blush raced over my skin and I looked down at my screen before he caught me watching. But ten minutes after he’d sat down I sent him an email, giving him my cell number, with a message saying… “Why don’t we be friends outside of work? If you want? What’s your number?”
A second later an email came back from him. It was just his number and nothing more.
I looked up and leaned ‘round my screen to see him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at his screen, like he was totally focused on work.
Justin
“Justin!” My kid brother, Dillon, hurtled out the school gate, right into my belly, with his backpack falling off his shoulder and smacking me in the thigh.
“Hey Dillon, woah. What’s up with you, kid?”
Having hugged me, he pulled away, laughing. “Nothin’.” His eyes were shining with a I-love-my-big-brother look of idolization. That look got me in the chest every time, with a sharp bite of affection.
“Did you have a good day?”
“Yeah.” He liked school but he hated the after club he had to go to when Mom was working and I had to pick him up.
“Dillon!” A pretty little girl with braids shouted over, taking her mom’s hand. She did a huge exaggerated wave, the way young kids did.
My already super cool and chilled little brother just lifted his hand. “Bye Miah.”
I laughed. He looked up at me, taking my hand. “Are you working on the ladies already little bro?”
He laughed. Then he said, “She does like me but it’s annoying. She hangs around all the time when I just wanna play.”
I gripped his hot, sticky hand tighter, looking up the street watching the traffic and getting ready to cross. “Well, one day, you are gonna be begging girls to just hang out with you.”
He made a disgusted sound, and I glanced down laughing at him. “Urrgh, no way. I don’t wanna play with girls … ”
For now. The day will come Dillon when you will love playing with girls… I didn’t say that. Just smiled at him, wishing I’d had a childhood like he did.
He may have to go into after-school club but he never had to comfort Mom like I did at his age, after her and Dad had fought, and he’d knocked her about, or after he’d had a run in with the cops and ended up in jail.
When we’d crossed the street, Dillon let go of my hand and started telling me about his day. Telling me all the eight-year-old-kid gossip from his school. I loved it when he did. He made me laugh the way he talked with a blazing fire of excitement, at a hundred miles an hour, and the flames of the excitment in his belly flickered over his facial expressions and in his eyes too.
Along the street I saw Jake, waiting on the corner of the sidewalk, where he always met us. He turned the corner and walked on as soon as he knew I’d seen him.
Met us––was a loose term. He never actually bothered waiting for us, or spoke to us, but walked two hundred yards ahead of us, pretending he didn’t have to walk back home with his fricking annoying older brother and the baby of the family.
Dillon chatted on. He didn’t care… Jake only stirred me up, no one else… and he knew it.
How the fuck had I ended up being treated like our frickin’ shit Dad? I didn’t know. But Jake treated me like I was his parent and not his big brother. He had an inbuilt button that said––do everything the opposite of what I said.
My cell buzzed, vibrating in my back pocket. I pulled it out. A message from Portia. Dillon kept talking.
It was a stupid picture of some weird dressed-up dog in a park. I laughed. Then another text came in.
‘Thought I would send you that to make you laugh. Did it?’
‘Yeah, it did.’
She could have punched me when she sent me her number. I hadn’t expected that, and I’d played it cool, just sending her my number back. But now she’d sent the first text too. What did that say?
The girl had my attention whether she wanted it or not.
“What did you laugh at?” Dillon’s brain finally caught up and overtook his mouth…
“Here.” I showed him the picture of the Jack Russell dog wearing a red and white wooly hat, sweater and scarf… He laughed too.
I slipped my phone back into my pocket, then rubbed a palm over Dillon’s hair as he started up with his eight-year-old bullshit again.
Jake was at the end of the block and about to turn, heading for home. I wished he’d wait. Our neighborhood was one of the worst in New York; kids ‘round here always claimed they didn’t have a choice about being in a gang. Gangs were what people did. But not me. I’d stayed in school, kept my head down, paid my way through College, working in a Mackie D’s, and now I was doing my best to keep my brothers out of all that shit.
My heart thumped steadily like it did every day when we walked back and Jake disappeared out of sight. Dillon kept talking, and I commented, laughed, and said all the things I was supposed to in reply, but my mind was on Jake.
There were loads of drive-by shootings in our neighborhood. Stabbings. Fights. For no better reason than people just wanted to show they were frickin’ tough. That wasn’t tough, that was cowardice. Tough was fighting against a life, and hood, that tried to hold you back.
My mom was tough. She’d escaped one of those guys. A guy who used to bring all sorts of crap back to our door and beat her up––and he’d slept around.
In a hood like this, she was bringing up four boys alone––working her ass off to do it.
Dad had thought himself tough. He’d grown up in a gang. He’d ended up leading it. But Mom was the tough one.
Maybe sometimes it made her seem like she didn’t care but she cared her heart out about us. Dad had just beaten all the softness out of her. Our mom cared with venom. She fought fiercely to do the best for us.
Respect.
I loved her.
We got as far as the street corner Jake had turned. When we turned it, there were a few kids in a car near him. My heart played an erratic base-beat against my ribs.
I settled a hand on Dillon’s shoulder, and drew him close against my hip as we walked on. He kept talking, oblivious to the tension that rattled about inside me. My eyes were on Jake. He kept moving, but the car slowed down near him. Shit. Come on… I was too far away to do anything. If the barrel of a gun appeared out the car window, Jake was a corpse, there was no way I could cover the two-hundred yards between us and do a single thing to stop him getting wiped out.
The car crawled along beside Jake, and a kid in the back seat wound down the window. I was walking faster without even thinking about it.
