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Willy was dragging his ass again on Wednesday morning, but truthfully it wasn’t all his fault. I was kind of dragging my ass too, still dwelling on all the things I’d been talking to Jill about the night before. It’s not like I was dreaming about it, it was more that weird state where your eyes are closed and you know you are thinking, and it feels like you are both asleep and not, like you’re resting, but still thinking, kinda in control of your thoughts and kinda not.
Well, the daze carried right over into morning like I was sleepwalking, and when Willy and I nally made it down the steps to head off to school, it might as well have been a dream, because standing on the sidewalk a few houses down, having just lugged the garbage to the street, was Paul Galluzzo, staring right at me.
He waved to me and I waved back, automatically, out of habit. What was I doing? He jogged up to us, and I kept thinking, All I had to do was turn and walk away, what the hell is wrong with me? He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d been up all night too, thinking about what he had done to Rashad. Poor guy—yup, that was my rst actual thought. Not Rashad. Paul. Jesus.
“What’s up, Collins?” he said when he got to us.
“Uh, hey,” I mumbled. All that normalcy was gone. He sniffled, and I wasn’t sure if it was one of those things a guy like him did before he socked a guy like me in the face. I gripped Willy’s hand.
Paul tussled Willy’s hair. He glanced back and forth between Willy and me, and I focused on the grease stain on Paul’s T-shirt.
“Hey,” he said. “I thought we were going to practice some footwork?” He didn’t sound angry, more like he was pleading. “I’m right here, man.”
“Yeah,” I said again, shing for words. “Look, I know. It’s been busy, and we have to get to school and all and—”
“Hey,” he said, now with more force. “Don’t bullshit me.”
is made Willy jump a little, and Paul calmed down. “No, listen,” he said, easy, like old times. “Little Guz’s been telling me about all the chatter at school.”
“Nah,” I said, not sure what to say. “It’s nothing.” “No,” Paul said. “No, it’s not. It’s weird. I know it.”
He hesitated, and I couldn’t nd a word to ll the silence. I just wanted to turn and run, but I had Willy holding me there like an anchor. Or maybe it was me? What the hell did I want him to say?
“You gotta hear my side of the story.”
at was the last thing I wanted to do. “Uh, I know,” I stuttered. “But—” “No. Listen. You do.” Paul clamped my shoulder with his hand. He raised
the other one slowly and pointed close to my face, scabs still tattooing his knuckles. “Because you were there. I know.”
Willy looked up at me. “What’s going on?”
Paul sniffled again. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair a mess. He was wearing ip- ops, and I’d never seen him in those stupid things. He let go of me and stood back, his hands on his hips.
“Look,” he said. “People tell a lot of fucked-up stories. People are talking about me. Well, I’m telling you this. ere was a woman in the store. e kid took her down because she caught him stealing, I went in to protect her, and then he went aer me, okay?” He wiped a hand over his head and then held his st in front of his mouth for a moment. “What was I supposed to do? It’s my job, Quinn. I was protecting the lady. I was just doing my job.”
He reached out to me again but didn’t grab me, just kind of touched my shoulder, like he wasn’t sure what he was doing. I leaned back, and his
ngers fell away awkwardly.
“I know,” I lied. “I hear you.”
“Do you?” Paul’s face was all screwed up. “I don’t think you do, Quinn.
What the hell’s the matter with you, man?”
“I know. It’s just—” I couldn’t nd anything else to say. “I have to get this guy to school.” I nodded to Willy. “Catch you later, though, right?”
Paul’s look of disgust ripped a hole in my chest. “Are you serious, Quinn?”
I shrugged, and Paul narrowed his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said, turning around and waving me off. “See you later.” But really, it sounded like he was saying fuck you.
And for the whole walk to Willy’s middle school and then to my school, all I could hear was that lie in his voice. He didn’t want to see me later. No frigging way. I didn’t want to see him, either. But what was worse was that I couldn’t believe he’d told me about what happened in the store. Or actually, it wasn’t that I couldn’t believe that he’d told me—it was that I didn’t believe what he’d told me. Because even if Rashad did everything Paul said he did— really?
I saw what I saw on the street.
at was the real story.
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I met Jill on the front steps by the tag. What had once been a non-hang at school had now become the hang at school. Everybody stood around the spray-painted slogan. e school maintenance crew hadn’t washed it off, and what made it all the more powerful was that it was still true. Rashad had been in the hospital ve nights, and he was still there. Rashad was absent again today.
On either side of the spray paint, kids passed out yers. A black st rose
from the bottom of each sheet and called for justice. It was what Jill had been talking about. She was organizing, getting involved, and she was there, with Tiffany, handing them out. I didn’t have Mr. Fisher for history like they did, but I knew who he was, and I saw him out there too—his bright white head bobbing through the crowd of students. Jill now told me in detail what was going down. A community group, a church, and some of the student clubs at school were planning a protest march on Friday. It would start on the West Side, go right by Jerry’s, and wind its way through town to city hall and Police Plaza 1. e march through town would begin at ve thirty p.m., approximately the same time Rashad had been arrested for petty the, resisting arrest, and public nuisance—whatever the hell that meant. And just as I was thinking it, I heard someone else ask it: “Will Rashad be there?” Nobody knew.
At the bell, Jill and I took off in different directions. I tried to catch up with Tooms, but he ignored me and hustled ahead of me into our English classroom. When I walked into class behind him, Mrs. Tracey stood at the window, looking down over the front steps and the entrance to the school. Even when everyone had taken their seats, she remained by the window, and the rest of the class kept talking, waiting for her to go to her desk. But she didn’t. In her hand, she held her copy of the novel e Invisible Man. A week earlier she’d made photocopies of the rst chapter, a short story Ralph Ellison published as “Battle Royal.” at story—I’d never read anything like it. e violence. e all-out warfare. e N word all over the place. When it had been assigned a week earlier, I’d read it all twisted up in discomfort, like the actual reading of the story was painful, but now, as Mrs. Tracey clutched her book and looked down to the sidewalk, a kind of nervousness rose in me. I’d hated the way the old white men in the story had acted—watching black boys getting beaten, beating each other, for sport—and I’d put as much distance between them and me as I could. I wasn’t them, I’d told myself as I read. White people were crazy back then, eighty years ago, when the story took place. Not now. But watching Mrs. Tracey stare out the window, a weight of dread dropped through me. Were we going to talk about the story again? Aer Rashad? Because aer what had happened to Rashad, it felt like no time had passed at all. It could have been eighty years ago. Or only eight. Now it wasn’t only the city aldermen. Now there were the videos, and we were all watching this shit happen again and again on our TVs and phones
—shaking our heads but doing nothing about it.
Mrs. Tracey still didn’t move from the window, and everyone began to
dget, looking at everyone else, and my eyes landed on the whiteboard. Her notes from what must have been her last-period class the day before were still on it. Active versus passive voice. I remembered the exact same lesson from ninth grade. I’d thought it was all a pain in the ass, but what had once been a stupid grammar lesson now formed a weird lump in my throat.
Mistakes were made, Mrs. Tracey had scrawled. And beneath it she’d written, Who? Who made the mistakes?
In my mind, I ran through the exercise I remembered from the time, rearranging the phrases, making something passive active, but this time I found myself changing the other words too, because I was clearly becoming obsessed—even if I didn’t want to be.
Mistakes were made. Rashad was beaten. Paul beat Rashad.
Mrs. Tracey nally moved from the window and did something just as surprising. She sat down behind her desk. Usually she walked around her desk, or she perched on the front of her desk. But she never sat. Now, slumped behind it, she’d never looked so small, the whiteboard as big as the sky over her tiny, hunched shoulders. I thought she was about to begin the lesson, but she pushed the book away from her on the desk and began to cry. I clenched my jaw tight and stared down at the oor, trying not to let her tears make me cry back in response. I just sat there breathing heavily
through my nose.
She pointed to the window and dropped her head into her hands. “I don’t want to see this happen to any of my students,” she said, catching her breath. “I don’t want to believe it still happens.”
I gripped one hand with the other, hoping to disappear. I wasn’t the only one. e room had never been so quiet. No one spoke or whispered. Mrs. Tracey just sat there, with her head in her hands. Aer a few last sobs, she apologized. “I’m sorry for my outburst—it’s just—” And then the tears came again and she apologized again and continued. “Mr. Godwin thinks it’s best if I don’t assign papers for this story. He thinks it’s best to just move on to the next unit.”
Something felt off about that. Don’t get me wrong, nobody wants to write a paper if he doesn’t have to, but this time, it felt like we were getting cheated out of something. Everyone still kept absolutely silent, but I wondered what was going through Tooms’s mind. He was nodding a slow, hesitant nod. An I read you kind of nod. I leaned back in my chair but couldn’t actually go anywhere, because the damn thing was all one unit and I felt trapped. It was too damn small for me anyway. And as I was sitting there, shiing around in that tiny-ass chair-desk, I remembered Mrs. Tracey making fun of Mr. Godwin, saying she’d never follow what the department head or the administration wanted her to teach. But now, suddenly, when they actually did direct her, she was blaming them for not talking about the book.
And then I thought about what was right there in the text. Ralph Ellison talking about invisibility. Not the wacky science ction kind, but the kind where people are looking at you but not seeing you, looking through you, or
around you—like, why the hell shouldn’t our classes be talking about what happened to Rashad? Was what happened to him invisible? Was he invisible?
I scribbled a note. I might be an asshole, but I know this isn’t right. Should we do something? e Invisible Man at Central High: Rashad. I tore the note from my notebook, wadded it, and threw it at Tooms.
e crumbled ball bounced off his desk, into his chest, and onto the ground. He squinted at me. “Read it,” I mouthed. He hesitated, but then he snatched it up and smoothed it out. He stared at the note for what seemed like forever, and then he looked back up at me.
“You with me?” he mouthed back. I nodded.
en, for the rst time ever in any class I’d ever been in with him, Tooms spoke up without being called on.
“Battle Royal,” he said, pulling his photocopy out of his folder. “For Rashad.”
And he began to read. “‘It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.’”
Now, Tooms is not a read-out-loud kind of guy, but he went right into it, reading clear and con dent for the whole room to hear, and it made the most perfect sense reading the words Ralph Ellison had written years ago. Mrs. Tracey lied her head, her face a mess, and something about her crying there in class made me so mad, like Rashad’s reality meant now she couldn’t talk about the story, or didn’t know how—but there was Ralph Ellison, and Tooms, too, just telling us what we needed to do. I unfolded my crinkled pages and followed along as Tooms read aloud, ending with the nal line of the rst paragraph: “‘It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: at I am nobody but myself! But rst I had to discover that I am an invisible man!’”
When Tooms fell silent, I glanced back, and I realized he was looking at me. I nodded, and even though I’m not the kind of guy who likes to read aloud either—I hate it—the rest of the room just sat there waiting for something to happen, and even Mrs. Tracey was stunned, so I jumped into the next paragraph. e lines were the old grandfather’s deathbed advice,
talking about his life aer slavery, his life still struggling: “‘Learn it to the young’uns’” his nal, “ ercely” whispered words. And it seemed like the words were calling right into the classroom. ey weren’t my words, they were Ellison’s, but there he was reminding us all what had to be learned by the “young’uns.”
en it was my time to be surprised, because Nam picked up where I le off, and aer Nam, Sonja read, then Latrice, and Alex, and soon it was clear the whole class was going to take a turn, because what would it say if you didn’t?
Mrs. Tracey watched and listened. She didn’t interrupt. e slurs and the violence from the dialogue ricocheted around the room. Some people skipped over them. Some people said “line of dialogue.” Chloe looked up, tears streaming down her own white face, and said, “I don’t want to say these words,” and nobody judged. We just waited to see what she would do. Some people said it all word for word.
But here are the words that kept ricocheting around me all day: Nobody says the words anymore, but somehow the violence still remains. If I didn’t want the violence to remain, I had to do a hell of a lot more than just say the right things and not say the wrong things.
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Practice was better than it had been in a couple of days. Coach drilled us with a few plays, then made us run laps, then dropped the three-point contest on us. It was no surprise that I won, because I’d been hitting threes since I was a freshman—I used my legs to shoot like Paul had taught me. But I didn’t think about him as I shot. I kept my head where it was supposed to be, in the moment, even when we scrimmaged. Coach was trying out different combinations of players, and although he didn’t say it, he was evaluating who was going to be a starter for sure. At rst I played against English, then I got swapped brie y, and when I went back in I was on his team. I was nervous, but a shooter has to shoot. I hit the rst one I took on a pass from him, and on the very next play, we had a two-on-one against Tooms, and although English might have taken it to the hoop against Tooms, he kicked it to me for the easy basket. I got him later too when I dropped the ball around Guzzo. English and I had a rhythm going, and I
knew that if we kept it up for the next few months, we’d both be breaking records. I mean, hell, why couldn’t the scouts be here now? When English and I were playing so well together!
But no game is ever that easy. Ten minutes before practice was supposed to end, Guzzo and Tooms went up for a rebound, and Tooms knocked Guzzo in the face with his elbow. Guzzo bucked backward, spun, and stumbled down to one knee. Coach blew his whistle and we all stopped, but already Guzzo was springing to his feet and shoving Tooms. Tooms pushed him back, and Nam and I got in between them before either of them threw a punch.
“What the hell’s the matter with you two?” Coach barked. He pulled us all apart, and for a split second it seemed like Guzzo and Tooms were going to go at it again, but Coach got each of them by the collars of their shirts. “ere’s no room for that bullshit here.”
“He jacked me,” Guzzo said. A line of blood dropped from his nose to his shirt.
“It was an accident,” Tooms said. “No, it wasn’t,” Guzzo shot back.
“Enough,” Coach told them, letting go of their shirts. “Take it easy.” He stared at Tooms. “It was an accident, right?”
“Of course.”
“Bullshit,” Guzzo interrupted. “Everyone has it out for me.”
Coach rubbed his jaw. “All right, look. Enough of that.” He looked around at all of us. “You think it’s dumb when someone says there’s no ‘I’ in team, but you stick one in there and you see how dumb that looks.”
Guzzo took a step back, but Coach waved him closer. “Bring it in, boys.” We all hesitated. “I said BRING IT IN!” he yelled.
So we piled in around him, and he stuck his hand in the middle. We followed, like we always did. “I get it. ere’s a lot of bullshit out there, and it needs to get resolved, but we’re not resolving it in here. Not in practice and not on this court. We leave all that bullshit at the door. In here, on this court, we need to win games. at’s all we need to do, and we need to work like one team or we’re fucked. You hear me? We’ve got all kinds of people coming to see us. ey start coming next week. Next week! You ready for that? e press, the scouts. When is the last time those guys from Duke were here? You hear me?”
A couple guys said yes, but the rest of us merely nodded. Guzzo leaned on my back, but I was looking across the circle at English and Shannon. I got what Coach was saying. I wanted to see teammates, but it got me thinking. Maybe right now all I saw were teammates around me, but once we stepped back into the real world, who did I see? Who did they see? Coach could keep shouting at us until we all parroted back what he wanted, but I knew English and Shannon answered because they had to, not because they wanted to. Tooms, too. And that’s what I was doing too, because Coach kept telling us to leave everything else at the door, but I was thinking about it the other way around. How did the team stay a team back out the door? How did the team stay a team out in the street?
Guzzo’s nose kept bleeding, right through all the yelling, so Coach told me to get him into the locker room and cleaned up. en Coach blew his whistle, the scrimmage started again with new combinations, and the squeaking of sneakers and the ball on the court followed me into the locker room.
Guzzo jogged ahead of me, not saying a word while he washed his face and grabbed a couple paper towels. He walked around to a bench deeper in the locker room, sat, and held his head back.
I leaned against a nearby locker and crossed my arms. “He didn’t hit you on purpose.”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Come on.”
“People have it all backward. ey do,” Guzzo said. He wiped at his nose and then pinched it closed again. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry, but my brother did the right thing. He has to make tough calls. I’m sorry they’re friends with that guy, but what are you gonna do? I mean, Paul—he was helping the woman in the store. He didn’t do anything wrong. He was doing his job.”
“But that’s not how everyone sees it, man.” “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they’re right.” “Yeah, but—”
“But what?” Guzzo wiped at his nose again and raised his voice. “But what? Whose side are you on here?”
“Come on, you heard Coach,” I said. “No sides.”
“No sides? Asshole, of course there are sides. ere are two sides to every situation.” His nose started bleeding again, so I got him another paper towel.
He wiped at his nose again. It still bled. I got him another paper towel, but he just held it in his hand. “ey could call you for a witness, couldn’t they?” “Maybe,” I said. I was feeling paranoid about this, because ever since my conversation with Jill, I kept thinking that I had to do it. I had to let someone know. And then what, stand in a courtroom and point my nger at
Paul? I couldn’t even imagine doing that.
“I don’t know how it works, though,” I continued. “Anyway, everyone’s seen the video. It was taken from a spot closer than I was.”
“But if they called you, what would you say?”
I was silent. Before anybody would call me into some freaking courtroom, I’d have to tell somebody official that I was there.
“Whose side are you on?” Guzzo asked again, and when I didn’t answer him, he continued. “Everyone’s gotta get their heads out of their asses. We’re not a team if Tooms or anybody else is going to clock me every chance he gets.”
“No, man, the problem is assuming he’s out to get you. He isn’t.”
Guzzo pinched his nose again and tipped his head back. “I don’t need a fucking nurse,” he said. “Get out of here. I know whose side you’re on. And I’m going to tell my brother how you don’t have his back. Aer all he did for you, man. Fuck you.”
He stood, and I backed away. Even with a bloody nose, Guzzo could drop me in a heartbeat. “It’s about doing the right thing,” Guzzo said mockingly. “I hate all this politically correct bullshit. Nobody’d be spray painting your name on the sidewalk if Paul had grabbed you coming out of Jerry’s.” He punched a locker with the side of his st. “Half the school’s calling my brother a racist. He was just doing his job. People throw that word ‘racist’ around all the time now. Pretty soon everyone’s going to start calling me a racist if I don’t pass Tooms the ball. It’s fucked up and you know it.”
“Guzzo,” I said. “You’re not the victim. Your brother isn’t either.”
e look on his face went erce, and I was glad as hell that Coach began bringing the rest of the team into the locker room. He called out to us, and we reluctantly joined him and the rest of the guys around the bench closest to the showers. “One more time—bring it in, boys,” Coach said. “We’re all in this together.” He looked at Guzzo, then at Tooms.
“Sorry,” Tooms said to Guzzo through his teeth. “Galluzzo?” Coach prompted.
“Yeah, yeah,” Guzzo said. “Me too.” en he pulled the bloody paper towel away from his face and wadded it into a hard ball. “We’re good, right?” he said across the circle to Tooms. He smiled, sarcastically.
If the rest of us had melted away and Coach had disappeared, I think Tooms would have leaped across the bench and punched Guzzo straight in the face, for real this time. And I wouldn’t have blamed him. But what the hell? Didn’t that make me a traitor to my best friend?
“Hey,” I said to Guzzo. “It’s over.”
Guzzo glared at me. “Damn straight,” he said.
“at’s right!” Coach said. “And we’re a team, and we need to take care of each other. You know the rules. We take care of each other on the court and off it. We don’t go to parties, and we help make sure no one else on the team goes to them either. No one needs to be stupid. We’ve got four months to show the world we’re number one. No parties, and no protests, you hear me?”
Some of the guys nodded. “I said, you hear me?”
“Yes,” we yelled automatically. “Mean it!”
“YES.”
“Again!”
“YES!”
He stuck his hand in and we followed. “Okay. Team on three. One, two, three.”
“TEAM!” we all shouted, lying just to get the damn practice nished. Team. Maybe? Like the whole school is a team, the whole city is a team? But we weren’t one just because we called ourselves one. We had to mean it to be it, and to be it maybe we had to talk about the tough shit out loud. Otherwise we’d just keep lying to each other all the time. Lying. Paul wasn’t the only one.
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I HAD PLANNED TO COME VISIT YOU, BUT IT WAS COMMUNICATED TO ME THAT YOU DIDN’T WANT ANY VISITORS. AND IN TOUGH TIMES LIKE THESE, I CAN TOTALLY UNDERSTAND YOU WANTING AS MUCH PRIVACY AS POSSIBLE, AND HAVE ENCOURAGED YOUR FELLOW CADETS TO ALSO RESPECT YOUR WISHES. NONETHELESS, I WANTED YOU TO KNOW YOUR COMRADES AND I HAVE YOU IN OUR THOUGHTS AND WISH YOU A SPEEDY RECOVERY AND RETURN TO THE PROGRAM. AND TO ENCOURAGE YOU IN THIS TIME, I’VE ENCLOSED A CARD WITH OUR CREED.
ALL THE BEST, CHIEF KILLABREW
I AM AN ARMY JUNIOR ROTC CADET.
I WILL ALWAYS CONDUCT MYSELF TO BRING CREDIT TO MY FAMILY, COUNTRY, SCHOOL, AND THE CORPS OF CADETS.
I AM LOYAL AND PATRIOTIC.
I AM THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
I DO NOT LIE, CHEAT, OR STEAL AND WILL ALWAYS BE ACCOUNTABLE FOR MY ACTIONS AND DEEDS.
I WILL ALWAYS PRACTICE GOOD CITIZENSHIP AND PATRIOTISM.
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I WILL WORK HARD TO IMPROVE MY MIND AND STRENGTHEN MY BODY.
I WILL SEEK THE MANTLE OF LEADERSHIP AND STAND PREPARED TO UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION AND THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE.
MAY GOD GRANT ME THE STRENGTH TO ALWAYS LIVE BY THIS CREED.
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If you’re wondering if I had been having nightmares, y’know, about that day, the answer is, no. I hadn’t been. Not until Wednesday. Actually, it started Tuesday night aer my friends and family le my room, and I decided to nally read Chief Killabrew’s card. I couldn’t gure out if he had inserted the creed as some kind of reminder to me that if I’m guilty to fess up, and that I was expected to never lie and steal, or what. Maybe he really was trying to encourage me. Maybe he was saying that because I was a cadet, there was no way I could be guilty. I don’t know. I just know that it rubbed me in a weird way, because ROTC, especially to people like my dad, was the
rst step to the military, and ultimately into law enforcement. I mean, for all I knew, Galluzzo could’ve been in ROTC when he was my age. Was he “the future of America”? Was he upholding “the American way of life”? I guess it depends on who you ask. Maybe. And maybe it was these thoughts rattling around my head that sparked the nightmare.
I was back in Jerry’s, but in the dream, the chips were located in the drink fridge. So I’m standing at the refrigerator staring through the glass, when I hear a voice coming from behind me.
“I know what you’re doing,” the voice said.
For some reason, I didn’t turn around. I just looked into the glass to see the re ection of whoever was there. And it was him. Officer Galluzzo, like Goliath standing with his hand already on his weapon, sizing me up.
“I ain’t doing nothing,” I said, still facing the glass.
“I know what you’re doing,” he repeated, taking a step closer, the sound of his boots thumping on the vinyl oor. I knew I should’ve turned around, but I couldn’t. I was frozen. But I could still see him through the glass, his mirrored image becoming clearer as he got closer and closer. en I adjusted my eyes to see my own re ection, my own face. But I couldn’t. I mean, my
face was there, but . . . it wasn’t. ere were no eyes. No nose or mouth. Just blank brown skin.
And that’s when I woke up, my heart pounding, my throat scratchy and dry. e dream seemed to last ve minutes, but it had actually been hours, and it was now Wednesday morning. I reached over to the food tray beside my bed for the leover cranberry juice from dinner the night before. In hospitals, juice comes in the same kind of cups as fruit cocktails and applesauce, the ones where you have to peel back the foil. Damn things are hard to open. My hands, for some weird reason, were weak, wouldn’t work right. Maybe it was the dream. Maybe it was everything that was going on— the reality. Whatever it was, I struggled to pull the aluminum seal back far enough to take a sip of juice. And I needed it. My throat felt like I had eaten my blanket.
I pulled and peeled, until nally the stupid foil snapped away from the
plastic and cranberry juice spilled all over the place. Of course.
I snatched the wet sheet back. ere was still some juice le, so I decided to get what I could. Right when I took a sip, there was a knock on my door. Now, I know it was probably just a regular knock, but at that moment it sounded like a bang, and I was so jittery that I spilled whatever was le of the juice on myself.
“Shit,” I grumbled.
“Watch your mouth.” My father was pushing the door open. He poked his head in—a strange thing that everyone does at the hospital for some reason
—before entering.
“Good morning,” he said, eyeing me as I dabbed juice into my gown, the burgundy blotches on my chest and stomach looking like blood.
“Hey,” I said. “What time is it?” “Just about seven.”
“Why are you here so early?”
Dad closed the door behind him and came to the foot of the bed. “Wanted to catch you before I went to work. See how you were doing?”
“Oh,” I said, kinda shocked. “I’m okay. How ’bout you? Ma told me you were sick.”
“Yeah. Something didn’t agree with my system. But I’m ne.” He sat on the edge of the bed, which was different for him. Usually he sat in a chair on the other side of the room—as far away from me as possible.
“Cool.” I wasn’t really sure what else to say.
Dad sat there staring at the side table where my phone and the spirometer were.
“Listen, I, uh . . . ,” he started. “I want to tell you a story. When I was a cop
—” Pause.
Here’s the thing. My father has three different ways to start a parental sermon about a whole bunch of I don’t want to hear it.
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When I was your age: always about how he was doing way more than I am when he was in high school. Let him tell it, he put the principal in detention.
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When I was in the army: always came whenever I was tired. It didn’t matter what I was tired from. If I showed any signs of exhaustion, he would hit me with how when he was in the army he wasn’t allowed to be tired, and that if he even yawned they made him drop down and give them a thousand push-ups.
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When I was a cop: always came whenever he was either defending cops or insulting teenagers.
“When I was a cop,” he started. He reached up and loosened his navy- blue tie. en he hiked his khaki pants up, just enough to show his tan socks, peppered with dark-brown diamonds. Office clothes are as boring as offices. Anyway, I braced myself and prepared to ignore whatever was coming.
“One time,” he began, “I got a call that there were a few guys making a bunch of noise in the middle of the night, over on the East Side. You know how it is over there. Nine o’clock, that whole neighborhood shuts down. Now I was used to these quick runs. You drive up, hit your lights and your siren, and if the kids don’t take off running, you just roll down the window and tell them to keep it moving. Never really a big deal.” My father was still staring at the spirometer. As if he was talking to it, as if I wasn’t in the room. “So my partner and I answer the call and head on over. When we pull up, there’s a white kid in tight black jeans and a sweater and this black kid going for it. A backpack was upside down on the side of the curb, and these two were just throwing down, scrapping. e black kid was dressed like . . .” He
looked at me, nally. “Dressed like your brother. Hair all over his head. A hoodie. Boots. His pants were damn near all the way down. And he was mopping this boy. My partner and I jumped out of the car and approached them, and before we could even give them a chance to stop ghting, I ran over and jacked the black boy up because I knew he was in the wrong. I just knew it. I mean, you should’ve seen how he was pummeling this kid. And he fought me back, telling me that I had it wrong. He slipped right from my grip and ran for the backpack. I pulled my gun. Told him to leave it. He kept yelling, ‘I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything! He’s the criminal!’ But now he’s wheezing, like he was having a hard time speaking. en he grabbed the backpack. By now, my partner’s got the white kid. I tell the black dude to leave the bag and put his hands up. But he doesn’t, and instead opens it. Puts his hand inside. And before he could pull it out, I pulled the trigger.”
Holy shit!
“What!” I yelped. I had never heard this story, and I thought I had heard all the stories. I heard all the ones about the people he saved—the woman who had been beaten by her husband; the high-speed chase of a bank robber, who Dad eventually caught aer running him off the road, movie- style. I had heard all the stories about how Dad had been shot at. And de nitely the one about how he had been shot. I saw the bullet wound in his chest every morning when he got out of the shower, like a tiny crater or a third nipple, a symbol of near death. But I had never, ever, EVER heard this one.
Dad’s Adam’s apple rolled down his throat, then back up. en he continued. “He was reaching for his inhaler. Turns out, he lived in that neighborhood and was walking home late, when the white kid tried to rob him. He was trying to ght the kid off, and when we showed up, his adrenaline went so high that he couldn’t breathe. Asthma attack. So he had to get to his inhaler, but he was having a hard time telling me that. I just assumed he . . .”
“Wait. Wait . . .” I put my hand up, pushing the words back into my father’s mouth. If there was ever a time that I needed, for once, to control a conversation with him, it was now. I only had one question. “Did you kill him?”
“No.” Dad teethed his top lip. “But I paralyzed him from the waist down.”
I just sat there, dumbfounded. My dad, my dad, had paralyzed an unarmed kid, a black kid, and I had had no idea. My dad shot a kid. I mean, to me, my father was the model of discipline and courage. Sure, he was stern, and sometimes judgmental, but I always felt like he meant well. But to that kid—and now my head was reeling—to that kid, my dad was no different than Officer Galluzzo. Another trigger-happy cop who was quick to assume and even quicker to shoot.
My father lled in the silence my lack of verbal response had created. “You know, you were still very young, but Spoony remembers it all. e
news. e drama. I’m not proud of it. It’ll never stop haunting me, and I think it messes with your brother still too.”
“It probably messes with that boy’s—what’s his name?” I asked, hard. “Darnell Shackleford,” he rattled off. It was clearly a name he couldn’t
forget.
“It probably still messes with Darnell and his family too.”
“Right.” Dad nodded, sadly. “ing is, I had been in so many other situations where things had gotten crazy. A hand goes in a pocket and out comes a pistol or a blade. And all I could think about was making it home to you, Spoony, and your mother. It’s a hard job, a really hard job, and you could never understand that. You could never know what it’s like to kiss your family good-bye in the morning, knowing you could get a call over your radio that could end your life.”
I could hear the struggle in his voice. Like, he really wanted me to understand this, and part of me did. Part of me could even appreciate knowing he thought of us every time he le the house. But still. “en why did you choose to be a cop?”
“Believe it or not, I wanted to do some good. I really did. But then I realized aer a while that most of the time, I was walking into situations expecting to nd a certain kind of criminal. I was looking for . . .”
“For me?”
Dad reached over and picked up the spirometer and started inspecting it from every angle. He couldn’t say it, and instead just nished the story. “So I quit the force.” He took a deep breath, and I got the feeling that he felt both relieved and ashamed that he had gotten that off his chest. “Look, all I’m trying to say is that not all cops are bad.”
“I know that.” I hadn’t even noticed—mainly because of my nervousness
—that the foil from the juice cup, I had taken it and rolled it between my thumb and pointer ngers, over and over again, until it had become a perfectly round pellet. A tiny, uncrushable thing.
“As a matter of fact, most cops are good. I worked with a lot of great guys, really trying to make a difference. You need to know that they’re not all wolves.”
“Dad, I do. But not all kids who look and dress like me are bad either. Most of them aren’t. And even the ones who are don’t deserve to be killed, especially if they don’t have no weapons.”
“But a lot of times they do, Rashad.”
“But Spoony was telling me yesterday that most times, they don’t.” “Spoony doesn’t know everything.” I could tell Dad was getting
frustrated. “And neither do you.”
“And neither do you.” I couldn’t back down from him. Not this time.
Dad stood up, smirked, and nodded. He looked at me as if it was his rst time seeing me. As if I had just taken off a mask, even though I was practically wearing one with all the itchy gauze taped to my face. Maybe it was him who had just taken off a mask. He set the spirometer down on the side table and reached for my hand. “Listen, I gotta get going. Your mother said she was coming by later, and that she might be bringing a lawyer in to talk to you. She wants to press charges, so . . . yeah. Be on the lookout for her.”
Press charges? My initial thought was that pressing charges was a bad idea. My second thought was that I would have to go to court, which I already wasn’t too keen on. My third thought was just an echo of my rst thought, that pressing charges was a bad idea, but there was no point in trying to talk my mother out of it. Even my father knew that.
“I’ll be here.” I stated the obvious. We shook hands, awkward and formal. “Okay.”
He headed for the door.
“Dad,” I called. He turned around. “If I’m checked out by Friday, I’m thinking about going down to the protest. If I go, you should come.”
He didn’t respond. But as he le the room, something in his face dimmed.
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Later, aer an hour or two more of sleep, and an hour or two of working on my drawing, sketching and shading some, I guess, screwed-up self-portrait, I decided that it was time for another walk. I took Tuesday off from walking, but I knew I couldn’t take another day off, because if I did, Clarissa would chew me out (in the nicest way ever). And the truth is, I wanted to get out of the room, this little closet room, with the beeping things, and the TV. If it weren’t for Clarissa, my hospital room wouldn’t have been much different than a prison cell. Not that I’ve ever been to jail, but based on what I’ve heard in rap songs, and what my dad always said about it (another one of his tactics to get us to do right was to talk about jail), it seemed pretty similar. An uncomfortable bed. ree meals. Loneliness, even when the visitors come.
So I got up, brushed my teeth, washed my face, closed my gown up tight
—what’s the deal with the whole ass-out hospital gown thing, anyway?—and le my room. I was going stir-crazy, especially aer my father dropping that bomb on me. My dad. I mean, how could he have just . . . I couldn’t even think straight about what he did. e other thing, though, was that I needed to make sure that if I was going to try to go to this protest—I hadn’t really made up my mind yet, but I was de nitely thinking about it—I had better practice walking.
Once I got through my door, the uorescent white light from the ward hit me, stung my eyes. is time, the plan was to just do a loop. Walk all the way around until I was back where I started. I inched down the hall, my legs eventually returning to normal as the stiffness worked itself out. I tried not to be a creep, but it’s really hard not to look in an open door, and most of the patients on the oor had their doors wide open for whatever reason. A woman sat in a chair, asleep, in Room 413. An older man sat on the edge of his bed, oxygen tubes hooked under his nostrils as he struggled to clip his
ngernails in Room 415. A young girl playing on a cell phone as an older woman massaged the feet of a person I couldn’t see lying in bed, in Room
417. And on and on I went. Peeking into the rooms of strangers. Peeking into their lives. Hearing people coughing and moaning. Seeing families gathered together, sometimes talking, sometimes not talking. I even saw a
few rooms with TVs on, the news playing, everyone peeking into my life as I was peeking into theirs.
Once I nally nished the lap, which may have taken een minutes— pathetic—I returned to my room to nd two women in it, one I recognized and one I didn’t. e one I didn’t was looking sort of down, toward the oor.
e one I did recognize was looking directly at the one I didn’t. At rst, I thought I was loopy, like I was buggin’, so I stepped out to make sure I had walked into the right room. Room 409. R. BUTLER. at’s me.
I stepped back inside hesitantly.
“Uh, hello,” I said, then spoke to the woman I recognized. “Mrs.
Fitzgerald?”
“Hi, baby,” she said grandmotherly. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I was coming to bring you something, but when I got to your room this lady was in here. And I asked her if she knew you and she said, not really, so I decided that I would sit in here with her until you got back.” Mrs. Fitzgerald’s arms were crossed, and she was glaring at the lady. She was guarding my room. Shoot, maybe she really did volunteer at the re department.
“ank you,” I said, easing farther into the room. I was happy to see Mrs. Fitzgerald, as I’d had no intention of trying to make that trek back to the gi shop—last time damn near killed me. So it was nice that she popped in to check on me. en I turned to the other lady because, well, now Mrs. Fitzgerald had made the whole situation even more awkward.
e woman stood and extended her hand. I shook it. “Rashad, I’m so sorry for just barging in like this. I’d been meaning to come see you, but things have just been so busy, and I just, well, I just wanted to stop by and see how you were.”
I had no idea what to say, so I just studied her face, trying to place her.
But I couldn’t.
“Oh, gosh, you don’t know who I am!” she said suddenly. “My name is Katie Lansing. I’m the lady in the store who accidentally fell over you.”
e woman with the navy suit and white sneakers. e one searching for a beer aer a long week.
I reached for my bed and sat, suddenly feeling a little dizzy, my mind racing. Why had she decided to come see me? It wasn’t her fault that all this
happened—though that klutzy moment seemed to set this whole thing in motion. No, I take that back. It had nothing to do with her. It might’ve happened even if she hadn’t tripped over me. And if not to me, maybe to someone else. De nitely to someone else.
“How . . . did you nd me?”
“is is the only decent hospital in town—lucky guess. Plus, your name’s on the door.” She smiled slightly.
“Well, what can I do for you?” I still had no idea what to say.
“Yeah, what can he do for you?” Mrs. Fitzgerald totally had my back. I guess she could tell I was uncomfortable.
Ms. Lansing’s face went serious. “Well, I guess I just wanted to say I’m sorry about everything that happened, I mean, that is happening.” She blinked hard. I was getting used to the hospital blinks. “I saw everything.
e way that officer . . . I just . . .” Now she started to get choked up. “I should go. I just mostly wanted to come by and give you this.” She handed me her business card. “If you need me to testify, I absolutely will.”
“anks,” I said, suddenly thinking again about the fact that at some point, once I was out of the hospital and even aer the protest, there was going to have to be a trial. I had to go to court. I had never been to court before, but judging from all the TV shows—which is all I really had to go off
—it seemed almost as scary as going to jail. But maybe if Ms. Lansing came and told the story as it really happened, they’d believe her, and I could get out of there as quickly as possible. at was my hope. Not likely, but still . . . a hope. And for that reason, I was grateful for her business card, which I set on the side table. And then she was gone.
Now it was just me and Mrs. Fitzgerald. She sat with a plastic bag in her lap, and her right leg crossed over her le, exposing her saggy stockings, which were the same color brown as she was, so it looked like a layer of ankle skin was shedding from her body like a snake.
“So . . .” Mrs. Fitzgerald folded her hands on top of the plastic bag. “A car accident, huh?” Uh-oh, I thought.
“She told you everything?”
“She didn’t have to. I knew who you were when you came into the gi shop. I read the newspaper, front to back, every single day. And I don’t know if you know this or not, but you, my boy, are news.” She glanced up at the
TV. It was off, but the gesture was merely to acknowledge that it had been on, everywhere.
“Yeah, unfortunately,” I huffed. “So why didn’t you say something?”
“Say what? To hold your head up? at everything would be okay? Baby, I could tell by the look on your face that you ain’t need none of that. Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human. Not as victims. Just you as you. Rashad Butler, before all this.”
“Yeah,” I said, really grateful for that, though it had never really even crossed my mind that that’s exactly what I needed.
“But there’s still business to tend to.” “What you mean?”
“Well, there are still things that can’t be overlooked. Like this protest I’ve been hearing about. You going?” Mrs. Fitzgerald asked, blunt. Old people never hold back.
“Planning on it. I think. I just gotta wait and see if I get outta here rst.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Ain’t nobody holding you here. You can walk out whenever you want.” I reached over and slid Ms. Lansing’s business card from one corner of the side table to the other. en I ipped it upside down and moved it back to its original spot.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. But I don’t know. I just don’t want to get out there and then have something go wrong with my ribs and then I gotta come back here for another week. Better to be safe than sorry.” I ain’t never been so careful in my life, but I had also never felt pain like that before either.
“No, it’s not,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for me to say that so that she could shut it down. “Not all the time.” She glared at me for a moment, and then just as quickly her face relaxed. As if she was scanning me and then found what she was looking for. e chink in my armor.
“You scared.”
“It’s not that, it’s—”
“It is that.” e old lady cut me off. “Let me tell you something. I’m seventy-four. You know what that means? at means I was around during the civil rights movement. Means I remember all of that. e segregation.
e lynchings. Not being able to do what you want to do, or go where you want to go. Or vote. I remember everybody looking at my brother, God bless his soul, like a criminal. An animal. Like he was scum or less than, just
because of the way he looked. Skin like coal. Hair like cotton—” She paused and tongued the roof of her mouth, so I offered her water in a Styrofoam cup Clarissa had brought in earlier. I hadn’t touched it. Mrs. Fitzgerald took a sip, and then she was off. “I remember the bus boycott, and the Freedom Riders, and all that. I remember the March on Washington, and I especially remember the ones down in Selma.”
“You were there for all that?” I asked in amazement.
She took another sip of water, swallowed, then said, “No. I wasn’t there for any of them.” She got a erce look on her face. “Because I was scared. My brother took the bus trip down to Selma. He begged me to go. Begged me. But I told him it didn’t matter. I told him that he was going to get himself killed, and that that wasn’t bravery, it was stupidity. So he went without me. I watched the clips on the news. I saw him being beaten with everyone else, and realized that my brother, in fact, was the most courageous man I knew, because Selma had nothing to do with him. Well, one could argue that it did, a little bit. But he was doing it for us. All of us.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald rocked forward in the chair until she eventually got back to her feet. “Now, I’m not telling you what to do. But I’m telling you that I’ve been watching the news, and I see what’s going on. ere’s something that ain’t healed, and it’s not just those ribs of yours. And it’s perfectly okay for you to be afraid, but whether you protest or not, you’ll still be scared. Might as well let your voice be heard, son, because let me tell you something, before you know it you’ll be seventy-four and working in a gi shop, and no one will be listening anymore.” She set the plastic bag on the seat. “Brought some snacks. You gotta be sick of this hospital mess by now.”
“What is it?” I asked, reaching for the bag.
“Just some chips. I didn’t know what avor you liked, so I brought them all. Except plain.”
|
I sat back on the bed and thought about what Mrs. Fitzgerald said. Tried to imagine protesting in Selma, the March on Washington. Man. And I was worried about a regular street in my regular town. I thought about the fear, but I also thought about how I would feel if I didn’t go, if I didn’t, as she said, speak up. Maybe nothing would happen. But it was at least worth a try. I
turned the TV on, and sat and watched the news, but this time I really watched it. Forced myself to see myself. To relive the pain and confusion and my life changing in the time it took to drop a bag of chips on a sticky oor. I pulled out my sketch pad and started drawing like crazy, but it was hard— stupid damn tears kept wetting the page, they wouldn’t stop, but neither would I. So I kept going, letting the wet spread the lead in weird ways as I shaded and darkened the image. e gure of a man pushing his st through the other man’s chest. e other gure standing behind, cheering. A few minutes more, and normally it would’ve been complete. A solid piece, maybe even the best I had ever made. But it wasn’t quite there yet. It was close, but still un nished. I took my pencil, and for the rst time broke away from Aaron Douglas’s signature style. Because I couldn’t stop—and I began to draw features on the face of the man having his chest punched through. Starting with the mouth.
