A bad feeling settles in the pit of my stomach like a seed. All Laz told me is that Booker was expelled from his old school and served time in a juvenile detention center.
“When you’re as big as I am, some people are intimidated, but other people like to fuck with you, just to see how far they can push you. Gibson was like that. He yelled at everyone, but he’d scream his fucking head off at me. Every practice, every game. Like he was trying to break me.” Booker clears his throat and doesn’t quite look at me, but turns his head, just a bit, as if it’s the best he can do in lieu of eye contact. “My mom got sick and I started playing like shit and everyone noticed. Coach Reed could tell something was wrong, but when I didn’t say what, he was cool with it. Just told me I should take a break if I needed to. But Gibson wanted to get to state that year—real bad. And he thought they could do it for the first time in years with me on the team.”
I didn’t know his mom had been sick. I just knew that he lived with his dad and she wasn’t around. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the dark, I look at his face, try to find the emotion in his big chocolate-brown eyes or in the angle of his mouth. But I see nothing—just his blank gaze focused on the rug.
“One week, Gibson was really riding me… just saying whatever he could to get my mind back on the field. Brutal. I wanted to kill him, but I just kept playing because at least if I was playing, I wasn’t thinking about how my mom wasn’t getting better. Then, for some reason… Coach Reed… he never usually went there, but one of the guys had pissed him off and he just started screaming at whoever he could see. He said something—he didn’t know my mom was sick. I didn’t tell anyone. Not until… But he said something like, Bet your pansy-ass mom could play better than the shit you’re pulling out there, Stratton. And I fucking lost it. Everything went red. I don’t remember any of it.”
“What did you do?” I ask, trying not to cringe. I am the one who asked him to tell me, after all. “I mean, what did they say you did?”
“I tore away from the game and went right up to him and punched him in the face. Over and over and over. Then I blacked out.” He runs a hand over his face, over his eyes, as if trying to remove the image from his memory. “I broke his jaw and a couple of his ribs and—shit.” His voice breaks and he stops.
His words feel out of place in this room around all the little-kid furniture—and around me. I like how sturdy Booker is. How, even though I don’t know him very well, I have never thought he would use his size against me. But this doesn’t sound like your average fight. It sounds like an attack.
Still, as much as what he’s saying scares me, I feel like it’s scaring him, too. The memories. Slowly, I put my hand on his arm, and he looks at me for the first time since he started talking.
“It’s like it wasn’t me. Like it was someone else. And when I realized what I’d done…” Booker shakes his head. “I just couldn’t believe it until I looked down at my hands. At my shoes. Coach Reed’s blood was on them. And I just kept looking back and forth between him and Gibson, wondering how I snapped on the wrong one. Coach Reed forgave me, but Gibson… he was so pissed that his chance at state was shot, and it wasn’t enough for me to be expelled. He got the school to press assault charges and I ended up in juvie the last few months of seventh grade.”
“I’m sorry, Booker.”
“It was my old man’s fucking nightmare. All my life, I’d grown up hearing him talk about how nobody wanted to be sent to the Audy Home. How teachers and parents used to scare the shit out of him and other kids by saying they’d have to go there if they fucked up.”
My parents grew up in Chicago, too, and they’ve said the same things about the Audy Home. It’s not officially called that anymore, but I’ve heard the stories, and whatever the name is, nobody wants to go there.
“I’ll get it if this is too much,” he says when I don’t say anything. “If you don’t—”
He doesn’t continue.
A part of me, the one that’s so sheltered it fights against everything that breaks the rules, like lying about where I am and drinking rum-laced Coke, thinks it is too much. That I should be with someone who has a clean record, like Mitchell. Someone who never gets in trouble. Like me.
But the other part is stronger. The one that wants to touch Booker and kiss Booker and maybe even one day be with Booker. The part that reminds me he has only ever been gentle around me.
He blinks. “I went to anger management, too. My dad made me quit playing football because he read a bunch of articles and thinks getting hit so much fucks up everyone’s brains. That CTE thing. And I haven’t done anything like that again. I promise I wouldn’t—I’d never hurt you, Dove.”
“I know,” I say quickly, giving in to the strong part. “It’s not too much.”
“It’s not?”
I nod and he smiles and I move my hand from his arm to his shoulder, big and muscled. He flexes involuntarily, then relaxes against my hand. He’s looking at me and now his eyes are full of feeling: softness and sadness and what I am sure is a bit of relief.
He touches his forehead to mine.
I lift my hand to his face, and I lean forward and kiss him first. His emotions transfer to his kiss. The sadness is in the urgent way he presses his mouth to mine, as if he’s never needed anything so badly. The softness is in how he coaxes my lips apart, slow and almost questioning.
I wonder if he can taste the alcohol on my tongue like I can taste his or if it has all mingled together in the sweetness of this kiss.
I wonder if this feels a bit dangerous to him, too, after his confession, or if it is just the other part of me thinking that. The sheltered, weak part.
My phone vibrates and I pull away briefly to make sure it isn’t my mother. The movie I’m supposedly seeing should be wrapping up about now.
It’s Laz.
Still here? Should head out soon if you want to make it home by curfew
“Sorry. It’s Laz,” I say to Booker as I quickly text back. I don’t want him to leave without me.
Ten more minutes. Meet you downstairs
A few moments later, his reply comes.
Your mom, your funeral
But what he doesn’t understand is that for once in my life—maybe for the first time—I am not worried about what she thinks.
I am finally living.
I TURN MY KEY IN THE FRONT DOOR TWO MINUTES BEFORE CURFEW.
My mother is sitting in the living room, pretending like she’s heavily invested in a true crime documentary and isn’t watching the clock instead.
She pauses the TV and smiles when I walk in. “How was the movie?”
“Good. Longer than I thought, and then Laz and I ran into one of his friends on the way out.”
The lie rolls off my tongue, sweet and easy. I sit with it for a moment, but it never turns sour.
I yawn. “I’m going to get ready for bed.”
Laz and I got a ride home from Greg, and I fell asleep in the car, even though I tried to stay awake to spy on them from the back seat. I’ve never seen Laz with anyone he likes. Ayanna doesn’t have rules like my mother, but he’s afraid that she won’t love him if he’s honest about who he’s into. Greg and Laz were talking about their physics final as my eyes closed; Laz had to shake me awake when we pulled up in front of my building.