ONE

A bottle spun out of a car, a bright, beautiful burst against the pavement. It was dark, none of us had faces, and none of them either, headlights off, voices challenging us to come out into the street.

Earl was the one who changed everything, hopping out on one foot like a man with a peg leg, but it was only because he was getting ready to give a kick, his right leg cocked. He was dancing out there to kick a car, making a joke of it.

Everyone laughed. Even some of the refinery kids hooted, hanging out for once so we could see, faces like ours but strangers, people we would never know. But most of us didn’t even know each other, kids from all over Oakland, a mix of races and attitudes. I hated all this, typical high school summer, none of us with anything better to do. I thought I had left this sort of thing behind.

When Earl went down it was because he was clumsy, kicking the rear end of a Chevy pickup and missing. He sat there afterward, looking around the way you do when you are hurt more than you expect. Or maybe he was milking the laughs.

“They hit him!”

What a thing to shout, a ragged lie, a big red headline in everybody’s mind. It was me. I said it. I was sick of everyone standing around.

“Earl is hurt!” I cried. Earl did look badly hurt, once you looked at him that way, dumb with pain, his mouth slack, his head trying to look back, legs squished into place.

Look at him, I wanted to cry out.

Look at him, he’s dying.

I glanced around at my feet for something to throw and lunged at the curb for a chunk of broken concrete. It was not as broken as it looked, stuck into the curb.

I dug my heel into the concrete, and it broke. I took a few running steps, brushing past people just standing there, unsure what to do. I threw the chunk as hard as I could. It punched into a car door, fragmenting.

For a moment it was all over. The concrete had burst, the car was dented. That was all. Nothing else was necessary, and we could all go home.

Then bodies poured from cars. Some of the drivers wrestled steering wheels around, deciding maybe it was time to head east along Lakeshore and take the freeway back north to the Chevron towns they came from, already having seen enough excitement. Driving a car—especially if it’s your own car, even a hulk with the chassis rusted through—sometimes makes a person feel like playing it safe.

But half the passengers were already at us, fists swinging and hitting nothing, teeth gleaming. The police were swamped, helmeted heads in a tide of grabbing, punching bodies. A helicopter pounded the air overhead, licked us all with a searchlight, and then lurched upward, gaining altitude. Sirens sang, jagged high-low notes. It was one of the reasons I had quit school, tired of the violence.

The city of Oakland chains the trash cans around Lake Merritt. You pick them up and shake them and trash tumbles out, but you can’t roll the cans away or hurl them out into the street; a heavy length of chain anchors them to a tree or a light pole. Freelance recycling collectors had been there ahead of us, and only garbage was left, but I found an empty orange juice bottle, a smiling fruit wearing sunglasses on the label.

I elbowed out into the crowd with a sour, dry taste in my mouth, because things were about to get really bad, people breathing hard, faces shining with blood. It took only a few moments before people were tired and scared, not fighting now so much as shoving, and the real trouble was about to start. I didn’t know what I had in mind. Maybe I was going to break the bottle and use the broken edge on someone.

At the same time, I knew this was the kind of thing I hated, caught up with a bunch of kids I didn’t respect, just as crazy as they were.

“I think I’m going to meet you up by the Mini Mart,” Bea was saying, as loud as she could. I had to read her lips, Bea’s voice lost in all the yelling and swearing, more cop cars approaching the edge of the crowd, amplified electronic commands.

She had a knit cap tugged down over her ears. “Wouldn’t you like some ice cream?” she was saying: you come, too. It was just like her to state things indirectly. Bea has one of those crinkly voices. It sounds like she has to clear her throat half the time, but it’s just her natural way of speaking.

I read the look in her eyes. I put down the glass bottle very carefully, knowing that someone else would knock it over or seize it and hurl it into someone’s face. The cop cars have loudspeakers mounted inside, under the hoods. Cops can speak into a hand mike and the entire car is a loudspeaker announcing, This is an illegal assembly.

The explosion was soft, sickening, a giant water balloon. The gas was hard to see in the darkness, but the way people panicked surprised me, because I had seen movies where bad guys tie hankies over their faces and keep gunning down cops.

The teargas hit me, barbed wire across my eyes, and I went down to my hands and knees, ducking all the way under it. Feet trampled each other, and one huge foot ground my hand into the asphalt as I rolled, digging my way through the mob, yelling for Bea.

That was when I touched the cold steel, wrapping my fingers around it.

I hunched over my find, kneeling on the pavement. I crouched there, waiting for the avalanche of bodies to pass, people falling over me, the breath slugged from my body.

I slipped it into my pocket.