by Steph Cha
Dedication
For Maria Joo
Epigraph
We ain’t meant to survive, ’cause it’s a setup.
—Tupac Shakur, Keep Ya Head Up, dedicated to the memory of Latasha Harlins
Even to this day I can’t believe something like this could happen to our family.
—letter from Soon Ja Du to Judge Joyce Karlin, October 25, 1991
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
II
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
III
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
IV
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Steph Cha
Copyright
About the Publisher
I
Friday, March 8, 1991
Well, this is it,” said Ava. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to find these fools.”
Shawn gaped at the crowd gathered across the street. The movie wasn’t supposed to start for another hour and a half, but there had to be hundreds of people waiting outside the theater. It was dark already, too, hard to make out faces even with the neat row of lamps lining the sidewalk. Ava said Westwood was white people territory, but almost everyone here was black, a lot of them high school kids. They’d have to get closer to pick out Ray and his friends.
Ava grabbed Shawn’s hand as they crossed the street. He pulled back, thinking of all those older kids seeing him get dragged along by his sister. “Aw, Ave, I’m not a baby,” he said.
“Who said you were a baby? I just don’t want to lose you.”
They walked slowly down the sidewalk, starting from the box office, where the marquee overhead announced the showtimes for New Jack City. Shawn smiled. He’d been looking forward to this night all week. Everyone at school was talking about this movie, and he was going on opening night. It didn’t matter that Aunt Sheila had made Ray and Ava take him when they said they’d be watching White Fang. He was here now, sneaking into an R-rated movie, just like them.
“Ava! Shawn!”
He turned to see Ray coming toward them. Ray’s best friend, Duncan, was with him, his face lit up with a big grin. Shawn let go of Ava’s hand, hoping they hadn’t seen.
“There you are,” she said. “This is crazy. We gotta wait in that line? Don’t tell me you gave up our spot.”
“That’s the line to get tickets,” said Duncan. “We already got ours.” He made a show of fanning them out with both hands while Ray whooped and danced behind him.
“You guys are stupid.” Ava laughed. “See, Shawn, this is what happens when you cut school to go to a movie.”
“Hey, show some gratitude. We been here for hours,” said Ray. He balled his hand into a fist and shook it at Shawn. “And you remember what happens if you tell Mom.”
“I ain’t scared of you, Ray. But Aunt Sheila’d whup all three of us.”
Ray laughed and put his fist down. He was just joking anyway. He knew Shawn would keep his mouth shut. He hadn’t told on Ray or even Ava since he was too young to know better. And if he did want to get them in trouble, he had plenty of other ways. Hell, if Aunt Sheila wouldn’t let them see a gang movie, what if she knew Ray was in a real gang?
She wouldn’t understand it. Not like Shawn did. Aunt Sheila knew there were gangs, but she talked about them like they weren’t her problem. She never warned her boys not to join. She just acted like she didn’t have to, seeing as she didn’t raise troublemakers and thugs. Her boys weren’t like those bad ones. The ones who shot dogs for spite and disobeyed their mothers.
But it seemed like half the kids in the neighborhood were in gangs. A few of them were scary—the dude who shot his neighbor’s dog, he was a legit bad dude—but not the ones Shawn knew. Duncan was intimidating but not in that way. He was just larger than life, funny and slick and popular with girls, the kind of guy Shawn hoped he might be when he turned sixteen. And there was no one in the world less scary than Ray. Shawn should know—they’d shared a room since Shawn was five. Ray wore Spider-Man boxers under all his slick blue gear. He sang songs from the radio in a girl voice to make Shawn laugh before they went to sleep. Ray and Ava were the same age, but Ava teased him like another younger brother, giving him crap for his goofy haircuts, his bad grades. If Ray was a Crip, anyone could be a Crip.
They walked over toward a closed electronics store, where Shawn recognized a bunch of kids from their neighborhood, all around Ray and Ava’s age. Some of them were maybe even seventeen, old enough to get into the movie without pretending.
“Look who we found!” Duncan hollered, pointing at Ava.
Shawn watched as they all swarmed around his sister, greeting her with hugs and high fives. She’d gone to school with them until ninth grade, when she’d started at Westchester, and they must have been happy to see her.
One of the girls nodded at Shawn. He didn’t know her name, but he remembered her face. She’d been in choir with Ava in middle school, and he could still picture the way her lips moved when she sang. She was even prettier now. He put his hands in his pockets and nodded back at her.
“You babysitting?” she asked Ava.
Shawn shriveled with embarrassment. He slouched, hoping it wouldn’t show on his face. Ava smiled at him, and he knew she saw through him. She wrapped an arm around his shoulders and turned back to the group. “Y’all know my brother, Shawn,” she said.
He stuck close to Ava as they joined the others. He stood quietly, watching the way they all goofed around together, so smooth and easy, spreading across the sidewalk like it was their own front lawn. Even Ray and Ava shone like strangers in this crew, looking older and cooler than they ever did at home. He hung back and listened, waiting for an opening. He wished he had something good to say, something funny or sharp, to show he wasn’t just Ava’s wack little brother.
Ava took her Walkman out of her backpack and put her headphones crooked on her head, so they covered one ear. Shawn wished he had a Walkman. Ava had gotten hers for Christmas. He’d asked for one, too, but Aunt Sheila said he didn’t need one, and anyway, he knew she wouldn’t buy him any cassettes with swear words. Ava hit play and her eyes went dreamy. Her fingers tapped out a tune on her thighs.
“What you listening to?” asked Duncan.
Shawn thought of his aunt’s strictness with new resentment. If he only had that Walkman, Duncan might ask him what kind of music he liked. He had a list of artists ready to go: Ice Cube, Tupac, A Tribe Called Quest, Michael Jackson. Maybe he’d leave off Michael Jackson.
“Nothing you ever heard of,” said Ava, smiling.
Duncan snatched the headphones off her and put them on. “What’s this?”
“Just some of the sickest tracks of the 1890s.” She snatched the headphones back, and everyone laughed. They all caught her listening to classical music, and she wasn’t even embarrassed.
“I heard of Chopin. Girl, we all heard of Chopin.”
“This is Debussy. And y’all only know Chopin ’cause of me.”
It was true, at least for Shawn and Ray. Ava played piano. She was good at it, too, going to competitions all around town. Au
nt Sheila made them go watch her, even when they had to drive out to far, random places like Glendale and Irvine. Once, when she played in Inglewood, all her friends showed up, too—to make fun of her, they said, but he saw how they shut up and listened when she played.
They still bagged on her, though, just like they bagged on her for being a magnet school nerd. Like they didn’t even think it was all that wack.
“You listen to this shit for fun?” asked Duncan.
“I don’t even want to know what you do for fun,” she said, putting her headphones back on.
Shawn couldn’t believe it. While he just stood there, his sister—a girl—was making the whole crew, even Duncan, howl and slap their knees. She looked in the zone, all relaxed, her face in a half smile. Shawn crossed his arms and looked away.
There was plenty around to look at. Westwood was a nice place, like an outdoor mall: orderly streets and bright stores, palm trees taller than the buildings. It looked so much tidier than their neighborhood, nothing fading or falling apart. On the way over, Ava told him how everyone went nuts a few years ago because of one gang shooting, the only one anyone seemed to care about because it was here, and the victim was an Asian girl. Westwood was far, but not that far—less than forty-five minutes, even with Ava driving like an old lady, afraid of messing up Uncle Richard’s car. But it felt like a different city. He watched the people in line for the box office, reading the impatience, the excitement, on their faces. He wondered if they all had come a long way to see this movie, too.
The line was still long, he noticed, and it looked even more disorganized than it had earlier. The movie was set to start in half an hour, and he worried it would sell out and all these people would have to go home. Then he saw that the crowd was shifting. It pushed forward, becoming less and less like a line, surging toward the box office. There was shouting, too, indistinct but building.
He looked at Ava, who was pulling her headphones down. When he caught her eye, he saw that she felt what he felt. There was something new and heavy in the air.
“Hey,” she said. “Something’s going on at the theater.”
Ray stood on his toes to take in the scene. “Maybe they opened the doors. It’s about that time.”
Duncan clapped a hand on Shawn’s shoulder. “How ’bout you help us out? Go run and see what’s happening.”
“Me?” Shawn’s eyes widened, and then he straightened up, ready to prove himself useful. “Yeah, no prob.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Ava, shoving her Walkman in her backpack.
“Nah, Ave, it’s okay. I’ll be right back.” He jogged off before his sister could follow.
He dashed across the street and pushed forward into the heart of the crowd, navigating the gaps until they narrowed, then disappeared, still a good twenty feet from the box office. He couldn’t go any farther; he was trapped, lodged like a scrap of meat in a row of teeth. It was loud now, everything pounding and close. Someone’s body odor hit him right in the throat.
He looked up as the man to his left raised his hands and cupped them to his mouth. The man shouted, “I’ll bet y’all praying this is the last time we show up in Westwood.”
Shawn tapped his shoulder, and the man turned to him with fire in his eyes. “What’s happening?” asked Shawn.
“They saying they sold too many tickets and we gotta leave.”
“What if we already got tickets?”
“Don’t matter. The show’s canceled.” He raised his voice again. “’Cause they scared of us. They see ten black people and they think we bring the hood.”
“We got our tickets already. We paid for them and everything.”
“That don’t mean shit.”
“But that ain’t fair.”
The man laughed. He wasn’t much older than Ray and them, but his laugh was old and bitter. “What’s fair mean to them? Didn’t you hear about Rodney King?”
Shawn nodded like he knew all about it. Rodney King—he did know the name. A black guy the cops beat on last week or something. Aunt Sheila said it wasn’t right, but that the guy should’ve known better than to run from the cops and that he wouldn’t have been in that situation if he hadn’t been a felon in the first place. She and Ava almost got in a fight about it over dinner.
“So there’s no movie?” Shawn asked one last time.
He turned to go back to his group, but the path had closed behind him. He couldn’t even see his way out. If only he were taller. He felt like a little kid again, stranded and anxious and low to the rumbling ground.
Everyone was talking all at once, and the voices rose higher and higher, stacking and morphing into a giant mass of sound. He could almost see it, like a picture in a comic book: a fireball building and building until it was ready to blow.
His heart hopped and his palms prickled with sweat. This wasn’t right. He could feel it coming—something destructive, something big, something permanent. There was a while, after his mom died, when he used to get nightmares. They took place in a dark old house he’d never seen before, where he knew he was alone. The details always evaporated when he woke up, but even now he remembered the gasping terror of those nights, the relief of escape from the depths of something he didn’t understand. There must have been a time when he woke up looking for his mother, but the ritual he adopted—the only one that calmed him—was finding Ava the moment he opened his eyes. He needed the solidity of her body, the sound of her breath, to locate himself in his room, his house. It was why he slept in her bed, burrowed next to her, long after he knew he’d get made fun of if anyone at school found out.
That was years ago, a phase of his childhood, so distant he wasn’t sure how long it lasted. Yet there were still times he’d wake up in the middle of the night, and at the cusp of consciousness, when the dream world lingered, scan his room in a panic before remembering—he was thirteen now, and Ava was there, just in the next room.
Where was she now? He had to find her. Hold her in his sights. He moved through the crowd, getting jostled, his jaw open, eyes wide, alone and afraid and searching for her.
Then the crowd loosened, expanded into the streets, a spread of nerves and sweat and energy. Shawn felt the excitement jolt through him, and with it, something new—a fever in his blood.
Someone knocked over a trash can. In the weak light of city nighttime, the spill of garbage seemed to glow.
A boy rushed past him carrying a rock the size of a soda can, and Shawn wondered where it could’ve come from, this rough chunk of nature in a village trimmed with locked doors and polished glass. Then he noticed three wide-shouldered men surrounding a tree, breaking off branches. They looked almost calm—the fire in their eyes was not wildfire, but a controlled, channeled anger.
He followed them. He wasn’t alone—the crowd seemed to converge behind them. From the corner of one eye, he saw a flash of movement, a boy jumping to land on a parked car, but he stayed behind the three men with their branches, trailing them with a sense of wonder. Fists flew up all around him, and voices rose in exuberance and fury, their words swarming together until they morphed into chants. “Black power!” “Fight the power!”
And the men swung their branches, shattering a wall of glass.
He’d seen glass break plenty of times before, but never a pane so large and clean, so invisibly solid. This was a breach between worlds, a pried-open passage to another dimension. The crowd shouted again, this time with a clamor of triumph, and rushed over the broken glass. Shawn saw that he was back in front of the electronics store. There was no sign of Ava or Ray or their friends—they’d been in the way of the horde and scattered. He didn’t know where to go, so he pressed forward, his whole body thrumming as he crossed the jagged threshold.
He found a blank stretch of wall where he could make himself small, where he could stand alone and look for someone he knew in this chaos. He watched as people he’d never seen before acted in ways he’d never seen either. The men with the branches were swallowed in the c
rowd, as was their proud, purposeful aura, replaced by a buzzing frenzy. The store was stocked full of fragile, expensive things that were laid out for the taking, their surfaces glinting in the low light. The crowd was going nuts, grabbing what they could, and the noise was so loud that he barely noticed the high fruitless whine of the alarm. He gazed at the scene, and he thought that all these people would get in trouble, that he should get far away from them.
It took him a good five minutes to weave his way out of the store and into the street. The crowd was wild, but there was a direction to its flow like there was to a roaring river. Shawn stepped in, joining in its movement, pressing forward, away from where they’d all come.
He heard someone shout, “Move!” and he jumped out of the way in time to watch a giant man swerve by, perched on a brand-new bicycle that looked meant for a child. He watched him ride off, wondering if he’d fall and knock people over, cause a fight.
Then Shawn heard his name. His sister’s voice. He snapped his head in what he thought was the right direction, but he didn’t see her, and he wondered if he was just being hopeful.
“Shawn! Up here!”
Ava stood on the edge of a planter, elevated two feet above the rest of the crowd. Making herself a tower so he could find her.
She stayed there, grinning, until he scrambled over. When he got closer, he saw Ray and Duncan were waiting, too.
“There you are,” she said, hopping down to the ground. He had to stop himself from hugging her and was glad and embarrassed when she hugged him instead.
Duncan whistled. “Alright, let’s roll.”
He was holding a boom box over one shoulder. It was big, black, and shiny, with a tape deck and a CD player. Two speakers that bugged out like a fly’s eyes.
“Where did you get that?” Shawn asked dumbly.
“I had it the whole time. Didn’t you notice?” Duncan laughed and pointed to the electronics store. “You want one, you better act quick.”
“I’m cool,” Shawn said, as if he might nab a boom box next time, just wasn’t feeling it today.
The truth was he’d never stolen anything before, not even a candy bar. The first year he and Ava lived with Aunt Sheila, Ray got caught stealing from Frank’s Liquor, their old corner store. Nothing big, just a magazine—it had boobs on the cover; Shawn could picture it exactly—but Frank the Crank made Ray call Aunt Sheila, saying it was either her or the police. He was a huge jerk, an old Korean dude with cigarette breath and broken English who was always eyeing Ray like he was up to no good, but they had to do what he said.
