did he do?”
“Don’t ask me,” he shrugged, waltzing back out the front door.
“Yeah, later.”
Stupid people always stirring up trouble like they didn’t have anything better to do. AJ wasn’t one to make trouble, so whatever he was being accused of was BS I was sure.
“Hey Mark,” I called as I walked down the hall to his room. “Mark, get up.”
“I’m up,” he mumbled with his eyes still closed.
“You got fifteen minutes to get ready.”
The school was only a mile away so it only took ten minutes to get to. It was seven-thirty.
Five minutes passed, and Mark still wasn’t up. “Mark, get up!” I hollered, sticking my head into his room.
“Fine,” he grumbled, rolling out of bed. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Whatever you can find.”
“Where were you last night?” he asked, passing me the box of cereal.
Mark had dark hair like AJ’s, kind of long and a mess at that moment, sticking up in every which direction. He was fourteen and small for his age.
“I thought AJ was gonna have the cops out looking for you if you didn’t show up soon.”
“He was that worried, huh?” I asked, feeling worse.
“Yeah, man, it was like the time you got jumped a couple years ago, nobody found you forever.”
Two years ago I got jumped; it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Lying half-dead in an alley until you’ve lost so much blood you pass out is an eye opener. Nothing is quite the same after that. There’s always that one extra look over your shoulder, the check of the backseat before you put the car in drive, the double glance of the house locks after you’ve been home for fifteen minutes… nothing is ever quite the same.
It was drifters that had done it. I was walking home. It was early, probably seven at night, the sun dropping out of sight. They thought I was some kid who had hustled them earlier that night. I wasn’t. I had been out at the park with Marty, another Local. There had been two of them. I was fourteen years old, and built like it—scrawny due to a growth spurt. They had come up behind me, grabbed my jacket and slammed me into the brick wall behind the grocery store.
There was no one there to see me or hear me scream. They beat me badly; one held me while the other one hit me over and over again. They were probably forty years old, beating a fourteen-year-old into the pavement.
The knife had come out after what seemed like forever. They cut me all the way down my left side, and left me to bleed to death in the alley. AJ had the whole gang out looking for me. Blade had found me and taken me straight to the hospital. That’s how bad it had been. If you got taken to the hospital you were half dead ‘cause we didn’t have the money for it.
They left a scar that went all the way down the left side of my back where they had cut me, and another on my forearm—a result of the struggle.
“You ready to go?” I asked, pulling on my jacket and taking one more look in the mirror, shaking the memory from my mind.
“Yeah.”
I knew I’d have to walk him there, otherwise he wouldn’t go, and even during the day the street wasn’t the safest place to be. There were other gangs around like us. Our number one rival was Haker’s gang. We were always fighting for territory. Sure, we had our turf that no other street gang dared to step foot on, but the streets were the streets.
Then there were the Spades. We weren’t rivals, but we weren’t allies either. We didn’t really have anything to fight about; we had our turf and they had theirs. Neither of us was about stirring up trouble, we just acted as neighborhood protection from the thugs that itched to destroy it for no better reason than boredom.
The other gang we had ongoing problems with was the Shawns brothers. They had been around for a long time, way before the Locals had joined forces. They just passed the reigns down the generations. They were a tough gang, Shawns’ group, and we were always at war with each other, whether for territory or just to keep them at bay. They weren’t like us, they were hard and mean: they jumped people for fun, sold drugs, and robbed people. We just kept other gangs off the three blocks of our turf, and kept the people who lived there safe… or we tried to anyway.
“Well, I guess we’re here,” Mark said, looking up at the school building.
“What did you do to get Saturday school for anyway?” I looked up at the school, too.
“I may or may not have cussed out Mrs. Blare.”
“You got Mrs. Blare for lit, huh?” I had her when I was a freshman. She was a witch and had always been on my case.
“Sure do.”
“She probably deserved it, but you should try not to get in trouble at school so much.”
“What a hypocrite. You get in trouble all the time at school,” he retorted.
“Yeah, but I don’t do stuff that I know is going to get me in trouble, like cussing out my lit teacher. Of course, if someone picks a fight with me I’m not going to chicken out either. I have a reputation to protect.”
“You’re such a hypocrite.”
“Hey, do as I say not as I do.”
“Practice what you preach,” he threw over his shoulder as he went in the school.
Now I stood alone. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone long. I hadn’t gone more than a block when a red Honda stopped beside me. It was old, but you could see they were trying to fix it up. It looked to be in-between paint jobs; it was sanded down, and the spoiler looked ridiculously big for the car. Three guys stepped out. I lit a smoke and stood there trying to look calm. You would have to know me to know I was scared out of my mind. I’m tough and I can hold my own in a fight, but getting jumped and almost dying… that changes you. It’s something you never forget; it lurks inside of you and seeps out when you’re alone.
“What’d you want?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
“You a Cove?” one of them asked.
Yeah, I was a Cove. Cove was my last name, but I wasn’t planning on telling him that, just in case one of my brothers had done something out of line. The guy that asked had his head shaved and it looked stupid. Not many could pull the look off, and he wasn’t one of them. The other guys must have been brothers; they looked exactly alike, both tall and lanky with spiky black hair and dull-brown, almost black, eyes.
“What’s it to you?”
“Well, it just so happens, I’m looking for a Cove,” the bald one spoke for the group.
“Is that right?” I said, taking a long drag off my cigarette and starting to size them up.
The brothers didn’t look too tough, but they were trying. They weren’t built
