More Happy Than Not (13 page)

12

FIGHTS AND FIREWORKS

Y
es, it took Brendan three whole days to get over his little bitch-fit. If he had waited one more day, it would've been his longest grudge since we were fourteen—when he got mad at me for not choosing him as my partner for a gaming tournament on Third Avenue. Basically, Brendan thinks that if you're not with him, you're against him. It's ridiculous, but whatever. I'm just glad he grew up just in time so I could rush out of Yolanda's Pizzeria with him and the other guys.

Me-Crazy is fighting some twentysomething in the middle of the street.

I was nine when I got into my first fight with someone who wasn't my brother. I didn't know how to make a fist so Brendan had to help me. Every time the kid, Larry, would hit me, I would run back to Brendan to ball my fists for me until I couldn't take it any longer.

Yeah, I lost my first fight over a plastic whistle to a kid named Larry.

But learning how to make a fist helped me later in a fight against Nolan. We were all wrestling and he slammed me too hard against the mat. I got pissed and clocked his jaw. I lost again, but I got a couple good swings in before Brendan broke it up.

No one is breaking up Me-Crazy's fight, and, well, Dumb Son of a Bitch asked for it. That's what I'm calling him because you would have to be a dumb son of a bitch to pick a fight with Me-Crazy. It's true: Me-Crazy bumped into the guy at the pizzeria and didn't apologize. But Dumb Son of a Bitch shouldn't have called him a “homeless waste of life” just because Me-Crazy has bad acne, yellow teeth, and smells like he hasn't showered in over a week. To be fair, there's no way Dumb Son of a Bitch could've known the word “homeless” is Me-Crazy's only soft spot since he and his family have been evicted twice. But let this be a lesson to all never to fuck with someone who looks like they may not have a future outside prison.

So, Me-Crazy hit Dumb Son of a Bitch in the face with his own food tray and dragged him outside at the owner's request.

Dumb Son of a Bitch's nose is bleeding, not because of the tray
. . .
no, that's because Me-Crazy slammed the poor guy's face into a
buy three slices, get one free drink
sign.

“Someone should break this up,” Thomas says with an urgency I've never heard from any of my friends.

“He had it coming,” Skinny-Dave says. He's bouncing around like he has to piss, and I would know because he has a habit of holding it in so he can just have one great piss later in a staircase of his choosing. Strange kid.

“No one deserves
that
,” Thomas says after Me-Crazy punches Dumb Son of a Bitch in his balls repeatedly.

I mean, he's right.

Cars are at a stop now and honking their horns; some drivers get out to yell at Me-Crazy, others to watch the fight. Luckily for this guy, we're close to a hospital because, shit, I'm positive there's no way he's ever had his ass handed to him like he has today. Me-Crazy tackles him against a parked car and before he can smash Dumb Son of a Bitch's head into the window, we hear police sirens.

“Go! Go!”

“Run, fuckers!”

Even if we never touched Dumb Son of a Bitch, we also never tried to stop the fight. There's no way in hell the cops will find Me-Crazy once he goes into hiding, and none of us want to find ourselves in the situation where we're forced to either go to jail or rat out Me-Crazy's identity, so we run. Thomas follows me,
and he runs way faster than he did during our race three days ago, and I lead him down into the garage where we camp out behind a silver Mazda.

Thomas asks, “You do this a lot?”

“Not really.” It's clear he looks down on us all fighting, so I avoid telling him how we sometimes run into other projects so the cops will look for the suspect—usually Me-Crazy—there instead of our block. “How many fights have you been in?”

“Just one,” Thomas says.

“How is that possible?” Even Baby Freddy has been in more than one fight and he's a total pussy.

“I don't go around picking fights.”

“I don't either, but I have to fight back if someone comes at me. Right?” I've been exposed to fighting my entire life, and I never really stopped to think that there were alternatives to being laid out. But I like this idea that Thomas grew up never needing anyone to teach him how to make a fist, and I can't help but feel like we're all doing something wrong for always turning to ours.

“Yeah, I definitely don't want to see you beaten to death, but it was kind of a bummer seeing you not care all that much when someone else was getting roughed up,” Thomas says, and it's a blow that makes me feel like someone who throws away entire sandwiches in front of a homeless family. But it also makes me feel like someone has my back enough to speak up no matter how I might react.

“I guess being scared of Me-Crazy isn't much of an excuse, huh?”

“It's a hell of an excuse.”

No more looking at my fight record like war wounds to be proud of. Seriously, who am I, some super villain who thrives on destruction, like Hitler or Megatron? I can reach my happy ending without all hell breaking loose. “Should we go make sure an ambulance has come to help him out already?”

Thomas stands up and extends a hand to me, just like in the sprinklers last week. I'm nervous of what we'll find when we leave the garage.

Dumb Son of a
Bitch is okay as far as we know. There's no doubt some of our neighbors witnessed the fight too, probably even cheered it on from their windows. But if they were questioned about Me-Crazy's identity, they probably lied to protect themselves. Psychopath or not, he is our own, and we're stuck to him like a conjoined twin who may kill someone in front of us one day. Hell, he might even kill us.

But that was two days ago. Now it's Fourth of July, so we're focused on a day of fireworks instead. Brendan dropped five bucks on white popper rocks and carefully poured them all into an old popcorn bucket. Then he went up to the balcony, and I hung back down by the picnic table so I could give the signal on when to drop them. We tried pulling this prank off last year but Brendan dropped them all like a limp dick, and neither of us had enough money to fill up another.

Baby Freddy comes out of Good Food's. I kick the wall with my hands in my pockets. Brendan turns over the bucket, and all the popper rocks fall to the ground; the blast of tiny sparks and deafening pops scares the shit out of Baby Freddy. I give Brendan an air high five, then a real one when we all join up again.

“One day I'm going to be famous and rich and will never come back to check on you fuckers,” Baby Freddy says. He's only a year younger than the rest of us, but we do bully him like he's our little brother.

“Doubtful, if that name keeps following you around for the rest of your life,” I say.

“I bet y'all anything. I have faith.”

“Faith is just arrogance disguised by God,” Skinny-Dave says. It's exactly the kind of thing you expect to hear from a pothead.

Me-Crazy pulls out a few fireworks from his pockets—which, you know, we can all agree is insanely dangerous—and he taunts Baby Freddy with them.

“Let me see those,” I tell Me-Crazy, cutting in front of Baby Freddy. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't just stand by anymore when someone's life was being threatened. I don't want to know what Me-Crazy had to do to convince someone to sell him fireworks.

Baby Freddy asks, “Do you think we can use Thomas's roof to set these off? Our fireworks will be higher than everyone else's.”

I invited them all to Thomas's rooftop party on the ninth, although if they don't come it's not much of a party at all because Thomas doesn't seem to have any real friends outside of us. Without them it would just be him, Genevieve, and me.

“His neighbors would be up on the roof too,” I say. I think all roofs are out since Skinny-Dave, higher than a pothead on the moon, almost sent a firework blasting straight into someone's window last year.

We decide ground level is best and set up. Fat-Dave stole his mother's cooking lighter; he ignites the first firework while we're all still dangerously close to it. Luckily it soars and explodes in bursts of yellow somewhere above the twenty-seventh floor of Skinny-Dave's building.

We chill back, eating honeybuns and drinking Arizona teas, while Fat-Dave sends more of his fireworks zooming and whistling and exploding into the air.

Thomas finally joins us. He doesn't say a word, just grabs a honeybun and watches the show. I haven't seen him since yesterday morning when I left his house. There was zero sleeping during that sleepover and my body's clock is thrown off now. But it was worth it to be able to play hangman on the wall over his bed, to act like we were spies while we tiptoed from his room to the kitchen so we could warm up Hot Pockets without bothering his mother.

Fat-Dave offers me the lighter. I really wish Genevieve were here to hold my hand right now. There are four fireworks left and I choose the small orange one because the other three look like explosives, and shit, that would suck if they were. I ignite the wick, and the firework takes flight. In that moment, I wish my existence were as simple as being set on fire and exploding in the sky.

13

HEARTLESS

I
've been keeping Thomas company during his “Big Job-Hunt Saturday.” Things haven't really been going in his favor. His mom told him about an assistant job at this barbershop on Melrose, and even though he didn't really want to sweep up curls while barbers told crude stories about the women they've slept with, he was still bummed when the position had been filled. Worse, it was some smug kid who proudly rinsed a razor as Thomas was being turned away. Afterward we went to a flower shop. Thomas thought it could be a nice meditative place to work, but the florist worried about Thomas's flighty résumé. As did the baker, the fruit-stand guy, the art studio owner, and lastly and perhaps most insulting, the twenty-year-old who didn't think Thomas could bring any depth to his start-up business.

I mean, anyone who thinks you need depth to wrap presents for a pet's birthday is a fucking depthless idiot.

“Fuck it all, Stretch,” Thomas says now. He throws his remaining résumés in the trash, spitting on them all, which hardly seems called for, but I'm going to let him have his moment.

“You didn't actually want any of those jobs,” I say.

“Yeah, but what if something amazing opened up for me by trying out something I would never go for?”

“There are plenty other jobs to apply to.” I wish Mohad were hiring at Good Food's.

“Maybe I can be a pool boy.”

“Or a lifeguard,” I say. “Or a swimming coach. I'll be your first student.”

“You don't know how to swim?”

“Nope. Never really had to know how to, though it would've been nice considering how I almost drowned last summer.”

“How the hell did that happen?”

“The water was really cold and I thought I would throw myself into the deep end instead of slowly torturing myself by starting at the shallow end,” I say, the panic of that day carrying me away, like an undertow, before I laugh a little. “It was stupid to think I was tall enough to stand up in seven feet of water.”

“Pretty stupid, Stretch. What were you thinking when it was happening?”

“I was thinking about how I'd like to draw a comic where the hero is powerful but can't swim and finds himself drowning.”

“You weren't thinking about your family and friends? The afterlife? Maybe how you should've taken swimming lessons as a kid?”

“Nope.”

“You're heartless,” Thomas says. “Is this big drowning scene for the comic you lied about letting me read?”

“I didn't lie! I just keep putting it off because—you know what, follow me.” I don't want to be marked as a liar, so we head back to my apartment. I search for my Sun Warden comic as Thomas waits out in the hallway, and I decide I don't want to read this with him on his rooftop. I leave the comic on my bed and open the door. “Get in here,” I say.