
Spoony had, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine locs sprouting from his head like antennae. ick and matted like strips of carpet, but I always thought they looked pretty cool. Dad . . . not so much. ey’ll think you’re doing drugs, he’d say. Spoony’s clothes were always two (or three or four) sizes too big. at was just his style. at was pretty much his whole generation’s style. Nineties hip-hop, gritty, realness. Wu-Tang. Biggie. Hoodies and unlaced boots. ey’ll think you’re selling drugs, Dad would say. Why can’t you get a haircut? Why can’t you dress like a respectable adult? Why can’t you set an example for your brother? Huh, son? Why? And because Spoony was tired of explaining himself, and Dad was tired of asking him to change, they kept their conversations short and sweet. Like Spoony greeting him, “Dad,” head nod. Followed by Dad saying, “Spoony,” head nod. And that was that.
Spoony came over to my bed.
“Li’l bruh, you good?” he said, something grape- avored on his breath. “I’m good.”
“What happened?”
I started running the story down and got about halfway through, just up to when the cop pressed me, when Spoony lost it.
“See?” he said, looking around to our parents. “See? is is that bullshit! I’m so sick of them treating us like we animals. Like we America’s disobedient dogs!”
“Calm down, Spoony,” Ma said, which only made it worse.
“Calm down? Calm down?” Spoony’s voice got signi cantly less calm. “Haven’t we been a little too calm? ey get to do whatever they want to us, to him—to your son—and we’re supposed to just calm down?” He put his hands on his head, attening his locs, rocking back and forth in that way people do right before they punch a wall.
“Spoony—”
“And he was unarmed! Calm down? Do you know the stats? It’s something like black people are twice as likely to have no weapons on them when they’re killed by cops. Twice as likely! Should I run down the list of the people this has happened to? Calm down? Let’s paint their names on the
walls and watch, there’ll be enough to give the entire hospital a fresh new look. en tell me to calm down. He could’ve been killed!”
“But he wasn’t,” Dad said, deadpan. He seemed totally unimpressed by Spoony’s outburst, and probably wrote it off as theatrics. He was always calling Spoony a rebel without a cause.
“But he could’ve been! For a bag of chips that he was gonna pay for! For having brown skin and wearing his jeans a certain way. And guess what, Dad, that ROTC uniform was right there in that bag. e bag was open so that cop probably saw it. But did it matter?” Spoony’s voice fanned, the anger breaking him down.
“at’s enough!” Ma said rmly.
Dad and Spoony glared at each other until nally Dad turned away and looked out the window. Ma just sat on the bed, rubbing my hand, her eyes wet from it all. Spoony leaned against the wall. And I sat there thinking about what was going to happen to me. I know my father and brother were arguing about what had happened, but all I could think about in that moment was what was going to happen next. Would the charges stick? Would they follow me around, a smudge on my record until I was eighteen when it would nally disappear? Does anything actually disappear these days?
e silence was much worse than the yelling, so I ddled with the remote. e same one that controlled my bed controlled the television. I turned it on. Too bad TV sucks on Saturday morning unless you’re a little kid or a politician. And politics are painful to watch. Boring. So the sound of helium-pitched cartoon characters had to be the life ra for this sinking ship of awkwardness. ankfully, the doctor came in to save us from the equally awkward distraction of cartoons.
“Good morning, folks,” he said, full of cheer, which was weird because this was not a cheerful occasion. But I guess doctors always have to try to li the mood. “I’m Dr. Barnes.”
“David Butler,” my father said, shaking his hand. “Jessica,” my mother said, doing the same.
“Randolph,” Spoony said, introducing himself with his government name. He got the nickname Spoony because when he was young, he refused to eat with a fork. He was always scared he’d poke himself in the tongue, so he only ever used spoons. But that’s not something you tell a doctor.
“And Rashad,” the doctor said, pointing at me. I nodded. “Nice to meet all of you. I just want to give you all an update on what’s happening and what’s ahead of us.”
“Sounds good,” Dad said.
“Okay, so Rashad’s nose was broken, but we’ve already set it, so as long as he doesn’t bump it or knock it, it’ll heal just ne. e same goes for his ribs.
ere’s really nothing we can do about them except make sure that Rashad isn’t in any pain, but as long as they’re fairly stable, they’ll heal up as well. We did do an X-ray just to make sure there were no lacerations to any of his organs, and there weren’t, so we’re pretty much in the clear with that.”
“So when can he come home?” Ma asked, starting to beam.
“Well, that’s the thing. Under normal circumstances I would say that Rashad could go home tonight.” Ma stopped rubbing my hand. e doctor continued. “But this isn’t a normal circumstance. He has some internal bleeding—hemothorax, it’s called—which just means there are some torn blood vessels around his lungs due, I’m sure, to the impact. Usually, this xes itself, but we’ll need to monitor him for a few days in case it doesn’t.”
“And if it doesn’t . . . ,” my mother began. “en he’ll need surgery,” the doctor told us.
Surgery. at’s one of those words that no matter how many times you hear it, it always freaks you out. Surgery. My mother’s face tightened as she did everything she could to hold it together, but she couldn’t keep her leg from bouncing like she always does when she’s trying keep her emotions tucked in. Spoony bit down on his bottom lip. My father just seemed to be taking it all in, not particularly bothered.
“Sound good?” the doctor asked.
“Sounds good,” Dad replied, shaking the doctor’s hand once more. Dr.
Barnes said he’d be in to check on me in a few hours, and le.
I reached for the remote and turned the channel.
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I wish there were more interesting things to tell you about the rest of the day, but the truth is that most of it I spent dozing in and out of sleep, while my family sat around watching me doze in and out of sleep. Well, at least, Ma and Dad did. Spoony was in and out of the room, making and taking phone
calls, and whenever he was in the room he was texting. I didn’t know who all the texts were going to, but I knew at least some of them were going to his girlfriend, Berry. And, funny enough, Berry’s little brother was my homeboy, English. English Jones. e athlete, pretty boy, non-asshole who everybody loved. Yep, that guy. So I knew that if Berry knew what happened to me, English knew. And if English knew, Carlos and Shannon knew. And if those two dudes knew, then by Monday, half the school would know.
And then I was asleep. And then I was awake again. And Clarissa brought lunch in. I had barely touched breakfast. e oatmeal. Maybe a spoonful or two. It wasn’t so bad, but aer my father acted like . . . my father, I had pretty much lost my appetite. I offered it to my mother, but she couldn’t eat either. Spoony ate the fruit cocktail and said it reminded him of elementary school. “I used to love the grapes, but there was never enough of them,” he said,
holding the cup up to his face and slurping the fruit out.
For lunch, Central Hospital served up its nest turkey club sandwich with vegetable soup. I ate half the sandwich aer my mother pretty much forced me to eat something, and I have to say, it was pretty good. All these years I had been hearing about how nasty hospital food was, and now that I
nally got a chance to taste it, it wasn’t half-bad. Better than school lunch, that’s for damn sure.
Still nothing on TV except for an overly dramatic Lifetime movie that my mother was totally into. A cliché stalker story. A woman meets a man on a bus on her way home from work. ey exchange numbers. Go out on a rst date. He’s perfect: attractive, smart, and he has a good job as an audio engineer for television shows. She’s excited until she nds out he’s wired her whole house so that he can hear everything she does when he’s not around. He can hear her shower, and cook, and talk to her friends about how crazy he is. And he listens to the feed while he watches TV, on mute, in the attic of the house next door, where he lives (she doesn’t know this, though). Total stalker. Shittiest actors on Earth meets the shittiest story on Earth, which makes for the perfect Saturday aernoon movie. For my mom.
And then I was asleep. And then I was awake again. But this time, my folks were knocked out. Dad in the chair, his head bent at a painful-looking angle, his mouth wide open. As usual. My mother, small, had tucked her knees to her chest and nestled into her chair—the only cushioned one—like a child. She looked so peaceful. So calm. It was nice to see her get some rest.
e only person who wasn’t asleep was Spoony. He was still sitting there. Still fooling with his phone. Still texting.
“Spoon,” I called out soly—I didn’t want to wake my parents. It was nice to have the room quiet for a moment. It was nice to not see their eyes, my father’s disappointed, my mother’s all sad and worried.
Spoony looked up and rushed to my bed. “Wassup, man, you okay?” “I’m ne, I’m ne,” I said, calming him down.
“Okay,” he said, glancing down at his phone. “Look, I talked to Berry and told her what happened. She’s been all over the internet, checking to see if anything has been posted—you know, some live footage or something.”
“And?”
“And so far, nothing. But something’s gotta pop up. And I don’t care what Dad says, this ain’t right.” He bit down on his bottom lip. “It just ain’t right. And you know me. You know I’m not gonna sit here and let them sweep this under the rug, like this is okay.”
“I know.”
I gotta admit, there was a part of me that, even though I felt abused, wanted to tell him to let it go. To just let me heal, let me leave the hospital, let me go to court, let me do whatever stupid community service they wanted me to do, and let me go back to normal. I mean, I had seen this happen so many times. Not personally, but on TV. In the news. People getting beaten, and sometimes killed, by the cops, and then there’s all this fuss about it, only to build up to a big heartbreak when nothing happens.
e cops get off. And everybody cries and waits for the next dead kid, to do it all over again. at’s the way the story goes. A different kind of Lifetime movie. I didn’t want all that. Didn’t need it.
But I knew not to even bother saying it. Not to Spoony. No point. Because he’d agree that this was normal, and that that was the problem. Spoony had been dealing with this kind of crap for years. He’d never been beaten up, but he’d been stopped on the street several times, questioned by cops, asked to turn his pockets out and li his shirt up, for no reason. He’d been followed around stores, and stared at on buses by women who clutched their purses tight enough to poke holes in the leather. He was always a suspect. And I knew, without him saying a word, that the one thing he never wanted, but was sure would eventually happen, was for his little brother— the ROTC art kid—to become one too. So there was nothing that was going
to stop him from ghting this. ere was nothing I could do to calm him down. is was not going away. is was not getting swept under the rug of “oh well.” Not if Spoony had anything to do with it.
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In our town, it really isn’t shocking to see a ght go down. I’ve seen kids with house keys tucked between their knuckles throwing punches at each other. I’ve seen ten guys from our school chasing four dudes from another school down a block and a stranger step into the melee with a bat to protect the guys who were outnumbered. And Guzzo, Dwyer, and I spent most of Jill’s party telling ourselves we were tough as balls and that what happened outside Jerry’s was nothing. It wasn’t on our minds, we kept telling each other. No big deal. NBD, Dwyer wrote in beer on the wooden slats of the back porch with the nozzle from the keg.
In fact, we spent most of the party on that back porch, ignoring everyone
else. Guzzo never said a word to Jill for me, and through the window, I saw English moving through the room like the frigging king he is, getting up close to girls and making them laugh and giggle. I was sure if he found Jill, it’d be the same. I was out there in the darkness of the back porch, looking in through the window to the bright kitchen, like I was watching the whole damn party unfold on TV.
I gave Guzzo my ask at some point and when I eventually got it back it was empty, but I didn’t bug him about it. Because even though what happened at Jerry’s was NBD, it was really all we talked about that night. “My brother has to deal with that shit every day,” Guzzo kept saying. “And he just does it, no complaints. He’s amazing.”
But what had always amazed me most about Guzzo’s brother, Paul, was how he had made time for me. I was ten when my father died, and it was Paul who’d taken me down to Gooch to practice. Gooch was the neighborhood park, but Paul’d get us down there so early, we’d have the whole court to ourselves. He showed me how to do the spider drill, how to dribble with two balls, how to tuck my elbows when I shot. But the man I’d
watched grind a kid into the sidewalk—I don’t know—was like someone else. Someone I couldn’t place, some hulking animal stalking the shadows of my mind all night. I could hear his voice, and yet it wasn’t him. I could see his face, and yet it wasn’t him.
Dwyer and Guzzo drank much more than I did, and they stood around the keg shouting out the lyrics of all the hip-hop songs blasting from the living room inside. Earlier that day, I’d imagined myself dancing with Jill, hands in the air and then down along her back to her hips, as she draped hers around my neck, but I spent most of the night still stuck on that sidewalk outside Jerry’s, my heart pumping ercely in my throat, and when someone at Jill’s yelled that the cops had arrived, I almost thought I’d called them there with my mind.
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I slept terribly, but no matter how much or how little I sleep, I begin almost every day the same way: Ma’s voice in my head, telling me what I needed to do, what I needed to think about, how I needed to act. But on mornings like this one—or if Coach Carney was making us do suicides up and down the court for een minutes, or when Dwyer dropped another ve-pounder on either side of the bar on my last rep in the weight room—it was Dad’s voice in my head, or at least what I thought was his voice. I hadn’t heard it in so long, I couldn’t even tell if it was his or if I was making it up. Whatever it was, it got me to where I needed to get.
PUSH! If you don’t, someone else will. LIFT! If you don’t, someone else will.
Faster, faster, faster, faster, FASTER!
I was in the living room, my feet tucked under the lip of the couch, ring through a set of y crunches when I heard Ma’s actual sleepy voice dri up and over the room.
“Don’t kill yourself,” she said. I’d been so into my push-ups and sit-ups and all that I hadn’t even heard her come home. “Where’s the mat?” she continued.
I kept at it in my head. Push 25, 2, 3. Push 26, 2, 3. Push. Ma sighed. “Boys,” she said. I heard her slough into the kitchen and open the fridge. I
nished my set, sprang to my feet, and felt the room spin. Black dots popped
across my vision, and before I passed out, I dropped to the couch and sat there catching my breath.
“Water?” Ma asked from the kitchen.
“Yes,” I whisper-shouted, but she was already on her way to give it to me.
Ma sat down next to me and put her head on my shoulder. She was so much smaller than me now, and I liked the way she sometimes leaned into me or hugged me, like she was excited. Not in a weird way, but with something I think might have been pride. She’d already kicked off her shoes, and she’d already changed into one of the three T-shirts she always wore around the house.
I drank my water in two long gulps.
“Honey, you stink,” Ma said, pulling away from me. “Sorry. Gotta do my workouts, though. Every morning.”
She rolled to the other side of the couch. “Get off! You’re going to make the cushions stink.”
“Ma!”
“I’m serious.” She pushed my shoulder and laughed and I rolled onto the
oor. “Come on,” she continued. “You’ll ruin the rug.” She leaned back on the arm of the couch and crossed one leg over the other. She could have fallen asleep right there. e bags under her eyes were prunes. Loose strands of hair sprang from her head like she’d pulled a wool hat off and the static electricity still hung in the air around her. But, despite her exhaustion, somehow she still always found a smile for me.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said, yawning. “You look strange.” “Nothing,” I said.
She rubbed her face and squinted at me and I knew her mind was working to put it all together. But she was so tired. “I can trust you, right?” she asked, still slouched in the corner of the couch. “You’d tell me if something was the matter?”
“Of course,” I said quickly, even though there was a helluva lot on my mind. But I didn’t feel like telling her about any of it. “I’m just going to rinse off,” I said. It was going to be a two-shower day. “en I got to hit the court. Coach is picking the starters this week.”
“You’ll make it,” she said, as if ghting for a starting spot was NBD. As if it’d just come to me because I wanted it, not because I had to ght for it.
I le Ma slumped against the armrest and went straight to the bathroom. I got the water running hot rst, then switched it to cold, just to re up the senses and wake up. I still felt a little groggy from last night and I was pissed at myself, because aer my workout I wanted to get right to the court. I thought I had a real shot at being a starter, but next week was too important to coast through. I had to hit more three-pointers when we went around the world. I had to have the higher free-throw percentage. English was so good, he didn’t have to give up the ball, so if he did, I had to make sure he felt more comfortable giving me the ball—and that meant working harder to get open, and more importantly, making the shot when I got the ball. Because the scouts were coming. Of course the stands were going to be lled, but a few of those seats at every game were the seats we were all playing for. Full ride to Michigan State. Full ride to UNC. My dad had college paid for because he’d gone through ROTC at City College, but I had to do even better. Butler, Notre Dame, Villanova. Wisconsin, Arizona, Duke. Saint Spring eld’s son needed to go full ride too. Scouts paved the way—and I had to show them who I was. I had to be a starter.
And, as I was trying to psych myself up for a day of drills down at Gooch,
I stepped out of the bathroom, wrapped only in a towel, holding my stank- ass clothes in a wad, and nearly ran right into Ma. She held my jeans in one hand and my ask in the other. She jutted her chin at me.
“Quinn Marshall Collins. You tell me the truth this minute and you start from the very beginning.” She pinched her lips tight. “Is this how you want the world to know you? Some kind of derelict who doesn’t give a damn about his actions?”
I stuttered. It was the strangest thing. I’d never been caught before. It was like there was regular me, the one Ma smiled at and loved, the one I’d always been, and then this new guy, the one shivering in the hallway outside the bathroom, standing in his towel, wondering why Ma had gone looking through my room while I was in the shower.
“Can I just get dressed?”
Ma sniffed. “You have thirty seconds.” en she turned and marched to the kitchen. I broke the world’s record for throwing on sweats and busting back to the kitchen. She sat on one side of the little Formica table, steam from her mug of tea rising up to her face as she stared out the window to the
Barrows’ house next door. e ask lay askew beside the mug. She ran her hand over her eyes, and then up over her forehead like a visor.
“You know,” she said slowly, “this stuff can kill you. I know you don’t think so, but it can.”
“Ma—” I said, sitting in the chair across from her.
“Listen,” she interrupted. “When you act like this—when you sit around, breaking the law, thinking it is okay—you embarrass me, you embarrass your brother, and you embarrass yourself. You have more important things to worry about, young man.” e ask sat on the table between us and she picked it up. She waved it gently. “is is going in the garbage.”
“Okay.” en I had to add, at-out lying, “It was Guzzo’s idea.” “But you took it from our house. I just checked.”
She’d never done that before. Plus, I only took a askful aer she’d emptied a glass or two from the bottle, and there was always a new bottle to replace the old one.
“And even if it was.” She waved the ask again. “Guzzo drank nearly the whole thing.”
“Guzzo drank the alcohol. It was Guzzo’s idea. You make it sound like you weren’t there, Quinn. But you were. You were there.”
Maybe it was the alcohol still in my blood, but the way she said it, I was there, in the night, that hollowed-out gutted feeling, making me nervous and stupider than usual, like I couldn’t nd the simplest words. I saw Paul.
“I’m sorry.”
“Not good enough.”
“I’m sorry I stole the bourbon. I’m sorry I drank it with Guzzo and Dwyer.”
“You talk about wanting to be somebody, you talk about basketball, you talk about making your family proud, but then you act like this. What do you think people are going to think of you now?”
“Jesus, Ma,” I said. “It’s not that big a deal. It was only one night. It won’t happen again.”
She tapped the ask with her nger. “Remember you said that. at it was only this one time. Don’t let it happen again. And don’t ‘Jesus, Ma’ me.”
I looked out the window. “I’m just saying that I know it was dumb, and I’m sorry. I didn’t even have that much to drink. I swear.”
“It’s not about that, Quinn.” Ma leaned forward and grabbed my hands. She waited until I stopped looking out the window and looked at her. “It’s about how the world looks at you and when they do, who do you want them to see? What kind of a person do you want to be? Who do you think you are? You’re the one your brother looks up to. You’re a senior, Quinn. is is the year everyone looks to see what kind of man you want to become.”
I pulled my lips tight against my teeth to try to keep calm and not tear up like a baby. I didn’t want to be a baby. I didn’t want to be a jerk-off.
“I’m doing the best I can here,” Ma continued. “I’m on my own, honey, and I’m doing the best I can to help you, but I need your help to help your brother.”
She sipped her tea and watched me. I sat there like a mute because I didn’t know what to say. I felt like an idiot.
She sighed. “I was going to ask you, but now I’m just telling you. Pick up Willy from his game today. e Cambis are bringing him. In fact, go see your brother’s game. It means more to him if you’re there than me anyway, so go see his game.” She reached for her purse that hung on the back of her chair and pulled a few bills from her wallet. “He looks up to you. Spend some time with him. Take him out for pizza aer. Once basketball starts we’ll never see you. Take him out for lunch.”
So I did what I was told, and I put on some clean jeans and my light hoodie and took the bus over to the East Side for Willy’s game. Tough Will. Tough Will, who was known to sit down in the middle of his own soccer game, right there on the eld, until his coach gave up and called in the sub. Tough Will spent most of his games sitting on the sidelines eating orange slices.
When I got there, both teams were already warming up on either end of the eld. I’d played soccer before I was in high school and loved it. For Tough Will, it was another story. It was only the warm-ups and I could see him dragging his feet, not chasing anything or anyone anywhere—just standing around and waiting for someone to pass him the ball.
“Get in there, man!” I shouted. “Will! Will! Get in there, man.”
He looked over at me and waved, totally oblivious to the rest of the players and balls around him. Still, I guess I inspired him, because he turned and chased down a red-and-white ball and dribbled it a bit before taking a shot on net. It went wide le, but at least he ran aer the ball.
My phone started blowing up with texts, but Regina Cambi had set up a folding chair beside a cooler, and she was waving me over, so I had to ignore the texts because I sure as hell couldn’t ignore her. She sat with a few other moms, and the dads who’d come to the game stood around in a circle a little ways behind them, under the boughs of the one large oak tree that gave this park its name. I chatted with Mrs. Cambi at rst, but then the game began, and I started cheering Willy and his team on, using that as an excuse to pull away as if I wanted to walk down the sidelines and see the action more clearly, because my phone kept buzzing and buzzing in my pocket and I wanted to see what was going on.
Guzzo had texted “wassup” ten times.
SATURDAY 12:53 p.m. to Guzzo HOWS UR HEAD?
SATURDAY 12:53 p.m. from Guzzo FCKING AWFUL
SATURDAY 12:54 p.m. to Guzzo BANANAS & GATORADE, MAN
SATURDAY 12:54 p.m. from Guzzo IM PUKING WATER IF I DRINK IT
SATURDAY 12:55 p.m. to Guzzo DAMN. U BUSTED?
SATURDAY 12:55 p.m. from Guzzo NO
SATURDAY 12:55 p.m. to Guzzo
FCK I AM & IM NOT EVEN HUNGOVER
SATURDAY 12:57 p.m. from Guzzo ITS A SHITSHOW HERE
SATURDAY 12:57 p.m. to Guzzo WHA?
SATURDAY 12:58 p.m. from Guzzo PAULS HOME. ITS A BIG DEAL
SATURDAY 12:58 p.m. to Guzzo
IS IT ABOUT YESTERDAY? AT JERRYS?
SATURDAY 12:59 p.m. from Guzzo I DONT KNO. UM YEAH.
SATURDAY 1:00 p.m. to Guzzo DAMN
SATURDAY 1:02 p.m. from Guzzo
I GUESS WE R HAVIN A BBQ 2MRRW
SATURDAY 1:02 p.m. to Guzzo WHA?
SATURDAY 1:03 p.m. from Guzzo
YUP. C U THEN. TELL UR MOM TO BRING THAT MARSHMALLOW PIE
SATURDAY 1:03 p.m. to Guzzo SHE HAS 2 WORK I THINK
SATURDAY 1:04 p.m. from Guzzo NOPE. I ALRDY KNO SHES COMIN
I hesitated, and he wrote again.
SATURDAY 1:06 p.m. from Guzzo
EVRYBDY COMIN. GOTTA BUST. C U 2MRRW
So something had to be up, because the Galluzzo family never had people over. Or rather, they never invited people over. ere were so many people coming and going from the house that it always seemed like a party. But they never “officially” organized anything. I tried him a few more times, but he didn’t text back, so I gave up. I’d see him at the BBQ anyway, because of course I’d go. I always went, and wound up wol ng down Paul’s famous
burgers—but now I saw that face, Paul’s, burning, a bloodred mask of rage. He’d been so focused on kicking the shit out of that guy. I’d seen him. Had he seen me? What if he had? I’d never felt nervous around Paul, and suddenly, just thinking about him made me sweat.
As I was going through all this, I tried to watch the game, but it was slow as all hell and Will’s team was terrible. Still, Will was playing le back and he was actually running around and chasing the ball. Near the end of the rst half, one of the players on the other team got around a couple guys just over mid eld and seemed like he had a clean break for a shot, but Will came out of nowhere and nailed a sweet slide tackle. e parents on the other side of the eld started screaming like crazy, but Will’s tackle had been legal, at least as I could see it, and that’s what the referees thought too, and so when the
rst half ended, Will was the momentary hero, keeping the game more respectable because his team was only down one to zero. I found him and slapped him ve over the heads of a few teammates in the huddle with his coach, and then I backed off. People always felt bad for me at games because of Dad, and Ma was always working, but I liked being on my own. I liked
guring out what I had to do and doing it. No one seemed to get that, and I didn’t want to crowd Will, either, so I let him be. His coach was thrilled and put him back in for the second half.
Guzzo still didn’t text back, and I went back and forth with Dwyer a few times, but eventually, I put the phone away because it really was more fun to check out the game—and check out Will especially. is might sound dumb to some people, but it’s actually pretty cool having a little brother. I mean, he was a pain in the ass, and that I was here and not practicing over at Gooch pissed me off, but watching him smash into the guys on the other team, watching the way he shook off his own pain, made me realize that I did the same thing—twirl my st like I was revving myself up. He had the same crooked smile. And once, when there was a pause in the action, and he was close to me on the sidelines, and he was hunched over, with his hands on his knees, he looked over at me and nodded. And I knew he was saying thank you. Not because I’d shown up to watch him, but because I had shown up to watch him he was playing harder—and he was loving it.
And aer the game, I didn’t mind taking Tough Will over to Mother’s Pizza. On the bus back to the West Side, he kept asking me about the game
and what his team could have done better. “Scored a goal,” I said. “at would have helped.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know, but how?”
“Your striker. He couldn’t run. at was his problem. And when he had a shot, he hesitated. Can’t hesitate. Like you, man. You were awesome today.” I shook his shoulder and felt bad it was the only game I’d made it to all season. I wanted to be the guy who showed up, not the one who didn’t.
When we got to Mother’s it was slammed like always. Mother’s sits on a corner and the front door faces Spring Street and the to-go window faces Twentieth Street, and while I usually just hit the to-go window, especially when I swung by at night, the line was jammed inside and outside. So I stuck Willy on the end of one of the two picnic tables and went inside to see if it moved any faster. It still took awhile, and while I waited, I had to try to look everywhere else around the room except the one spot where I felt those eyes always watching me. at’s why I preferred the to-go window; I couldn’t see those eyes blazing into me. ose eyes. My eyes. My dad’s eyes—in the photo the pizza guys had up on the wall, two guys in greasy T-shirts with their arms up around my dad’s shoulders. Dad, a pillar of stone, dressed like usual in his Class A blues. e rest of the photos were of people in the pizza shop, but not the one with Dad. He’d gotten the guys to make pizzas for the soup kitchen at St. Mary’s. His photo looked down on me.
When I was nally up near the front, I felt a tug at my arm. I was about to turn back to Willy to tell him that he might have lost our seats, but it wasn’t Willy at my arm. It was Jill.
She pulled close to me, so the people behind us couldn’t hear. “Hey, Quinn, you mind getting an extra slice?” she asked. Her hair fell in two blond-brown curtains around her face, and I could smell her shampoo as she looked up at me conspiratorially, and when a girl looks at you like that, all you can say is, Whatever you want—I’ll do anything for you—is there anything else you want? “Yeah,” I somehow managed to say instead.
“Yeah, you mind?” She grinned.
“No. Yeah. No.” I laughed. Like a moron.
e thing about slices at Mother’s is that they are huge, so she stuck around to help carry it all outside. She offered some money but I waved her off. Because I had it good at Mother’s. I’d grabbed us all Cokes, too, because the guys at Mother’s always gave Saint Spring eld’s son a major discount,
and yeah, well, I was the kind of guy who just kept taking those free Cokes, no questions asked, like I actually deserved them or something.
“How were you planning on carrying this all out there on your own, anyway?” she asked.
I had two giant slices and two Cokes by the necks of the bottles; she had two slices and a Coke. “Guess I was just waiting for you,” I said.
She frowned, but in a cute way, like it was really a smile. “Oh, yeah. I bet you were.”
Willy had managed to save two seats, but when he saw us, he got up and offered Jill his. “Please,” he said. She tried to protest, but he wouldn’t let her. He stood at the end of the picnic table and glanced back and forth at us while he shoved pizza into his face.
“One of us is what you’d call a gentleman,” he informed us.
“He’s hilarious,” Jill said to me. Now what kind of world did I live in where my twelve-year-old brother was the cooler irt than me?
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m supposed to be his role model. But maybe it’s the other way around.”
“Nah,” she said. “I bet he learned all this from someone. But this someone needs to sit down today, huh?”
“I’m old and broken. He’s got his whole life ahead of him.” “Yeah,” Jill said. “And you’re hungover, right?”
“I knew it!” Willy yelped. “I knew you were going to a party last night.” “Oops,” Jill said.
I pointed at Willy. “Between us. Got me?”
“Oh, yeah,” Willy said. “Until I need the ammo.” “Willy—”
“Will, please.”
Jill laughed. She put her hand on Willy’s wrist, and his face changed. His whole body probably blushed as deep red as his face. He gave her the dopiest smile. Had I looked like that when she’d asked me to get her a slice? Jesus. But Jill didn’t mind. “Will,” she said. “Don’t get him in trouble, because then it will be my fault, and he’ll never speak to me again.”
I stared at Will, and he knew exactly what I was saying with my eyebrows: Don’t fuck this up, dude.
“Whatever,” Willy said. “I’m only kidding.”
Willy and I shared the extra slice as Jill and I talked about the party. I tried to get a sense of whether or not she and English had hooked up, but I wasn’t going to ask outright because it really was none of my damn business. She was being super irty, but not in the way I wanted her to mean it. is had happened before. Sometimes I got the feeling she thought of me more as a brother, but no dude wants to be thought of as a brother when he is sitting across from a girl who is not his sister and who makes his stomach ip when she says his name.
While we were talking, though, things were getting a little heated over by the corner. A couple of guys had walked up to two other guys in line and started barking. ey kept at it to the point where the rest of us outside couldn’t even hear ourselves. People started yelling around them, and when one of the guys pushed one of the guys in line, they broke into punches. I jumped up and stuffed Willy into the seat behind me. People yanked out their phones, calling the cops, but somebody must have called the cops already, because the berry lights ashed down the block. e guys in the
ght tried to swing a few more punches, but people in the crowd had pulled them apart and locked them in arm holds. One cop car pulled up and then another and everything happened so quickly, we all just stood around watching like dumb idiots until the cops had grabbed the four guys who’d been ghting, pinned them to the hoods of the two cars, and cuffed them.
I, of course, was back at the night before, when I’d seen Paul arrest the kid outside Jerry’s. But this was different. Another cop car pulled up and then another, then all eight cops started asking the crowd to disperse, only holding a few people back to ask questions. is kind of thing happened all the time at Mother’s; it sat right between neighborhoods, and kids from one block might beef with kids from another or some other shit, and while I tried to stay out of it, it was impossible not to watch it explode right in front of you.
e crowd outside Mother’s was white, black, Latino, Asian, just like Spring eld. e four guys being cuffed were white. e cops, almost all of them were white, but two of them were black. It was impossible not to think about this as Paul slamming that black kid into the sidewalk the night before replayed in my mind. It wasn’t like watching one of my brother’s video games or a movie. You hear bone. You see real blood. And you taste the rust of it and it makes you sick.
I broke into a sweat like I might puke. I turned to Willy and Jill. “Should we get out of here?” More people began to shout at the cops from the crowd. I was done with this. “We’ll walk you home,” I told Jill.
We busted back down the street away from the scene and took the long way around the neighborhood to Jill’s house. I could tell Jill was as distracted as I was, as if we both had private conversations going on in the back of our minds, and we used Willy, sandwiched between us, as the focal point of conversation. But when we got to her house, she said over Willy’s head, “ere’s a barbecue at my cousin’s tomorrow. You must be going.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Weird, right? e sudden party?” She looked at me, and I realized we might not have been having private conversations in our minds the whole way home. ey might have been the same one.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know, but I think I have an idea what this is about.” “Me too,” she said.
As she jogged up her front steps, something ugly and awful was forming in my mind, but I couldn’t quite nd the right words for it—or I didn’t want to. I wasn’t sure.
