New York City (Two Years Earlier)
“Never turn your back on your opponent, niño—that’s when the strongest fighters are sent to their knees.”
I nodded and shook the hair out of my eyes. My white T-shirt lay on the ground with my leather jacket, and adrenaline pumped through my veins. The punching bag with the figure of a man drawn on it stood in front of me. I balled my hands into fists, and Ángel gave a nod.
I drew in a breath and swung, going for the jaw of the dummy as he’d taught me. Over and over and over, I swung. Sweat beaded my upper lip. Rap music blared in the background, drowning out the sirens of New York City.
A single bulb dangled from the ceiling, its blinking light threatening to disappear. Most of the boys had already gone home for the day, but Ángel called me out, telling me he’d show me some techniques if I ever got jumped on the street.
“Wait.” Ángel stopped me mid-punch. “Sean.” He came around to face me, and his hand ran over his short beard. With the gold chain with a cross around his neck and hair pulled back in a ponytail, Ángel had the body and facial features of Enrique Iglesias.
He didn’t look like a gang lord.
He didn’t look like he was capable of murder.
“Sean,” Ángel said again. “Relajarse.” Chill out. He mimicked my pose. “You’re stiff. You need to relax your punches and take steady breaths.” He moved me out of the way and threw a couple of punches to demonstrate. “Understand?”
I nodded and went back to it for several minutes as the song switched to a Latino EDM. My heart pounded against the wall of my chest and in my ears. About five minutes later, as the sweat dripped down my back, I stepped away and Ángel nodded his approval.
“Buen!” He clapped me on the back. “You dope, niño.”
Ángel lit a cigarette and took a puff, white smoke drifting around his fingers.
A shadow flickers by the back door, and I realized that we were being watched. Jake.
Ángel must have noticed, too, and gave a nod. “Watch your back.”
“I think I can take care of myself.”
“You stand out, Sean, and that’s why I chose you. Jake’s butthurt because he’s not top dog, and he sees what I see in you: someone with enough smarts to make it out the better man. Don’t pretend he doesn’t have it in for you.” Ángel tossed his cigarette on the cement and ground it with the heel of his dirty Nike tennis shoe. “One of these fights, he’s going to have your face in the mud.”
I laughed. “Yeah, but I’m still going to end up on top.”
“Don’t turn your back,” Ángel repeated. “That’s when the strongest fighters end up on their knees.” He picked his phone off the corner table and turned the music off, the street noises now bleeding through the walls. “The enemy has the upper hand when you stop seeing them as a threat, Sean. Remember that.”
When I thought back on the brotherhood I joined, I didn’t see the Fénix Blood I ran away from, the banged-up, screwed-up-on-drugs guys. I saw the family I joined as a young man, before the dollar signs made Ángel Andrés blind.
We were the outcasts with bruised knuckles and a fire in our hearts to be better than our parents or the labels our peers had given us. Ángel taught us to survive, gave us the tools to fight both society and the demons inside. He taught us to wrestle, to attack, to punch and kick, and to rise above the dirt. We were the twenty-two, the perfect number, the unbreakable bond.
I thought I was happy there, smoking pot in my leather jacket like a gangster, with the tattoo on my left shoulder of the red Fénix dripping in blood and flame. There, I was numb and safe and secure for the first time in my life.
There, Mum’s death was a faraway incident, and I could sleep.
Really sleep.
Without the dreams of the past haunting me, I considered myself happy. We were a gang of misfits and brokens, and I found friends. When I was called “fag” at school, I could ignore the jabs, and as I grew in my workouts with Ángel and my boys, I became intimidating, able to stare down anyone who tried to shame me. Ángel took me to street fights, and I started earning money.
As my shoulders broadened, as scars formed near my face and neck from fistfights, people stopped heckling me. At first, I thought it was respect, but looking back, what I earned was fear.
Girls began to flirt with me and come onto me at parties, offering me drinks and laughing at my jokes. I got all A’s my senior year, and two days before graduation, when one of Jake’s boys called me “fag,” I finally got to beat the crap out of the kid’s face behind the school.
I was rising.
I was becoming who I wanted to be.
I wasn’t a weak kid who was destined to follow the footsteps of his alcoholic father. In the dead of night when I returned from my afternoons with my brothers, Dad never asked where I had been. He never pointed out it was one in the morning and I smelled of sweat and cheap beer and sweet weed, or that I was covered in bruises and bloody gashes from the fights.
I was nothing to him, and I didn’t care. I had Ángel and my gang—I was happy.
Because I no longer fell asleep to gunshot lullabies.