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. The only person who wasn’t asleep was Spoony. He was still sitting there. Still fooling with his phone. Still texting.
“Spoon,” I called out softly—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 fine, I’m fine,” 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. The cops get off. And everybody cries and waits for the next dead kid, to do it all over again. That’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 lift 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 fighting this. There was nothing I could do to calm him down. This was not going away. This was not getting swept under the rug of “oh well.” Not if Spoony had anything to do with it.
In our town, it really isn’t shocking to see a fight 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 flask 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 fiercely 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.
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 fifteen minutes, or when Dwyer dropped another five-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, firing through a set of fifty crunches when I heard Ma’s actual sleepy voice drift 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 finished 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.