Breakaway (5 page)

In the next minute, the big Yorktown center was down, a tangle of limbs with Mario, who had also taken a tumble. It all happened so fast, the refs couldn't even determine if a foul had been made or not.

The Yorktown player jumped to his feet shouting, “Goddamn spic! What the hell was that?”

“Who're you calling a spic?” Mario asked, giving him a shove that didn't even upset the guy's balance.

The Yorktown player towered over Mario so I stepped in between them and bumped the guy with my chest. “Say it again,” I said as I shoved him. He took a stumbling step back, one arm windmilling to keep his balance. I repeated myself, my voice quiet and level. “Say it again.”

“Fuck you,” the guy said, but he was starting to look worried.

“I want to hear you say it,” I said as I slapped him on the side of the head, the blow meant to humiliate more than hurt.

“Jaz, let it go, man,” Mario said, hands on his hips as he squinted into the sun.

By now Arturo and the ref were there, Arturo calling my name with a warning. I ignored them, grabbed the guy by the collar, and shook him. His hands went to my wrists as he tried to relieve the pressure of the twisted collar on this throat. “I want to hear you call him a spic again, you fucking pussy,” I said.

The ref was pulling at the Yorktown kid while Arturo was pulling at me.

The Yorktown player punched me then, hard to the cheekbone, and I saw stars.

My vision was blurred from anger and the blow to the head and there was a confusion of shouts from the people around us. Gathering a surge of strength from adrenaline, I threw Arturo's hand off and got the guy by the hair. I pounded his face with my right fist, two punches that cut his lip on his teeth. Though I felt nothing in my hand at the time, later my knuckles would be sore for a few days.

He drove his elbow up into my chin, and my teeth clacked together loudly in my head. The taste of hot blood filled my mouth and he punched me again as I turned my head to spit blood onto the grass.

I got in one last punch, a solid blow to his jaw that knocked him back on his ass, before someone grabbed me by the arm and yanked me back, hard, so that I was forced to let go of the guy. He scrambled away from me crab fashion on his butt as I turned my anger on the person who was pulling my arm. By the time I realized it was Mario pulling me, I had already given him a shove and sent him reeling.

“Goddamnit, Jaz!” Mario shouted at me. “Chill the fuck out!”

Arturo was there and the coach from the Yorktown team along with the ref blowing his whistle and waving a red card, everyone shouting and carrying on. The guy I had been fighting was still on the ground, one hand covering his mouth as blood seeped through his fingers.

“You're like a fucking ape,” Mario said as he followed me off the field.

“Shut up, you goddamn spic,” I muttered under my breath.

Mario laughed. “Oh, man,” was all he said.

That was how I ended up spending the last ten minutes of the game on the bench. The Yorktown player I had been fighting was thrown out of the game too after Mario explained the reason for the fight.

We ended up losing to Yorktown 2–1. I was pissed at myself for letting it happen. If I hadn't been on the bench for most of the game, we might have had a chance. Jordie was pissed too and made a big show of it for his audience, Cheryl and her friends Raine and Madison.

If there was such a thing as the popular crowd at school, Cheryl and Madison were its royalty. Their families had enough money and connections that they could afford to blow off schoolwork and spend all their time partying and would still have all the options of college and a bright future open to them. Mario was right about Cheryl being plastic, but it didn't surprise me that Jordie had taken an interest in her. Being popular had always been more important to him than it was to the rest of us. His family had money, real money, with a vacation house at the beach and a membership to the country club, though Jordie had never invited Mario or Chick or me to see either one.

Madison and I hooked up at a party once, made out when we were both drunk. She never spoke to me again after, so maybe she didn't remember. More likely she woke up the next day and realized she had swapped spit with some white trash guy at a party and would spend the rest of high school regretting it.

Raine Blair was of indeterminate social clique, equally at home with the Goths and the drama club freaks, but she came from a rich family so she orbited the popular clique as well. She was in my Civics class and was always piping up about current events and political issues. Her hair was a violent shade of blond with bright pink streaks throughout, and her clothes were an amalgam of '80s punk and '90s grunge. I also knew from locker room talk that she had a reputation as a girl who slept around, but that mostly struck me as wishful thinking on the part of the guys doing the talking.

Jordie called me over as I was walking to the locker room to change back into my street clothes. I wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone.

“Hey, Jaz, you know Cheryl and Madison and Raine, right?” Jordie asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I said with a nod at all of them. “How you doin'?”

“You look terrible,” Cheryl said with a giggle. “That guy really messed up your face.”

“It's not so bad,” I said, wishing I could tell her to fuck off.

“Is it true that guy called Mario a spic?” Madison asked, cracking her gum with a series of small clicking sounds.

“Something like that,” I said.

“That is messed up,” Madison said, her eyebrows raised as she studied her phone and quickly lost interest in our conversation.

“Are you okay?” Raine asked. The way she asked it was like she actually gave a crap and my head swiveled to look at her curiously. Her cheeks went pink with a blush.

“Yeah, I'm fine—,” I said, but Jordie cut me off then, drawing Cheryl's attention away from me and back to him.

“So, are we going to go get something to eat?” he asked Cheryl.

“Sure,” Cheryl said with a bright smile though Raine remained silent.

“You gonna roll with us, Jaz?” Jordie asked me. “We're headed to the diner.”

“I'll catch up with you later,” I said, knowing I had no intention of going anywhere with them. My face had started to ache and I wasn't in a mood to be civil. Jordie would be pissed if I blew his chance with Cheryl.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mario and Chick were waiting for me when I emerged from the locker room thirty minutes later, my hair still wet and my cheek aching. “You ready, princess?” Mario asked.

We headed down to the park near the apartment complex where Mario and I lived. The park was huge and included a network of trails and bike paths that stretched between two major residential areas. A picnic pavilion of raw wood was perched on the bank of the stream that meandered through the woods, a small footbridge the only access point to the pavilion from the bike trail.

A small path, barely noticeable unless you knew it was there, ran along the edge of the stream at the point where it flowed into the thickest part of the woods. Under the canopy of tree limbs, a collection of large boulders split the ribbon of water into two smaller streams. We'd sit on the rocks drinking beers or, when we were lucky, would bring girls to this place under the cover of darkness. Since only the pavilion area was accessible by car, the cops rarely bothered coming this far into the park.

Usually we kept a stash of beer hidden in a hollow space under one of the trees that grew along the bank of the stream, the dirt below it cut away from the moving water. Buried under a pile of damp leaves I found a six-pack of Natty Light and a single bottle of Miller. I left the Miller and carried the six-pack to the large rock in the middle of the stream where Mario and Chick already sat. It was close to dusk, dinnertime, when the park quieted and we saw only the occasional person walking over the footbridge with a dog or a baby stroller. Sometimes we would see other people our age, usually people we knew. Once the sun went down, the park was ruled by people our age, the only place we could always go to get away from our parents and the cops.

Sometimes the cops did come into the park, especially late on Friday and Saturday nights, to catch us out partying. We knew the park so well that as long as we made it into the woods we could get away easily. The cops didn't care enough about us to risk twisting an ankle or getting jumped by some delinquents, so they stayed out of the woods. It was only in the pavilion or along the trails that we had to worry about getting busted.

As we sat sipping on our beers, Mario pulled a bowl out of his pocket and loaded it with something. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from saying anything about it. Sometimes I smoked pot, but not often since it didn't seem to do much besides make me paranoid and sometimes, like a bonus, would give me a headache. Mario had been doing much more than smoking pot lately, and doing it a lot, sometimes during school. He would disappear during lunch and return glassy eyed and stupid for fifth period.

“What's that, Mario?” Chick asked.

“Shit,” I said before Mario could answer, and then leaned over and spit off the edge of the boulder.

“It's just weed,” Mario said with a pointed look at me. “It's not laced with anything, though I wish it was. Want some?”

“Maybe,” Chick said as he stood and came to crouch beside Mario, watching him as he hit the bowl, like Chick was watching some kind of tutorial.

“No, he doesn't want any,” I said, and Mario shot me an ugly look. We stared at each other in a battle of silent will but then I decided I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction and looked away. “Leave that shit alone, Chick,” I said. “It will make you stupid.”

“What do you know about it?” Mario asked. “It's just plain old weed. Never hurt anybody.” He turned his attention back to his bowl, lit it, and took a long drag, then held the smoke in for a minute before blowing out a thin blue cloud.

“You ever tried Molly?” Chick asked.

“Yeah, Molly's good,” Mario said with a nod, trying to sound like a fucking expert about something, “but you don't smoke it. Smoking it is a waste.”

“Yeah?” Chick asked, intently focused on Mario, and I covertly rolled my eyes with annoyance.

“Molly you take in a capsule,” Mario continued, aware of my annoyance but ignoring it. “Or if you only have a crystal, you can roll it in toilet paper or rolling papers or something and then swallow it. It's called parachuting.”

“It's
called
being a fucking idiot,” I said, then shook my head. “Jesus, what kind of an idiot eats toilet paper?”

“¡Nadie est
á
hablando contigo!”
Mario said, his voice raised in anger.

“¡C
á
llate!”
I shouted in return. Without thinking, I grabbed the bowl out of Mario's hand and, before he could utter a word of protest, threw the thing into the stream.

“Hey!” Mario shouted. “What the fuck, Jaz!”

“Keep that shit away from Chick,” I said, gritting my teeth to keep from raising my voice again.

“Oh, man,” Mario said in almost a whine. “That wasn't even mine. That was Travis's bowl. Man, now I have to go downtown to the head shop to replace that. You gonna pay for it?”

“No. Fuck off,” I said as I took a swallow of my beer to smother my anger. “Chick doesn't need to be messing with that. You keep that shit away from him. Keep it away from me too.”

“Since when did you become such a straight edge?” Mario asked me sullenly.

“Are you really asking me that question?” I asked, incredulous, but he wouldn't even look at me. Mario knew exactly why I hated the drug scene. I don't mean smoking a joint at a party or anything like that, but the hard stuff. The stuff that turned people into strangers. My dad's whole life had been one big party when I was a little kid. Ecstasy and mushrooms and LSD. He partied so much, he forgot to give a shit about what happened to me. Forgot soccer games and birthdays and weekend visitations.

Chick shifted in his seat and the sound of his sneaker scraping against the rock was loud in the silence that hung between us.

Mario stood and moved to the edge of the boulder, leaned over as he tried to locate the bowl in the boil of water around the rocks. Chick and I just sat there, waiting to see if he was actually going to go diving for the bowl. I sure as hell wasn't going to help him. If Chick even offered, I was going to tell him to mind his own business.

After a minute Mario gave up on finding the bowl and said, “I'm taking off. I'll see you around.”

I didn't watch him go. Just finished my beer as I listened to the sound of his retreat across the rocks, a small splash and a muttered curse as his foot slipped off the rock closest to the bank of the stream. Then he was gone.

“He's just mad,” Chick said quietly. “He'll get over it.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said indifferently. “I'm hungry. Let's head over to Bad Habits, see if Chris will hook us up with a couple of burgers.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Though it bothered Chick to see Mario and me argue, the truth was, Mario and I had been arguing like that since first grade. We had traded bloody noses and black eyes, insulted each other's mothers, and made comments about the inferior size of each other's dicks for a long time now. Sometimes I thought about apologizing after the fact or, if we had a particularly bad fight, it might occur to me to bring it up again to talk about it, though I never did. But usually, the insult or injury was forgotten within a few hours.

So it didn't surprise me the next day when Mario showed up at my door with a soccer ball tucked under one arm, an unlit cigarette behind his ear. “You up?” he called through the screen of the open window above the sofa bed.

Mom had left early that morning to open the store. She was the assistant manager of the Dollar General, a thirty-minute commute by bus. I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to decide if there was any reason to get up and start the day.