We Were Here (30 page)

Rondell throws the four guys off him like rag dolls. Bodies flying over the couch back, into the dining room table. The Mexican guy swinging another wild right, but Rondell deflects it, grabbing the Mexican by his hair and head-butting him right in the face. The loud shattering of the guy’s nose like dishes heaved against a concrete wall. A little girl’s scream comes out of the Mexican’s mouth as he covers his face and crumples to the rug on Jimmy’s limp body. Eyes rolling to the back of his head.

Still, Rondell pounces on him, delivers three lightning-quick jabs to his face. Blood spewing out of the guy’s nose and mouth and right eye, the back of his head banging the floor.

People grabbing Rondell’s sweatshirt, pulling him off. Rondell spinning and swinging fists at anybody, everybody.
Including me. The speed and agility he had on the basketball court. But the look in his eyes a look I’ve never seen before. Different from Mong’s. More desperate.

Everything happening so fast.

The black guy behind Rondell grabbing an empty forty bottle off the table, rearing back to smash Rondell’s head in. Me not thinking anything but diving at the guy, knocking the bottle from his hand. Wrestling to the ground, grabbing at each other in the scuffle, and somehow I’m smacking him in the chin with an uppercut and his head is snapping back. His face cringing and eyes closing, then opening. Him rolling onto me, pinning my arms, and I’m turning my head as his fist comes down hard on my ear and my cheek and my neck and the side of my head and everything is turning black and lost.

When I wake up Rondell is wrapping his two huge hands around the black guy’s neck and pulling him up. Rondell’s staring into his puffy face and squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. Gritting his teeth, shouting: “Nobody touch Mexico!”

Squeezing harder.

Eyes wild and spit flying from his mouth as he repeats this line over and over: “Nobody touch Mexico! Nobody touch Mexico! Nobody touch Mexico!”

Every person in the living room, guy or girl, spooked and backing away, silent. No talking. The music shut off. And I’m getting up and falling against the couch and getting up the rest of the way. Knowing Rondell will kill this kid. That he will stop his breath forever and that tomorrow he will not remember. The black dude’s face changing colors, turning bright red and purple, eyes bugging out of his head, looking back at Rondell, scared for his life.

“Let go!” I’m yelling at Rondell, but he’s not letting go.

I slap him on the back of his head and shout again: “Let fucking go, Rondell!”

Him looking at me.

Him letting go.

The black guy falling to the floor, clutching his own neck and coughing and choking to get back his breath. Flaca behind us crying now. Her girls screaming. Dudes shouting and jostling. My right eye blurred by my own blood falling into it. The Mexican guy moving just his fingers, making weak fists, rolling off the guy Jimmy, who doesn’t move at all. Blood all over everywhere on the rug and the couch and the records and everybody’s clothes and my own blood running into my eye, stinging, and the sound of the girls behind me and the crowd that’s just come in from the backyard to see.

And Rondell is staring at me now. He’s looking for direction. His face less crazy but his chest still heaving in and out and heaving in and out and heaving in and out.

I grab him by the sweatshirt and pull him with me, out of the living room and through the front door and across the lawn and into the street. Voices of dudes yelling behind us and girls screaming.

I look over my shoulder expecting everybody to be chasing us down with bats or the cops, but it isn’t either. It’s just Flaca and her four girls, running after us, bags flailing, their eyes wild with fear.

August 1—more

I was still in a fog as we all walked back onto the baseball field where we first met. Everybody out of breath from running and the girls talking over each other about what happened and where they were when it started and sneaking little looks at Rondell. My head was pounding where I got hit and I kept having to dab my sleeve against my cut ’cause it was bleeding again.

We went into one of the dugouts and sat on the bench. Rondell just listening to everybody with a blank look on his face, like he wasn’t even at the party and was hearing about this supposed fight for the first time.

At one point Jules turned to Rondell and shouted over the commotion: “Why didn’t you just stop when you knew they were knocked out?”

Rondell made a confused face. He looked to me.

“He could’ve killed that one black guy,” a girl named Rosanna said, refusing to look at Rondell.

“What about the guy on the ground?” Flaca said. “He didn’t move since I came in.”

The girl with the birthmark on her face was wiping tears from her eyes and shaking her head.

“Look,” I said. “We don’t even know how it started. They were probably messing with him.”

“Jesus, though,” Jules said. “I can’t get that Mexican guy’s bloody face out of my head. His nose was pointing all to the side.”

Rondell looked at the ground. He pulled his bag out from under the dugout bench where we’d stashed ’em, but when he saw the look I was giving him he pushed it back under.

“What’s that?” Flaca said.

I thought quick and said: “We stashed some stuff here so we didn’t have to go back to the hotel.”

Flaca looked down at where the bags were, and then she looked at Jules.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Rosanna said, shaking her head. “Why do guys always gotta fight each other to prove who’s the bigger man? We were just having fun.”

“It’s like they’re roosters,” Jules said. “I saw this special on TV about cockfighting. It’s the exact same thing.”

“But we’re human beings,” Rosanna shot back. “We’re supposed to be more involved than that shit, right?”

“‘Evolved,’” Jules said.

“You know what I mean,” Rosanna said.

“God,” the birthmark girl said. “I thought I was gonna be sick.”

“Yo, could everybody just calm down?” I said, feeling all stressed and confused. “We made it back here. Everybody’s okay. That’s the main thing.”

“You see those guys laying on the floor?” Rosanna shot back with attitude. “They look okay to you?”

“I’m talkin’ about us, though,” I said.

The girls kept looking at Rondell, who was looking back and forth from them to me like he had no idea what we were talking about. For the first time since I met him I thought maybe Rondell was better off locked up. Where he couldn’t hurt somebody or even himself. Maybe there’s a reason we have jail.

Rosanna stood up and grabbed her bag, said: “I’m outta here. I’m going home.”

“We’re
all
going home,” Jules said. “Flaca, you too. Say goodbye to Miguel and let’s go.”

I turned to Flaca, who was giving Jules a look, like they were saying something with their eyes. Then she turned to me. “Miguel,” she said, “let’s walk your friend to the other dugout so my girls can wait here without worrying while you and me say bye.”

I shrugged, told Rondell to come on.

He sat up and reached under the bench for both our bags, but Flaca said: “You could just leave your stuff. We won’t be that long.”

Jules looked at Flaca and said: “We’ll wait here.”

I led Rondell into the other dugout and told him to wait for me on the bench.

“How come, Mexico?” he said.

“’cause you freaked everybody out, man. They think you ruined the entire party.”

“Wha’chu mean?” he said.

“Just trust me,” I said. “Look, we’ll talk about it later. Right now I’m gonna say bye to Flaca.”

He looked at the ground and then looked up at me again, said: “I’m scared.”

And that confused me more than any single thing he’d ever said since I met him. The guy beats the hell out of three guys and now he’s scared? I looked at him all crazy, said: “What are you even talking about?”

He shrugged and lowered his head and then laid down on the bench.

“There you go,” I said. “Take a little nap for a sec and I’ll be right back.”

He closed his eyes and folded his hands together on his stomach and started mumbling under his breath like he was speaking in tongues. I was tripping out watching him, but just then Flaca took me by the arm and pulled me out of the dugout and back over to the one where her girls were sitting. She told them she needed ten minutes with me alone.

They all looked at each other except Jules, who said, “Okay, just go. We’ll be right here.”

Flaca nodded and pulled me away, told me we were going to this other part of the park.

My Ten Minutes with Flaca:

The two of us walked together without saying a word. We went along the dark bushes that lined the edge of the park, past an old dried-up fountain full of dead wrinkled leaves, a
run-down tennis court with no net and weeds growing through every crack, and all the way into this abandoned playground. There was only a couple tagged-up swings, a rusty slide and some paint-chipped monkey bars. We cut through the hard sand and sat next to each other on the swings, started rocking back and forth a little.

At first neither of us said anything or even looked at each other. I reached down for a rock and held it in my right hand, looking all around us at the playground. She pushed a little of her hair behind her ear and stared at the ground.

Finally I cleared my throat and told her: “Sorry about the party and all that. I don’t even know what happened.”

“It wasn’t you,” she said, looking up at me. “But your friend was scary, Miguel. Something isn’t right about him.”

I shrugged, tossed the rock outside of the playground, into the grass.

“Anyways,” Flaca said. And then she started swinging a little faster. She flung her head back and looked in the sky and then she slowed down again and said: “I grew up in this park, you know.”

“Yeah?” I said.

She stopped. “My stepdad used to take me when I was little. He’d push me on this exact swing.”

I nodded but she didn’t see ’cause she was reaching into her pocket for her phone. She flipped it open to check a text and then flipped it closed, slipped it back in her pocket.

It went quiet between us again, but just sitting there with her, after everything that had just happened at the party and my head still all foggy, it made me have a strange feeling. For some reason I actually wanted to tell her everything about me and Rondell. I wanted to tell someone the truth about us. And I already know how people shouldn’t go around telling their business to people they don’t even know, but at the
same time, besides Rondell I didn’t know
anybody
anymore. Flaca and me had at least messed around and talked some.

I looked up at her. She was staring at her right palm, some of her long dark hair spilling in front of her pretty brown face. And then the weirdest thing happened, man. I totally started telling her stuff. I just opened my mouth and it all came pouring out. Shit I hadn’t even processed yet.

I told her how five months and three days ago I did something that changed my life forever, something so fucked up I promised myself I’d never say it out loud or feel anything for anybody ever again. Not even myself. I told her how because of what I did I got sentenced to a group home for nine months and how the entire first month I didn’t talk to nobody, including the counselors, ’cause I didn’t think anybody was worth my time. Then they put Rondell in my room, and even though he was straight special ed and a Bible thumper, he at least got me talking some—which was probably why I had his back now. I told her how another resident, Mong, came in my room in the middle of the night and asked if I wanted to break out of the group home and try to make it to Mexico. How I agreed to go not so much ’cause I wanted to but ’cause I couldn’t think up any reasons not to. I honestly didn’t give a shit about anything anymore. Who cares what happens to you when you don’t care if you’re alive or dead, you know? I told her about the night we actually left, how I snuck in the office and stole the petty cash and all our files from the desk drawers and hopped out the window into some flower bed. How once we got to the mall Mong said he knew a resort place in Mexico where we could live and get jobs and be free and how that’s the first point I actually thought maybe I could start a new life, one where the shit I did back home no longer existed.

I told Flaca how we got picked up by Mong’s cousin Mei-li,
who drove us the wrong way, and how we had to run out of the pizza place while she was in the bathroom and figure out how to get down the coast from the middle of San Francisco without a ride. I told her how me and Mong were having mad problems with each other this whole time, but then we had a long talk at a beach in Malibu about life and the earth and true love and other deep shit, and how weird it was when out of nowhere he told me I was his best friend. Then the next morning, I told her, Mong drowned himself right there in front of me and Rondell. And since neither one of us knew what to say we just didn’t say anything and grabbed our shit and walked away.

Once I got started telling Flaca stuff, I couldn’t stop, man. It was like somebody else took over my body. I just kept talking and talking and talking, and for some reason the shit was making me feel more and more real. Like the past four months actually happened, it wasn’t just something I watched on TV or in a movie or read in one of my books. All this stuff, what I did and the judge making my sentence and us sleeping on beaches and building bonfires and getting in fights and running from cops—even tonight, the party, and me and Flaca hooking up in that empty room and Rondell beating the shit out of those guys and now sitting here on these little-kid swings—all this was actually my life.

I explained to Flaca what happened when me and Rondell finally made it down to Mexico, how once I was actually standing there, looking into the country, I couldn’t go across. Something made me freeze up. At the time I had no idea what it was, but now I think it was something to do with my gramps and my pops. How one snuck into America and became a citizen, and the other joined the army and died for our country. And someday I’d maybe go down to Mexico for
real, I told her, maybe I’d even live there and learn Spanish and visit where my grandparents were from. But I couldn’t do it yet. I still had to be in America. Until I made shit right. And that was why I came up with our new plan, how me and Rondell were gonna get money and replace what we took from the petty cash, send it back to the Lighthouse. After that I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do. I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. Maybe I’d talk to my moms. Or maybe I’d go to the place where they buried my old man and I’d actually sit there on his grave this time, like I’d always wanted to. I didn’t even know. But I was gonna handle the petty cash situation. That was for sure.