Jackpot

by Nic Stone

  He sighs. Even drunk, Jus can’t deny Melo’s the finest girl he’s ever laid eyes—not to mention hands—on.

  She starts to tilt, and Justyce catches her by the shoulders to keep her from falling. She startles, looking at him wide-eyed, and Jus can see everything about her that initially caught his attention. Melo’s dad is this Hall of Fame NFL linebacker (biiiiig black dude), but her mom is from Norway. She got Mrs. Taylor’s milky Norwegian complexion, wavy hair the color of honey, and amazing green eyes that are kind of purple around the edge, but she has really full lips, a small waist, crazy curvy hips, and probably the nicest butt Jus has ever seen in his life.

  That’s part of his problem: he gets too tripped up by how beautiful she is. He never would’ve dreamed a girl as fine as her would be into him.

  Now he’s got the urge to kiss her even though her eyes are red and her hair’s a mess and she smells like vodka and cigarettes and weed. But when he goes to push her hair out of her face, she shoves his hand away again. “Don’t touch me, Justyce.”

  She starts shifting her stuff around on the ground—lipstick, Kleenex, tampons, one of those circular thingies with the makeup in one half and a mirror in the other, a flask. “Ugh, where are my keeeeeeeys?”

  Justyce spots them in front of the back tire and snatches them up. “You’re not driving, Melo.”

  “Give ’em.” She swipes for the keys but falls into his arms instead. Justyce props her against the car again and gathers the rest of her stuff to put it back in her bag—which is large enough to hold a week’s worth of groceries (what is it with girls and purses the size of duffel bags?). He unlocks the car, tosses the bag on the floor of the backseat, and tries to get Melo up off the ground.

  Then everything goes really wrong, really fast.

  First, she throws up all over the hoodie Jus is wearing.

  Which belongs to Manny. Who specifically said, “Don’t come back here with throw-up on my hoodie.”

  Perfect.

  Jus takes off the sweatshirt and tosses it in the backseat.

  When he tries to pick Melo up again, she slaps him. Hard. “Leave me alone, Justyce,” she says.

  “I can’t do that, Mel. There’s no way you’ll make it home if you try to drive yourself.”

  He tries to lift her by the armpits and she spits in his face.

  He considers walking away again. He could call her parents, stick her keys in his pocket, and bounce. Oak Ridge is probably the safest neighborhood in Atlanta. She’d be fine for the twenty-five minutes it would take Mr. Taylor to get here.

  But he can’t. Despite Manny’s assertion that Melo needs to “suffer some consequences for once,” leaving her here all vulnerable doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. So he picks her up and tosses her over his shoulder.

  Melo responds in her usual delicate fashion: she screams and beats him on the back with her fists.

  Justyce struggles to get the back door open and is lowering her into the car when he hears the WHOOOOP of a short siren and sees the blue lights. In the few seconds it takes the police car to screech to a stop behind him, Justyce settles Melo into the backseat.

  Now she’s gone catatonic.

  Justyce can hear the approaching footsteps, but he stays focused on getting Melo strapped in. He wants it to be clear to the cop that she wasn’t gonna drive so she won’t be in even worse trouble.

  Before he can get his head out of the car, he feels a tug on his shirt and is yanked backward. His head smacks the doorframe just before a hand clamps down on the back of his neck. His upper body slams onto the trunk with so much force, he bites the inside of his cheek, and his mouth fills with blood.

  Jus swallows, head spinning, unable to get his bearings. The sting of cold metal around his wrists pulls him back to reality.

  Handcuffs.

  It hits him: Melo’s drunk beyond belief in the backseat of a car she fully intended to drive, yet Jus is the one in handcuffs.

  The cop shoves him to the ground beside the police cruiser as he asks if Justyce understands his rights. Justyce doesn’t remember hearing any rights, but his ears had been ringing from the two blows to the head, so maybe he missed them. He swallows more blood.

  “Officer, this is a big misundersta—” he starts to say, but he doesn’t get to finish because the officer hits him in the face.

  I should be devastated or pissed or deflated as I let myself into the house next door and climb the stairs to my best friend’s bedroom. I should be crushed that less than a month into my junior year of high school, my latest girlfriend kicked me to the curb like a pair of too-small shoes.

  It’s ridiculous that I have to stop outside the door to get my act together so Best Friend won’t get suspicious, isn’t it? Rubbing my eyes so the whites look a little red, slumping my shoulders, hanging my head, and poking my bottom lip out just the slightest bit so I look sad…

  Best Friend doesn’t even look up from her phone when I open the door. Normally I’d be offended since I did all this work pretending sadness, but right now it’s a good thing she keeps her eyes fixed to the little screen. She’s sitting at her desk, laptop open, in one of those thin-strapped tank tops—nothing underneath, mind you, and she’s got a good bit more going on up there than most girls our age. She’s also wearing really small shorts, and she’s not small down bottom, either. In the words of her papi: “All chichis and culo, that girl…”

  And I can’t not notice. Been trying to ignore her *assets* since they started blooming, if you will, in seventh grade. Largely because I know she would kick me to the curb if she knew I thought of her…that way. But anyway, when I see her sitting there with her light brown skin on display like sun-kissed sand and her hair plopped on top of her head in a messy-bun thing, my devastated-dumped-dude act drops like a bad habit.

  I close my eyes. The image has already seared itself into my memory, but I need to pull myself back together. With my eyes still closed, I cross the room I know better than my own and drop down into the old La-Z-Boy that belonged to my dad.

  Despite the squeak of the springs in this chair, she doesn’t say a word.

  I crack one eye: no earbuds. There’s no way she doesn’t realize I’m in here….She smiles at something on her phone, tap-tap-tap-tap-taps around, and after literally two seconds, there’s the ping of an incoming text. She L’s-O-L.

  I sigh. Loudly. Like, overly loudly.

  Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. “You’re back early,” she says without looking up.

  “You should put some clothes on, Jupe.”

  “Pffft. Last I checked, you’re in my domain, peon.”

  Typical. “I need to talk to you,” I say.

  “So talk.”

  Ping! She reads. Chuckles.

  Who the hell is she even talking to?

  I take a deep breath. Wrangle a leash onto the green-eyed monster bastard raging within. “I can’t.”

  She glares over her shoulder at me. “Don’t be difficult.” God.

  Even the stank-face is a sight to behold. “You’re the one being difficult,” I say.

  “Oh, well, excuse me for feeling any opposition to you waltzing into my room without knocking and suggesting that I adapt to your uninvited presence.” She sets her phone down—thank God—faces her computer, and mutters, “Friggin’ patriarchy, I swear.”

  I smile and glance around the room: the unmade bed and piles of clothes—dirty stuff on the floor near the closet, clean in a basket at the foot of the bed; the old TV and VHS player she keeps for my sake since she never uses them when I’m not here, or so she says; the photo on the dresser of me, her, my mom, and her dads on vacation in Jamaica six years ago; the small tower of community service and public speaking certificates and plaques stacked in the corner that she “just hasn’t gotten around” to hanging on the white walls.

  I�
�ll never forget my first time being in here ten years ago: she was six, and I was seven, and a week after Mama and I moved in next door, Jupe dragged me into this “domain” of hers because she wanted “to know more about my sadness.” She knew we’d moved because my dad died—I told her that the day we met. But this was the day I hit her with the details: he was killed in a car crash and he’d been out of town and I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye.

  Still hate talking about this.

  I cried and cried on her bed, and Jupe wrapped her skinny arms around me and told me everything would be okay. She said she knew all about death because her bunny Migsy “got uterined cancers and the vet couldn’t save her.” And she told me that after a while it wouldn’t “hurt so bad,” but “I’ll be your friend when it hurts the most, Courtney.”

  And there she is: Jupiter Charity-Sanchez at her computer, with her grass-green fingernails, three studs in each ear, and a hoop through her right nostril, likely organizing some community event to bring “sustenance and smiles” to the local homeless or a boycott of some major retailer in protest of sweatshop conditions in Sri Lanka.

  Jupe—my very, very best friend in the universe. Force, firebrand, future leader of America, I’m sure.

  This is home. She is home.

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