Lucius was perched on the side of the tub, pointing at my toothbrush. “Better bring that to the police station,” he said.
“Shut up,” I said. “I just brushed.” I buttoned my dad’s old dress shirt and remembered being a kid and watching him do the same.
Lucius poked the air and said, “Not for morning breath, bruh.”
“What am I gonna do?” I asked. “Cut someone with an Oral-B?”
I pinched the back of my collar in both hands and ran them to the front, creasing it, feeling kinda slick.
“Niggas sharpen ’em on the floor in jail.” Lucius scribbled the air. “Turn ’em into shivs.”
“Damn.”
“You should know this by now,” he said.
Now.
My knees splayed out as I pedaled Mason’s BMX. Lucius jogged behind in an oversized velour tracksuit. We crossed the bricks of the empty campus, heading downtown. Police are bees. When they’re around, sit still and hope they’ll leave you alone. But what if you enter their air-conditioned hive?
“How do you think this is gonna go?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Lucius panted. “The cops ever been cool?”
I lifted my elbows. While the breeze dried my pits, I flashed over every broken-up show and skate-spot bust.
“Maybe that DEA cop in Texas?” I asked.
We hit the red light by the cathedral on North Laurel. Lucius stopped next to me, hands on knees, chest heaving. “So, you saying . . . that a cop that . . . pulled you over for outta state plates . . . was coo’?”
“Well,” I said. “He told us they get a lot of drug traffic on that road.”
Lucius frowned and two perfect lines of sweat raced down the side of his face.
“Remember?” I said. “He got real happy when he found out we had a band, because he liked heavy metal or something.”
The cop had twanged, “Aw, y’all play heavy music? I love heavy music.”
At that, he’d forgotten to search our van for the weed we’d stuck in the baggy fabric hanging from the ceiling.
“Well, good thing you wasn’t ridin’ up front.” Lucius shook his head. “What woulda happened if y’all was some niggas?”
I wiped Lucius’s sweat from my upper lip and flicked it into the crosswalk. He was right. I’d been so happy about not getting the van searched that I didn’t think about why it had happened. Was I about to be “some niggas” at the police station?