He said, “Fuck you waiting for, little girl? A hall pass?” And he bowed and held out his arm and she saw light fill his eyes for an instant, a moment in which she saw how beautiful they could be, powder blue and soft, love living there like a morning prayer. When he caressed her ass as she passed, she resisted the urge to lean into his hand.
When she got home, she saw his eyes in the mirror. She ran a hand over her new body, over the sudden nubs of her breasts, and she knew for the first time why her father sometimes seemed afraid and ashamed when he looked at her. She knew, looking in the mirror, that she was not of him; she was of her mother; she felt buried with her in the dark earth.
The next day, when she walked through the playground, he was waiting. He was smiling, and his shirt had been ironed.
What happened to Sylvester was all Rory’s fault, really, part of the stupid shit that went on in their neighborhood so much that to keep up with the whos and the whys you’d need a damn scorecard.
Rory stole some guy’s Zoom LeBrons one night while everyone was goofing in the hydrant spray. When the guy asked around, one of Rory’s girlfriends, Lorraine, told the guy it was Rory. Lorraine hated Rory because he’d saddled her with a baby who shit and cried all night and kept her from her friends. So the guy kicked Rory’s ass and took his LeBrons back, and one night Rory and his buddy Pearl took Lorraine up to Pope’s Hill and caved in her head with a tree branch. Once she was dead, they did some other things too so the police would think it was some psycho and not a neighborhood thing.
Rory told some friends, though; said it was like fucking a fish on ice. And Sylvester heard about it. Sylvester was Lorraine’s half brother on the father’s side, and one night he and a carload of boys came cruising for Rory.
It was summer and she was sitting on her stoop waiting for KL. Her father was inside snoozing, and her sister, Sonya, was sitting on the big blue mailbox at the head of the alley, saying she was going to tell their father she was seeing KL again, catch her another beating. Sonya was singing it: “I’m a tell Dad-ee / You and KL getting bump-ee.”
Then Rory came out of his house and she saw the car come up the street with the windows rolling down and the muzzles sticking out and she began to step off the stoop when the noise started and Sonya floated for a second, as if the breeze had puckered up and kissed her. She floated up off the mailbox and then she flipped sideways and hit a trash can a few feet back in the alley.
Rory danced against the wall of the Korean deli, parts of him popping, his arms flapping like a stork’s.
When she reached Sonya, her sister was covering her kneecaps with her palms. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes and held her shoulders until her teeth stopped chattering, until the tiny whistle-noise coming from her chest stopped all at once, just whistled back into itself and went to sleep.
KL calls them mushrooms. It’s like that old Centipedes game, KL says, where you have to shoot the centipede but those mushrooms keep falling, getting in the way.
Sometimes, KL says, you’re aiming for the centipede, but you hit the mushroom.
KL found out the Whitehall crew from Franklin Park was looking for Sylvester because he owed them big and hadn’t been making payments. When KL told them he knew firsthand that Sylvester had been borrowing elsewhere, Whitehall agreed to his offer. Just do it out of state, they told him. Too many people hoping to tie us to shit.
So KL waited until October and they ended up driving to Hampton Beach with Sylvester, kept going even after she realized she’d forgotten the bullets. Sylvester, leaning his head against the window, so stupid he doesn’t even know KL’s girlfriend is the sister of the girl on the mailbox. So stupid he thinks KL’s suddenly his best friend, taking him out for a Sunday drive. So stupid.
Period.
On the beach, she asks KL if he looked into Sylvester’s eyes before he made him kneel in the ocean, if maybe he saw anything there.
“Come on,” KL says, “just, fuck, shut up, you know?”
She’s been out to the ocean once before. Not long after KL got back from Afghanistan and she met up with him, he scored off this cop who’d been part of the Lafayette Raiders bust. This cop had known someone who’d served over there with KL, someone who hadn’t made it back, and he sold the shit to KL for 40 percent of the street value, called it his “yellow ribbon” price, supporting the troops and shit. KL turned that package over in one night, and the next day they took the ferry to Provincetown.
They walked the dunes and they felt like silk underfoot, large spilling drifts of white silk. They ate lobster and watched the sky darken and become striped with pale pink ribbons. On the ferry back, she could smell the sun in KL’s fingers as they played with her hair. She could smell the dunes and the silk sand and the butter that had dripped off the lobster meat. And as the city appeared, all silver glitter and white and yellow light, she could feel the hum and hulk of it wash the smells away. She pressed her palm against KL’s hard stomach, felt the cables of muscle under the flesh, and she wished she could still smell it all baked into his skin.
She walks up the wet beach with him now and they cross the boardwalk and she thinks of Sonya floating off that mailbox and floating, right now, somewhere beyond this world, looking down, and she feels that her baby sister has grown older too, older than herself, that she has run far ahead of time and its laws. She is wrinkled now and wiser and she does not approve of what they have done.
What they have done needed to be done. She feels sure of that. Someone had to pay, a message had to be sent. Can’t have some fool traveling free through life like he got an all-day bus pass. You got to pay the freight. Everyone. Got to.
But still she can feel her sister, looking down on her with a grim set to her mouth, thinking: Stupid. Stupid.
She and KL reach the Escalade and he opens the hatch and she places the gun in there under the mat and the tire iron and the donut spare.
“Never want to hear his name aloud,” KL says. “Never again. We clear?”
She nods and they stand there in the sweeping rain.
“What now?” she says.
“Huh?”
“What now?” she repeats, because suddenly she has to know. She has to.
“We go home.”
“And then?”
He shrugs. “No then.”
“There’s gotta be then. There’s gotta be something next.”
Another shrug. “There ain’t.”
In the Escalade, KL driving, the rain still coming down, she thinks about going back to school, finishing. She imagines herself in a nurse’s uniform, living someplace beyond the neighborhood. She worries she’s getting ahead of herself. Don’t look so far into the future. Look into the next minute. See it. See that next minute pressing against your face. What can you do with it? With that time? What?
She closes her eyes. She tries to see it. She tries to make it her own. She tries and tries.
Until Gwen
Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an eight ball in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the backseat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar two Sundays a month at the local VFW. But she feels her calling — her true calling in life — is to write.