We’re behind Moose’s building. I recognize it now. Renoir.
We sneak a look over the hood of the car. It’s chaos all around. Bus-stop shelters and phone booths vandalized and scorched. The entire area reeks of wet burnt chemicals.
The courtyard between buildings, forty, fifty yards away, brims with cops in tight groups. Clusters of guys, most with their faces covered, launch stones at them, then duck back behind park benches and trees. The cops pick up the stones and chuck them back. Stuff comes raining down from windows and from the roof—scrap metal, a toaster, books. A Molotov cocktail lands beside one knot of cops, the flames bursting in a spray of red over the ground. The cops scatter but regroup right away.
One boy gets too close. The cops swarm him, punching and kicking him. A police van comes screeching to a stop beside them, but the cops keep on. Kicking and kicking.
I pull a rock the size of a baseball out of the ground, screaming, “Fucking murderers!” as I launch it at the van. It sails through the air and hits; the windshield splinters.
The cops don’t let up on the kid.
I’m searching for another rock. “Here,” Karim says, and he hands me a bandanna. I tie it over my mouth and follow him.
We sprint from the car to a side street off the parking lot, what sounds like gunfire in the distance. The street is old, cobbled. Two more hoodie boys catch up to us, and Karim and the two others start prying a paving stone loose. I start in too, prying stones free. One hoodie boy takes off his sweatshirt and ties the top closed, and we use it as a sack. I feel searing pain in my fingers, and when I raise them to my face, they’re covered in bloody gashes.
We get the sweatshirt sack half-full and Karim says, “C’mon.” We follow him the long way around, to the other side of the building. Karim launches a stone at a line of cops standing thirty yards away. He reaches back. I hand him one and take another for myself. Mine fits in my hand like a miniature football. I throw a spiral, wobbly but true: it arcs, then hurtles down and into the visor of the helmet of a cop leaning out from behind a tree, hitting him flush in the face. He drops in a heap and does not move.
“Ouais, mec!” Karim says, and the other boys cheer me.
We have to fall back behind some trees, but when the rubber bullets stop pinging around us, I throw another stone. Then another. One of the hoodie boys screams, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” as he winds up and launches. I join in. With each volley, the four of us shout France’s national motto. Under the bandanna, I can feel myself smiling.
Karim taps my shoulder. The sweatshirt sack is empty. We fall back but don’t go to the cobblestone street. Karim leads us behind the building and into an underground car park. We’re tossing knuckles and laughing.
“Trop cool!” one hoodie boy says.
“I got a text from Pierre,” says the other. He pulls down his bandanna. “Molière High School is destroyed!”
“Tchut!” Karim warns, and we still.
There is a beating of feet on the concrete ramp. We all tighten—I’m ready to run.
Three hoodie boys round the corner.
“Ouais, mecs!” Karim says.
They all greet each other. Me too.
“Did you guys get some?” one of the new boys says.
“It was us that got the pig van on Rue Blériot.”
“We heard about that!”
Another of the new boys says, “We did you better. Came upon a pig by himself.”
“No!”
“Got him on the ground. Stomped him till his buddies showed up.”
Another says, “I felt his ribs crack under my Timberlands.”
“Ouais!” Karim says.
“It’s just the beginning,” the leader of the new boys says. “Villeneuve is hell for pigs tonight.”
He removes a book bag he’s wearing and sets it carefully on the ground as we circle around. Then he pulls his Morts pour Rien T-shirt over his head. The butt of a pistol sticks out of the waistband of his jeans. We all see it. No one says anything.
“Jacques texted,” the leader says. He’s taking glass Evian bottles filled with what smells like gasoline out of his book bag. He lines them up and begins tearing the T-shirt into strips. “He says the cops are regrouping at the Quatre Routes.”
Karim helps him, pouring gas over the strips and stuffing them down into the mouths of the bottles. “At the Quatre Routes?” he says. “Let’s go greet them.”
The leader takes the sweatshirt we were storing stones in and puts it on, they load the bottles back into the bag, and we take off up the ramp. There are a few boys at the top, who join us. We jog down a dark alley, the streetlamps shot out. I let myself fall behind. And once we round the corner onto Rue des Près, I drop down behind a parked car. I squat there until I can’t hear them anymore.
I’m breathing hard, panting. I rip the bandanna from my face, chuck it into the gutter.
“What the hell?”
I’m talking aloud to myself.
“What the hell was that?”