All American Boys (24 page)

I
woke up a frigging hour before the alarm clock. My mind was racing. Ma was still at work, Willy still snored in the trundle bed below me, and so I got up and stood in the living room, staring out the window. Pink sunrise warmed the houses on the other side of the street, but it was still early enough that the dark blue-purple of night had not completely burned away. The whole neighborhood looked asleep. I headed for the front door, then down the stoop to the sidewalk. There was no one else out. Not a single car moved on my street or the two avenues at either end. Everything was still and quiet except for the swoop and chatter of a pair of sparrows darting in and out of driveways.

I was completely alone.

I looked toward the Galluzzo house. From where I stood,
I could see the American flag spearing up in its holder and hanging in loose folds in the air above the front steps, and a memory bit me—the day I stood beneath that flag in a cheap, itchy, dark suit that had once been Paul's and didn't fit Guzzo, but fit me everywhere except that the shoulders were too wide. I remembered Paul, squatting in front of me as I stood on the bottom step, patting my shoulders, trying to adjust the seam so it didn't fall forward over my arm. “Quinn,” he'd said. “There are no words that will make you feel any better that he's gone, but know this—you need anything, I mean anything, little man, you come to me.” And I remembered how miserable I'd felt, but also that—because Paul made sure I
knew
he was always going to be there for me—I felt relieved. Even though I didn't have my dad anymore, at least I had a version of his protection. I remembered how Paul, finally satisfied with the seam, had stood, turned toward the street, and held up his hand to block the sunlight from his eyes, and as he did, the shadow of his body fell over mine, blocking all the sunlight from me, too. I didn't have to squint. I looked out at the faces of the people along the sidewalk in front of us and I did not feel alone.

Something else dawned on me. When I'd stood under the flag and I'd looked up at Paul, who promised to take care of me, he had only recently graduated high school. I mean, he
hadn't been much older than I was now. He'd probably been thinking the same thing I was this year: Where am I going to be next year, and what the hell am I going to do with my life?

What had happened to that guy? Who had he become?

Until this week, all anybody'd been talking about was the damn basketball scouts. I'd obsessed over it too: what I needed to do to set myself up for tomorrow, next year, and whatever the hell came down the road after that. But as I stood in front of my own house in the cool, violet morning, I had the crazy idea that I could be standing here thirty years from now looking back. In my history class, we'd talked about how some moments in history are moments people never forget. People could remember exactly where they were and what they were doing. I was three years old when 9/11 happened, so I didn't remember it like all the teachers in school did. But Ma did, because she knew what it meant for Dad. Adults were always asking each other: Where were you when it happened? Where were you?

Well, where was I when Rashad was lying in the street? Where was
I
the year all these black American boys were lying in the streets? Thinking about scouts? Keeping my head down like Coach said?
That
was walking away. It was running away, for God's sake. I. Ran. Away. Fuck that. I didn't want to run away anymore. I didn't want to pretend
it wasn't happening. I wanted to turn around and run right into the face of it.

I took a deep breath as the breeze picked up, and as I stared down the street at Paul's house, I knew for damn sure what I was doing
this
Friday night.

I went back inside and began my usual morning workout, and as I was pumping through my squats, I had an idea. I ran into the kitchen and rifled through the junk drawers, looking for a black marker. I couldn't find one. I knew I didn't have one, but Willy might, so I crept through our room while he still slept and tried to find something that might work. Finally, in a green plastic box on the floor on his side of the closet, I found a big, black permanent marker. Then I dug out one of my plain white T-shirts.

On the front, I wrote:
I'M MARCHING

On the back, I wrote:
ARE YOU?

There were plenty of kids, black, white, and everyone else, who looked at me like I was a dumbass when I got to school wearing the T-shirt. And there were plenty of kids, black, white, and everyone else, who nodded or slapped hands with me. Even in English class, Mrs. Tracey looked at my T-shirt and smiled. “Me too,” she said. And I was actually
daring to think that the day was going down much easier than I thought it would when I saw Dean Wykoff walking down the hall between second and third periods. He stepped in front of me, one eyebrow raised, and read my T-shirt. I assumed he was going to give me one of his signature finger curls, that thing he does that's kind of like he's making fun of himself but also isn't and he actually expects you to come closer when he does it. As dean of students, he was also Dean of Discipline, and since I was “the model son” Quinn Collins, I'd never been called to his office before, and I thought, well, if this was going to be my first time, it was worth it. But he didn't give me the finger curl. He nodded, threw a little frown in, but kept on walking, not giving me a hard time at all.

Yes, there were some kids giving me the stink eye for wearing the shirt, but no one directly gave me shit until Dwyer found me in the hall after fourth period. He grabbed my elbow and pulled me over to the lockers.

“What the hell, man?” His freckly face was so close to mine he barely had to speak much louder than a whisper. “What are you doing?”

“What it says I'm doing.”

Dwyer glanced around the hall. “I said don't fuck this up, not fuck this up even more. What the hell, man? You better not let Coach see that shirt. No protest, remember?”

“Dude,” I said, yanking my arm out of his grip and stepping
back. “People should be able to go to the protest if they want. It's important, man.”

He pulled up and looked down at me, giving me a face worse than Dean Wykoff had ever given anybody. “You're wack,” Dwyer told me. “What the hell happened to you?” And then he split for class, leaving me to chew on that by myself. I didn't have the words for it, but I felt I had an answer to the question.

The rest of the day was a blur of distraction. Nobody was getting much done in class, and I had to hand it to Mrs. Erlich, because she trashed her trig plan for the day and wrote a bunch of facts and figures on the board, which I started copying into my notebook, fast.

In 2012, in the United Kingdom, the number of people (regardless of race) shot and killed by police officers: 1

In 2013, in the United Kingdom, the number of times police officers fired guns in the line of duty/the number of people fatally shot: 3/0

In the United States, in the seven year period ending in 2012, a white police officer killed a black person nearly two times a week.

“I'm not much of a talker,” she finished up. “You know that. But I know numbers. The numbers don't lie, kids. The numbers always tell a story.”

Guzzo was nowhere at lunch, but even though he'd avoided me all day, I knew he'd seen me, seen my T-shirt. At basketball practice, though, he couldn't avoid me anymore. He showed up late, just as Coach blew his whistle and a chaotic warm-up came to an end. I tried to catch Guzzo's eye, but he wouldn't look at me. Coach had us run drills to get the blood pumping, and then we practiced four or five plays. The last play was designed specifically for English, and Coach called it “Fist.” It was an isolation offense to run when another team played us man-to-man defense. We'd all form a column in the paint as English called the play at the top of the key, and then we'd scatter and make a wide box away from the net so English could take his man one-on-one to the hoop, because he could beat anybody off the dribble. And he did. Even though we knew the play, as we ran it, English beat us all, again and again. He was unstoppable.

And when it was finally time to scrimmage, Coach asked us to play hard, and he let the point guards call whatever plays they wanted. He struck a good balance—I was playing on the
team opposite English most of the time, and even though Fist was designed for him, he didn't call it. He ran every other play, once, twice, he ran Gold three times, and then finally, after I'd sunk a three from my sweet spot, English calmly walked the ball up the court to the hash mark and called Fist. He blazed past Nam for the easy layup. We missed at the other end, and English didn't push the fast break. He slowed it all down, got to the top of the key, called Fist again, spun a circle around Nam, and another one around Tooms—who came in from the weak side to help—and swooped under the basket with a reverse layup. He did it a third time in row, and this time, when he put his fist in the air, he paused and said, “Rashad,” and waved his fist like a flag before zigzagging a fierce line to the hoop, banging and slipping past nearly everybody. He yelled and slapped the backboard as he went up for the layup and nailed it.

We were glistening with sweat under the incandescent lights in the gym, all breathing heavy, even English, as he jogged backward to set up for D, and somehow, even though I was concentrating on the play, another part of my brain recognized how stupid it was to believe Rashad's name wasn't on all our minds—how interconnected all these things were in our lives, how we couldn't just separate basketball from the rest of our life, just like we couldn't separate history from the present, just like we couldn't have racism in America without racists.

My team pushed the ball up the court, and you could
already feel the nerves bouncing in our bodies. Nam kicked the ball down low as I made my cut to the far corner, but someone else got a finger on it, so it spun off course, and Guzzo and I chased after the loose ball. It had nearly rolled out of bounds, but he slammed into me anyway. We hit the floor, and what might have looked like good hustle was actually just us ripping at each other more than the ball itself, elbowing each other, until finally, the ball rolled away and the two of us wrestled on the floor. I slipped out of Guzzo's grip and got to my feet. His face was a twisted mitt of hate. He hated my guts, and I think he hated everyone's guts at that moment, but mine most of all, and I didn't blame him.

Coach blew his whistle, but Guzzo just stared dead at me.

We got back into the scrimmage, and I tried to shake it off, but I couldn't shake the snarl on Guzzo's face when he looked at me, any more than I could shake Rashad's name from my head.

The game started up again, and after only a few trips up and down the court I found myself going for a rebound against Guzzo, and it was like he had been waiting for this all day, because as I went up for the ball, I caught a flash of his elbow in the corner of my eye, and then I felt my lip explode. I fell straight on my ass, tried to stand, wobbled, and collapsed. Everybody was around me in seconds. Guzzo first. He had his hand out, helping me up, apologizing loudly, saying it was
an accident. My whole head rang like the bells of St. Mary's after Easter Mass.

It was an accident, Guzzo kept insisting, and while I'm sure no one believed him, Coach let it slide and told me to go clean myself up. It was getting near the end of practice anyway, and I didn't want to hear any damn speeches or anything—especially more rules about not going to the march. I'd worn the T-shirt. Now I was committed. As I washed and got changed, my mind was on fire, and it would have been impossible to chant
team
if Coach had asked me to.

I was ready to go when the rest of the team came into the locker room. I slung my backpack over my shoulder, and on my way out, I found English. I told him we should just call the play Rashad, instead of Fist, something everybody in the stands would have to hear every time we ran the play.