* * *
Gripping the arms of the chair like he was on a roller coaster with no safety belt, Frankie waited for Mrs. Gordon to get off the phone. He had explained what had happened to his father. He’d asked for time away from school. Now his counselor was talking to the principal on his behalf. Fury was building, building. He should not have come to school; he should have just used Winston’s phone. He needed to be at the hospital, the surgery had to be over by now. It was his duty to be there, especially since it was his bumboclot fault that his father was there in the first place.
The counselor placed the phone back in the cradle. “Okay.”
There was that word again. It plagued him—you should have listened, you should have listened.
“The principal will make a concession this one time, given your excellent record and that you’ve turned in your final engineering assignment.”
Frankie loosened his grip on the chair. His fingers felt as cramped as if he were still holding on. “Thank you.”
“But you need to keep up with your regular classwork,” she went on. “And check in once or twice a week with your teachers until—” She patted the table.
Frankie shifted uneasily. Checking in once or twice a week was no big deal, but he couldn’t see coming full-time until his father was back on his feet. How long would that take? They wouldn’t even let him see his father yet. “Thanks, miss. For everything.”
“Now, have you told anyone?”
“Ah, the people back in Troy know.”
“Anyone here?”
“No. I came to see you first thing.”
“Frankie, it might be best… if no one at school knows that your father was shot.”
He wondered where she was going. “Okayyyyyy.”
“Confidentiality might serve you better.” She cleared her throat. “If anyone asks why you’re not in school regularly, maybe just tell them you have an illness in the family. Does that work for you?”
Actually, it made sense. If somebody, some idiot classmate, made some bad joke about his father getting shot, he might go off, he was so pissed. “Yes, that works.”
She intertwined her fingers. “Good. I wish your father Godspeed.”
* * *
So caught up in his thoughts, Frankie nearly walked right into another student as he left the office. He moved left—she moved in the same direction and they nearly crashed again. Frankie looked up just as the girl did. She. Her. Leah. The same girl he was thinking about before Joe’s party went sideways. She laughed, then said, “Frankie. Hey, stranger.” He was an instant mess—part happy to see her, part nervous to see his dad.
Leah was a senior too. Her groove was art. She wore her green school tie lower than any other student he’d seen—the knot halfway to her belt. With one quick move, she could shake it loose—defiance of school policy that she wore real well. Teachers must have said something, but knowing Leah, she probably talked her way out of it. Last year he thought he and she were about to start something. Then all of a sudden she got all spooked, started to avoid him.
“How’re you doing?” Her smile—perfect—two dimples.
Talk about a loaded question! He quickly sidestepped it, saying, “All right. You?”
She eyed him up and down. “Excuse me for saying this, but you don’t really look all right.”
He half shrugged, suddenly having the urge to unload—part of why he’d been so surprised when she up and disappeared on him was that they’d seemed to be able to talk to each other so easily. But, Dad. He had to go. “Yeah, well, I can’t really talk right now.” That came out totally wrong. Moron!
“Okayyyyy.” She smiled strangely, like she was smiling reassurance. “I get it… I wasn’t very cool about things the last time we… I was shitty, right?”
This was an apology he’d never heard before. I was shitty. It was so in-your-face. “Yeah, I guess.” He wanted to just say it was cool, and be cool, but damn, he needed to go.
“Just yeah?” Her smile widened, even as she said, “You have every right to be mad.”
“I don’t need your permission to be mad.” Permission. He hated that word. Permission to go to the party. Permission not to go to school with a sick father. Permission to be mad. Enough! “We had something going. And you just stopped. So yeah, it was shitty.”
“Like I said.” She was still smiling.
“What is this? I mean, why are you here stepping to me now, anyway?”
“I thought we could talk… but you don’t seem like you’re in the mood.”
“No… now’s not good—” He was an idiot.
She lifted her head high. “Later, then.” Then she was gone.
The school crest on the wall—the words YET HIGHER—seemed to mock him, like how much lower could he go.
* * *
Two excruciating days later, Frankie sat in the outdoor waiting area of the hospital. He’d been back and forth a half dozen times now, sitting in almost the same spot, hearing the same news, that his father was still in intensive care and couldn’t be seen. He tapped his feet against the ground, feeling mad with worry. At least Samson was alive, right? At least that. And at least this time, Uncle Joe and Aunt Jenny came with him. They knew how to get answers. They knew the game.
Flanked by a frail older man’s bony shoulder on one side, and the hefty, sweaty arm of a young woman on the other, Frankie peered up at the five-story building, a big off-white concrete slab that he couldn’t stop thinking of as an unfinished headstone. The sun pounded down; convective heat bore into his skin. Whoever had built the hospital hadn’t considered the sun’s path, but they could have, should have. There was plenty of room to orient the area to diminish the effects of the heat. He started making mental calculations, envisioning ways to correct the problem, to keep himself from thoughts of Samson, as oppressive as the heat.
Uncle Joe never seemed to break a sweat—what was up with that? He was pacing back and forth, growling into his cell phone, his free hand swinging like a hammer.
“Listen to me, Buck-Buck, me don’t care about that. Me want everybody who did come to my party to get a bag of grocery, with meat, not only the people that got shot. Everybody.”
Joe’s smooth Rastafarian delivery had been replaced by a militaristic staccato, a captain on the battlefield.
“Flowers? No, mon, I tell you, me want them to get food and things they can use.” He clutched his forehead like he had a headache. “The people need to know me is there for them. Is two innocents dead, a dozen hurt, you know, mon?”
Frankie rubbed away the ash that clung to his knuckles. He’d forgotten to wash up this morning and now couldn’t remember if he had done so the day before, either. Mr. Brown had commented on his dirty hands once—said Frankie had to think like a businessman, consider how the customers would feel buying food from someone with dirty hands. Mr. Brown had been all buttoned up, even about selling yams, when he was making a hundred times more selling ganja. He was old-school, and Frankie missed him. And then there were the other people: Mrs. Jenkins’s grown boy who’d also killed, Winston’s friend who’d taken a bullet to the calf, and the guy who grabbed that little kid—he just got released from the hospital today.