JOLENE PLACES THE HEAVY GUN IN MY hands and molds my fingers into place. Her hand over mine is cool and steady. My palm stings. Sweat and anticipation.
“You feel that?” she says.
“Sure.” I try to shrug her hand away. I’m ready. I can do it.
She holds me firm. “Slow. One step at a time,” she says. “It’s not enough to learn to shoot. You’re going to have to learn to fight.”
“I already know how.”
I learned to fight on the living room carpet, when one of Mama’s boyfriends realized I had grown breasts. It only happened the one time, and I won, but I can’t look at that rug without thinking about it.
“Raheem’s going to stand behind you the first time. You have to feel the gun kick before you learn how to counter it.”
I nod. My finger curls into place around the trigger. Raheem’s hands land firmly on my upper back.
“He won’t let you fall, okay?” Jolene says. I glance back at him, the grim set of his lips, the concentrated furrow above his nose. She didn’t have to say it. I know. Raheem would never let me fall.
I tried to burn that rug once. Set a match to the edge of its fibers till it caught and watched it start to glow. The flames rose, lapping like it could lick itself clean. Maybe me along with it. Raheem caught me, put it out with a bunch of white powder from the kitchen. Baking soda, I guess.
“Are you ready?” he says now, just as I feel the fire rising around me.
“Yeah.”
Raheem gives me this nod, and while there’s no way he actually knows what I’m thinking, it’s like he does know. The way he always knows.
“Lift, aim, shoot,” he says. “It helps to think about something you really want to destroy.”
I heft the gun to shoulder height and suddenly the reality ahead of me grows much bigger than any of the moments before. I’ve waited so long to be standing here.
The raw stuff that just spills out sometimes, can no longer be contained in the little box I call me. So when I stand there, feeling it, all heavy like the weight of the world balanced on my fingertips, there isn’t a thing to be done but give it voice. Tiny explosions in my hand, one by one. Shooting. Shooting, till every bullet is dislodged and the trigger clicks, spent. My shoulders rock against Raheem’s steady hands.
“Good,” Jolene says. “That’s good, Maxie.”