Jamal’s mother pulled up to the front of the school. “Your father and I gave you too much rope.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jamal said, and told himself he meant it.
His mother said nothing as he climbed down from her car. He would learn later that her next stop was a lawyer’s office.
He pushed open the school’s front doors and stepped into a trembling tunnel of green and yellow crepe. The cheerleaders had arrived early, he saw, and thrown themselves into the spirit of the biggest game of the season. He shouldn’t be surprised. This town would never allow something as trivial as a homicide to stop the Bison herd.
Hand-painted posters covered every wall. Bison stickers clogged the lockers. No wonder the school didn’t have the money to bring in grief counselors, Jamal thought. The cost of all this green tinsel alone would have paid for his lunch for a month.
The door of Dylan’s locker was so loaded down with ribbons and pennants and bouquets of flowers it almost seemed to be gloating. His photo, the one you saw everywhere around town, was stuck in the center, and beneath it was printed “RIP Leading the Big Herd in the Sky.”
Jesus. Dylan. One of the few guys on the team who’d ever been decent to Jamal had been reduced to a poster as sweet and sad as flat soda.
Wait: someone already scrawled a line of graffiti on a corner of Dylan’s photo. Could nothing in life stay good anymore?
Jamal leaned in, squinted at the words.
help it feeds help
The fuck?
Jamal’s locker stood almost bare beside Dylan’s, untouched but for the words WE BELIEVE IN YOU scrawled across the metal in green Sharpie. It was nice to know someone did. The sloping handwriting, he recognized, with a little smile, was Kimbra Lott’s.
His body ached from the pummeling he’d taken all week at practice—that fat fuck Parter had made a special project of Jamal. Never mind that a good quarterback behind a solid line is only sacked a handful of times in a season. For the last two days, Parter had sent his heaviest tackles after his new QB at every opportunity until Jamal was now half-certain the man had broken something in his brain.
How else could Jamal explain everything he saw when he slept?
He felt a fist strike his shoulder. Garrett and Mitchell ambled by, laughing to themselves. For the hundredth time this week, Garrett asked, a little singsong lilt in his voice, “Where were you last weekend, Reynolds?”
Jamal massaged the pain flaring down his arm. He wondered how much more of this treatment he could take.
He thought (as he’d been thinking all week) of Bethany, and immediately he was livid. “You should go for it, bro,” Dylan had said last month. “I think she’s really into you.”
“I’d never!” Jamal had protested, his face flushing, his heart in his throat. “I’d never do that to you, D.”
“Please, it’s nothing. My girl and me, we’ve got an understanding.”
“You what?”
“Go for it, seriously.” Dylan had laughed, then gotten mock serious, the Grand King of the Gridiron, joking in the way he did when he wanted something. “You have my blessing, Reynolds.”
So Jamal had finally responded to Bethany’s unanswered text messages:
OK. Let’s do it.
And yet when they’d finally gotten down to business Friday night she’d called the whole thing off the second his hand had touched her chest. She’d said she had a headache. Maybe it was her period coming on, she wondered.
Hell, Jamal had thought bitterly. Maybe it was Ebola. The girl had been made of excuses.
Jamal was, at heart, a decent man. He didn’t believe girls owed him a thing—least of all sex—but considering all the shit he was now mired in, he vaguely wished he had more to show for last weekend than a couple awkward moments with a small boob, a microwaved pizza and ten hours of good TV. At least, he thought—always looking on the bright side of things, even in the face of a capital murder charge—Bethany’s house got HBO.
The bell rang. He thought back to Friday’s game, back when he had been so excited to put their plan into motion (excited if only because he knew how pleased it seemed to make Dylan.)
At the thought of the game, something came back to him.
“Yo, G,” Jamal called down the hall. Garrett turned back. “Tell me, Mason—what was you and the other boys looking at during halftime?”
The bell rang again. Students hastened into class. A weak breeze struggled through the hall’s open windows.
“The fuck did you just say?”
Garrett started toward him, Mitchell following a step behind.
“It’s an easy question,” Jamal said, holding his ground as the massive boy came close. “You and KT and Mitchell, all the boys in your little squad, you was all looking at something on your phones, being all clandestine and shit. You gotta remember. You sure thought it was amazing.”
Garrett’s cheeks had turned purple. Jamal could smell the rage on him, a mustardy scent that reminded him vaguely of Frito pie. He couldn’t help but be startled. Garrett was hardly a mild man but Jamal had never seen him tweaked like this before.
“If you say one more fucking word I will kill you, Reynolds.”
“You can try,” Jamal said. He smiled.
Garrett brought up his fist to strike Jamal; Mitchell grabbed his arm to hold him back; Bethany’s voice shouted their names down the hall. She was hustling in their direction, wearing pants and a sweater despite the heat of the morning.
“You remember what I fucking told you,” Garrett said. He stormed away.
“Are you alright?” Bethany said.
“No.” He turned his attention to her, adrenaline still racing through his brain. “Where the fuck did Dylan go last weekend?”
She frowned. “He was at the coast, Jamal, how many times do I have to tell you people?”
“‘You people’?”
“Forget Dylan—you have to go, Jamal. You have to go now. My dad knows.”
Jamal blinked. “What?”
“He found me at Jasmine’s this morning. It was that fucking fence. I texted Dad when you were leaving Sunday night to say I was going to get food but the fucking fence never opened again for me to come back. He finally put it together. Jamal, he has cameras in the house, places he never told me about. They were recording everything. The whole time.”
The bottom fell out of Jamal’s stomach. “But we didn’t do anything.”
She pulled back the sleeve of her sweater. Her arm was a vivid purple-brown.
“You have to go somewhere, Jamal. He’s going to do something crazy.”
At the sight of the bruises, Jamal slung his bag over his shoulder with a strange cold calm. Fine, he thought. Running seemed to be working fine for KT. Bentley could keep its dreams and its nightmares. Jamal had never much liked it here anyway.
Only when he reached the parking lot did Jamal remember that his Explorer was still at the auto shop—the trip to Bethany’s place this weekend had finally overtaxed his SUV’s spotty alternator and the part was, of course, on back order.
He started dialing his mother out of habit. He stopped. What would he say? Can you drive me to the airport and buy me a ticket to Colombia? Why, he wondered now, had he never thought to get a passport?
A moment later he heard the sirens, saw the flashing lights flying down the highway. The cars headed straight for him. Some distant sense of self-preservation made Jamal replace the phone in his pocket so no one could imagine it was a gun.
He supposed, in the end, he had dug this hole himself.