All American Boys Read online

  “Man, I’ve been stopped on the street,” English said.

  “You have?” Berry sparked up.

  “Yeah. More than once, too. Cops wanting me to lift my shirt so they could see if I had weapons on me. Pat-downs and all that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Berry asked.

  “Because I already know what time it is. I’d seen it before, so it was nothing. Plus I didn’t want you freakin’ out.”

  “At least yours were only pat-downs. One time they had me facedown on the sidewalk on Overlook Street. Said they got word that there was a robbery and said the description of the person was five-foot-nine, dark skin, with a black T-shirt and black sneakers on,” Shannon explained. “That could’ve been anybody.”

  “That could’ve been any kid I work with at the rec center. Matter fact, that could’ve been me!” Spoony chimed in.

  “Exactly,” Berry agreed.

  And I wished the stories stopped there. I really did. But they didn’t. They went on and on, story after story about not trusting police officers because they always seemed to act like bullies. And even though there were times when they’d been helpful, the bad times . . . were BAD TIMES. And it just seemed like they didn’t . . . I don’t know. Like, they see us. But they don’t really see us.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay what?” Spoony asked.

  “Okay. I’m down with the protest.” I have to admit, I said I was down but I wasn’t really sure I meant it. I was scared. And it’s not like they needed me to sign on. This wasn’t really about me. This was bigger than me. I knew that now. But I wanted my brother and my friends to know, since the spotlight was on me, that I was in. That I would stand with them.

  That is, if I could get out of the hospital.

  “Name a word that rhymes with grain.”

  “Pain.”

  “Good answer! Good answer!”

  Wednesday

  Willy was dragging his ass again on Wednesday morning, but truthfully it wasn’t all his fault. I was kind of dragging my ass too, still dwelling on all the things I’d been talking to Jill about the night before. It’s not like I was dreaming about it, it was more that weird state where your eyes are closed and you know you are thinking, and it feels like you are both asleep and not, like you’re resting, but still thinking, kinda in control of your thoughts and kinda not.

  Well, the daze carried right over into morning like I was sleepwalking, and when Willy and I finally made it down the steps to head off to school, it might as well have been a dream, because standing on the sidewalk a few houses down, having just lugged the garbage to the street, was Paul Galluzzo, staring right at me.

  He waved to me and I waved back, automatically, out of habit. What was I doing? He jogged up to us, and I kept thinking, All I had to do was turn and walk away, what the hell is wrong with me? He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d been up all night too, thinking about what he had done to Rashad. Poor guy—yup, that was my first actual thought. Not Rashad. Paul. Jesus.

  “What’s up, Collins?” he said when he got to us.

  “Uh, hey,” I mumbled. All that normalcy was gone. He sniffled, and I wasn’t sure if it was one of those things a guy like him did before he socked a guy like me in the face. I gripped Willy’s hand.

  Paul tussled Willy’s hair. He glanced back and forth between Willy and me, and I focused on the grease stain on Paul’s T-shirt.

  “Hey,” he said. “I thought we were going to practice some footwork?” He didn’t sound angry, more like he was pleading. “I’m right here, man.”

  “Yeah,” I said again, fishing for words. “Look, I know. It’s been busy, and we have to get to school and all and—”

  “Hey,” he said, now with more force. “Don’t bullshit me.”

  This made Willy jump a little, and Paul calmed down. “No, listen,” he said, easy, like old times. “Little Guz’s been telling me about all the chatter at school.”

  “Nah,” I said, not sure what to say. “It’s nothing.”

  “No,” Paul said. “No, it’s not. It’s weird. I know it.”

  He hesitated, and I couldn’t find a word to fill the silence. I just wanted to turn and run, but I had Willy holding me there like an anchor. Or maybe it was me? What the hell did I want him to say?

  “You gotta hear my side of the story.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to do. “Uh, I know,” I stuttered. “But—”

  “No. Listen. You do.” Paul clamped my shoulder with his hand. He raised the other one slowly and pointed close to my face, scabs still tattooing his knuckles. “Because you were there. I know.”

  Willy looked up at me. “What’s going on?”

  Paul sniffled again. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair a mess. He was wearing flip-flops, and I’d never seen him in those stupid things. He let go of me and stood back, his hands on his hips.

  “Look,” he said. “People tell a lot of fucked-up stories. People are talking about me. Well, I’m telling you this. There was a woman in the store. The kid took her down because she caught him stealing, I went in to protect her, and then he went after me, okay?” He wiped a hand over his head and then held his fist in front of his mouth for a moment. “What was I supposed to do? It’s my job, Quinn. I was protecting the lady. I was just doing my job.”

  He reached out to me again but didn’t grab me, just kind of touched my shoulder, like he wasn’t sure what he was doing. I leaned back, and his fingers fell away awkwardly.

  “I know,” I lied. “I hear you.”

  “Do you?” Paul’s face was all screwed up. “I don’t think you do, Quinn. What the hell’s the matter with you, man?”

  “I know. It’s just—” I couldn’t find anything else to say. “I have to get this guy to school.” I nodded to Willy. “Catch you later, though, right?”

  Paul’s look of disgust ripped a hole in my chest. “Are you serious, Quinn?”

  I shrugged, and Paul narrowed his eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said, turning around and waving me off. “See you later.”

  But really, it sounded like he was saying fuck you.

  And for the whole walk to Willy’s middle school and then to my school, all I could hear was that lie in his voice. He didn’t want to see me later. No frigging way. I didn’t want to see him, either. But what was worse was that I couldn’t believe he’d told me about what happened in the store. Or actually, it wasn’t that I couldn’t believe that he’d told me—it was that I didn’t believe what he’d told me. Because even if Rashad did everything Paul said he did—really?

  I saw what I saw on the street.

  That was the real story.

  I met Jill on the front steps by the tag. What had once been a non-hang at school had now become the hang at school. Everybody stood around the spray-painted slogan. The school maintenance crew hadn’t washed it off, and what made it all the more powerful was that it was still true. Rashad had been in the hospital five nights, and he was still there. Rashad was absent again today.

  On either side of the spray paint, kids passed out flyers. A black fist rose from the bottom of each sheet and called for justice. It was what Jill had been talking about. She was organizing, getting involved, and she was there, with Tiffany, handing them out. I didn’t have Mr. Fisher for history like they did, but I knew who he was, and I saw him out there too—his bright white head bobbing through the crowd of students. Jill now told me in detail what was going down. A community group, a church, and some of the student clubs at school were planning a protest march on Friday. It would start on the West Side, go right by Jerry’s, and wind its way through town to city hall and Police Plaza 1. The march through town would begin at five thirty p.m., approximately the same time Rashad had been arrested for petty theft, resisting arrest, and public nuisance—whatever the hell that meant. And just as I was thinking it, I heard someone else ask it: “Will Rashad be there?” Nobody knew.

  At the bell,
Jill and I took off in different directions. I tried to catch up with Tooms, but he ignored me and hustled ahead of me into our English classroom. When I walked into class behind him, Mrs. Tracey stood at the window, looking down over the front steps and the entrance to the school. Even when everyone had taken their seats, she remained by the window, and the rest of the class kept talking, waiting for her to go to her desk. But she didn’t. In her hand, she held her copy of the novel The Invisible Man. A week earlier she’d made photocopies of the first chapter, a short story Ralph Ellison published as “Battle Royal.” That story—I’d never read anything like it. The violence. The all-out warfare. The N word all over the place. When it had been assigned a week earlier, I’d read it all twisted up in discomfort, like the actual reading of the story was painful, but now, as Mrs. Tracey clutched her book and looked down to the sidewalk, a kind of nervousness rose in me. I’d hated the way the old white men in the story had acted—watching black boys getting beaten, beating each other, for sport—and I’d put as much distance between them and me as I could. I wasn’t them, I’d told myself as I read. White people were crazy back then, eighty years ago, when the story took place. Not now. But watching Mrs. Tracey stare out the window, a weight of dread dropped through me. Were we going to talk about the story again? After Rashad? Because after what had happened to Rashad, it felt like no time had passed at all. It could have been eighty years ago. Or only eight. Now it wasn’t only the city aldermen. Now there were the videos, and we were all watching this shit happen again and again on our TVs and phones—shaking our heads but doing nothing about it.

  Mrs. Tracey still didn’t move from the window, and everyone began to fidget, looking at everyone else, and my eyes landed on the whiteboard. Her notes from what must have been her last-period class the day before were still on it. Active versus passive voice. I remembered the exact same lesson from ninth grade. I’d thought it was all a pain in the ass, but what had once been a stupid grammar lesson now formed a weird lump in my throat.

  Mistakes were made, Mrs. Tracey had scrawled. And beneath it she’d written, Who? Who made the mistakes?

  In my mind, I ran through the exercise I remembered from the time, rearranging the phrases, making something passive active, but this time I found myself changing the other words too, because I was clearly becoming obsessed—even if I didn’t want to be.

  Mistakes were made.

  Rashad was beaten.

  Paul beat Rashad.

  Mrs. Tracey finally moved from the window and did something just as surprising. She sat down behind her desk. Usually she walked around her desk, or she perched on the front of her desk. But she never sat. Now, slumped behind it, she’d never looked so small, the whiteboard as big as the sky over her tiny, hunched shoulders. I thought she was about to begin the lesson, but she pushed the book away from her on the desk and began to cry.

  I clenched my jaw tight and stared down at the floor, trying not to let her tears make me cry back in response. I just sat there breathing heavily through my nose.

  She pointed to the window and dropped her head into her hands. “I don’t want to see this happen to any of my students,” she said, catching her breath. “I don’t want to believe it still happens.”

  I gripped one hand with the other, hoping to disappear. I wasn’t the only one. The room had never been so quiet. No one spoke or whispered. Mrs. Tracey just sat there, with her head in her hands. After a few last sobs, she apologized. “I’m sorry for my outburst—it’s just—” And then the tears came again and she apologized again and continued. “Mr. Godwin thinks it’s best if I don’t assign papers for this story. He thinks it’s best to just move on to the next unit.”

  Something felt off about that. Don’t get me wrong, nobody wants to write a paper if he doesn’t have to, but this time, it felt like we were getting cheated out of something. Everyone still kept absolutely silent, but I wondered what was going through Tooms’s mind. He was nodding a slow, hesitant nod. An I read you kind of nod. I leaned back in my chair but couldn’t actually go anywhere, because the damn thing was all one unit and I felt trapped. It was too damn small for me anyway. And as I was sitting there, shifting around in that tiny-ass chair-desk, I remembered Mrs. Tracey making fun of Mr. Godwin, saying she’d never follow what the department head or the administration wanted her to teach. But now, suddenly, when they actually did direct her, she was blaming them for not talking about the book.

  And then I thought about what was right there in the text. Ralph Ellison talking about invisibility. Not the wacky science fiction kind, but the kind where people are looking at you but not seeing you, looking through you, or around you—like, why the hell shouldn’t our classes be talking about what happened to Rashad? Was what happened to him invisible? Was he invisible?

  I scribbled a note. I might be an asshole, but I know this isn’t right. Should we do something? The Invisible Man at Central High: Rashad. I tore the note from my notebook, wadded it, and threw it at Tooms.

  The crumbled ball bounced off his desk, into his chest, and onto the ground. He squinted at me. “Read it,” I mouthed. He hesitated, but then he snatched it up and smoothed it out. He stared at the note for what seemed like forever, and then he looked back up at me.

  “You with me?” he mouthed back.

  I nodded.

  Then, for the first time ever in any class I’d ever been in with him, Tooms spoke up without being called on.

  “Battle Royal,” he said, pulling his photocopy out of his folder. “For Rashad.”

  And he began to read. “ ‘It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.’ ”

  Now, Tooms is not a read-out-loud kind of guy, but he went right into it, reading clear and confident for the whole room to hear, and it made the most perfect sense reading the words Ralph Ellison had written years ago. Mrs. Tracey lifted her head, her face a mess, and something about her crying there in class made me so mad, like Rashad’s reality meant now she couldn’t talk about the story, or didn’t know how—but there was Ralph Ellison, and Tooms, too, just telling us what we needed to do. I unfolded my crinkled pages and followed along as Tooms read aloud, ending with the final line of the first paragraph: “ ‘It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself! But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!’ ”

  When Tooms fell silent, I glanced back, and I realized he was looking at me. I nodded, and even though I’m not the kind of guy who likes to read aloud either—I hate it—the rest of the room just sat there waiting for something to happen, and even Mrs. Tracey was stunned, so I jumped into the next paragraph. The lines were the old grandfather’s deathbed advice, talking about his life after slavery, his life still struggling: “ ‘Learn it to the young’uns’ ” his final, “fiercely” whispered words. And it seemed like the words were calling right into the classroom. They weren’t my words, they were Ellison’s, but there he was reminding us all what had to be learned by the “young’uns.”

  Then it was my time to be surprised, because Nam picked up where I left off, and after Nam, Sonja read, then Latrice, and Alex, and soon it was clear the whole class was going to take a turn, because what would it say if you didn’t?

  Mrs. Tracey watched and listened. She didn’t interrupt. The slurs and the violence from the dialogue ricocheted around the room. Some people skipped over them. Some people said “line of dialogue.” Chloe looked up, tears streaming down her own white face, and said, “I don’t want to say these words,” and nobody judged. We just waited to see what she would do. Some people said it all word for word.

  But here are the words that kept ricocheting around me all day: Nobody says the words anymore, but somehow the violence still remains. If I didn’t want the violence to remain, I had to do a hell of a lot more than just sa
y the right things and not say the wrong things.

  Practice was better than it had been in a couple of days. Coach drilled us with a few plays, then made us run laps, then dropped the three-point contest on us. It was no surprise that I won, because I’d been hitting threes since I was a freshman—I used my legs to shoot like Paul had taught me. But I didn’t think about him as I shot. I kept my head where it was supposed to be, in the moment, even when we scrimmaged. Coach was trying out different combinations of players, and although he didn’t say it, he was evaluating who was going to be a starter for sure. At first I played against English, then I got swapped briefly, and when I went back in I was on his team. I was nervous, but a shooter has to shoot. I hit the first one I took on a pass from him, and on the very next play, we had a two-on-one against Tooms, and although English might have taken it to the hoop against Tooms, he kicked it to me for the easy basket. I got him later too when I dropped the ball around Guzzo. English and I had a rhythm going, and I knew that if we kept it up for the next few months, we’d both be breaking records. I mean, hell, why couldn’t the scouts be here now? When English and I were playing so well together!

  But no game is ever that easy. Ten minutes before practice was supposed to end, Guzzo and Tooms went up for a rebound, and Tooms knocked Guzzo in the face with his elbow. Guzzo bucked backward, spun, and stumbled down to one knee. Coach blew his whistle and we all stopped, but already Guzzo was springing to his feet and shoving Tooms. Tooms pushed him back, and Nam and I got in between them before either of them threw a punch.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you two?” Coach barked. He pulled us all apart, and for a split second it seemed like Guzzo and Tooms were going to go at it again, but Coach got each of them by the collars of their shirts. “There’s no room for that bullshit here.”

  “He jacked me,” Guzzo said. A line of blood dropped from his nose to his shirt.