All American Boys Page 7

  I was pissed about the photo, and to be honest, a little embarrassed by it, but I knew Spoony had a point. I would’ve hated for them to put up some picture of me hanging with Carlos, posing with my middle fingers up. Even though . . . well . . . never mind.

  The story played over and over and over again, like watching a movie in virtual reality where it doesn’t really seem like you—like it’s real—but you can feel every blow, every break. You can taste blood. You can smell the officer’s breath. And that was hard for me. To see myself, like that. They kept saying it was a developing story. As more unfolds. As we learn more.

  “Cut it off,” I finally said.

  “We need to keep up with how it develops,” Spoony said.

  “Cut it off, Spoon!” I reached for the remote myself and was instantly reminded that my ribs were broken. “Argkk!” My mother lifted off her seat, ready to spring into mommy mode. Spoony quickly handed me the clicker.

  “Okay, okay,” he said apologetically. “Take it easy. My bad, man. It’s just . . .”

  “I’m fine,” I said hard, shooting down whatever reason he was about to deliver. I turned the TV off. “I just don’t want to watch it no more.”

  The truth is, I wasn’t mad at Spoony. I wasn’t. As a matter of fact, he did exactly what I expected him to do. I just didn’t want to keep watching it.

  My mother, trying to cut the tension, began digging in her church bag, which was way bigger than her normal bag. The church bag had to be big enough to fit her Sunday service survival kit. Her Bible, some candy, and all the sins of our family. “Oh, Rashad, I forgot, I brought the stuff you asked for.”

  The stuff I asked for was my phone and phone charger—my mother was given the duffel bag with my ROTC uniform and phone after I, and it, were released into her custody. But more importantly, I wanted my art supplies—sketchbook and pencils. That’s all I really needed. That was my hospital survival kit.

  She plugged my phone in the wall and put the sketchbook and pencils on the roller tray-table next to the chicken tenders I now wasn’t going to be eating. And as soon as my phone had enough juice to power on, the damn dog started barking. Nonstop.

  Let me explain.

  Me and Carlos had this stupid joke that whenever we were going to a party, we would set our text message alerts to a crazy sound effect. Not for any real reason. I mean, originally it was so we’d always know where each other was, or be able to find a phone if any of us lost one. But at a party, who would be able to hear it over the music? See, stupid. But we kept doing it because it was our thing. A tradition. Like, good luck, or something.

  This week Carlos picked a dog bark, just because he thought it would be funny, or dare I say, cool, to tell a girl that there was something in his pants, barking. I mean, it was kind of funny. But also, so wack. Then he challenged me and said that he could get a girl with that bark line before I could. Truth is, I wasn’t even going to try. But I played along and changed my alert anyway. And now that my phone had enough battery to turn on, the dog was barking crazy.

  “Hand me that,” I said to Spoony, who was frowning at all the stupid noise.

  I checked my messages.

  FRIDAY 4:43 p.m. from Spoony

  SHAD YOU STILL COMIN TO GET $$?

  FRIDAY 5:13 p.m. from Spoony

  ??? WTF

  FRIDAY 5:21 p.m. from Los

  YO BE AT MY CRIB BY 7

  FRIDAY 5:22 p.m. from Los

  AND WATCH HOW MANY GIRLS I GET WITH THAT DOG JOKE

  FRIDAY 5:23 p.m. from Los

  U KNO GIRLS LUV DOGS DUDE!

  FRIDAY 5:35 p.m. from Los

  WHERE U AT?

  FRIDAY 5:51 p.m. from Spoony

  WHERE U AT?

  FRIDAY 6:05 p.m. from Ma

  HEY, SPOONY AND CARLOS CALLED HERE LOOKING FOR YOU. I CALLED BUT IT KEEPS GOING TO VOICE MAIL. CALL ME.

  FRIDAY 7:00 p.m. from Los

  DUDE UR KILLIN’ ME. WHERE THE FUCK ARE U?

  FRIDAY 8:47 p.m. from Los

  I DONT KNOW WHERE U ARE BUT IM OUT. IF U CAUGHT A RIDE WITH SOMEBODY ELSE YOU COULDA TOLD ME BRO. DAMN. UNLESS YOU WITH A GIRL. THEN I UNDERSTAND. BUT I KNO U NOT. I’LL CATCH YOU AT THE PARTY. BRING YOUR BEST GAME.

  FRIDAY 10:03 p.m. from English

  SHAD YOU HERE? ME SHAN AND LOS LOOKIN FOR U. LOS TRIPPIN! LMAO

  SATURDAY 1:01 p.m. from Los

  WHERE WERE U? OF COURSE IT GOT SHUT DOWN. SHIT WAS BANANAS!

  SATURDAY 4:26 p.m. from Shan

  YO, LOS IS TIRED OF TEXTN U SO NOW IM TEXTN U. U GOOD?

  SATURDAY 4:41 p.m. from Shan

  WHERE ARE U?

  SATURDAY 4:49 p.m. from Los

  ENGLISH JUST TOLD ME BERRY SAID U IN THE HOSPITAL!

  SATURDAY 4:51 p.m. from English

  U IN THE HOSPITAL? WTF

  SATURDAY 4:52 p.m. from Shan

  YO YOU IN THE HOSPITAL BRO? ENGLISH SAID SOME SHIT ABOUT THE COPS?

  SUNDAY 12:11 p.m. from Los

  YO YOU ON THE NEWS! CRAZY!

  Crazy, indeed. I scrolled through, reading them all before sending quick responses to the three of them—Shannon, Carlos, and English—letting them know that I was okay. Well, I said a little more than that.

  SUNDAY 12:17 p.m. to Los, Shan, English

  IM GOOD FELLAS. GOT ACCUSED OF STEALING FROM JERRY’S AND THE COP ON DUTY ROUGHED ME UP. BROKE MY NOSE AND SOME RIBS. BUT IM OK.

  “I see he’s got his lifeline back,” Dad grumbled, coming back into the room, looking calmer than when he’d left.

  “Yeah, so he should be back to normal in no time,” Ma said, trying to be positive.

  “I don’t know about that,” Spoony muttered. Thankfully my father didn’t hear him, because I wasn’t sure I could take another blowup. So I turned the TV back on quick. A risk, I know. But I had to do something as it looked like my folks were settling in for the afternoon. And guess what saved the day? Football.

  “Ah. Football,” Spoony said. “Another one of America’s favorite pastimes, besides baseball, and beating the brains out of—”

  “Chill,” I ordered. Honestly, I just wanted to take it easy for the rest of the day. I didn’t want to hear Spoony preach about how hard it is to be black, or my father preach about how young people lack pride and integrity, making us easy targets. I didn’t even want to think about the preacher preaching about how God is in control of it all, or my mother, my sweet, sweet mother caught in the middle of it all. The referee who blows the whistle but is way too nice to call foul on anyone. That’s her. She just wants me to be okay. That’s it and that’s all. So if football was going to be the thing that took our minds off the mess for at least a few hours, then fine with me. Let’s cheer and scream and cuss at the TV. Not at each other.

  When the game was over, my family left. And at that moment, I thanked the God I hoped was there. Back to an empty, peaceful room. Just me and my spirometer, which, by the way, was also pretty painful to use. I mean, to inhale slowly felt like sucking in shards of glass. Yeah—not awesome.

  After the game, the news came on. The first story was about a kid accused of stealing from a store on the West Side. The footage of me being thrown to the ground. Again. Again. Again. My picture. My name. Again. And now, a new development. The officer’s name. Officer Paul Galluzzo. And his face on the screen.

  I stayed home with Willy Saturday night and we watched World War Z and then had a Mario Kart marathon until I felt bug-eyed and useless. It was good to escape into his world for a while, because after we walked Jill home, I was still stuck in my head and it wasn’t fair to Willy. But Sunday was different. Ma came home, napped for a couple hours, made her marshmallow pie that everyone in the world loves but me—because marshmallows taste like little chunks of chewy soap!—and then the three of us went down the block to the Galluzzos’.

  We arrived late; the house was already packed. A couple of the younger neighborhood kids sat on the stairs that overlooked the front hall and the living room. Each one had a hype
r-colored plastic gun, and they pretended to shoot the group of guys in the living room watching the Pats play the Broncos on TV. It was the afternoon game, but it was already in the second quarter. They were screaming at what should have been a pass interference that hadn’t been called.

  “Boys!” Ma yelled into the room.

  I almost laughed at how quickly the roomful of grown men snapped to attention when they heard Ma.

  A moment passed, then Guzzo’s dad shouted back, “Marshmallow pie!” Everyone cheered.

  “Nice to see you too, Richie,” Ma said. We walked into the kitchen and she put the pie on the counter, Mrs. Galluzzo hugging us all hello. Out the window, I could see the small backyard, the porch. It was packed too. It looked like half the neighborhood had shown up. Willy scrambled off to find some kids his age down in the basement, where they usually played video games, and I headed outside. But I gotta admit, I felt weird. The Galluzzos’ had always been my second home, but as I moved through the kitchen toward the back porch, I felt oddly slow and awkward, like I was wading through a pool of water.

  As soon as I stepped onto the porch I saw him. Paul. My stomach clenched. He was flipping burgers at the grill. A red bandanna tied up over his head. Ratty T-shirt, even in this cool November weather. Guzzo stood right beside him. Two brothers side by side. Man, I’d never really taken in how huge they were, like, they could have squatted, pitched forward, and put their knuckles in the dirt, and they’d be the linemen I just saw wearing Pats and Broncos uniforms. They waved, and I waved back, but was instantly wondering if Guzzo had said anything to his brother about the other night. It bugged me not knowing. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to keep quiet about it, or if I was supposed to head over and slap Paul on the back. It did feel like this party was thrown together all of a sudden for him. Why else were we all there? Paul didn’t live here, and yet he stood there at the grill, like he was at the helm or something, and the whole party radiated out in front of him.

  Paul prodded the burgers and I saw that Jill was on the porch too. She was sitting on the railing, leaning against the post in the corner, watching Dwyer shoot hoops in the driveway. I joined her in the corner, sitting on the other railing, facing her and the yard behind her, where I could see Guzzo nudging Paul and pointing at me.

  “You think you all really have a chance this year?” Jill asked me, nodding toward the basketball.

  Of course she’d go there first—that was all anybody wanted to talk about.

  “Everyone else does,” I said.

  She turned and looked at me. “That make you nervous?”

  “I keep hearing this voice in the back of my head,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like a frigging crazy person. “It’s pushing me, you know, like, ‘go, go, go,’ but what I really hear is ‘Don’t fuck it up.’ ”

  “Coach putting pressure on you?” she asked.

  That wasn’t even half of it! Coach Carney and his plans were drilled into me. We’d had our warm-up practices the week before. The first serious preseason practices began on Monday. Everyone knew we had a great team this year. People were even talking about it in the press, wanting to know how far we’d go—semifinals, finals—but all we cared about was who was going to be a starter. That’s who the scouts would focus on—the guys with serious playing time.

  But it wasn’t the team that bothered me, it was the press. I’d already seen Coach Carney doing interviews left and right, getting all excited like some clown at the carnival. I was sure we’d see more of them too. It had been a long time since we’d had a team with a shot at being ranked number one in the state, and even though there were only fifteen players, three coaches, and a part-time trainer, it felt like we were chasing the trophy for thousands of people.

  But right then, I decided I was only going to concentrate on one person. Jill. So I just said, “Not too bad,” and she nodded, and it was kind of impossible not watch the light shift in the highlights in her hair. There were other people on the porch, but nobody was listening to us.

  “So here’s something, I don’t know, weird. You know how the cops came to the party the other night?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, no one got busted. The cops broke up the party, shook a few guys down, looking for pot, but not finding any, and they just made me send everyone away, made me stand there in the hall and watch everyone leave. They made me call my parents. It was so embarrassing.” She leaned in closer. “But what was worse, they stood there in the front hall looking at me, waiting for my folks to come home, after everyone else had left, and one of them, I don’t even know his name, but he obviously knew I was Paulie’s cousin, he kept looking at me like he was disgusted. Finally, he pointed at me and said, ‘Don’t fuck this up for your family.’ ”

  “Did you get in any kind of trouble?”

  “No,” Jill said skeptically. “I thought he was going to call Paulie, but he didn’t. He just said that, waited for my parents, and when they got home, he left. Nothing else happened. It was just . . . like I said, weird.”

  Mr. Galluzzo pushed open the screen door to yell out to Paul. “Hey, it’s almost halftime. We got a roomful o’ guys gonna come running out here for burgers soon.”

  Just his dad shouting to him seemed to pull the whole yard closer—pulled me closer to him. I looked past Jill’s shoulder to Guzzo and Paul. They were still at the grill, Paul with the spatula in one hand. “I get a day off and all you do is put me to work?” he yelled back to his dad. He laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said, raising his hand in the air, the spatula his scepter, “I got this.” Paul was famous for his burgers. He made them himself and even while the burger itself was still juicy, the bits of onion inside stayed nice and crunchy. They were my favorite, better than anything Ma ever made. Mr. Galluzzo poked his head back in the house to tell folks that the burgers would be ready in a minute, but someone shouted to him to come see some play Brady made, and he left the porch and let the door slam behind him.

  “I think I know why they couldn’t call Paul,” I said to Jill.

  She gave me a go on look, then added carefully, “Yeah, I saw something on the news.”

  “I saw it happen.”

  “What?” Jill bent forward and grabbed my wrist.

  I could hear the rubbery echo of the ball pounding in the driveway, the chatter from some of the neighbors in the backyard, the rattle of a bag filled with bottles being moved through the kitchen inside. I shifted closer to her on the railing. “Me and Guzzo and Dwyer were at Jerry’s before your party,” I told her, voice low. “I saw it. I saw Paul and that kid.”

  “It was Rashad, Quinn. That’s who Paul arrested. You know Rashad. He goes to our school. He’s tight with English and those guys.”

  “Fuck,” I said. In fact, as soon as she said it, I could picture him, hanging with English in the halls. “ROTC dude, right? Shit.”

  I felt like such an ass. I’d quickly convinced myself I had no idea who that kid with Paul was that night. And yeah, there were like a thousand kids in each grade at school, or whatever, but I did know him. Or know of him, really. I’d seen him—Rashad—in that uniform, and it’d made me think of my dad wearing his own at college. How my dad had looked proud in all those pictures.

  Jill cocked her head in disbelief. “You all just watched it go down?”

  “Guzzo and Dwyer were waiting in the alley. But I was there.” I glanced around, all paranoid, making my voice even lower. “It was ugly. I don’t know what Rashad did, but Paul kicked the shit out of him.”

  “I heard someone talking about it earlier,” Jill said, scooching closer. “They said he was resisting arrest.”

  “I guess.”

  “Did Paul, like, see you, or anything?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know,” I said. It felt weird to talk about any of this, as if by mentioning it at all, I was betraying Paul. I looked over to him and Guzzo as if reading their faces might tell me what they were thinking, or whether Guzzo had said anythin
g.

  “I don’t think he saw me,” I said, turning back to Jill. “I doubt it.”

  “Did Guzzo?”

  “What?”

  “Tell him?”

  We were hunched so close together at this point that when I heard my name shouted out, it felt like someone dropped an ice cube down the back of my shirt.

  “Hey, Quinn!” It was Paul. “Why don’t you quit hitting on my cousin and come help me serve these burgers?”

  I froze. The timing scared the hell out of me—it was as if he knew I’d just been talking about him! Jill spun around and yelled, “Go flip your own burgers, Paul!”

  “What does that even mean?” he asked. He and Guzzo laughed.

  “I don’t know,” Jill said, turning back to me. “But better than saying nothing.”

  Jill never took shit, never let anyone get the jump on her. I always figured it was because she was used to being the only girl in a huge group of guys—there were eleven Galluzzo cousins, and she was the only female—and she just wouldn’t let them tease her, or if they did, she decided long ago that she sure as hell was going to make it through the gauntlet regardless.

  I, however, wasn’t as used to it. In fact, I must have looked stupid with nerves because her eyes stayed glued to me as I got up and told her I’d catch up with her later, and as I turned, she smiled and I felt the air leave me in a rush, because I wanted to take her by the hand and get the hell out of there, but I couldn’t.

  “Quinn!” Paul again.

  Then Guzzo. “Quinn!”

  Then Guzzo began a slow clap, and he and Paul chanted my name louder and louder as I crossed over to them, and I was sure even folks in the neighborhood who weren’t already at the party could hear them.

  “Dude,” Guzzo said when I reached them. “You have no chance.”

  “Like you know anything about chances.”

  “Damn right,” Paul said, grinning at me.

  “Shut up,” Guzzo said.

  Paul ignored him. He had a bottle of beer in his left hand, and he held out that fist to bump knuckles with me, and I did. “What’s up, Quinn?” he said. “You don’t say hello anymore?” He took a swig of beer and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his T-shirt. That’s when I noticed his right fist was stuffed into a bucket of ice water on the grill shelf beside him, all casual—frigging hell, he had scabs all over his knuckles—like nursing his wounds from Friday night right there in front of everybody at the BBQ was NBD!