Sighing, I pack my laptop into my backpack and spear Counts with a look of surrender.
“Fine. I’ll poke my head in, make sure she’s alive. Then I’m out. I’ve got the Ring tonight.”
His expression looking relieved, he nods. “Yeah. I’ll come by later. Help you with the books.”
“Countin’ on it.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m sitting astride my jet-black Harley, the one I bought with one of my first earnings I made when I first started running the G-Ring.
The ride to the trailer park is short, less than twenty minutes as I weave through the edge of the city and into the oblivion beyond which they call a “transitional” neighborhood. Turning right past a questionable apartment complex that should be considered a mansion next to the place where I grew up, I follow an unpaved path toward the cluster of trailers hidden back behind a thicket of old oak trees.
Passing the first three, I glance at the bent and dying grass in front of Counts’ dad’s place. The trailer is a dingy white, planted on the ground without any wheels. It’s not even a doublewide. The place just looks…sad.
Every time I pull into this park my hackles rise, my brain goes into overdrive plotting the quickest way to get back out again.
I continue driving the short distance from his trailer to mine and dismount the bike, my boots kicking up dust as I plant them on the ground.
My mom’s trailer sits apart from the others, a doublewide monstrosity with flower boxes on the windows. Flower boxes with no fucking flowers in them. Sometimes she goes on these kicks, where she decides she’s gonna “pretty up the place.” Hence the empty flower boxes, the broken hummingbird feeder hanging on a bent iron stake in the scraggly yard, and the “handmade” wreath of twigs gracing the paint-peeling front door. When I was little, I’d get excited about it when she’d go on one of her kicks to make our little trailer feel like a home. She’d drag me from store to store, buying stuff that made no sense to me but seemed to make her happy. I used to live for the moments when she was happy.
But then later, I realized that those trivial things she bought for the house meant we’d have to go without something else we really needed. Like dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. Or our light bill. Eventually, those little stopping sprees stopped being fun.
I jog up the three wooden steps and place my hand on the doorknob, hesitating.
Why do I do this to myself? What am I gonna find in here that’s any different than the last time?
Then I hear it. The sound is faint, but it’s there. It’s a wet, muffled noise that ends with the smash of something inside shattering, and I’m through the front door in seconds, slamming it against the thin wall in my rush.
The plaster cracks. It just adds to the growing spider web already lining the wall.
My eyes widen in shock, my hands instantly curling into fists at my sides.
It’s not because of the empty liquor bottles strewn across the tiny living room. No, that’s a sight I’m used to seeing. It’s not because the mess of fast food bags, empty pill bottles, and pizza boxes littering the place. Also nothing new.
It’s not even the smell that keeps me frozen to the spot.
It smells like rat shit and spoiled milk. Something else I’m very familiar with.
No…the thing that turns my heart into a glacier, refusing to pump blood to my veins, is the sight of my mother, lying on the floor, her dirty blonde hair strewn around her in a distorted fan, being choked out by a man I’ve never seen before in my life.
I’m only frozen for a second. And then I’m moving. Flying, really. Soaring across the room in two long strides, ripping the piece of trash away from my mom and throwing him up against the wall.
I hear her start to cough, feel her movement as she leans over and retches. That sound lets me know she’s okay, so I focus on him.
He’s wasted. That much is clear from his red-rimmed eyes and sluggish movements. “Who the hell are you?” His speech is slurred.
I glare at him. “Right now? I’m your worst nightmare.”
My fist lands a solid right hook to his jaw. He goes down. The pain of it stings my hand, but the feeling is glorious. It’s been a long time since I’ve let the beast inside me out, and this guy, this man who had the gall to put his hands on the woman who birthed me, is about to feel the full wrath of it.
I kick him in the side, a roar bursting free from my chest. And then I’m down on top of him, one punch after another raining from my fists. The sound of his face turning into a bloody pulp is good. His eyes swell, and that’s good. He starts blubbering, crying, begging me to stop hitting him, and that’s better.
There’s a little voice inside my head telling me to stop. That I’m better than this now. That I don’t have to let this anger consume me anymore. But I can’t hear it clearly enough. It’s lost behind the roar of the rage.
Behind me, my mom screams. It’s a startling sound, because her voice is hoarse, and yet she still yells. “Ace! Ace! Ace!”
But I ignore it. I ignore all the noise, all of it except the dull roar inside my head that tells me not to stop.
And then I’m being pulled backward. I fight, but someone with an iron-clad grip drags me backwards. I glance over my shoulder, wild, and see my uncle gripping me tightly.
“Enough.” His voice is low, commanding. “Ace, man, you gotta stop. He’s down. She’s okay.” He just keeps talking, keeps saying the things that I need to hear.
My eyes are glazed over as I take in the scene around me. The dude on the floor, beaten to a bloody pulp. He’s not moving.
“Is he dead?” My voice is flat.
My mom gasps between the words she’s shouting into the phone. “Help us! My son broke into my place. He just beat the shit out of my boyfriend!”
The words should sting, should wound me like daggers piercing the skin. But all I feel when I hear them is rage.
And pity for a woman who can’t get her life together, even when she’s seconds away from losing it.
I glance down at my hands. Red and sticky with blood. His blood.
I should be freaking out. I should be hurting. I should feel regret.
But all I feel is numb.
“You’re so damn stupid!” My uncle’s tone is like acid as he tosses the words at his sister. “You never deserved him, you know that? Rot in hell. If you or that sorry sack of shit over there even think about pressing charges against Ace, I’ll come after you my damn self.”
We walk out of the trailer, without looking back.
Three
NAIMA
The hard, metallic music rages in my head, traveling from my ear buds straight to my lonely heart. The harder the music, the more it feeds my desire to just…be.
Be me.
Be free.
Because no one can hear what I listen to. It’s my own little secret, and here in my room, lying on my bed in the preppy sorority house with my favorite bands roaring in my ears, it’s the only thing that saves me from going absolutely insane.
The knock on my bedroom door doesn’t budge me because I don’t hear it. It’s not until Rose, our sorority house mom, pokes her head gingerly in through the cracked door that I sit up and take notice.