by Mark Oshiro
Hull rolled his eyes and returned to Shawna’s locker. She leaned up against the other lockers, rage simmering on her face. Moss shivered, the anxiety back and coursing in his veins, and he reached in his locker to grab his book.
The harsh tone in Hull’s voice reeled him back in. “What’s this?” Hull shouted. “Huh? You got an explanation for it?”
Moss turned. Hull held a ziplock bag up in the air, and Moss’s heart dropped. White pills. Lots of them. Shawna made to grab them, but Hull yanked them out of her reach. “Mr. Jacobs, hold this,” Hull said, passing the baggie to him, and Shawna was stuttering. She couldn’t get the words out of her mouth.
“No, no, no,” Shawna managed to say. “D-d-don’t.”
“What is that?” Hull shouted. “You peddlin’ drugs? In my school?”
“No, I’m not!” Shawna shot back. “I promise! Please, let me explain—”
Hull’s arm shot out, hard, and his forearm hit the spot just below Shawna’s throat, and the man pinned Shawna against a locker, her back hitting the metal so hard that it buckled. Moss dropped his lock on the ground, heard it clatter against the tile, and Shawna tried to yelp. All that came out was a strangled and pathetic sound, like the spit had curdled in her mouth.
“Don’t lie to me!” Hull yelled.
Mr. Jacobs, stunned for a few seconds, leapt forward and tried to pull Hull’s arm off Shawna. “Stop it!” he yelled. “Let him explain!” He caught himself. “Let her explain, I mean!”
Moss was pushed, and he banged his elbow on his open locker door, and students poured out around them, some coming from open classroom doors, others from various hallways. The noise rose sharply, echoing, bouncing off the high ceiling and the walls. Moss held on to his locker as he watched students swarm around Officer Hull, Shawna, and Mr. Jacobs. Phones were out. Someone shouted, “Leave her alone!” Mr. Jacobs, terror on his face, raised his arms up in a sign of concession, but then lowered them and tried to push everyone away when he saw things spiraling out of control.
But Moss’s focus wasn’t on the assistant principal anymore. Hull had pushed his arm into Shawna even harder, had lifted her in the air, and Shawna was struggling to breathe. The yelling pitched higher, and Moss just acted. If he didn’t, he knew that his anxiety would consume him. He threw himself forward, toward Hull, and was met with Mr. Jacobs’s open palm against his chest. “She can’t breathe!” Moss said, and he pushed back as hard as he could. “Stop it!”
Njemile was there, too, screaming at Hull, screaming at Mr. Jacobs, trying to get to her. “Get your hands off her!” Njemile yelled.
They were surrounded. There were so many people that Moss could no longer see anything but bodies. Students were kicking lockers to add to the din. A chair flew overhead and crashed against the space above Shawna’s locker. It plummeted to the ground and hit another student, having left a sizable hole in the wall. The screaming collided with itself, bouncing around the quad, amplified in that space, echoes on top of echoes. Yet in all the noise, the next sound was so distinct that the mob quieted, if only for a moment.
Thunk!
Hull had backed off. Shawna was on the floor. Her head had cracked against the tile. She was shaking, twitching on the floor, her eyes rolled up. “What the hell? What the—” Hull never finished what he was saying. Mr. Jacobs shoved him to the side, and he smacked into a couple of kids who had crowded in the hallway.
“What have you done?” Mr. Jacobs shouted, his pale face red, his eyes narrowed in rage.
Moss fell to his knees next to Shawna, but he had no idea what to do. He grabbed her shoulders and tried to keep her from sliding across the floor. “What do I do?” Moss shouted, the beginning of a panic attack swelling in his throat.
Shawna sputtered, and students next to Moss parted, and Mrs. Torrance was there, screaming at Mr. Jacobs, pushing students out of the way, and the crowd let her go by, and she dropped to her hands and knees alongside Moss.
“Give me a piece of clothing,” she ordered. “A sweater, something like that!”
The reaction was surreal; at least five kids handed their sweaters or jackets over within a few seconds. She took a couple and balled them up, gently pushing Moss out of the way. Shawna was still shaking; Mrs. Torrance placed one of the sweaters under her head and turned her on to her side. “Stay with me, baby, stay with me,” she said softly. No one else was saying a word. There were a few camera phones out, one of them pointed directly at Officer Hull, who watched the scene with a muted horror on his face. His hands were behind his head, his eyes wide, his mouth open.
“Shawna is epileptic,” Mrs. Torrance announced, then glanced down at her watch. She slowly pulled down the front of Shawna’s shirt, exposing a newly formed welt on her brown skin. “What is this? Who did this?”
Shawna stopped shaking, and her eyes focused on Mrs. Torrance’s face, her chest rising and falling rapidly. She moved her mouth, but words weren’t coming out.
“Don’t try to talk yet, honey,” said Mrs. Torrance. “You’re fine. I am here to help you.” She looked back up. “No one answered me. Who did this?”
“He did,” said Moss, pointing at Hull, his voice shaking.
“Over these,” Mr. Jacobs added, holding up the clear bag. “An ambulance is on its way,” he added.
Mrs. Torrance ignored him, turning back to Shawna. “Shawna, honey, you all right?”
It took her a moment, but she nodded.
“Can you talk or would you rather wait?”
She swallowed. “It hurts, Mrs. Torrance.”
“What hurts?” She pointed to Shawna’s chest. “That?”
“And my head.”
“What happened, Shawna? Can you tell me?”
She swallowed again, and then her eyes shot over to Moss. “No, but he saw it,” she croaked.
The anxiety spread anew, running from the center of his torso outward as Mrs. Torrance rose off her hands. She looked back at Moss. “Mr. Jeffries, can you tell me what happened?”
He couldn’t ignore the staring. He glanced around, and every eye in the place was locked on him. Waiting. Even Mr. Jacobs, who should have been clearing the space out, who should have been acting like he was in charge, looked at Moss.
“He found that bag of pills in Shawna’s locker,” Moss said, each word a struggle to get out. “Officer Hull, I mean. He thought Shawna was selling drugs or something.”
Hull stepped forward, his eyebrows arched, but Mr. Jacobs stuck a hand out. “Don’t,” he said. “I will deal with you later.”
“It broke.”
Shawna’s voice was hoarse. Moss saw tears form in Shawna’s eyes, and his face burned with anger.
“What was that?” said Mrs. Torrance. “What broke?”
She cleared her throat and then wiped her eyes. “My prescription bottle,” she said. “It broke this morning. I had to put my meds in that bag.”
“Jesus,” Mrs. Torrance muttered, and she stood up, moving her dreads out of her face. She strode a few steps to Mr. Jacobs, who took a step back when she got close.
“Get ’em, Mrs. Torrance!” someone from the crowd yelled, but when laughter broke the silence, she raised a hand.
“Everyone get to class,” she said. “Now!”
As the students started to shuffle away, Moss was close enough to hear what she said to Mr. Jacobs. Her face was wrinkled up, and she leaned in to the assistant principal.
“You are going to fix this.”
Moss knelt down next to Shawna, unsure what to do next. Shawna looked over at him. She reached out and grabbed Moss’s hand. Thank you, she mouthed.
He held Shawna’s hand until the paramedics shooed him away.
8
Moss barely heard the front door open. He’d been staring at a scratch on the coffee table in the living room for a long while, and it felt like he’d left his body and was staring down at it from above. The sound of the door creaking open pulled him back, and he shook away the sensation. He looked up a
t his mother in her postal uniform, and something on his face must have given him up.
“Oh, no, baby,” she said, shutting the door quickly. “Did something happen?”
She scrambled over to the couch, dropping her bag on the floor and curling up next to him. He leaned into her and sighed. “I’m fine,” he said. “Or I think I am.”
“You have another attack?” She ran her hand over his scalp, something she knew helped to calm him down. But he shook his head.
“Actually, no,” he said. “I feel like I should have. Something awful happened at school today.”
He told her everything, only pausing to catch his breath when it felt like too much. He froze up again when he spoke of the holster and the gun, and Wanda pulled him into a hug. By the time he got to the end of the story, though, he didn’t feel better. He started shaking, and it unraveled. All of the fear, all of the terror, it spilled out of him along with the tears.
“How can they do that to her?” Moss wailed. “How can they keep getting away with it?”
“Oh, honey,” she said, pulling him closer. “I’m so sorry you had to see that. And I hope she’s okay.”
“It’s probably just the start,” he whined. “What if they call me next? How am I ever going to survive an interaction like that?”
“Maybe it’s time I paid a visit to that school…” Wanda said, her forehead wrinkled with concern.
“No, no, Mama, you got enough to deal with,” he said. “It’s funny … you remember Mrs. Torrance? From years ago.”
“Sure. She still teach at your school?”
He nodded. “She’s my homeroom teacher and I got her for English.” He coughed and his mother patted him on the back. “Anyway, she said today, before this all happened, that she wondered how long the school could keep this up. I wouldn’t be surprised if they finally gave up on all this after today.”
“I don’t know, Moss,” she said. “You might be surprised at how unwilling people are to turn a critical eye on themselves.”
He pulled away from her and wiped at his nose. “I musta just bottled this all up,” he said. “You know, my therapist said I shouldn’t do this, but it was like … Shawna needed help, and I just kept it all inside. I just shoved all of it deep down and now look at me.”
“I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” she said, and she reached down to her bag to pull out her water flask. She took a sip and offered him some. While Moss gulped it down, his mother continued. “You saw someone else in peril, and you prioritized them. I think you knew you could deal with yourself later, so you just pushed your own needs aside to help someone else. I ain’t an expert, but that sounds pretty noble to me.”
He tried to smile. “Yeah, I guess if you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.” Moss drank some more water and handed the metal container back to her. “I guess it’s just hard to get over the shame.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well.…” He adjusted himself and leaned against the armrest so he could face his mother. “During my last therapy session, I was talking to Constance about how sometimes I hate how emotional I am. How easy it is for me to cry or feel anxious or get upset.”
Wanda nodded her head at him. “Sure, I get that. It’s like you feel as if all your emotions are right on the surface.”
“Exactly!” Moss exclaimed.
“Is that why you get so bothered whenever we figure out what you’re thinking?”
That set him back a bit. “Wow,” he said. “I guess. I never thought about it that way.”
“Maybe I should lay off teasing you about that,” she said. “I don’t want to make you feel worse.”
“No, it really doesn’t bother me like that. It’s just that sometimes I wish my brain worked like everyone else’s. That I could get through the day without the fear of a breakdown looming over me.”
She nodded at him again. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” he admitted. “I’m just glad I can talk to you about this stuff. It’s…” He didn’t finish the sentence and his eyes dropped back down to the scratch on the coffee table that he’d stared at before.
“Moss?” Wanda said. “What is it?”
Papa got that table, Moss thought. He found it at a yard sale down the street. It was a new card to add to his Rolodex, he realized, and it gave him the courage to say the other thought that had come to him.
“Mama, you still think about Papa anymore?”
Now it was her turn to feel the spotlight. “Sure,” she said after a few moments. “It’s hard not to. There are reminders of him everywhere.”
“Like this table,” he said. “I remember when he brought it home, and he whacked it on the front door’s knob, and that’s how that scratch got there.”
She laughed. “Why did he always feel the need to bring home every piece of furniture he found, like they were stray animals?”
“Hey, I wanted him to bring home actual stray animals, so imagine my disappointment whenever he’d come home with a chair.”
“Why you ask me that, baby?” Wanda leaned into her left hand, propped under her chin.
“I was just thinking,” Moss said. “I was gonna say that I was glad I can talk to you because it’s … well, it’s almost like his death brought us closer.”
When his mother’s eyes went glassy in response, Moss felt his chest heave. “No, no, Mama, I’m sorry! I knew it sounded terrible in my head and that’s why I didn’t say it.”
But she reached out to him after wiping a tear away. “No, baby, do not apologize. You realize how lucky I am that my son is one of my best friends?”
Heat rushed to his face. “Aw, Mama, stop it.”
“It’s true! I mean, of course I wish your papa was here. I’d give almost anything to have him back. But I wouldn’t trade you for him.”
The immensity of that swallowed him, and he leaned back into his mother as she rubbed his back, up and down. Moss cried because he missed his father, missed a misguided habit of picking up unowned furniture, missed that silly humor. And he cried because his world was split. He’d been cursed by violence and loss. He’d been blessed with love and support. He couldn’t separate them, and he had to learn to live with both.
But Moss could live with all of it as long as his mother was there.
9
Moss and Njemile were getting off at the MacArthur station the next morning when Njemile said, “I declare this year over. Fin. Cerrado. Done.” With each word, she threw her hands out in front of her. On the last one, she grabbed Bits’s upraised hand, and she spun, her skirt twirling about her body.
“The year just started, and I, too, agree that this year is o-vah,” Bits replied. They turned to Moss and gave him a once-over. “As for Moss’s shirt,” they began, “I declare that school is now in session for Moss’s sense of style.”
“Thanks, Bits,” Moss replied.
“Purple’s a good color on you, boo,” Bits offered up, and then turned their attention back to dancing with Njemile across the BART platform. When they got to the stairs, Njemile demanded that Bits lift her into the air and they did so, holding her small frame aloft before setting her down. The two frolicked as best as one could frolic in a descent down stairs full of exiting BART riders, and Moss admired the effort.
They walked to school without incident, though Moss would have been hard-pressed to have noticed the detonation of an atom bomb that morning. His thoughts were scattered, jumping from one image to the next, like the Rolodex but without a purpose.
“You’re lost,” Njemile said to him as they turned onto their school’s street.
Moss waved her off with a smile. “Just in thought,” he said, “but I’m good. I guess.”
Njemile thankfully left him alone, and he was glad his friends knew when not to press him too forcefully. Moss pulled his phone out for perhaps the tenth time that morning, and opened his messages to stare at what Javier had sent that morning:
&nbs
p; Can’t wait to see u tonite!!
Moss wished that conversation came easy to him, but as he read the text over and over again, every response he came up with sounded like a cliché. How do people do this? he wondered. He’d seen Esperanza talk to girls, and the words were so natural to her. She knew how to flirt, knew how to disarm someone with a compliment, and knew how to conquer that initial mountain of awkward that usually defeated him. Maybe I should just ask her, he thought. He sent a text to her first: Esperanza, 911, need help talking to boys.
A few seconds later: I’m getting off early. Meet you at WOH when you’re off?
He sent her a GIF of Michael Fassbender saying, “Perfection,” then went back to his thread with Javier. He stared at it some more. Couldn’t he just say that he was excited, too? Was that too much?
He didn’t send a reply. His phone went back in his pocket, sitting there like a stone. He’d deal with it later.
“So,” Moss said at the first break in the conversation, “anyone hear if Shawna is okay?”
“No, I haven’t heard anything yet,” Njemile said.
“Poor girl,” said Bits.
“You seen the videos yet?” Njemile said. “It was like half my Facebook feed this morning.”
“How many?” Moss asked. “I only saw a few phones out yesterday.”
“Dude, I’ve seen hella videos so far,” replied Njemile. “From like twenty different angles.”
“Damn,” said Moss.
“Yeah. Are you surprised by that?” she said.
“I guess not,” he admitted. “But the administration isn’t going to be too happy about it.”
“My Snapchat was mostly videos from it,” Bits said, shaking their head. “It’s too much.”
“So what are we gonna do about it?” said Njemile. “I wonder if the principal will mention yesterday at all.”
“Is there anything we can do?” said Moss. He rubbed his eye with the back of his hand and yawned. “I’m sure they’ll find some way to blame Shawna for everything.”
