When I was finally 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.
The 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 Springfield’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 flirt 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 flirty, but not in the way I wanted her to mean it. This 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 flip 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. They 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 flashed down the block. The guys in the fight 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 fighting, 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. This 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.
The crowd outside Mother’s was white, black, Latino, Asian, just like Springfield. The four guys being cuffed were white. The 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, “There’s a barbecue at my cousin’s tomorrow. You must be going.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Weird, right? The sudden party?” She looked at me, and I realized we might not have been having private conversations in our minds the whole way home. They 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 find the right words for it—or I didn’t want to. I wasn’t sure.
Sunday
Sunday. I slept late and woke up to an empty room. Silence. No one. So nice.
Sunday TV is just as bad as Saturday TV, so I left it off and laid there in the cold space, staring at the wall, thinking about everything.
I was supposed to have been at Jill’s party on Friday. Me, English, Shannon, and Carlos—three-piece and fries. I was supposed to be all up on Tiffany Watts, giving her the business because even though I was soldier-boy when I was in school, everybody knew I was nice with the moves. Rhythm ain’t never been an issue for me. I was the kid Spoony made dance in front of his friends when we were younger. Show them the latest steps that I picked up from music videos. I owned the block party dance contests. So Jill’s party, like every party, was my time to two-step without it being a march. My time to be at ease, and let the soul seep back into this soldier. Damn shame I didn’t make it. Instead some big-ass cop decided to have a fist party on my face. Y’know, normal stuff. No biggie. I’m just a punk-ass kid. I have no rights. Just got body slammed for no reason. Just got my life threatened, while lying flat on the sidewalk. A broken nose, broken ribs, and a knee in the back is way more exciting than fine-ass girls checking for me (after they finished checking for English).