Playground

by 50 Cent

  “You’re missing out,” Darrell said, reaching into his bag and pulling out three cans of Pabst, which he passed to the other guys. Nia saw him, but didn’t seem to care. Darrell was just the kind of guy who could get away with anything in which members of the opposite sex were concerned.

  “I’ll be back in a while,” Nia said after standing out there with us a little longer. “You guys behave now, you promise?”

  The boys just laughed, but I nodded and repeated “promise” in a real serious voice.

  “The song is tight, don’t you think?” Bobbie said as Nia made her way back inside.

  He was talking to me, so I said, “Yeah. Real tight.” I don’t think I’d ever heard the song before, but I definitely liked it.

  “Oh, hey, you see who that is standing over there?” Andres asked suddenly. He, too, was looking right at me. “Guy with the shit-eating grin on his face—you know who that is?”

  I both knew and didn’t want to know, so I just shrugged as I flicked my eyes over to the guy leaning against the only tree in the backyard.

  “Terrence Johnson in the flesh,” Darrell said unnecessarily. “What a piece of shit that guy is, damn.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just kept on standing there, tapping my foot like I was getting real into the song I’d never heard before. But Andres wasn’t going to let me off that easy. He took a big long chug of his beer and made an “aah!” sound, like he’d just finished a race. And then he clapped me right on the back. “I’m still thinking that mofo needs to be taught a real good lesson right about now, wouldn’t you say, Butterball? And we’re lucky—we mighty, mighty lucky—that we’ve got just the guy to do it. Don’t you think?”

  The guy Terrence was laughing real loud and, yeah, he looked like a douchebag, but I’d be lying if I said I felt anything for him in that moment. He was just another tall good-looking guy, and I didn’t have no beef with him. I remembered the promise I’d made to Nia the day before and finally met Andres’s gaze. It took everything I had in me to say, “Nah, I don’t really see the point of it.”

  Andres hooted at this. He was still staring at me so hard, like in one of those espionage movies in which the CIA interrogators are trying to break the double agent. It was like torture. After too long a pause, Andres echoed, “The point? The point, boy? What’s that even mean?”

  Now all three of them—Andres and Bobbie and Darrell—were all looking right at me. Their eyes were glassy from all the drinks they’d had, and I was starting to feel a little confused. “I—I’m not sure,” I said finally. “What I meant was ... well, I guess I don’t really know.”

  “Well, then how ’bout I spell it out for you, huh?” Darrell said, coming so close I could smell his boozy breath on my face. Andres still had his hand on my back, and I had a claustrophobic sensation, like the walls were closing in on me. “The point,” Darrell went on, “is that he stole Tammy from our boy Bobbie, and if you don’t watch out, he’s gonna steal Nia, too.”

  I shot my eyes around the backyard to make sure Nia wasn’t within hearing range. “What do you mean?” I whisper-hissed. “There’s nothing between me and Nia and you know it!”

  “Don’t you worry, B-ball, man,” Andres said, his hand now making smooth stroking motions down my back. “We know your game, and we’re all totally cool with it. Nia’s a good pick. You got some fly taste, and not just in shoes. So let’s get this party started, what do you say? Show Nia and the rest of us who’s boss, what do you say?”

  I tried to squirm away, but Andres’s grip on my back was firm. It was clear none of them were messing around. “Well,” I said finally, “it’s too bad, but I didn’t bring my batteries tonight. I forgot.”

  At this, all three boys grinned at me. “You’re in luck,” Andres said, grinning widest of all, “because I didn’t. Our asses came prepared.” And just like that he reached into the pocket of his hoodie, pulled out a sock, and stuck it right in my hand.

  “I got more if you want,” Darrell said, pointing at the backpack where he kept the beers.

  “Nah,” I said. “Thanks, but I think this’ll be fine.”

  As my fingers closed around the sock, I felt the cool weight of the batteries through the cotton, much heavier than what I’d used with Maurice. Andres must’ve loaded two packs of batteries in there, damn. This thing could do some serious damage.

  “C’mon, man,” Andres urged, “it was so cool when you jumped that little piece of shit on the playground. We hadn’t known what a badass you was before.”

  As I gripped the sock in my hand, something surged inside me, and I remembered what my dad had told me at the movie theater that night, about wanting respect. About needing it. And I looked over at that guy Terrence and I don’t know what happened, but somehow, for a split second there, all I saw was Maurice’s face. Maurice the loser, who would never have been invited to this party in a hundred years and who wouldn’t have gone even if he had been.

  Still, though, I wasn’t planning on doing nothing. I hadn’t forgotten the promise I’d made Nia the day before. I took that shit seriously, wanted her to know she could count on me.

  “Go on, now,” Andres was saying, giving my back a shove. “This party’s boring as shit. We need ol’ Butterball to liven shit up, right, boys?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Darrell and Bobbie high-fiving each other, and then another real strange sensation swept over me. It was like my brain was no longer there in Aunt Cora’s backyard, but like I was floating ten feet up in the air, looking down at Garden City and all the stupid shit the kids there thought was so important. And Maurice, who thought he knew everything about me but actually knew jack shit. Who’d deserved even worse than he’d gotten.

  By the time I strode over to where Terrence stood laughing with his friends, my brain was completely blank. I wasn’t thinking nothing at all, not one thing, as I windmilled my arm back and took a swing right at his face.

  And then all time seemed to stop. While my arm was still suspended midair, Terrence gave me a look I’ll never be able to erase from my memory no matter how hard I try: It was like even with a sock full of batteries in my hand, I didn’t scare him even a little bit. I was the same big fat joke I’d always been.

  Then, in the same split second, all slow and casual-like, Terrence ducked, and instead of hitting his face my hand flailed wildly in the air. I lost my balance and went teetering forward into the tree.

  That was the last thing I remember clearly. Next thing I knew, I was on the ground, people were laughing, and there were sneakers smashing into my face. Oh, man, the pain, I can’t even describe the pain I was feeling, but it was only in my body.

  My brain was still far, far away, floating high above everyone’s petty little lives, including mine. At some point I heard Nia’s voice shouting, “Stop it! Get off him!” then a chorus of other voices saying, “But he started it!” and then, above the rest, a strong male voice—and even in my messed-up state I knew it had to be Terrence—say, “All right, boys, give it a rest. This blubberbutt ain’t worth soiling your shoes on no more.”

  And then some older dude had me by the collar of my South Pole shirt, and just like that I was out on the street again, alone as I’d ever been in my life. I’d probably been at the party a grand total of three minutes before shit went south.

  I was back home by nine o’clock, not like anyone ever came back to check on me.

  21

  “Do you have any idea why you might’ve acted the way you did?”

  Liz’s voice pierced the darkness. I popped my eyes open and realized where I was all of a sudden. Oh, damn. I didn’t know what had come over me, or how long I’d been like that. I felt suddenly embarrassed in that room—dark now, since Liz had dimmed the lights at some point over the last hour. Had I actually fallen asleep? On today of all days, I’d strolled into Liz’s office and passed out like an old drunk? Man, sometimes I really did have trouble understanding why I acted like I did.


  I rubbed my eyes, still thinking of how I’d floated over everyone like that, and how I wished I could live my whole life like that, suspended a few feet in the air. Is that what Clark Kent felt like when he walked into the phone booth and came out Superman—that his body no longer belonged to him? Or Spider-Man, who was just a nerdy-ass kid like me before he grew all his extra legs? What happened inside those superheroes as their bodies slipped out from under them and became something totally different—or, like me, did they feel nothing at all?

  Nah, I’m just fooling myself. More than usual, I mean. Those guys, they helped people. I don’t know what I thought I was doing in Cora’s backyard, but it sure wasn’t that. And when I woke up yesterday morning and saw my face in the mirror—my eye a shitload more wacked-out-looking than it’d been the night before, so puffed-up I could hardly open it at all—I knew I’d gotten exactly what I deserved.

  “You didn’t deserve it,” Liz said, her voice coming at me from miles away. “Nobody ever deserves to get beat up like that.”

  Had I really said that shit out loud? I pulled my hand away from my face and shrank into the sofa. I guess it was no big surprise that Liz didn’t know what she was talking about. I had deserved every kick that had landed on my ass. But Terrence—nah. Terrence was just some guy who’d never done me no harm in his life before I walked up to him with that sock. Like I said, I don’t know what I was thinking.

  Maurice, well, that was a different deal. Try as I might, I still couldn’t feel all that bad for getting even with Maurice like I did. I thought of the first—the only—time I’d had him over to our apartment, and for the millionth time I wondered if I could somehow take back that invitation, lock the deadbolt on him, keep him from seeing whatever he thought he saw. And saying all that shit he’d said. Liz would never understand, so there was no point in my telling her. It was like she could sense how hard just showing up had been for me, how tired I still was, so after all her hooting and hollering, she seemed to make a conscious decision, just this once, to let me off easy. To just let me sit in place and wake up in my own good time while that terrible memory looped over and over in my head.

  I’d never had Maurice to my place before because it was so much scummier than his fancy suburban crib, but I’d stayed up late the night before fixing shit up so it’d look as nice as it could look. I’d stacked all of Mom’s nursing textbooks and notebooks and put them on the bureau in her bedroom. Evelyn had even gotten out our old Dirt Devil and cleaned up the floor a little, and when I left for school that morning I’d thought the place didn’t look as busted as it usually did. It had looked almost kinda nice.

  Anyway I did all that, really knocked myself out, and I’d even gone over to Key Food to fill the kitchen with the kind of healthy shit Maurice’s mom always had on hand, orange juice and graham crackers and even those little miniature carrots she kept chilled in the fridge. So yeah, that’s what I’d been afraid of: that Maurice would see how ghetto we were, how close to coming apart at the seams. It had never occurred to me that he’d see something else in this raggedy-ass apartment, much less run off his mouth about it like he did.

  As soon as we’d gone in my bedroom, he’d said, “Now I understand why you’ve never brought me here before, but I just want you to know I’m cool with it. I’m not like all those other kids at school. My parents are educated, and they’ve taught me to be accepting of all different types of people.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. Because, like a dumbass, I honestly didn’t know.

  Maurice had looked me right in the face and said, “I know your mom’s gay, Butterball. You could’ve just told me because I wouldn’t have cared.” And because he obviously wasn’t still looking at my face at the time, he went on, “I think it’s really cool, actually. I never would’ve guessed, but now it kind of makes sense.”

  I came very close to killing him dead right then, and I might’ve if not for my mom and Evelyn just on the other side of the wall. I didn’t want them to overhear nothing, which was just one of the reasons I wanted Maurice out of the apartment. Just one of the reasons.

  What Maurice was saying to me—he was telling lies. Crazy, evil lies. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t want to know what he was talking about. I tried to imagine my dad’s face if he’d happened to walk in the room at this exact moment . . . if he’d happened to walk in during all sorts of moments that had gone down since we’d moved out here. My dad wouldn’t take this shit. Not from my mother, and definitely not from stupid-ass Maurice.

  “You know who Miss Stipler is? The wellness counselor?” Maurice asked me a few seconds later. He still wasn’t keyed into my state of mind, like not even a little bit. Yeah, I knew who Miss Stipler was—a tiny, muscular woman who dressed like she was in the Army and, even at under five feet tall, looked capable of crushing Mike Tyson in the ring.

  “She’s a lesbian, too, you know, and she’s not embarrassed about it at all,” Maurice went on cluelessly. “She has a girlfriend, or partner I guess is the word she used. You should talk to her sometime if you want. She’s a nice lady, for real. She taught my health class last year and I liked her a lot. She cared about us kids in a way that not too many teachers at Watkins do, you know?”

  By this point I was having trouble breathing. I glared across the room at Maurice, seeing if I could kill him with my eyes like some minor superhero. It didn’t work. “Stop talking now, Maurice,” I grumbled, low and threatening so he’d know I meant it. I hated him, hated what he was saying, and hated how he wasn’t paying attention to me at all, like he’d gone off in his own world and forgotten all about me.

  I mean, shit. There was a limit to what I could take, with Maurice and everyone else. I was done with him, done listening to that squeaky know-it-all voice and reading his stupid-ass graphic novels that his rich parents bought him whenever he asked. He could go on and become a lawyer and make a million dollars for all I cared, but I wanted no more part in it.

  I got off my bed and walked the three steps toward where Maurice was sitting at my little desk. “Get out of my house,” I said, getting all up in his face so he’d get the message fast. You could fit about four Maurices inside my tightest pair of jeans, but somehow in that moment, for just a split second, I was the one afraid of him.

  Maurice had all the power now, but what would he do with it? He was a nobody, yeah, but one wrong word from even the biggest nobody in school would be enough—more than enough—to undo everything I’d built out here. And you just could never predict what was going to come out of that smirking, know-it-all mouth next. I thought of my dad again, of what he’d say or do if he found out. Would he blame me? Like getting stuck out here in the middle of nowhere was my choice, or like I wasn’t man enough to keep my mom on the straight and narrow. I could just see the look of disgust and disappointment on his face, and I knew it could never, ever happen.

  “Hey, relax,” Maurice said. “Like I said, I think it’s really cool—it’s like something you’d see on a TV show, you know? And your mom’s girlfriend is so pretty, too!”

  “She’s not her girlfriend,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, but all the fury impossible to miss, so that even Maurice might finally pick up what I was putting down. “And I want you out of this apartment right this second or I swear to God I’ll throw you out head first.”

  Maurice looked at me, and for the first time his eyes got all wide and scared. “Hey, listen, it’s no big deal, all right? You don’t have to get all pissed at me. I was just saying that if you had any questions or anything, Miss Stipler might—”

  “I’m not going to say shit to Miss Stipler,” I growled, “and what’s more neither is your ass. So get the hell out of here, and I mean now.” I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him to his feet.

  “All right, all right, man, chill, let go of me!”

  When I finally released my grip on his collar, I saw I’d been holding on tight, pulling the shirt so close to his ne
ck that it left a little mark when I let go. We were at the door of the apartment now, and thank God my mom and Evelyn were both in the kitchen, talking and laughing together. My mom never sounded that happy when it was just me around.

  I opened the front door of the apartment and shoved Maurice as hard as I could into the hall, then shut the door fast behind him. Then I walked right back into my room and shut that door, too. Didn’t want to put no damper on all the fun and games my mom and Evelyn were having.

  About two minutes later, I heard a knock and then my mom’s voice. “Boys?” she said. “Dinner’s ready.”

  When I shuffled out into the main room, I could tell she was surprised to see me alone, but, being my mom, she held her tongue. Evelyn, as usual, was less discreet. “Where’s your friend?” she asked.

  “He had to go home,” I muttered, thinking, That asshole is not my friend.

  I saw my mom and Evelyn exchange a look. I was getting pretty sick of adults and all their looks, but what could I say about it? Nothing, so I just kept on sitting there on the couch where I ate all my meals. Evelyn and Mom let the subject drop, too, and I thought there might have been some benefits to living in a house where no one ever said shit.

  I never spoke to Maurice again, or not directly. He came up to me a few times in the cafeteria, looking droopy and pathetic, but I never turned around, never even nodded at him in the hall ever again. I decided to just let it all slide until that day about two weeks after his visit to my apartment when I felt a little tap on my shoulder in the cafeteria line.

  I turned around but didn’t see anyone until I looked down toward my feet. There, about a foot below me, was Miss Stipler, the dyke health teacher Maurice loved so much. She looked like she was hopping the next plane to Afghanistan in these crazy green pants with pockets bulging out everywhere. Even for Watkins, her outfit was crazy as shit.