by Randy Ribay
I don’t answer, and he drops his head back into his hands. Except now he’s clenching and unclenching his fists over and over again.
My eyes drift past Wallace, to one of the two photos tacked on my wall. It’s a shot of Bunny and me when we were nine, arms draped around each other’s necks. We had just won this two-on-two tournament we used to play in every spring. I remember that after the last game this chubby little kid wiped his booger on my hand when we went to shake.
Bunny was amazing even back then. People we didn’t even know would come and watch our games, oohing and ahhing every time he schooled someone.
Sketchy old dudes always hung around at those tournaments, handing Bunny business cards, saying they’d never seen anyone like him and they were personal trainers and they could work with him for free even though they didn’t normally do that and blah blah blah. We’d see some of the same ones every time, acting like they were his dad or coach or something, talking about his “natural talent.” Like they didn’t have anything better to do with their time than watch kids ball. Of course, we all knew their game: Try to get in good with a rising star and ride his coattails to the top.
But Bunny didn’t go for any of that. Even though a lot of kids our way did, maybe hoping they’d find some pride or popularity, maybe a new father figure, or maybe at least someone to throw a little cash their way when new sneakers came out.
Nah. Bunny didn’t need any of that. He stayed out of trouble. Listened to his actual coaches. Went to skills clinics and camps. Studied plays on YouTube. Put in extra time on the court, the track, and the weight room whenever he could. I’ve never seen anyone so focused and determined in my life.
I don’t think anybody knows this, but Bunny doesn’t even know how to ride a bike. Dude spent so much time practicing and learning to ball, he never got around to it.
My eyes slide to the other photo on my wall. It’s Wallace and me at his eighteenth birthday party. We’re sitting on his couch with those little cone-shaped hats, and he’s got his arm around my shoulder as we both flash peace signs at the camera.
I use the term “party” loosely. His grandma threw it for him, and it was only the three of us plus one of her church friends plus an Oreo ice cream cake.
I lean back in my chair, cross my arms over my stomach. I notice a loose thread on one of my sleeves, so I wrap it around my finger and yank it out to keep it from unraveling any farther.
“Tonight was a fluke,” I say. “No way they’ll win the next one without him.”
Wallace doesn’t say anything.
“And if they do, you can move to Russia. I hear they have pretty favorable extradition laws.”
He looks up at me, lip curled into a sneer. “You think this a joke, Nas?”
“I know it’s not, I just—”
“Naw, you don’t know,” he says, cutting off my apology as he rises like he’s going to hit me. “You’re safe here in your warm house. You’ve got a bed instead of a couch. A fridge full of food. A mom and a dad who give a fuck about you.” He gestures beyond me to my desk lamp. “You’ve got a fucking desk, man. And a fucking desk lamp. And whatever the fuck that shit is.” He points at my plastic organizer that has little trays for paperclips and thumbtacks and a pad of sticky notes. “Shit, cuz. We’re living in the same city, but we’re in two different worlds. You may as well be on the moon.”
Wallace storms out of my room, stomps down the stairs, and bursts through the door and out into the night.
I sit there for a moment, not knowing what to do, what to think, twirling that plucked thread around my finger. My dad appears at my door after some time. He leans against the frame, arms folded over his chest. “Everything okay?”
I shrug. And even though Wallace just got loud with me, I’m thinking about how nobody’s probably asking him that simple question right now.
“I know you mean well,” my dad says, “but some people are too far gone.”
I don’t say anything to that. I don’t even nod.
He pushes off the door frame and then starts to walk away. But then he stops and turns back. “Hey, you see Bunny’s team won?”
When I answer, my words are flat as pancakes. “Yeah, Dad. I did.”
He nods. “When he gets home, you should slide over and say congratulations. All this noise with the state can’t be easy on him. I bet he could use a friend.”
“Maybe,” I say, wondering if my dad would still love me if he knew what I did to Bunny. If he knew who I really am.
“Whatever you think is best,” he says, and then goes back downstairs.
Problem is, I don’t have any idea about that.
39
Bunny
I pull down my hood as I walk through the door behind Eric and Drew and into the noise. I feel everyone’s eyes on me, probably since I don’t ever show up at these things. But I told Brooke I’d come by if we won, and a deal’s a deal. Even though it’s a school night, my parents said it was cool so long as I don’t drink and I’m home and in bed by eleven. Guess they thought it’d be good for me to escape from the stress of what’s going on with the state for a few moments.
Stacy’s house is huge, of course. I can tell even with lights low. The ceiling’s, like, two or three stories high with a few skylights, and there are hallways and staircases going off the entry room in different directions. The place is packed with kids who look happy that we won and happy to be out of their school uniforms. And even though Kendrick Lamar’s blasting from some unseen, high-end sound system, hardly anyone’s dancing. Most are standing around with those red cups, talking. I recognize some kids from around the hallways, but I don’t know most, since I keep to myself. A guy who falls in that second category steps in front of me. As Eric and Drew keep walking, the guy gives me a high-five.
“Wesley Snipes!” he shouts.
I look over my shoulder. “What?”
He notices my confusion. “Sorry—I know that’s not your name. It’s just that you look like Wesley Snipes, dude.”
For the record, I don’t look anything like Wesley Snipes.
He pushes a red cup into my hand. It looks like it’s filled with foam. “Hey, you know I used to live in Whitman?”
“Oh. What neighborhood?”
“Well, not like Whitman proper. But right outside it.” Then he names the next town over, the place where a lot of the white people who used to live in Whitman moved to during the sixties.
The kid keeps talking, but I walk away and make my way through the house to catch up with what seems like the only two people I know here.
In the dining room, people are crowded around a long table. Like a visitor on another planet, I stop to see what’s going on. There are red cups arranged in a triangle at either end. Two guys are trying to toss a Ping-Pong ball into the cups on the opposite end. Beer pong, I guess. I don’t go to a lot of parties, so I’ve never seen people play it except on TV and in movies. One of them eventually succeeds, everyone cheers, and the other kid plucks out the Ping-Pong ball and downs the drink in a single gulp.
A moment later, a girl with long brown hair walks up, squealing with delight. It’s Stacy.
“Ohmygod! Bunny!” she says, and then comes in for a hug. She’s all short, so I have to bend down so she can get her arms around my neck.
After I pull out of the hug, she goes up on her tiptoes and starts looking around. “Brooke’s here. I have to find her.”
“Why?” I ask. “I’m probably not going to stay very—”
She disappears into the crowd before I finish my thought.
My instinct is to pull out my cell to kill some time and avoid having to talk to anyone. Even if I did have my phone, though, I’m not sure what I’d do with it. Keyona had wanted to talk after the game, but I told her I was tired and going to sleep early. No way I’m about to hit up Nasir anymore. That leaves social media. But I stopped using most of those apps a while ago, and I definitely wouldn’t want to hear what people are saying about tha
t article the paper posted online this afternoon.
So I keep watching the beer pong game. There are a few more close shots before one finally makes it into a cup again. More cheering erupts as more beer is chugged.
I look into my own cup. The foam has settled, and it looks like it’s only about one-third full now.
A few moments later, Stacy reappears. “Found her.” She grabs my wrist and begins dragging me through the crowd. We leave the game behind us and cut through the kitchen, where someone’s doing a handstand on top of a keg while the other kids are chanting. I kind of want to see what this is all about, but Stacy’s on a mission. I follow her through a maze of hallways until we come out to the bottom of a staircase. Stacy lets go of my wrist and then points up the stairs. “Go.”
“Why? What’s up there?” I ask, more because I feel the need to say something than because I don’t know who’s up there.
She then puts her hands on my back and starts pushing me to walk up the staircase.
“All right,” I say, and start going up on my own.
“Have fun!” she calls up to me in a singsong voice before slipping away.
The staircase curves around a corner, where I find Brooke sitting on the steps just above the landing, drink in one hand and phone in the other. She’s in a T-shirt and jeans, but looks better to me than she does in the cheerleading outfit. Maybe it’s because she looks more normal, more comfortable. She smiles when she sees me, puts her phone away, and says something. Even though it’s quieter up here, it’s still hard to hear with the party just below.
I can’t hear you, I mouth.
She leans forward, and I put my ear next to her mouth. “You came!” she says. I feel the warmth of her breath on the side of my face.
Then we reposition so I can speak into her ear. “I said I would.”
Brooke holds up her cup, and I clink mine against it—as much as you can clink plastic. Then I sit down on the step next to her.
“Didn’t think I’d see you tonight,” she says.
“Why’s that?”
It hasn’t gotten any quieter, so we have to keep taking turns talking into each other’s ear.
She takes a drink. “I don’t know. Some people say you think you’re better than the rest of us.” I must pull some kind of face because she throws up her hands in mock surrender. “Chill, Bunny. I didn’t say I think that.”
“They’re wrong.”
She shrugs. Takes another drink. “Well, you don’t hang out with anyone at St. Sebastian’s—”
“I hang out with Eric and Drew,” I say.
“Really?” Brooke says, brushing her blond hair back. “Not counting burritos the other week, this is the first time I’ve seen you with them outside of school or basketball.” Her eyes go to my cup. “By the way, I remember you saying something about having a drink with me if we won?”
Maybe to prove I don’t think I’m better than everyone here, or maybe because I’m still upset about everything in my life, I down my drink in one gulp like the kids playing beer pong downstairs. It tastes nasty as hell, but I force myself to swallow every last drop, making a face as I do so.
Brooke smiles and gives me a high-five. “How do you like it?”
I gaze into the bottom of my empty cup. “Tasted like ass.”
“Oh, so you’re familiar with the taste of ass?” She laughs.
I laugh. “You know what I mean.”
“True.” She frowns like an emoji. “This beer’s pretty shitty. I told Stacy to spring for the better stuff, but she said no one cares. You get used to it, I guess.” She takes another drink.
Maybe she’s right. I’m starting to feel a warm glow at the center of my stomach. It’s kind of nice, and I get why people drink, because I’m already wondering if another one will make my stomach warmer.
“Refill?” Brooke asks as if reading my mind.
I nod, and she takes me by the hand and leads me back downstairs to the keg, where some random kid fills my cup and then hands it to me while bowing as if I were royalty. Brooke laughs as I thank him. The kid refills Brooke’s, then all three of us clink our cups together and drink. Before I know it, I’ve emptied mine. Brooke starts chatting with the kid as he refills my cup again. I drink it as I wait, and sure enough, as I stand there my stomach does get warmer and glowier, and I know that’s not a word as soon as I think it, but I don’t even care. I say it aloud: “Glowier.”
A few people look at me, but I don’t care about that either. In fact, there’s a lot I suddenly find myself not caring about right now. Keyona. Nasir. The bookstore. The NJSIAA. My future.
As I get one more refill, Brooke leans into my ear and says, “Be careful, rookie,” then she pulls me away from the keg and back through the crowd. I’ve got this floaty, drifting feeling, like I’m a boat.
“I’m a boat,” I say.
“What?” she says.
“Nothing,” I say.
We climb the steps, and I’m about to sit down at the same spot where we were before when Brooke leans in and says, “It’s too loud to talk here! Let’s go upstairs!”
I nod, because why not? And then I take another drink.
She smiles, turns around, and leads me all the way upstairs. To be honest, I try not to look at her butt, but it’s right there and it’s looking real nice in those jeans.
Before long, we reach the top. She leads me down a hallway and into a dark room, then closes the door behind us. The sounds of the party are distant and muffled.
Brooke flips the light switch. “That’s better,” she says, no longer having to shout.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light and for my ears to stop ringing, but when they do I check things out. There’s a dresser on one wall, a patterned chair with an ottoman in the corner, and a bed with a nightstand in the other corner. All clean and modern looking like it’s right out of an IKEA catalogue. There’s some abstract art on the wall, but no photos or anything personal anywhere.
Also, I think I can see Brooke’s bra through her T-shirt.
“One of the guest rooms,” Brooke explains.
I take a drink, imagining what it must be like to live in a house with multiple guest rooms. What it might be like to see Brooke’s bra not through a T-shirt.
Brooke climbs onto the bed and positions herself so she’s lying on her stomach, propped up by her elbows at the edge of the mattress so she can still hold her cup.
I consider lying down next to her but decide to sit in the chair instead. I lean back, put my feet up on the ottoman, and take another drink.
“There’s so much I don’t know about you, Bunny Thompson.”
I nod. Drink. Enjoy the feeling of my stress slipping away with each sip, like fallen leaves floating downstream.
“How’s dance going?” I ask.
She laughs again. “I can’t believe you remembered.” She looks into her cup, takes a drink. “It’s going well. You really should come to our spring recital in April.”
“Sure,” I say, because anything seems possible right now. “Remind me when it gets closer.”
We fall quiet, but it isn’t even awkward. It “is what it is,” as my dad likes to say. We’re sitting there. I’m bobbing my head to the muffled bass beat I can feel thumping through the floor. Every now and then, one of us takes another sip. And it’s all cool, all very cool, so cool I don’t know why I don’t do this more often.
Brooke asks me something, but I miss it. I move out of the chair and onto the bed next to her. “Huh?”
She laughs. Leans over and sets her drink on the nightstand. “I said, who are you?”
“Who am I? Um. Bunny, I think.”
She laughs again. “I mean, like, who are you really? I know there must be more to you than basketball. But I don’t know anything beyond that.”
I shrug. “Not much else to know.”
“Liar,” she says, swinging around so she’s sitting up on the edge of the bed just like I am, the sides of our
legs touching.
“Well, if I told you everything, you wouldn’t really understand.” I lift my cup to my lips, but it’s empty.
“Oh?” Brooke asks, brushing her blond hair behind her ear.
“Like, how much can you really know a person if your life is the complete opposite?”
“What do you mean?”
“All right. Here’s one example.” I gesture around the room. “Everyone at St. S is mad rich. I don’t know what that’s like. And I don’t think I can, like how I don’t think you all can get what it’s like to grow up in the city. We can spend all day trading stories, but at the end of the day, most things you can’t understand unless you experience it for yourself.”
She doesn’t answer right away, like she’s choosing her words carefully. I watch her lips, which look nice and soft, as she says, “You’re making a lot of assumptions about the kids at our school.”
“Oh, yeah?”
Brooke crosses her legs and leans back on her hands. “Not all of them are rich. The school gives a lot of financial aid, you know. More than most Catholic schools. A lot of kids have grants or sponsors like you probably have.”
“Yeah, the other students of color recruited for sports.”
“No,” she says. “Other kids, too . . . Kids like me.”
I start to laugh, but she keeps a straight face. “For real?”
She nods. “Grants cover half my tuition.” Before I can say anything to that, she goes on. “And just because someone’s white doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. If you talked to more of your classmates, like, really tried to get to know them, you might find a few whose problems aren’t that different from yours.”
“Right,” I say, all sarcastic.
She draws away from me. “You don’t have to be an asshole.”
“Sorry,” I say, without really meaning it. “I’m just telling you it how it is. I don’t think your problems compare to mine.”
“You don’t even know what my problems are, Bunny.”
“And you don’t know mine. Not my real ones, anyway.”
“So tell me about them.”
