Texts from Bennett (28 page)

::Thud::
went something in the vents. Being that this was the only thing that kept me from manslaughter charges, I focused intently on the other reverberating sounds coming from it. I heard twists and dials, then a large machine breathing out hot air. The laundry room.

“The dryer!” I yelled.

I ran down the basement stairs and collided with the half-open laundry room door, slamming it open to find Cindy there, naked, shriveled, and sunburned, standing in front of the dryer, shivering.

“Yo, bitch, why you stealin’ our laundry services?” Bennett barked.

I motioned for him to stop talking, but it was too late. She turned around with black, drug-induced eyes and a pale face, crunching and spasming.

“Cindy, put on your clothes, please. You need to go,” I requested, with my hands over my face, to avoid looking at her disgusting physique.

“What, man? I’m fuckin’ nekkid, man, leave me alone—I’m dryin’ my clothes!”

Without hesitation, I reached my hand out to turn off the dryer, but Cindy thought I was reaching for her. She dodged my hand and charged past me, barely grazing my fingertips. Her skin felt like what I imagine a moldy alien would feel like. I nearly gagged.

“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me—don’ touch me! Donntuchme—I just need to dry my clothes and go to sleep!” she yelled, as she ran up the stairs.

Bennett and I looked at each other briefly and peeled off after her.

“Stop running! You’re going to wake my neighbors!” I screamed after her.

Man, meth heads can run
fast
. I didn’t want to touch her, so I was running behind her trying to, like, corral her with my yelling, hoping I could just get her to stop. “Cindy, stop running—you’re completely naked—my neighbors will see you!”

She slammed open the front door of my house and ran out onto the front yard. I heard the garage door opening. Sounded like Bennett had taken an alternate route.

Cindy bolted halfway across my front yard and stopped, dug her feet into the ground, and juked away from me. I really didn’t want to touch her, but I played along, hoping she’d stop running or fall over or maybe die from cardiac arrest. We ran in circles for what seemed like forty-five minutes. I was totally winded. She was high on drugs, so she had the stamina of a Greek battle horse, pulling a chariot.

We switched to a figure-eight shape, with me yelling “Cindy! Stop running!”

“
Lemme dry my clothes and get some food and sleep. Be a good American, man!
” she snarled.

Circles upon circles we ran. It baffles me to this day that meth heads aren’t triathletes. They have tireless stamina. And while Cindy’s body could’ve gone another three hours running around, she seemed to be slowing down a bit due to being sleepy. I was completely exhausted and could barely breathe. I planted my feet into the ground and put my hands on my knees. She was a good ten feet away from me, juking and twisting, hoping I couldn’t grab her.

When I stopped suddenly, she stopped suddenly and focused her eyes on me. She was breathing heavy. I could hear chunks of lung particle squeezing through her chest tube.

“Cindy . . . why are you making me chase you? Can we stop running? Please?”

Her back was to my house, her front adjacent to me. The street was directly behind me. It was approaching dawn. The most subtle blue began bleeding through the black sky. It was past six.

Both of us were in a stalemate on the driveway. Panting. My meth-guest dropped to her knees from exhaustion. Across the street and one house to the left, the garage door lifted open and Jean Paul zipped out on his bike. If you’re up early enough, you can catch him practicing wheelies and bunny hops in the driveway before his mom takes him to school.

“Good morning, Mac! Pleasant morning!” Jean Paul called out.

“Hey, buddy, stay out of the street!” I said back with concern in my voice, wanting to keep a ton of distance between him and Cindy.

Cindy’s eyes turned yellow like she was a rabid werewolf. Thick ribbons of mucus and saliva dripped from her top teeth to her
bottom teeth. She began salivating, staring at Jean Paul, as if she were plotting a stealth velociraptor ambush on him.

“Well, ain’t that little boy cute? I think I’m gonna adopt the little fucker,” Cindy said as she rose up from her knees and began gently walking toward him. I instantly froze with panic.

“Cindy, don’t go over there!” I said.

“Oh I’m goin’. I’m going.”

However, before she could take another step toward our little neighborhood all-star, Leshaun, like a steroid-enhanced Super Bowl linebacker, came charging at full speed from the garage directly behind Cindy and
slammed
into her back with pulverizing impact, levitating her body a good three feet in the air, causing her hair to zap in all directions like her head was a Tesla coil surging shafts of purple electric current, knocking the wind out of her lungs, flipping her forward one and a half times, and dropping her to the ground with a loud, face-first smack on the driveway’s edge.

Cindy groaned from pain, and curled into a naked, white-trash ball. I cringed and looked away, but while she was lying on the ground in a drug-induced stupor, heaving for oxygen, Leshaun hovered over her yelling, “Yeah! Bitch! Don’t fuck with the East Avalon Crips. We turnt all the way up, ho!”

He then leaned over and picked up what appeared to be her front tooth. He showed it to me and began cracking up. “That shit was fuckin’ gangsta! I hit that bitch like Ray Lewis, my nigga! Whooaaaa! I should play football or work for the cops as a bitch tackler. Hahaha.”

I scanned and surveyed my neighborhood. Thankfully, no one saw a thing. Not even Jean Paul, he was trying to do wheelies in his garage, where his father’s car is usually parked.

“Make sure she doesn’t leave . . . and is still breathing,” I said to Leshaun.

I then walked inside, got her clothes from the dryer, and called the police. Back outside, I saw that Bennett had materialized from wherever the fuck he was and tied a green garden hose around her to restrain her. I sent Leshaun to the basement to hide from the
police, since he would easily end up in jail if they looked up who he was—we could just say I’d tackled Cindy.

Forty-five minutes later, Officer Paul Gray of the Kansas City Police Department was on my driveway telling me all about Cindy: “Oh, yes, this one. She’s a bipolar meth addict who sometimes gets so high that she ends up in various suburbs of Kansas City, wandering the neighborhoods, howling at the moon, jumping in people’s cars, trying to hitch rides. She gets arrested a few times a month, but has never really committed a crime that could keep her in jail. It’s a shame. She’ll probably end up eating a puppy or something. If we’re lucky, she’ll get eighteen months for animal cruelty. Not sure if that counts as cannibalism. Haha! Oh well, have a good night.”

•

I walked into the house to find Leshaun and Bennett both eating bowls of cereal at the table. Bennett stood too fast for the sticky chair-leg bottoms to catch a smooth wave of inertia, which tripped the chair, smacking it into the blinds behind him.

“Cuz. I’m so sorry, Cuz. Oh nigga—” he started to say, approaching me with his hand out to shake my hand. “She just seemed c—”

“How do you get women to like you like that?” I cut him off.

Bennett looked back over his shoulder at Leshaun, who out of confusion at my response, squeezed his eyebrows together and halfway opened his mouth, with no words escaping it.

“Uh . . . huh?” he said.

“You heard me,” I said, sitting down. “Bennett, at this point, I don’t care if my house catches fire and burns down. My life is fucked.”

“Uh . . .” Bennett was perplexed. I wasn’t angry like he assumed I was going to be.

I picked up this shitty olive-green clay vase that Harper had bought for my kitchen table and studied the miniscule designer cracks veining through it.

“My life is fucked!” I said, heaving it across the table between them into the refrigerator . . . where it didn’t break.

“Hahahaha!” Leshaun began laughing.

I looked at him, alarmed.

“Nigga, I ain’t laughin’ at you. I just know how it feel. Throw that bitch-ass vase!” he said empathetically, standing up and grabbing the vase from the floor himself. “I’m probably going to fuckin’ jail because I ditched my house arrest to get some pussy! Why can’t I get it right? Why can’t I make the right decisions?”

He slammed the vase down, also not breaking it. Watching it for a second, he picked it up again, set it back in the center of the table, then sat back in his chair and gazed at it.

“Damn, that vase is badass,” he said.

Trying to punch the vase, Bennett overthrew his arm and hit it with his pinkie knuckle, eliciting a small
::ding!::
and not even moving it an inch.

“Huh,” he said.

“How do you get chicks to like you like that?” I said again quickly. “I used to be able to get cute girls, but this whole thing with Harper tore out my heart. How am I supposed to ever walk again?” I asked, alternating between which of the two of them I was looking at.

“See?” Leshaun said, looking at Bennett.

“Man . . .” Bennett said, standing up. “I gotta go to work. I ain’t even fuckin’ sleep.” And like that I thought my little fuck-up cousin had given up on
me
. Until he said over his shoulder, “But I’m gonna show you my commandments, my G. You actin’ hurt in da booty hole right now, so I’mma show you da playa’s rule book.”

Pulling up his pants a little, he barrelled downstairs into the basement.

“Ohhhh, shit,” Leshaun said, excitedly taking a milky bite of cereal. “You ’bout to get your whole game back, homie.”

“Wait—it’s like seven o’clock in the morning. And wait . . . I thought you got fired?” I yelled down the stairs.

“I start at da grocery store today. Gotta get dis money, mane! I’m a workin’ mane!”

“Wait, when did you get hired?” I said.

“Uh, a few days ago? Why?” he said.

“No. Nothing. That’s just . . . great,” I said optimistically.

“I got bills to pay, homie! Gotta help Mama pay you.”

I was proud of the kid. He hadn’t even announced that he got the job.

“Cuz, you gotta understand somethin’. This is the
only
thing Bino cares about. He had so much trouble gettin’ girls at house parties that he started workin’ on this list. He would sit in school all day, workin’ on it and not studyin’. Use it, playa. It works,” Leshaun said.

“I swear on Crip, I hope it does,” I said jokingly.

Leshaun raised one spooky eyebrow. “It will. Ay though, you my nigga and shit. But don’t swear on Crip. Don’t take the gang’s name in vain. I’m s’posed to shank you over that shit, but I’m hella tired.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s coo’, man. Hey. I tried to read that Ann Rand book or whatever? Atlas Shrugs?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I dunno, man. I read kinda slow and shit. But damn . . . my nigga John Galt got some peeps lookin’ for him. He owe someone money or somethin’?”

I will love Leshaun until I die.

Ten minutes later, Bennett reappeared from the basement, dressed in his work clothes and with a name tag that read #####—his legal first name.

“You gonna be awake, my G?” Bennett said.

“Yep,” I said.

“Aiight, gimme just a few to get thangs coo’ at work,” Bennett said and handed me a folded piece of paper. I watched him lumber out the front door and waited for Leshaun to go downstairs to sleep before opening it.

BENNETT DA BOSS HOGGZ 11 COMMANDMINTS OF GITTIN’ BITCHEZ
it said at the top in the most gangster font I had ever seen.

I couldn’t believe I was at this point. I was now my degenerate, troubled cousin’s pupil as he schooled me on how to properly attract women. It was official: I was officially desperate, and Professor Bennett’s class was about to start.

Reading it once, I laid back in bed to ponder my fate and wonder if this was a class one really wants a passing grade in.

BENNETT:
k u stil up

BENNETT:
Cuzo

ME:
I’m up.

BENNETT:
k u got da paper ?

ME:
Yes. I don’t understand what any of it means.

BENNETT:
im gunna xplain

ME:
Ok. Let’s go. Get me a woman, young cousin.

Lying in bed, having been unable to fall asleep and feeling blue since I read the list, I was morose. Exhausted. Heartbroken all over again.

As much as I was hoping Bennett would have good advice to give, he was only seventeen. Telling me to “dress like a gangsta” wasn’t going to cut it.

Bennett gave me a lot of advice through text. My phone was hot, my eyes hurt from staring at the screen, I was overwhelmed with information—but I was intrigued. Somehow he managed to spend his entire double shift—his entire first day—at the grocery store telling me how to pull chicks.

BENNETT:
k hear go Bennett Da Boss Hoggz 11 commandmints of gittin’ bitchez

BENNETT:
u their

ME:
Yes. Shoot.

ME:
Wait. Why are their 11 and not 10?

BENNETT:
i will tell u in a sec. read da 1st one off da page