All American Boys (12 page)

I
f I thought walking away from Paul would make me not think about him, or what he had done for me over the years, I was an idiot. At school on Monday it felt like everyone was talking about Rashad. Who'd seen him? What was going on? Was he coming back to school? How bad was he hurt? Was he gonna die? When you go to a school as large as ours, it's impossible to know everyone, but even in a school as large as ours you definitely know someone who was friends with Rashad. And of course, it worked the other way around too—especially when the cop involved was the older brother of your oldest friend.

But what was worse was that everyone—
everyone
—was talking about the video. The clip that had made the rounds on the Sunday morning news shows, and then went viral.
The video everyone had seen but me, because there was no way in hell I was putting myself back there, back at Friday night, watching that happen all over again.

I'd gotten texts all night from Dwyer and a couple of other guys on the team, other kids too, but I'd ignored them. I'd clicked my phone to mute. No way was I watching that video. I wanted to erase the whole damn memory from my mind, but I couldn't because it was like the whole damn high school had been there on the street with me—everybody had seen it.

It was nonstop
Rashad buzz
all day, and by fourth period, as I was making my way up the stairs and Nam yelled to me from behind, I already knew what he was going to say.

“Quinn, man. Wait up.” Nam was another one of the guys on the team, our point guard when English needed a break, and he dodged around a few people to catch up with me. “Yo, all that shit that went down with Rashad on Friday, right?”

“Yeah, man.”

There were a couple of other people in the stairwell watching us. Listening.

“The cop, that's Guzzo's brother, right?”

“Yeah, man.”

“But like, that's got to be weird, right?”

“Yeah, man. It is. It's weird.”

“I mean, you wonder why he did it?”

“What? Steal something from Jerry's? Are you kidding?”

“No, man. Not Rashad. I'm talking about Paul Galluzzo. Why'd he do it?”

We pushed open the doors to the third floor and walked down to trig. A couple guys I'd seen at Jill's on Friday nodded to me. I nodded back. “What the hell, Nam?” I said. “He was just doing his job.”

“You kidding? You've seen the video, right?”

“No.”

“What? You kidding?”

We walked into trig together and sat down in our usual seats. Mrs. Erlich sat us in alphabetical order, which put me in the last row, but Nam sat in the middle, next to English. I flashed a peace sign to English and he nodded, but only briefly, then he and Nam started talking quietly. Nam looked back at me once, and I was certain they were talking about Paul and Guzzo, and therefore me too.

Why did it feel like everyone was looking at me? Wanting answers to all those questions from me? Plus, what the hell was wrong with me, anyway? Why was
I
the paranoid one? Shouldn't they all be looking at Guzzo instead?

Then it hit me.
The video!
Was I on it? Had anyone seen me on it? That must have been why everyone was staring at me like I had four heads. They were looking at the dude who just stood there like a pants-shitting five-year-old watching everything happen in front of him instead of doing anything about it.

After class, Nam and English busted out before I could catch up with them, and I was sure it was going to be a long day—and practice was going to suck. If nothing else, English and I would usually swap a few words about a party or a game from the weekend, something, anything, but today he was clearly avoiding me. I made my way downstairs, hoping not to get caught in another conversation I didn't want to have, and when I pushed open the door to the second floor, I was surprised to see Jill by my locker. She was waiting for me! And she was about the only person I wanted to talk to.

“Hey,” she said as we hugged hello. “Do you want to grab lunch?”

Of course, I'd have had lunch with her any damn day and every damn day, and after we both dumped our books in my locker, we skipped the cafeteria and went around the corner to Burger King.

“Back-to-back burger days,” I said when we found some seats.

“Salad. Seriously. Does anybody actually like it? Multicolored Styrofoam. No thanks. I'm a burger girl.”

“Hell yeah,” I said. “But these aren't half as good as Paul's.”

“Yeah . . .” She trailed off and we were quiet for a moment while we ate. But then she finally got to it. “Have you seen Guzzo today?”

“No.” In fact, honestly, I'd actually been
avoiding
him. We
weren't in any classes together, so we usually found each other by one of our lockers or in the hallway to the gym. But not today. Of course, he hadn't come looking for me, either.

“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.