by JJ Strong
He ate. The leg bobbed, table shook. I realized I was suddenly no longer in control of this enterprise. That Amir would probably go through with whatever plan he was cooking up whether or not I decided to participate. And that maybe he and Ray needed me there to keep it from going too far.
“Well,” I said. “What exactly do you have in mind?”
He held a fork full of scrambled eggs in front of his mouth, thinking. Outside the window to our right, a New Jersey Transit train sped by, on its way to the city. Amir watched it go. His eyes narrowed. He nodded slowly.
And he smiled.
“Cops and robbers,” he said. “The ultimate chase.”
* * *
So . . . Jersey City. Day after Christmas. Ray ran toward Brielle and me. We couldn’t see yet what he was running from, but obviously I already knew. I led the three of us away from the street, back to the huge abandoned lot at the waterfront. Brielle ran slowly. From somewhere not too far away, I heard sirens. Amir appeared, coming at us from the castle, a small, blurry figure leaning into the snowy wind.
Ray’s mouth hung open in perfect goddamn holy terror. From the direction of the warehouse that Brielle and I had shared earlier that day, I spotted two blue-jacketed officers sprinting across the empty property.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Look.”
Amir must have seen them too because he immediately pulled back. I took us south along the water, hooked across a concrete lot filled with huge piles of stones, then vaulted the outfield fence of a rundown baseball field. I had to boost Brielle over the fence, and Ray eased her down on the other side. By the time we reached the infield, the officers had hurdled the fence with ease and were closing in on us at a steady, uncaring pace.
This is bad, I thought.
This is bad, this is bad, this is bad.
I took Bri’s hand and pulled her onward. When we stepped off the field and onto a small deserted street, a kid in a hoodie sprinted out of a nearby patch of trees toward us. I heard him breathing and knew it was Roman. He shouted, “Wait up, yo!”
“Get out of here,” Ray told him.
“I’m here to help,” he breathed.
Bri eyed Roman, trying to make some signal of disgust push through all that exhaustion on her face.
We kept running. Four of us now. The place was all vacant space. Nowhere to ditch the cops. We moved across yet another parking lot, this one with enormous red, blue, and orange cargo containers scattered all over it. The police were close enough to shout at us and threaten to shoot, but so far no shots had been fired. When they caught us, I didn’t think they’d be gentle.
“Watch this,” Roman said.
Roman unzipped his pants as he ran and pulled out his dick—a hilariously massive thing. He turned, keeping pace with us as he stumbled backward, and waved it at the police, shouting, “You want some of this, you pig fuckers, you gotta catch me first!”
He hooked east across the parking lot, peeling away from us, his dick still bouncing wildly from his fly. One of the officers broke away to chase him. Roman crawled up the ladder of one of the cargo cans like some sort of demented orangutan, with the cop going after him.
The other cop still came at us. There was nothing to do but run. Abandon the plan. Find a hole to hide in, regroup, and take it from there. I was thinking about how to explain everything to Ray, fearing that if he got caught he might confess to an imaginary murder, and, actually, I was looking forward to revealing the truth. We’d taken this as far as it could go. I no longer thought the way that Amir wanted it to end was smart or useful or necessary, and I was eager to ditch these cops and get home.
A gunshot popped and echoed somewhere nearby. Our pursuing officer eased up, listening. Then another shot, from the direction of the castle. The cop glanced back once more in our direction, then peeled off down a side street toward the blast.
Amir’s shot diverted the cop away from us, and in another few moments, by some miracle of his wit, he found us again. We were catching our breath on some random street corner, wiping melted snow from our chins, and I said, “Ray, listen . . .” when Amir appeared, moving methodically toward us down the slippery sidewalk, a mischievous flash in his eye.
And in that one quick moment, I shoved away my hesitation for good. Okay, I thought. Whatever. Forget it. This is fun. Everything’s fine. We’re just having fun.
I snatched the O’Dell siblings by their arms and led them toward the PATH station, just like Amir and I had planned.
Ray
THERE WAS ONE DAY when Amir and I went for a run after school. No cops and robbers—just a warm-up jog we sometimes took with Cullen, but this day it was only the two of us: up South Mountain Avenue and then into the reservation toward Hemlock Falls. The falls were mostly frozen and brown, the rock covered with tons of graffiti. We moved across a big, flat stone to the top of the falls, where a little stream worked through the middle of the frozen river. It’d been a full month since I’d started training with Cullen, and I felt strong—actually refreshed after the run rather than totally destroyed.
“Do you have a girlfriend or anything?” Amir asked me.
“No,” I told him. “I barely even know any girls.”
“Me neither.”
“There was this one girl, at my old school. Cheryl Kennedy. I was totally in love with her.”
“And what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There was a party once. The only reason I was invited was because it was next door to my house, and the kid—Tim Mason—and I were friends when we were little. It was his birthday party, and I’m positive his parents made him invite me. But anyway, later in the night we were in his backyard playing truth or dare, and someone dared Cheryl to take me to the woods and make out with me.”
“Sweet.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I thought so too. So I went out there. She smiled at me or whatever and said she’d be right there.”
I stopped telling the story and watched the gray sky.
“What happened?”
“Like I said . . . nothing. She never came. I stood out there for a long-ass time before I realized. The worst part was I tried to listen to everyone laughing or joking about having tricked me, you know? But it didn’t sound like that at all. They just went on with their party. Like they forgot I’d ever been there in the first place.”
“Assholes.”
“Yeah.”
“People are fucking assholes, man. I don’t know why they have to be like that.”
“You know the weird thing about Cheryl Kennedy? I was totally in love with her. I swear. Like I was positive she was put on this earth just for me. And it took me so long to realize that everyone else was in love with her too. It’s funny how that works. It’s like the good-looking people get together with the good-looking people. But if you’re ugly, it’s not like you’re attracted to other ugly people, right? So what about the rest of us?”
Amir nodded. He lay back on the rock and sighed before he said, “Sometimes I’m pretty sure I don’t even like girls.” He closed his eyes, like he couldn’t stand to see what might happen to the world after saying something like this out loud.
I scratched at a patch of moss in a crack at my feet and let enough time pass so that the next thing I said could be a totally new topic. Of course I had the same doubts as Amir, or at least similar ones, if not exactly the same. I had all sorts of strange feelings about all sorts of people that I couldn’t seem to control, no matter how much I tried. I remembered reading a book about puberty in seventh grade and getting hard when reading the part where a bunch of guys talked about how much they jerked off as teenagers and how it was totally normal. I remembered the hard-on I got the first time I shaved the darkening hair above my lip. A boner from shaving. It was funny, when you thought about it. Then
there were all those times when some thickheaded bully would call me gay or a homo, and I’d shrug it off in the moment but then later have to figure out if maybe those kids knew something about me that I didn’t. And if so, what then? And where did that leave my urgings for someone like Cheryl Kennedy? I knew the way I felt about Amir wasn’t the same way I felt about someone like her, but I couldn’t help but think that he felt differently than I did. That he maybe liked me in some other way. Or maybe not. I never got to find out. Either way, it didn’t bother me. What did I care? I’d never known anyone like him. He changed me. Even more than Cullen did, he woke me up.
When I looked over at him, he was still lying on his back with his eyes closed. “What’s the worst thing you ever thought?” he asked.
I laughed in a strange way—feeling weird about being asked such a straightforward, out-of-the-blue question—but was actually glad I did, because Amir’s face went from being serious to kind of smiling out of the corner of his mouth.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you ever have thoughts that, after you have them, you’re like, holy shit, where did that come from?”
“Sure.”
“So . . . what’s the worst one you ever had?”
“You go first.”
“No way, I asked the question.”
I took a breath and held it in, watching a woman walk her tiny, yapping dog along the edge of the water below us. “Sometimes I think it would be easier if I were dead instead of alive.”
Amir nodded. The woman pulled her dog back from the ice, and they walked the path into the woods. “Me too,” he said.
“You think that too?”
“For sure. Things would definitely be easier if you were dead.”
He laughed and tossed a small rock into the stream.
“I think about that all the time,” he said.
I shoved him, laughing, “Fuck you.”
“You’ve been holding me back, man.”
“Right.”
We rose and moved across the rock toward the trail. I brushed off the cold, wet gravel stamped to my sweats.
“So that’s it?” I said. “I pour my heart out, and you’re not going to answer the question?”
We walked for a while and didn’t talk. We jogged across South Orange Avenue, back toward school and the late bus. While we were waiting for a traffic light, three blocks from school, he told me.
“That time I ran across 280,” he said, looking at the ground.
“Yeah?”
“It wasn’t like I wanted to get hit or anything. But when I got to the median, right before I started up again, I had this image of a car hitting me and it causing a massive, like all-time massive, pileup of cars.”
He stared off. The light had changed, but we didn’t walk. I jumped in place a little to keep warm.
“And I thought . . . that would be so. Fucking. Awesome. You know?”
“Yeah.”
“Which is so crazy,” he said. He wiped his nose, which was red and chapped from the cold. “It’s so fucking crazy! I don’t know those people. They don’t deserve that. Why would I think something like that?”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“It’s not okay.”
“I get it, though. That’s all I mean. I get that feeling.”
“It’s not like I wanted the people in those cars to get hurt. When I imagined it, they weren’t even really there. It was only the cars themselves, just . . . smashing together. The fucking noise of it all. And right there in the middle of it . . . was me.”
He sniffled and wiped his nose again, and I wanted to reach out and hug him or put an arm on his shoulder or . . . something. Of course I knew what he meant. That’s the whole reason we were here. But before I could muster the courage to reach out for him, he stepped into the street, and so I followed him, saying nothing.
* * *
Standing now in Jersey City with my hands on my knees, breathing hard, three blocks down the street from the castle, which was just as marked up with graffiti as Hemlock Falls and whose towers you could see poking through a line of leafless trees, I watched Amir come at me, and I took a breath, and I said out loud, “Amir, please just let me go,” before finally standing upright and following Cullen.
We ran for what felt like hours with Amir a steady two blocks behind us. Ran in the snow and cold and across intersections, which became busier and busier as we moved into the heart of the city. There was a passage from St. Augustine that I’d read and reread until I’d memorized it: “If I did anything against my will, it seemed to me to be something which happened to me rather than something which I did, and I looked upon it not as a fault, but as a punishment.”
I knew that I played some mysterious role in the unfolding of my own fate. Otherwise why would I exist as a conscious being at all? But still it felt more like this was happening to me rather than because of me.
Cullen led us down the steps of the PATH station. At the bottom of the stairs stood two enormous men in camouflage, each with an epically fierce machine gun slung over their shoulder. Cullen pulled out a MetroCard, swiped it, and motioned me through the turnstile. He did the same for himself and Bri. I was dumb. So clueless. Why would he have a MetroCard? It didn’t seem strange until long after the fact. But there were all sorts of things about Cullen I didn’t know, so I let it happen.
We hurried onto the train. Navigated from one car to the next, slipping between holiday travelers, opening and closing the heavy doors between cars, all the way to the front of the train. I peeked out the windows and did not see Amir. The doors closed with three warning beeps and a hush.
The train lurched forward, and soon we were rocketing under the Hudson toward New York. I watched the door at the end of the car. If Amir was on the train, I wasn’t sure if he could move between cars while in the tunnel. Maybe the doors automatically locked or something. I wasn’t about to walk over there and check.
“Tell him,” Bri said, hitting Cullen on the knee.
“What?”
“Tell him what you told me.”
“About what?”
“Malik!” Bri said. “He’s not dead!” She nudged my arm. “Ray? You hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He’s alive. Right, Cullen?”
Random colored lights flitted past the window—green, red, blue. Cullen stared at me and didn’t say anything.
“Tell him! Tell him now!”
My ears popped as we came out of the tunnel.
Bri punched Cullen on the shoulder. “What is the matter with you?” She punched him again and again. Across the aisle, a family with two little kids watched us. I looked at our reflections in the black window and tried to see ourselves as they saw us: dirty, wild, unsupervised. Delinquents.
The train stopped at Christopher Street, and Cullen shook his head no at me. I understood. Amir would expect us to get off here. We stayed put until Ninth Street, then exited. As soon as you were in the city, everything was faster. People swarmed on the platform when we stepped off the train, tossing bags over their shoulders, shoving strollers through the ruckus. The three of us huddled in a corner. I was too afraid to move, hoping that if Amir had been on the train and by some horrible stroke of luck exited at this station, he’d be swept along in the flow of traffic and end up looking for us at street level.
Bri was agitated. “Ray, listen to me. He told me. Cullen told me that Malik is alive. It’s okay. Okay? Can you listen to me, please?”
Yes. Okay. I was listening now. I understood. Not everything—not yet. But enough.
At the far end of the platform, through the crowd, I saw him. His eyes. His hand in a jacket pocket. He moved against the momentum of the crowd, pushing upstream toward us. He was my friend. He’d brought me here.
Cullen looked down the black tunnel. �
��We gotta go.”
“Go where?” Bri’s hands were shaking. She was trying not to cry.
“We’ll pop out at the next station.”
“Are you crazy?”
“It’s our only chance!”
“No! No, no, no!”
Amir came toward me, stalking through the crowd. I understood what he wanted me to do. I knew how to win the game.
“I’ll go.”
“Ray, no . . .” Bri tried to grab my coat, but I pulled away and looked down the tunnel to make sure no trains were approaching.
“I need to do this!” I said to her. “You stay!”
Bri was crying for real now. “You don’t have to! Cullen, please, tell him he doesn’t have to!”
Cullen stood with his arms crossed over his chest—maybe he was grinning a little.
“Stop it!” Bri shouted so it echoed throughout the tunnel. “Cullen, why are you letting this happen? Please! Stop it!”
Bri again tried to grab my coat to keep me from going, and as I turned to pry her hands off me I saw Amir shove his way between two people, gun in his pocket, eyes wild. This was it. My turn had come.
I pushed my sister away, leaped onto the tracks, stumbled once, rose, and sprinted into the darkness. I turned back just long enough to see Amir taking the leap, chasing after me. The single track opened up to a cavernous maze of tracks. I hurdled the third rail and landed on the middle path, where the express trains come screaming through.
I ran. A cold wind came through the tunnel. It was so loud that I worried I might not hear an oncoming train, but then almost immediately the ground shook with a roar and a spotlight came out of the black. I tripped across to the neighboring tracks—there were maybe six of them in all—but wherever I went, the light seemed to come right at me. It grew and grew, and the whole world shook, and I looked back, expecting to find Amir but instead seeing another train, just as bright, just as loud, screaming at me from the other direction. The air exploded when the two trains crossed paths with me standing upright in the space between them, clutching a steel beam. The sensation was like if you were falling through the sky and got caught in a storm cloud full of lightning.
