by Randy Ribay
“Keyona,” I say.
“I thought I lost you.”
“I know.”
She laughs. I laugh. She runs her hand over the top of my head and then kisses me once more, and it tastes like the salt of our tears.
“Sorry,” I say over Keyona’s shoulder to Nasir, who’s been leaning against the door this entire time.
“Nah, it’s cool,” he says. “Really.”
“Come over here, man,” I say.
Keyona scoots over so Nasir can stand beside me. He goes to give me a close-fisted dap, but I pull him in for a hug with my left arm. My other one may be broken, but my heart feels stronger and larger than ever. It feels so wide it could swallow the world.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Me too,” I say.
And we don’t need to say more than that. We both understand what we’re apologizing for.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he says.
“Me too,” I say. And then I laugh, because I am alive and it’s clearer than ever now that I really need to spend more of my life laughing.
Epilogue
June 15
Nasir
I put on khakis and a nice shirt, and my parents drive me to the County Correctional Facility. Nobody says anything along the way, but my mom and my dad keep glancing at me in the rearview mirror. I ignore their worrying and try to think of what I’m going to say to Wallace. I thought I’d know by now, thought I’d have a speech ready to go. It’s been a few months since that night. But every time I sat down to write something out, my mind went blank.
The jail’s downtown, only a few minutes’ ride from our place, not too far from where Wallace used to live with his grandma and where Word Up used to be before Mr. Thompson sold it.
We park in a gated lot across the street, and then my dad turns in the passenger seat to face me. “You sure you want to do this?”
I take a deep breath and try to steady my shaking hands. “I’m not sure I’d say I want to, but I think I need to.”
“We’ll be right there with you,” my mom says from behind the wheel. “If you want to leave before the time is up, just let us know.”
“It’s only half an hour,” I say.
“Still,” she says.
I nod.
We step out of the car and into the warm summer morning. The sky is a perfect blue, which contrasts with the jail, which is a series of tall, blocky buildings the color of sand and with windows like knife slits. The facility is surrounded by a red brick wall topped with coils of barbed wire. We cross the street and join the clump of visitors waiting in front of the gate. The crowd’s a mixture of people, all different ages and races. Some are smoking and chatting quietly, while others stare at their phones. Some look like this is about as routine as going to the grocery store, and some look as nervous as I feel.
I check the time on my phone. We’re half an hour early.
My parents stand on either side of me as we wait. My dad’s reading a book, and my mom’s gazing into the distance with her arms folded over her chest.
I close my eyes. I try thinking through what I’m going to say, but words won’t come. Instead, images fill my mind.
Bunny holding a trophy, hoisted onto his teammates’ shoulders.
Bunny at my door in the middle of the night.
The courts covered in snow.
Bunny’s shot with the deflated ball getting stuck in the frozen net.
Wallace appearing with a bottle and then busting it on the backboard.
The snow against my face as Wallace shoved me to the ground.
The jolts of pain as he climbed on top of me and punched me over and over again.
The glint of metal.
The thunderous crack and burst of light.
Bunny bleeding.
The snow falling.
All of it like a silent movie playing in my head. No words. No thoughts. Just images, pure and painful, flickering against the backs of my eyelids.
I start crying. I’ll never forget that it was my fault Bunny came so close to never playing ball again or worse. Or maybe it’s because I could have stopped Wallace from firing the gun in the first place if I had only said the right words in the right way. Or maybe it’s both reasons.
Anyway, my dad notices, hugs me, and offers a tissue. I shake my head. It’s not a snot-running-down-your-nose kind of crying. It’s the quiet kind.
Eventually, a couple of guards appear. One of them gives instructions I can’t hear and then opens the gate. He leads the way as the other guard brings up the rear like they’re shepherding us. We follow the crowd into the building and then stand in a line in the vestibule while they wand each person. After that, each of us signs this big-ass book, and they check our names against the computer. They put all of our belongings in these little lockers and then we wait around for the elevators.
It’s a quiet, awkward ride down a few floors. The guard cracks a joke, but nobody laughs. He repeats a few of the rules, and a moment later, the doors open and we all follow him to the visiting area.
It’s like in the movies. A row of booths, each one with a stool, a phone, and a glass wall that separates the mirrored situation on the opposite side. The thing I don’t expect is that the prisoners are already seated and waiting. I walk down the row, my parents lingering behind me, until I find Wallace sitting at the second-to-last booth. He looks like a faded photo of his former self. He’s in one of those traffic-cone-orange jumpsuits with a number stenciled on the front. His head is shaved, the lopsided fade gone. His face is gaunt. Eyes cold.
He doesn’t smile when he sees me. He just lifts his chin in recognition.
It’s a strange thing, seeing him again. In my mind, he’s been as good as dead all this time. Having him in front of me in real life feels like being with a ghost.
My hands are shaking again. I take a seat. Wallace is inches away. He picks up the phone, and I do the same.
Neither of us says anything for a minute. We hold each other’s gaze, a static silence crackling on the line. And then he speaks.
“Bunny didn’t want to come with you?” He laughs.
I don’t.
“Just kidding, man. What’s good?” The phone makes his voice sound small, but it’s the same low mumble I remember.
“Not much,” I say. But that’s not true. Bunny’s arm is healing well, and he texted me earlier that college coaches have been blowing up his phone all day since he’s officially a junior now.
But it’s not like Wallace needs to hear that.
“I wasn’t sure you’d ever visit,” he says. “Nobody visits.”
I try to gather my thoughts. Any hope I had that they’d magically form in the moment is dashed. My brain’s a mess of images from that night and raw emotion. Anger. Hatred. Sadness. Exhaustion.
“You don’t look like you want to be here, cuz,” he says.
I shrug.
“How’s life on the outside? I know the Sixers still suck.”
“I tried to help you,” I say. “I did everything I could.”
He looks away.
“Everyone says I should forget about you. That you’re a lost cause, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“They right?”
He shrugs. “Looks that way.”
I wait for Wallace to say something else, but he doesn’t. He just sits there, looking down with the plastic phone pressed against his ear.
I think about how he turned himself in a couple days after the shooting. How he pleaded guilty to the attempted murder charge. How that means by the time he’s out of here, Bunny and I will be out of college, maybe even have careers and families of our own.
My parents, Keyona, and Bunny all say that I tried and that that’s enough. They say that at the end of the day, Wallace isn’t my responsibility.
Logically, I know they’re right. But there’s something in me that keeps on asking if he is, that keeps on saying that if he continues believing he’s
nothing, then nothing’s going to change.
The night everything went down, I wish I could have spoken something so true, so powerful, that it would have caught in his soul and forced him to take his finger off the trigger. Or maybe there was something I could have said before it even got to that level. But I didn’t.
So right now, I don’t hang up on Wallace. We sit with the silence and glass between us. I continue to search for the right words, hoping they’re out there somewhere.
Acknowledgments
Much love to the team that helped bring this story to life:
To Kathryn—thank you for pretty much everything. I am a better writer and a better human being because of you. Thank you for reading so many drafts of everything I write, for board game date nights, for weekend hikes, and for season one of The Amazing Race.
To my parents—thank you for believing in me throughout the years. To my brother and sister—thank you for being excited about my writing even when I wasn’t. To all of my family—thank you for the love you send across borders and oceans. From your kind words to the selfies with my first book you posted online when you found it in the store, your support makes my heart explode.
To all of my students, past and present—thank you for inspiring me and for continuing to give me hope in the next generation. I truly believe you are more aware and more compassionate than any other.
To Margaret Raymo and the entire HMH crew—thank you for believing in this story, whipping it into shape, and sending it out into the real world. It would be grossly obvious to say this book would not exist without you all, so I won’t.
To Kaylee Davis, Kimiko Nakamura, and Dee Mura—thank you for your editorial feedback and moral support, and for handling all the business-y type stuff so I can focus on playing make-believe.
To Paul Davis—thank you for giving me insight into what life is like for a high school basketball star. Though, I’m pretty sure I beat you one-on-one when we were kids in that little court in your backyard. If not, I’m still going to tell people that I did.
To Aaron Kim, who read the very first version of Nasir and Bunny’s tale when it was just a short story—thank you for your critique notes and encouragement as I turned it into a full novel. I still remember the exact moment when you told me you knew you’d see it in a bookstore someday.
To my early readers: RJ McDaniel, Xavier Berry, Shahmar Beasley, Miles Burton, Brendan Kiely, Patrice Caldwell, and others—thank you for your honest feedback. This story is better because of each one of you. Of course, all mistakes are my own.
To Dr. Kate Delaney—thank you for answering my weird medical questions. Book-related and otherwise.
To Kendrick Lamar, Kid Cudi, Blue Scholars, and Tupac—thank you for your music. Your songs played as I wrote much of this book, and I know my words would not have been the same without yours.
To Loki and Arwen—you can’t read this because you are dogs, but thank you for making sure I wake up in the morning. Also, you are very soft, which I like.
To my YA communities in Philly, the Bay Area, and online—thank you for the panels and Twitter chats, the advice, the writing sessions, the companionship, the conversations, and the commiseration. Thank you for making me feel included, and thank you for the stories you tell.
Thank you to the teachers and counselors and coaches who care, to the teammates who know they need to look out for each other on and off the court, to the librarians and booksellers and bloggers who know that stories can save lives, and to anyone who fights for careful representation because they know how much it matters.
Finally, thank you, dear reader. You are why I write.
About the Author
Photo by Dave Londres
RANDY RIBAY was born in the Philippines and raised in Michigan and Colorado. After a decade on the East Coast, he now lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two dog-children.
Learn more at www.randyribay.com
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