Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  “I’ll get the money!”

  “Get it now!”

  I looked to Cullen to see about the alarm and what to do next, but Cullen just stood there staring at the clerk, not saying anything. The guy was taking such a long time getting all the cash out of the register, and I was terrified about that alarm, so I screamed—not even words, just a wild, maniacal noise from my throat—and I pointed the gun at a refrigerator full of beer and pulled the trigger.

  The glass exploded. Beer poured out. It felt like some ancient door to the underworld had opened up inside me. I couldn’t breathe, and I tried to stop my arm from shaking as I pointed the gun at the clerk, who had gone pale and appeared frozen in place.

  “Open. The. Register,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Ray, just, Jesus . . . relax. I’m doing it.”

  The register slid open. The guy gathered the cash. Cullen stared at him, but with a look that was somehow different from the one he’d been sporting just one minute ago. Because of the gunshot? Because he was scared? I looked from Cullen to the clerk and back to Cullen, trying to think. The guy pushed a pile of cash across the counter.

  “Here,” he said. “Go.”

  Cullen scooped up the cash and pulled my sleeve. “Come on.”

  “Wait,” I said, turning to the clerk. “What did you say?”

  Cullen grabbed my shoulder, pocketing the money. “The alarm! Let’s go!”

  My name. He had said my name. Hadn’t he? I stared at him and instantly understood everything. I knew who this guy was and why he looked so familiar. How could I not have seen it right away? He was bigger, sure, wider in the shoulders, and older, but he had the same almond-shaped eyes and short, sloping nose. They could have been cousins. Or . . . brothers.

  I smiled. “You think I’m stupid?”

  “What? Ray, come on, there’s no time.”

  “What’d you do? Deactivate the alarm?” I pointed with the gun to a security camera in the ceiling. “Turn those off too?”

  “Just go,” the clerk said. “Go!”

  I tried to remember his name. Amir had told me about him. He went to Seton Hall. Worked part-time for their uncle. The name was in the blazer, I remembered. The hand-me-down that Amir wore.

  “Malik,” I said.

  “Look, Ray . . .” Cullen started.

  “How dumb do you think I am?”

  “We need to leave right now!”

  “What’s the rush?” I said. “None of this is real anyway. We’re not actually robbing a convenience store, are we?”

  “No, but you did actually shoot up the beer case, genius.”

  I was so mad. Everything went hot and white, and there was a dizzy moment when I wasn’t there. When I didn’t exist. I heard the next explosion of the gun before I even felt the trigger give. The soda case. Boom. The milk case. Bang. I walked the aisles of the store, shooting as I went: blasting bags of chips, incinerating aspirin bottles. Cullen and Malik came after me. I shoved over one of the shelves. Candy bars and gum packs tumbled across the floor.

  “Ray!” Cullen was shouting. “Calm the fuck down!”

  “This is so stupid,” I shouted back. “This isn’t at all what I wanted. I wanted something real!”

  I heard a door open in the back of the store. When I looked to see what it was, Cullen lunged at me, grabbing for the gun. He had my shirt with one hand and was grabbing for the gun with the other. I kept pulling away, but he wouldn’t let go, and I couldn’t see the clerk anymore, and someone was coming from the back of the store where that door had opened. Cullen and I tumbled to the floor of the snack aisle. He snatched the wrist of my gun hand, and I squirmed away from him. He scrambled across the floor at me like a spider, grabbing and crawling and screaming at me, and someone was coming from the back of the store. He grabbed my arm and sunk his fingers into a bruise where Nick had hit me, and I shouted in pain and elbowed Cullen in the eye and bang! The gun fired into a shelf of groceries. Cullen rose and stumbled back, knocking into and tipping over the same shelf I had just shot. I heard Malik groan on the other side, pinned under the weight of the rack.

  The fading echo of the gunshot rippled through me for a moment that seemed to last forever. I couldn’t move. The world blurred. Malik was on the floor. I held on to a refrigerator door for balance. Cereal was spilled everywhere. Broken bottles. Glass. Malik moaned. His hand was on his stomach, and when he brought it away it was covered in blood. Blood on his hand. On his shirt. On the floor.

  Something cracked open in my chest. I dropped the gun. And I ran.

  It was only when I sprinted across the street and up the muddy slope into the trees, slipping in the mud, rising, slipping again, breathing like crazy and trying to stop the earth from spinning on me, that I dared to look back to see who had been coming out of that back room.

  But of course I already knew. I crouched in the brush and looked at the store. There was Malik, Cullen, and this new third person. He was kneeling next to the injured clerk. I locked eyes with him. I knew I should run, but I couldn’t look away.

  He was right there. Holding his bleeding brother. Staring at me.

  Cullen

  DECEMBER 26 I was standing at a pay phone outside a deli in Jersey City. It was a little after dawn, and I looked down a street lined with row houses to the Hudson River. My cell battery was dead, and Amir wasn’t answering his phone. It was six in the morning, but you’d think with all that was happening he’d be sleeping with the damn phone to his ear. My fingers felt like frozen glass. “Come on, man,” I said, jumping in place. “Pick up the phone.”

  On Christmas night, Brielle, Ray, and I had holed up in what was once maybe a house or a hospital or a hotel but that was now an abandoned building that looked like a haunted castle. It was three stories tall and from each corner rose a redbrick tower with a pointed top. Stone steps, a big terrace, and double doors that I swear weighed a thousand pounds. It was at street level but hidden from view by a border of bushes, which were dead and brown but which you still couldn’t see through. Once past this barrier, the place opened to a big lawn and beyond that a vacant lot filled with leftover construction machines and abandoned warehouses. Its windows boarded up, the house was splattered with graffiti. Horror movie–type stuff.

  We camped on the third floor at the top of a spiral staircase where a heap of crumbled concrete gave us a little spot for a fire. Earlier that morning, I’d tiptoed down the stairs, careful not to send the whole thing crashing down and wake Bri and Ray. The building was filled with hostile signs of earlier visitors: broken bottles, glass pipes, graffiti symbols of anarchists, satanists, and gang members, with the satanists seeming to have outlasted the others in the turf war. At the top floor, where Ray and Brielle were still huddled against the wall, sleeping on each other’s shoulders, someone had painted a red star around a black stallion’s head and listed “The Eleven Satanic Rules of Earth” below it. It wasn’t so bad in the light of day, but during the night, when we built the fire below where a hunk of ceiling had collapsed who knows how long ago, the flames had thrown a creepy-as-hell glow across the blood-colored scribblings.

  Ray hadn’t said much since we fled Rosewood the afternoon before. He stared at his feet a lot and kept shrugging his shoulders like he wanted them to swallow his head. I told him that I’d left the store just after he did—quick enough to get away but not quick enough to jump in the car with Bri and him. Ray was positive that the shot he delivered to Malik’s gut had killed him, but he wasn’t about to get anywhere near the place anytime soon to find out for sure. Of course I knew Amir’s brother worked at the store. And I knew Amir would be there on Christmas Eve. After what happened with the stolen car, I wasn’t about to let things go bad again. I was all for a good time, but I had no interest in letting Ray be questioned by the cops. It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t the type of guy who could withstand interrogatio
n. He just hadn’t grown up lying to adults the way I had.

  After I talked with Amir, I was going to buy some breakfast sausages from a nearby deli and cook them over the fire so we could all eat something hot. Then I’d sit back and wait for Amir to show up so we could get this done with and get back home before anyone got arrested or hurt or worse.

  But Amir wasn’t answering. I cursed myself for forgetting to charge my damn cell phone so I wouldn’t have to keep hanging up before his voice mail answered in order to get my two quarters back.

  I called Nana. She didn’t answer either. She was usually up by four thirty A.M. but tended to drift off for nap number one as early as six, so I left a message with the usual report: food in the fridge, be back later, love you.

  I dialed Amir one more time before deciding to try Roman.

  Ro always answered his phone. Never thought twice about it. He usually fell asleep fully clothed, phone in his pocket, and he had no qualms about who was calling or what time it was or whatever. If it rang, he picked up. This morning, he had just woken, and his voice sounded like when you’re lying on the beach and someone shuffles close by and you hear the sand below you move.

  “Yo,” he said. “Fuckers ditched me.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Bitch just drove off without me.”

  “Listen, I need a favor.”

  I heard the flick of a lighter followed by Roman inhaling and then breathing out the phrase “No fucking way,” before he fell into a brief coughing fit. “Look, I’m not messing with this shit anymore.”

  I stared down the block at the water that was so still it looked like black ice. “Listen,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Uh, no it ain’t, bro. Your boy shot that dude.”

  “Ro. How long have you known me?”

  “I don’t . . . I mean . . . you want me to count?”

  “No. I’m saying, you think I don’t know what I’m doing?”

  “Sure seemed like you didn’t.”

  “I got this whole thing covered.”

  Again I heard the lighter and Roman pulling in a bunch of smoke. “I don’t understand what you’re telling me right now.”

  “Just get your ass out here. I need you to stop and pick somebody up. Can you do that?

  “Who?”

  “Amir Shadid.”

  “Who?”

  “The brother of the guy from the store.”

  Roman coughed once and didn’t say anything.

  “Come on, man. We’re having fun out here. Wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him. “You afraid of a freshman who weighs all of ninety pounds?”

  Again he was inhaling. And then coughing. And then he was silent. For a long time. It went on so long I thought maybe he’d fallen back to sleep.

  “Don’t know what the hell you’re up to, man.” He cleared his throat and sighed, insisting on being all over-the-top and dramatic about it. Finally he said, “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  Ray

  I WOKE IN MY BED the morning after the robbery, trying to remember how I’d gotten there. I stared at the ceiling for a good while, rubbed my eyes, then moved to the edge of the mattress and rested my chin on the windowsill and thought about all the people out there in their houses. Christmas morning was sad and rainy. Even though it was daytime, some houses had their lights on because the sun wasn’t coming out. I sat there and watched my neighborhood where nothing was happening and felt a feeling I couldn’t explain. Like I was missing my home even though I was inside it, and missing my neighborhood even though I was looking right at it. There was a deep, whirring pain in the center of my head that made me dizzy.

  I remembered being in Cullen’s car with Bri. She’d been driving. And talking to me. When I thought about it now, I could almost re-create the sound of her voice but not any of the words she was saying. One time when I was little and we were at the beach, I had ducked my head under a wave and stayed underwater for as long as I could, and when I opened my eyes down there I looked up and saw the rushing foam above me, and all I thought about was how much more quietly the waves came in when you were underwater. That’s what it felt like being in the car with Bri. Like I was under a wave—one of the really big ones—and couldn’t hear anything, but also like I couldn’t breathe and knew I’d have to come up for air before the next big one came rolling in.

  I couldn’t remember if we talked about where to go or whether or not to try to find Cullen. I couldn’t remember coming home or walking upstairs and getting in bed. All I was thinking about at the time was Amir’s brother. Malik. I’d killed him. I was sure of it.

  When I finally left my bedroom window and went downstairs the next morning, I was so surprised to find Bri, Dad, and Mom sitting in the living room and all the presents waiting for us under the tree that I almost laughed. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. Maybe, I thought, everything is somehow okay. Maybe nobody will ever find out. Maybe last night never even happened.

  We sat and opened our presents, and for a while I thought it was nice, but very soon I started to understand that nobody was having fun. Dad was acting like we were all having the most wonderful time, which is maybe what tricked me, however briefly, into thinking that I was too. But if you listened closely enough and looked at his eyes when he handed the presents to me and Bri—some of them still signed “From Santa”—you could tell he was faking it. He so badly wanted us to be having a good time that he’d never admit to being less than happy himself.

  Bri and Mom weren’t faking it, though. They hardly said one word the whole time, and they both looked tired. Ever since I’d revealed the results of my latest beating from Nick, Mom had pretty much been a total wreck—she barely got out of bed and, except for last night at church, hadn’t gotten dressed in days. I knew it was going to be bad when I ripped my shirt open like that. I told myself that Dad was asking for it and that I was doing it to shock him, but I knew I was doing it for Mom too. I saw her looking at me. I felt her sadness. And later I would feel bad about it, but in the moment, showing her the truth like that—forcing her to see the real me—and knowing what it would do to her filled me with a fierce, perverted kind of pleasure.

  Bri was also quiet and moved slowly that morning, not looking at me even when I gave her a gift. I started to worry that maybe she’d end up like Mom someday and that I would be the one who had sent her down that path with what I’d done in the store. I wasn’t exactly giving her a great present—it was a sweater Dad had bought at the mall that he let me put my name on. In all the excitement about the robbery, I never thought to buy anyone gifts. It occurred to me now that I hadn’t thought at all about any of the days that would come after the robbery. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, right after it happened, the world had stopped spinning and we all just disappeared.

  It wasn’t lost on me that today was supposed to be in celebration of the birth of Jesus. There was a little nativity scene set up on a table over by the Christmas tree. When we were younger, Bri and I used to fight over who got to put the little plastic baby Jesus in the manger on Christmas morning. I didn’t know who put it there this year. Dad, probably. To me, Jesus was even more mysterious and confusing than God. I knew a lot of people found God through Jesus, and vice versa, but to me the two didn’t have anything to do with one another. If I ever did find a way to believe in one, I was pretty sure that it would take me a whole other lifetime to believe in the other. In any case, none of that really mattered anymore. There was a part of me that still hoped God would, by some miracle, decide to reveal himself to me, but deep down I knew that after last night it wasn’t going to happen. Why would He bother with someone like me?

  But what first got me thinking about Jesus and how Bri and I used to fight over the nativity scene was that she
got me a really nice present: Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession.

  “I don’t know what type of confession they mean,” she told me. “But I saw you reading the other one.”

  “St. Augustine,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “So I saw this and thought you might like it.”

  I did like it. Even before I opened it and read a single word, I knew I liked it. And I wished I could have told Bri that, but something inside me kept me from doing so. Maybe it was what had happened the night before. Or maybe it was how badly I felt about the dumb sweater that she probably wouldn’t even wear. Maybe it was Dad looking at the two of us with a sappy grin like he wanted us to hug or something. Most likely, though, even as awful as I felt about everything—most of all the shooting—it was simply that she was my sister, and I was her brother, and I couldn’t remember how to get along with her like we’d done when we were little. Each day we seemed to wake up as two new people who had to introduce themselves to each other all over again.

  “Cool,” I said to her. “Thanks.”

  After breakfast, Mom had gone back to bed and Dad was at the sink washing dishes. I was sitting on the couch next to the tree in the living room. I hadn’t eaten much at breakfast and now felt like I might pass out. I sat there feeling my heart beat like crazy, afraid that the underwater feeling was coming back and trying to make it stop. Bri walked by me on the way up to her room, motioning for me to follow.

  “Why?” I said.

  She glanced quickly at Dad, not wanting him to hear, and motioned again as she hurried away.

  She closed the door to her room when I stepped inside. It smelled flowery and was really warm.

  She paced the room. “We need to talk,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. Suddenly I felt nauseated. All the things I didn’t want to think about came rushing in.

  She tapped a nervous fingernail against her front teeth. “I don’t know what to do.”

  My chest felt tight.