“We have to get out of here now,” I hissed.
“What the hell happened?” Guzzo asked.
I looked up at the chain-link fence behind us. It was higher than a basketball rim, maybe fifteen feet. But climbable. On the other side were the tracks to the commuter rail. “Dude,” I said, putting my hands on the fence. “It’s your brother. He busted some guy in the store. It’s fucking ugly and we need to get the hell out of here. Now!”
I started to climb.
“The tracks?” Dwyer asked. “Are you crazy?”
When I got to the top, I looked both ways. No trains. Still, it was probably a high traffic time, so that wouldn’t last for long. I dropped one leg on the other side of the fence, swung myself over, and began to climb down.
“What the fuck, man?” Guzzo shouted.
“No one saw me,” I said when I hit the ground. “If we get out of here right now, maybe nobody will, and we can all just pretend like we weren’t here. Like it didn’t happen.”
“What happened?” Guzzo asked, one hand on the fence, but hesitating. “Is Paul okay?”
“Yeah, man,” I said. “But he just beat the piss out of some kid on the sidewalk and we don’t want to be around to have to answer any questions—it was fucking ugly. Now get over here before a train comes.”
They hauled ass over the fence, and we ran along the pebble embankment of the railway until we came to the Fourth Street bridge, and then we slid down the embankment to the fence along Fourth Street and climbed over that one. I heard a whistle in the distance, but we all made it over and away from the tracks in plenty of time.
“Paul?” Guzzo said again, his voice cracking.
“It was bad,” I admitted.
“What the hell do you think the kid did?” Guzzo asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever he did, your brother just put him in the hospital for it.”
“You know what?” Dwyer said. “Let’s just get a slice and chill. Seriously.”
It was a good plan, but when we got there, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had seen. I swear I thought about the guy on the ground, but mostly I thought about Paul, because Paul was Guzzo’s older brother, and after my own father died, Paul had basically been my older brother too. And I couldn’t shake that look of rage I’d seen on the face of a man I knew and thought of as family.
Saturday
Custody. That’s the one word I kept hearing over and over again as I drifted in and out of a painkiller coma, which by the way, might’ve been the best sleep I’d had in I don’t even know how long. And that’s with a broken nose and a few fractured ribs.
Custody. They brought me into the hospital, handcuffs still on, blood still pouring from my nose like a faucet with rusty pipes. My head pounding. Every breath hurt. My jacket, the one my brother gave me, now torn.
Custody. The doctors sent me through X-rays, administered pain drugs, fiddled with my nose until it was set back in its original place, even though they made sure to tell me that it would never look the same. That it would always look broken. But once it healed I would, at least, be able to breathe normally. They applied ice packs to my ribs, which were super uncomfortable because after a while the cold makes your skin feel like it’s burning. But after that, it all goes numb.
Custody. A police officer—not the one who did this to me, but a different one, the one who fingerprinted me—stood outside the hospital room on guard, making sure I didn’t run. As if I could. As if I were a real criminal. As if I were a criminal at all. He stood watch at the door until my parents arrived.
Custody. The police officer explained to my folks that I had been caught stealing. Not only that, but that I had also been charged with resisting arrest and public nuisance. There was no point trying to explain. I could barely breathe. I could barely keep my eyes open. The officer read the citations and explained that even though they were all misdemeanors, I had been processed and would still have to appear in court. Then, because I’m a minor, my folks had to fill out paperwork so that I could be signed over and returned to their custody. After that, the police officer left.
The next morning, when I woke up from it all, there was my mother, sitting in a chair on the other side of my hospital room, staring out the window.
“Ma,” I said, instantly wincing. I could feel the gauze taped to my face, to my nose. It’s that same tight feeling my skin gets after swimming, after the chlorine has turned me into cardboard. I cleared my throat and called out for her again.
She whipped toward me, sprang from the chair, and dashed over to my bedside as if I was about to deliver my last words.
“Rashad,” she said, her voice full of all the motherly stuff. Worry and love and hope and fear. “Oh, baby,” she repeated, rubbing her hand on my forehead gently, her voice cracking. “How you feelin’?”
The truth was, I was feeling two ways. Physically, I obviously didn’t feel great, that’s for sure. But not terrible. Not like I thought I’d feel. But maybe that was the drugs doing their thing. I did feel some soreness, though. My breathing was weird and uncomfortable. Every breath felt like a hundred tiny needles sticking me in the chest. And that was breathing through my mouth. Breathing through my nose wasn’t an option. Not yet, at least. But I was okay. Hell, I was alive. And so the other stuff—well, the alternative was way worse.
The other way I was feeling was just . . . confused. I mean, I hadn’t done anything. Nothing at all. So why was I hooked up to all these machines, lying in this uncomfortable bed? Why was I arrested? Why was my mother waiting there for me to wake up, dried tears crusted on her face, prayer on her breath?
“I’m okay,” I said.
She sat on the side of the bed. “Listen, I need you to tell me what happened, Rashad. And I need you to be honest with me, okay?” But before I could answer, my father came into the room, making a not-so-grand entrance. He had two cups of coffee, and even though one was for my mother, my dad’s face looked like he could’ve used them both. And maybe a third. But him being tired didn’t stop him from preaching.
“He up?” my dad asked my mom, handing her a cup. He hadn’t even looked at me yet. If he had, just for a second, he would’ve noticed my eyes were open, a sure sign of me being awake. My mother nodded, almost as if she were giving him the green light to acknowledge me.
“Rashad.” He said my name the same way he said it every other day when he was waking me up for school. As if nothing was wrong. As if he wasn’t broken up by the sight of me lying in bed, black and blue and taped and bandaged and tubed and connected to machines monitoring whether or not I was actually still breathing.
“Hmm,” I grunted.
“Help me out here, son,” he said in his normal voice, which was his asshole voice. “I need to know what the hell you were thinking, shoplifting. Shoplifting? And from Jerry’s of all places?” Dad had that disappointed look on his face—the same face he used to give me before I joined ROTC, the same face he made whenever he talked about Spoony.
“I didn’t steal nothin’,” I said, suddenly feeling too tired to explain, even though I just woke up.