All American Boys Read online

  “Whatever. After you left yesterday, everybody was talking about how it was unfair the media had to make such a big deal of the situation. ‘How are cops supposed to do their jobs if they’re always under the microscope?’ Rita kept saying. ‘It’s just backward,’ she kept saying. She might be my aunt, but it bugged the hell out of me.”

  “Yeah, but then look at today,” I said, more mopey than I wanted to sound. “All anybody’s talking about is that stupid video.”

  “Well, duh.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just took another bite of my burger. Jill watched me as I chewed.

  “What?” I finally said with my cheek still full.

  “You haven’t watched it, have you?”

  I took a sip of soda. “No,” I admitted.

  “You should,” she said. She sounded almost a little pissed at me.

  “I was there. I don’t want to see it again,” I argued. “I just keep thinking about how extreme it all was. I mean, I don’t know what Rashad did, but whatever it was, I can’t imagine he needed to get beaten like that. I mean, as far as I know, he’s a guy looking to stay out of trouble.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.” She paused. “And did you hear?” she asked with more concern. “He has internal bleeding.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He has to stay in the hospital for like days.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. It’s awful.”

  I was silent again.

  “And you were there,” Jill continued. “I can’t believe you were there.”

  “I was,” I said. But as I was freaking out that she might have been saying she’d seen me in the video, my pulse suddenly quickened because—oh, my God!—I’d been there with Paul before. Or, sort of been there. Years and years ago. How had I forgotten about that? Paul, with another kid. Marc Blair. “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  Jill nibbled on a fry and waited for me to continue.

  “It was almost like that time he kicked the shit out of Marc Blair,” I said. “I mean, that was different. But this thing with Rashad. That thing with Marc. They’re like side by side in my mind right now.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, scrunching up her nose. “I forgot all about that. Paulie killed that guy.”

  Not literally. But it was bad. I hadn’t actually seen it. But I’d seen the aftermath. And here’s the thing—Paul’d done it for me. I felt sick.

  Jill tapped the empty plastic Coke bottle against the table nervously. “You think those are the only two times?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s Paul. This is the same guy I’ve seen carrying my mom up the front steps, for God’s sake.” I was thinking about that time Ma got trashed because it was her first wedding anniversary without Dad. Paul had been so gentle. He’d taken the frigging day off just so she didn’t have to spend it alone. “She was tanked,” I said to Jill. “And he helped her home. I remember him putting her down on the couch and pulling the afghan over her.”

  “Paulie’s always been the good guy.”

  “That’s what I want to think.”

  “That’s what my mother kept saying last night after the party, after she was done yelling at me for being the world’s most ungrateful daughter for the hundredth time. ‘Paulie’s the good guy,’ she kept saying. ‘Why is anyone giving him a hard time?’ But people are giving him a hard time. I don’t know. I was watching some of the news online. It’s kind of hard not to wonder. I mean, I wasn’t there, but . . .”

  “You’ve seen the video,” I said, flat. The fear that I was in it kept buzzing through me.

  “Yeah, Quinn. Everyone’s seen it. It’s crazy.”

  I swallowed hard and finally asked. “Am I in it?”

  “What?” Jill said. “No. You must have been too far away. Different angle. I don’t know.”

  I couldn’t help it. I sighed with relief. “Jesus. Thank God.”

  Jill narrowed her eyes. “This is not about you, dumbass.”

  I took a deep breath through my nose and just held it. She was right. I’d been all worked up about whether or not I was on the video. Rashad was in the video and he was in the hospital. Paul was in the video too. Where was he now? Sitting at his parents’ house watching all the news about himself on TV? Was he hiding?

  “Look,” Jill went on. “I get why you’re worried, but when you see it, well, it’s just crazy.” She hesitated. “I feel so stupid saying this, but I don’t know. It just changes things for me.”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly.

  We finished the last few fries and had to get back to school. But before we got up, I reached across the table and put my hand on Jill’s. “I know this sounds weird, but I kind of feel like you are the only person I can talk to about this right now.”

  She turned her hand beneath mine and squeezed back. “I know. Me too.”

  As we walked back to school, we tried to joke a little about the party on Friday, but we both knew we were just putting on a show and really thinking about Paul and Rashad. Because as Jill was telling me about the guy who spent half the night puking in the upstairs bathroom because he’d done a keg stand right before I’d gotten there, I was thinking more about how I spent all this time playing basketball with a bunch of guys who were friends with Rashad and I didn’t know jack-all about him—which made me feel all kinds of asshole-ish.

  When we got back, Jill had to rush to get all the way over to the physics lab, but I had econ with Ms. Webber, so I took my time at my locker, playing with my phone, but really, now I was stuck on that time Paul had beaten up Marc Blair.

  When I’d been much younger, and I first started going down to Gooch on my own, there was a guy who lived right next to the park who was a few years older than me, Marc Blair. Compared to my scrawny ass, he was all muscle—if it didn’t get too cold in the winter, he’d have played shirtless year round, a pit bull charging up and down the court on these squat, beefy legs. I was too young, and he never let me onto the court when he was there. I hated it. He didn’t like me, or any of the kids younger than him either, but he didn’t like me in particular, because while most kids my age played mute around him, I sometimes mouthed off. Finally, after I’d called him an asshole one too many times, he grabbed me by the collar, dragged me across the court to the chain-link fence, and pressed my face into the wire so hard it left a crisscross hatch of red indented on my cheek and forehead. When he let go, I cried on the spot like a goddamn baby, falling to my hands and knees. He stood back and pointed at me, and I was so scared I puked near the base of the fence. And after that, I was always afraid of him. And I began to imagine what it would be like for Paul to beat him up. Take care of him. I thought about it with a kind of freaky hunger. Paul wasn’t a cop yet. He was just the tough guy who took me under his wing. I wanted to see Marc pay. I wanted him to feel a kind of pain that matched my own level of fear whenever I was near him.

  And that was the part that was tripping me up now. The fear. I was making leaps in my mind now, but once I’d hung on that word “fear,” I remembered the time I was a freshman and I saw a senior walking down the hall. He was black, and I didn’t know his name, but he was wearing an old-school Public Enemy T-shirt: Fear of a Black Planet—the bull’s-eye logo poised to eclipse the Earth. Fear. The T-shirt was right. Like the way Mrs. Cambi talked about our neighborhood now. Fear. Like the way Ma told me to cross the street to the other side of the sidewalk if I was walking home alone and I saw a group of guys walking toward me. Guys. That wasn’t the word she used. Thugs. Fear of thugs. Just like what some people were saying on the news. Rashad looked like a thug.

  “Thug” was the word Paul used when I told him about Marc. It was two weeks after Marc had pushed me into the fence. I finally told Paul, and Paul found him later that same night. Beat the hell out of him. Paul was banged up too, but he said he’d won. Fucking thug won’t bug you anymore, for real.

  I never found out if Marc had needed to go to the hospital that night. But if Paul’s bruises and split lip were the
signs of the winner, I had to image that Marc was a whole lot worse.

  And now, six years later, I felt as sick as if it had happened yesterday: I was the one who could have put another kid in the hospital all those years ago, just by asking someone to take care of him. It was no different than ordering a hit. Didn’t that make me a thug? Christ sake, I’d wanted to see someone else’s blood. To see him bleed.

  And so I was thinking about all that when I got to Ms. Webber’s class. After she got us settled, she explained that she had a change of plan for the day. We’d get back to our study of marginal utility another day. Today we were just going to sit quietly and work on a practice section for the next test. Quietly. She emphasized that. Quietly. But as we got started, it was all too easy to see Ms. Webber twitching, smiling like she was reminding herself to, and anybody could tell she was nervous and just wanted a silent and nonteaching day of class.

  Only about five minutes into it, though, Molly leaned over and asked EJ if he’d been to Jill’s party. Before he even had time to answer, Ms. Webber looked up from the pile of papers she was grading and pointed to EJ.

  “Every time, EJ,” she said abruptly, so loud that she seemed to surprise even herself.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You.” Ms. Webber’s eyes narrowed and she spoke calmly, maybe too calmly. “Every time I look up and see something going on, some distraction. There you are. Right at the center of it. Do you need to take your test out in the hall?”

  “Guilty until proven innocent, huh?” He hesitated, but not for long. Nobody likes to be spoken to like he’s a damn child, least of all EJ, and he wasn’t the kind of kid to stay quiet. He didn’t miss a beat. “Just like Rashad.”

  I swear I could hear Ms. Webber suck in her breath as she tried to figure out how to answer.

  It was awkward for all of us. Especially because EJ was black, just like Rashad, and Ms. Webber was white, just like Paul—like me and like Molly, too. I think EJ was hoping someone else would pipe up, but none of us did, not the white kids, nor any of the kids of color. We all just left him hanging out there until finally Ms. Webber found something she wanted to say.

  “That’s not— It’s not— You just can’t go conflating things like that.” Then she pointed to the copy of the test she had in front of her. “This is for your benefit,” she squeaked. “We don’t have time to talk about this right now.” She took another breath. “I’m sorry. I know there’s a student from our school who is in the hospital today, but we don’t have the full story. What I do know is that if we are going to be ready for these exams, we have to get down to business today. They won’t wait for us. We have to be ready.”

  “Rashad,” Molly said.

  “What?” Ms. Webber said.

  EJ looked at her, surprised.

  “Rashad,” Molly said louder. “That’s his name. Rashad’s in the hospital.”

  “I know that,” Ms. Webber said.

  “Yeah, well, that student in the hospital isn’t here to take any practice tests today because he’s, you know, beaten to hell,” EJ said.

  “Rashad,” Molly said again.

  EJ smiled. “Rashad,” he said louder.

  They both said the name again and looked around for others to join them, but the rest of us sat there in shock.

  “All right, both of you, outside now!” Ms. Webber yelled. She was flushed straight down to the base of her neck. She stood up and walked EJ and Molly to the hall, and as they left they kept saying “Rashad, Rashad,” until I couldn’t hear them anymore.

  And before Ms. Webber came back in, someone in the back whispered, “Paul Galluzzo.”

  The other damn name that was all over the news. I turned around to see who it was, but everyone had his or her head down. I was pretty sure it’d been a guy, and I found myself looking at Rahkim and Malcolm and realized I was looking at the only two other black guys in class. I was pissed. I was pissed someone had said it, because I was sure they said it so I would hear, and I was pissed I was taking it to heart, and I was pissed I’d just done the same goddamn thing and had assumed it had been Rahkim or Malcolm, but I was pissed that I was pissed, because I was also pretty sure it had been one of them.

  And mostly I was pissed because I just wanted everyone to shut up about it. Didn’t talking about it just make it worse for all of us? Did everything have to be about Paul and Rashad?

  I was still pissed after school when I got to the locker room, changed, and headed out to the court. Guys were already shooting and warming up. I stretched and bounced up and down on the sidelines, keeping to myself. That wasn’t new. I like to avoid the early shoot-around, the chaos of just throwing the ball up and having it bounce out because someone else’s shot smacked it away. I liked to find my rhythm on my own. I got loose with a ball and worked on my handling, sprinting up and down the sidelines with shadow fake-outs, keeping the legs loose as I popped a zigzag pattern back and forth, working the day out, so I could just concentrate on basketball.

  Easier said than done, though. I couldn’t get my head in the zone—and found myself keeping an eye on English and Shannon Pushcart, and I knew exactly why—they were tight with Rashad. I watched English spin circles around Tooms, moving so quickly he could have been on skates on ice. Shannon, Nam, Dwyer, and Guzzo and most of the rest of the team chased loose balls that bounced off the rim like popcorn. Nobody else seemed pissed off, though. Was I the only one looking out at every goddamn interaction on the court through the filter of Rashad and Paul? I didn’t think so.

  Coach gathered us at the bleachers, and the fifteen of us stacked up side by side in the first three tiers, as if we were having our photo taken. He paced back and forth as he gave us a speech about how everybody was saying it was our year, the newspapers, people in the league, even TV sports news was covering us. But who was he kidding? He was going crazy about it too.

  “Now I know what you’re thinking, boys, you’re thinking about the scouts,” Coach now said. “Who is coming when? When’s that guy from UNC coming, right, English? Or is it Georgetown?” He bent toward him and grinned.

  English glanced up at Coach and nodded.

  “But you got to block out the bullshit,” Coach said, choosing English again, this time pointing at him. Then he stood up and continued to pace. “If all you think about are the scouts, all you think about is yourself. Then we don’t win. Then nobody wins.” He paused. “You listening?” he barked.

  “Yes, Coach,” we grumbled back, but he just kept on talking, not waiting for our answer.

  “Every day is the same day. We are one team, and we stop the other team from getting easy shots, and we work them hard as hell on the other end so they give us the easy shots. We do that as one team and we do that every day. You hear me?”

  “Yes,” we said.

  “I said you hear me?”

  “Yes!” We all shouted now.

  “You hear me?” he boomed.

  “YES!”

  “Bring it in.”

  We jumped out of our seats and circled him, dropping our hands into the pile.

  “TEAM on three. One, two, three.”

  “TEAM!”

  “That’s right, bring it back in here.” We were all bouncing and swaying, loose bodies with blood on fire. We got our hands back in the pile.

  “Media shit’s gonna hound us every day. You let me handle that. You just ignore that shit. There’s all kinds of pressure going on out there, at school, in your lives back home. You leave it all at the door of this gym. In this gym we’re only Falcons, you hear me?”

  “YES!”

  “Pack it in closer!”

  We did as we were told.

  “You tell me whose house this is.”

  “Our house!”

  “Who are we?”

  “FALCONS!”

  “Who?”

  “FALCONS!”

  “Who?”

  “FALCONS!”

  “Team on three. One, two, three!”

 
; “TEAM!”

  That is what I wanted to believe too. I’d walked onto the court and seen the team like this: seven black guys, five white guys, two Latino guys, and one Vietnamese guy. But now, after Coach’s rally, after we got into three lines and began the weave together, passing and running, passing and running, five balls whipping through the air between all this, dodging in and away from each other, fifteen guys moving like the connected parts of one heavy-breathing animal, I thought that maybe leaving all the shit behind at the door wasn’t such bad advice. And hell, it wasn’t my problem, really, right? Couldn’t I leave it at the door wherever I went? Maybe we all should have tried to do that. It wasn’t any of our problem. It was a problem of the law, and the law would work it out—isn’t that what it was for, for God’s sake? To take care of us?

  And as I hustled to the sidelines and jumped into a full minute of foot fire, shouting the countdown from sixty with Coach, I kept wondering: Wouldn’t we have been better off thinking that way? All of us. What did we really gain by talking about this—Paul, Rashad, what happened—digging it up and making everyone feel like shit?

  Maybe for this one practice we were all thinking only about the team: one unit, one thing, no parts, one whole, no problems, just one goal for one team, none of us thinking about race or racism, all of us color-blind and committed like evangelicals to the word “team,” just like Coach wanted.

  Maybe. But I doubted it. That’s what I wanted to think, but it wasn’t what was in my mind or gut. Instead I knew there was a problem, and I was beginning to think I was a part of it—whether I was in the damn video or not.

  There’s this dude named Aaron Douglas. Scratch that. There was this dude named Aaron Douglas. A painter in the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Mrs. Caperdeen, my art teacher freshman year, turned me on to him during a lesson about artists from that period. Now, I had already been into art, way before Mrs. Caperdeen’s class. I’ve been drawing since I was like five or six. It came from hanging out with my dad after church on Sundays. Well, Spoony and Ma would be there too, but for some reason, when I think back on it, it always seemed like it was just me and Dad, probably because we had our own thing. Our own after-church tradition. He would drive the whole family to this diner downtown. Ma would order the eggs and English muffin, Spoony always got the French toast, and me and Dad both got pancakes. Then Spoony and Ma would go back and forth trading corny jokes, which I was usually all about, except on Sundays. Sundays was when I butted out and let the two of them have their dry humor because me and Dad, we had pancakes, coffee (hot chocolate for me), and the newspaper.