"There it is." Baylon's arms hung at his side. He didn't know how long he had stood there, staring at his reflection as the memories overwhelmed him. "The cost of my sin."
"What sin?" Griff asked.
"Bad luck."
"All your wounds are self-inflicted."
His life was an inexorable spiral leading to a point he dreaded to think about. Somehow not thinking about it made its inevitability less real. Night and Dred. He and King. He and Griff. He and Michelle. There was no warranty on friendships. They began, they ended, each in their own season. And when they ended, the ripples of those relationships spread into the next. A cycle of pain he would continue to pay for.
"Sometimes I feel like it's cursed. Either of them."
"The knife?" Griff asked.
"Yeah. All it has ever brought is blood and trouble."
"The cost of defending yourself."
"But it shouldn't have to be that way."
"You still the fairest of them all… punk motherfucker.
CHAPTER NINE
No one knew who threw the first punch and for damn sure who fired the shots that dropped Alaina Walker. Truth be told, even when the video was shown and re-shown on the news later that evening, the mob scene in the park was little more than fifteen to twenty girls wilding, a sea of arms and blurred faces scrabbling in a cluster of aggression. Investigators determined the fight actually started at Northwest High School.
"I need to go ahead and get my GED." Lady G swatted at one of the lazy bees who flitted after her can of soda. A thin trickle of sweat trailed down the side of her face. The heat of the day already fouled her mood and the incessant buzz only furthered her irritation. She tugged at her gloves.
"What for?" Rhianna's small rasp of a voice scraped at her ears. A sweatband with a skull and crossbones insignia on it encircled Rhianna's head. A dozen jelly bracelets choked each wrist. It didn't matter that she never spoke of things on her mind. She wore them, or rather, they wore her. She shirked whenever men neared, moreso than usual. Chipped nail polish wasted along the fingertips of her ashy hands. Dark circles welled under her eyes.
"I don't know. Maybe go to college."
"Why? What you gone be? A toxicologist or something?"
"Nah…" Her voice trailed, the tan brick walls of the school seeming suddenly formidable. "Just talking I guess."
The park was next to the Jonathan Jennings Public School 109 elementary school, though that didn't stop graffiti artists from tagging the slide or tables with profanities and gang designations, marking their territory like so many dogs pissing over themselves. Nor did it stop folks from coming up here to get high. The pair, along with a few of their girls, sat along one of the two dilapidated picnic tables under the shelter. Rhianna wanted to get her head up a little since Prez hadn't spoken to her since the night at the bridge. In fact, she and Lady G hadn't said a word about it either. It was like if they never mentioned it, maybe it didn't happen. Sure, they'd been questioned by the police and released, but the evening blurred into a haze of half-remembered conversations. Still, the image of the black tarp spread over two distinct lumps of flesh that had once been Trevant haunted her. That and the sight of all the blood. There was no tarp large enough to cover all the blood.
"Come on, now. Beyonce sang about doing for her man 'what Martin did for the people'," Lady G chirped to lighten the mood.
"That song is an earworm. I'm tired of these fools who call themselves singers these days. You see Justin Wiggerlake's ass trying to dis Prince? Come on now." Rhianna scanned the front of Breton Court for any sign of Prez. Prez was alive enough, still selling for Dollar over here at Breton Court, not that he acknowledged them. He certainly wouldn't describe the ineffable dread he felt whenever he thought about being with the girls as fear, but he, too, kept a discreet distance from them.
"You're still talking about my baby."
"I'm just sayin'. You never saw Hall and Oates dissin' Earth, Wind, and Fire."
"Come close so I can cut you." Lady G rolled up her sleeves, in feigned anger, unconscious of how conspicuous her gloves now seemed.
"Shut up."
"Someone hold my earrings." Lady G pantomimed removing her earrings and waited for Rhianna to give into her smile. "Some fools need to be cut."
In order to put on a pleasant face for rush-hour commuters, Breton Court had been freshly painted. The townhouses were two storey, two or three bedrooms depending on the layout. The end cap of the rows were one level, one bedroom. Its landscape was fairly well maintained, as an old Jamaican fatherand-son team tended the lawns every Saturday morning. Life percolated along at its usual rhythms. A Hispanic family, a grandmother with her two adult children and a few toddlers, chatted amiably in a doorway. A few children rode their bikes unsteadily along the drive. Some teenagers huddled under trees engaged in the play dance of hormone-fueled flirting and banter. Green's people loitered on porch steps or ducked between patio enclaves in order to conduct business.
As one went deeper into the court, the pleasant facade broke down. A gradual erosion into dilapidation the further away it got from casual eyes. Cars jacked up, tires missing, windshields cracked if not entirely knocked out, glass shards still pooled beneath them. The townhouse window shutters shattered or dangled at odd angles. Chipped paint and rotted wood made up many patios. A couple of end condos had the back patios missing entirely. The siding on the end townhouses missed a few slats. A patch ran perpendicular to the rest and still revealed wood rafters of roof. The disrepair from storm damage when a tornado touched down a few years back. This was where King lived. He removed the 'For Sale' sign from his front window.
King couldn't pinpoint when he'd developed spiritual eyes – soft eyes some folks would say – able to take in everything, the full picture, and even feel it on some level. He was connected to the court and its people. Up until then, all he'd wanted was to keep his head down, mind his own, and muddle through. No, that was a lie. In his heart, his life had always been one of quiet discipline, despite his circumstances. Reading. Meditating. Working out. Always in a state of preparing for something. Maybe he sensed something was coming. It had to be more than simply knowing that he was meant for something, a purpose, because who didn't have their childhood daydreams fueled by a belief that they were destined for greatness? King sat on the porch of his condo, whiling away most of his days peoplewatching. Every time he wandered toward the front of the court, Green's crew declared a time-out. Lingering at the front of the court, he had an unobstructed view of the park.
School dismissed barely twenty minutes earlier and those who walked home trickled into the park. A lot had changed at Northwest High School even in the few years since King attended there. Back in his day, before every major holiday break – Christmas, Spring Break, even summer vacation – the school collapsed in a cauldron of racial tension. Too often, the police helicopter circled the school as mini-riots spread throughout the campus, the slightest spark – a jostle in the lunch line, the wrong color boy rebuffed by the wrong color girl – provided all the excuse needed to pit black against white. Now, with the major Hispanic influx, the game had done changed for real.
A white Toyota Corolla, a decade old with a rusting bumper, screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, drawing everyone's attention as a half-dozen girls tumbled out. Alaina Walker just got out of juvey and was not allowed to associate with her gang sisters. The crossroads moment of her life was between a boring-ass life with no friends or risking her probation by standing tall with her girls. Some folks couldn't help but gravitate to chaos. If chaos was all they knew, chaos was their comfort. Chaos was safe. Alaina marched her crew into the face of Lady G. The two simply hated each other and neither, if pressed, could tell anyone why. It was as if the air between them poisoned with a pheromonal hatred whenever they neared each other.