Monday – Quinn

If 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 de nitely 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. e clip that had made the rounds on the Sunday morning news shows, and then went viral. e 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.”

 ere were a couple of other people in the stairwell watching us.

Listening.

“e 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 oor 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 ashed a peace sign to English and he nodded, but only brie y, 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?

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

Aer 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 oor, 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 aer 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 nally 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. Aer you le 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 nally 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. at thing with Marc. ey’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 aermath. 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. is 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 rst 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.”

“at’s what I want to think.”

“at’s what my mother kept saying last night aer the party, aer 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, at. e fear that I was in it kept buzzing through me.

“Yeah, Quinn. Everyone’s seen it. It’s crazy.”

I swallowed hard and nally 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. ank God.”

Jill narrowed her eyes. “is 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 nished 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 rst 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, aer 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 le 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 aer 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. e 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. e 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. at wasn’t the word she used. ugs. Fear of thugs. Just like what some people were saying on the news. Rashad looked like a thug.

“ug” was the word Paul used when I told him about Marc. It was two weeks aer Marc had pushed me into the fence. I nally 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.

Aer 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.

Only about ve minutes into it, though, Molly leaned over and asked EJ if he’d been to Jill’s party. Before he even had time to answer, Ms. Webber looked up from the pile of papers she was grading and pointed to EJ.

“Every time, EJ,” she said abruptly, so loud that she seemed to surprise

even herself.

“What?” he asked.

“You.” Ms. Webber’s eyes narrowed and she spoke calmly, maybe too calmly. “Every time I look up and see something going on, some distraction. ere you are. Right at the center of it. Do you need to take your test out in the hall?”

“Guilty until proven innocent, huh?” He hesitated, but not for long.

Nobody likes to be spoken to like he’s a damn child, least of all EJ, and he wasn’t the kind of kid to stay quiet. He didn’t miss a beat. “Just like Rashad.”

I swear I could hear Ms. Webber suck in her breath as she tried to gure out how to answer.

It was awkward for all of us. Especially because EJ was black, just like Rashad, and Ms. Webber was white, just like Paul—like me and like Molly, too. I think EJ was hoping someone else would pipe up, but none of us did, not the white kids, nor any of the kids of color. We all just le him hanging out there until nally Ms. Webber found something she wanted to say.

“at’s not— It’s not— You just can’t go con ating things like that.” en she pointed to the copy of the test she had in front of her. “is is for your bene t,” she squeaked. “We don’t have time to talk about this right now.” She

took another breath. “I’m sorry. I know there’s a student from our school who is in the hospital today, but we don’t have the full story. What I do know is that if we are going to be ready for these exams, we have to get down to business today. ey won’t wait for us. We have to be ready.”

“Rashad,” Molly said.

“What?” Ms. Webber said.

EJ looked at her, surprised.

“Rashad,” Molly said louder. “at’s his name. Rashad’s in the hospital.”

“I know that,” Ms. Webber said.

“Yeah, well, that student in the hospital isn’t here to take any practice tests today because he’s, you know, beaten to hell,” EJ said.

“Rashad,” Molly said again.

EJ smiled. “Rashad,” he said louder.

ey both said the name again and looked around for others to join them, but the rest of us sat there in shock.

“All right, both of you, outside now!” Ms. Webber yelled. She was ushed straight down to the base of her neck. She stood up and walked EJ and Molly to the hall, and as they le they kept saying “Rashad, Rashad,” until I couldn’t hear them anymore.

And before Ms. Webber came back in, someone in the back whispered, “Paul Galluzzo.”

e other damn name that was all over the news. I turned around to see who it was, but everyone had his or her head down. I was pretty sure it’d been a guy, and I found myself looking at Rahkim and Malcolm and realized I was looking at the only two other black guys in class. I was pissed. I was pissed someone had said it, because I was sure they said it so I would hear, and I was pissed I was taking it to heart, and I was pissed I’d just done the same goddamn thing and had assumed it had been Rahkim or Malcolm, but I was pissed that I was pissed, because I was also pretty sure it had been one of them.

And mostly I was pissed because I just wanted everyone to shut up about it. Didn’t talking about it just make it worse for all of us? Did everything have to be about Paul and Rashad?

I was still pissed aer school when I got to the locker room, changed, and headed out to the court. Guys were already shooting and warming up. I stretched and bounced up and down on the sidelines, keeping to myself.

at wasn’t new. I like to avoid the early shoot-around, the chaos of just throwing the ball up and having it bounce out because someone else’s shot smacked it away. I liked to nd my rhythm on my own. I got loose with a ball and worked on my handling, sprinting up and down the sidelines with shadow fake-outs, keeping the legs loose as I popped a zigzag pattern back and forth, working the day out, so I could just concentrate on basketball.

Easier said than done, though. I couldn’t get my head in the zone—and found myself keeping an eye on English and Shannon Pushcart, and I knew exactly why—they were tight with Rashad. I watched English spin circles around Tooms, moving so quickly he could have been on skates on ice.

Shannon, Nam, Dwyer, and Guzzo and most of the rest of the team chased loose balls that bounced off the rim like popcorn. Nobody else seemed pissed off, though. Was I the only one looking out at every goddamn interaction on the court through the lter of Rashad and Paul? I didn’t think so.

Coach gathered us at the bleachers, and the een of us stacked up side by side in the rst three tiers, as if we were having our photo taken. He paced back and forth as he gave us a speech about how everybody was saying it was our year, the newspapers, people in the league, even TV sports news was covering us. But who was he kidding? He was going crazy about it too.

“Now I know what you’re thinking, boys, you’re thinking about the scouts,” Coach now said. “Who is coming when? When’s that guy from UNC coming, right, English? Or is it Georgetown?” He bent toward him and

grinned.

English glanced up at Coach and nodded.

“But you got to block out the bullshit,” Coach said, choosing English again, this time pointing at him. en he stood up and continued to pace. “If all you think about are the scouts, all you think about is yourself. en we don’t win. en nobody wins.” He paused. “You listening?” he barked.

“Yes, Coach,” we grumbled back, but he just kept on talking, not waiting for our answer.

“Every day is the same day. We are one team, and we stop the other team from getting easy shots, and we work them hard as hell on the other end so they give us the easy shots. We do that as one team and we do that every day.

You hear me?”

 “Yes,” we said.

“I said you hear me?”

“Yes!” We all shouted now.

“You hear me?” he boomed.

“YES!”

“Bring it in.”

We jumped out of our seats and circled him, dropping our hands into the

pile.

“TEAM on three. One, two, three.”

“TEAM!”

“at’s right, bring it back in here.” We were all bouncing and swaying, loose bodies with blood on re. We got our hands back in the pile.

“Media shit’s gonna hound us every day. You let me handle that. You just ignore that shit. ere’s all kinds of pressure going on out there, at school, in your lives back home. You leave it all at the door of this gym. In this gym

we’re only Falcons, you hear me?”

“YES!”

“Pack it in closer!”

We did as we were told.

“You tell me whose house this is.”

“Our house!”

“Who are we?”

“FALCONS!”

“Who?”

“FALCONS!”

“Who?”

“FALCONS!”

“Team on three. One, two, three!”

“TEAM!”

at is what I wanted to believe too. I’d walked onto the court and seen the team like this: seven black guys, ve white guys, two Latino guys, and one Vietnamese guy. But now, aer Coach’s rally, aer we got into three lines and began the weave together, passing and running, passing and running,

ve balls whipping through the air between all this, dodging in and away from each other, een guys moving like the connected parts of one heavy- breathing animal, I thought that maybe leaving all the shit behind at the

door wasn’t such bad advice. And hell, it wasn’t my problem, really, right?

Couldn’t I leave it at the door wherever I went? Maybe we all should have tried to do that. It wasn’t any of our problem. It was a problem of the law, and the law would work it out—isn’t that what it was for, for God’s sake? To take care of us?

And as I hustled to the sidelines and jumped into a full minute of foot

re, shouting the countdown from sixty with Coach, I kept wondering: Wouldn’t we have been better off thinking that way? All of us. What did we really gain by talking about this—Paul, Rashad, what happened—digging it up and making everyone feel like shit?

Maybe for this one practice we were all thinking only about the team: one unit, one thing, no parts, one whole, no problems, just one goal for one team, none of us thinking about race or racism, all of us color-blind and committed like evangelicals to the word “team,” just like Coach wanted.

Maybe. But I doubted it. at’s what I wanted to think, but it wasn’t what was in my mind or gut. Instead I knew there was a problem, and I was beginning to think I was a part of it—whether I was in the damn video or not.