At dismissal the next day, I don’t wait for Mike on our school’s corner. I just want to go to Ma’s job. Solo. That’s it. That’s how I feel.
“Bryan?”
I surprise Ma from behind with a hug.
Ma’s my heart. The way she strokes my head and cheek. The way she smells the same good smell. The way she hugs me back and her hug makes me not want to leave her. I start to feel like I want to tell her so much ill stuff I’ve done with Mike. But if I told her, it’d be a wrap. She’d ground me for half the stuff me and him been into. She’d kill me for the other half of stuff we did.
“Where is Mike?” she asks.
“I just want to do homework alone in my office.”
“Okay.” She pats my shoulder. “Go ahead.”
I go into my office, shrug off my book bag, grab my clipboard off my file cabinet, sit in my desk-chair, and look at my clipboard’s notes. My eyes move down the page of what I wrote, but I’m not really reading. I’m just feeling this quiet. I’m feeling being alone.
I look at Ma for a second. Maybe I can tell her some things about Mike. Some things about me.
“Ma?” I call her.
She comes to me. “What’s up, baby?”
“Since you not busy, want to sit in my office?”
Then, out of nowhere, it gets busy. This boy who looks my age with a grown man and woman appear at Ma’s desk.
I tell Ma, “They looking for you?”
Ma turns to them and jumps straight into helping them. She pauses. “Bryan, can you come help me out?”
“Sure.”
Ma introduces me and the boy. “This is Kamau. Kamau, this is my son, Bryan.”
We nod hi.
“Bryan,” Ma asks, “can Kamau do his homework with you while his parents and I go over some paperwork?”
I nod at Kamau to follow me. His gear isn’t like the kids from my projects. Or from any of the places me and Mike visited lately. He looks broke like his fam has even less money than we have when we struggle-struggle. As we head into my office, I ask him, “You live out here?”
He doesn’t speak. He just stares at the floor and shakes his head. Maybe he’s shy.
I wave at a foldable metal chair for him to sit and I go sit in mine. I slide my book bag to my feet, unzip it, and start pulling out my schoolbooks and stuff to get ready to do my homework. As I start stacking that on my desk, Kamau sits straight up. His eyes get all lit and curious and glued to a comic sticking out my pile of schoolbooks.
“I like that comic.” His accent isn’t from here. He sounds Jamaican or something.
“This?” I hand him my Fantastic Four comic.
He takes it and looks through it mad quiet. He doesn’t look like he could be me or Mike’s brother, but his eyes are the way ours used to look when we spent hours hypnotized by comics.
“Who would you be?” I ask.
He looks at me, confused.
“Like which of the Fantastic Four would you be?”
“The Human Torch.” His accent isn’t Jamaican. I know because the lunch lady at school is Jamaican and they sound different.
“Where you from? You sound like you speak another language.”
“I’m African. From Kenya.”
“Word? For real, for real?!”
He looks at me like I’m clowning him.
“Nah, I mean that’s wavy you African. I mean cool. You know this comic?” I shuffle through my stuff, then find it. “This is Black Panther. He’s African. Like you.”
Kamau takes it into his hands. He doesn’t know Black Panther.
He flips through it like he is in heaven.
“Who would you be?” he asks me.
“Who what?”
He chuckles. “If you were a Fantastic Four.”
“Oh. Like you. I’d be the Human Torch. Like, who else on that team is better, y’feel me?”
Right now, I notice two things.
First, this is the first time I hit it off with another kid about comics since me and Mike. Mad heads know comics, but they don’t get amped the way me and Mike get amped. Clicking with Kamau is rare: the way we jump straight into comics like this.
The second thing I notice is that girl Melanie from my school is in here with her parents. They seem to be just dropping off some big, closed yellow envelope and chatting. I don’t know how long she’s been watching me with Kamau, but this time I can tell she’s happy with what she sees. She smiles and waves like it’s cool I’m being cool with Kamau.
I wave back. This is way better than the last time she saw me and shot me a disgusted look like I was an idiot for being with Mike as he kept smacking James.
If that’s not cool enough, me and Kamau go back to talking about how tight it’d be to fly above skyscrapers and shoot flames from our hands like Human Torch.
“Flame on!” we say at the same time.
“How hot do you think he gets?” Kamau asks.
We geek out on that.
Then I ask, “Do you think he could melt Colossus from X-Men?”
We bug for a while on that.
“Or that metal that makes up Wolverine’s claws and skeleton?” Kamau asks. “The same metal in Captain America’s shield, do you think he could melt that?”
Man! Me and this dude have fun like me and Mike before Mike turned . . .
“You moving out here?” I ask. I hope so.
“No,” he says. “My parents want your mom to help us get an apartment in another neighborhood where my dad starts a job.”
“Oh.” I try fronting like I’m not disappointed.
“Anyways,” I bring the conversation back to the Human Torch. “What if Iceman from the X-Men and the Human Torch faced off? Who’d win?”
He argues why Iceman has a good chance. Then he argues why the Human Torch might body Iceman.
I’m just eating it up, listening to Kamau.
When I pull some of my drawings of superheroes out of my folder, he gets hyped. He doesn’t draw but thinks I got skills.
“How did you do this to Hulk’s chest?” He points.
As I answer his question about how I got the shading right on the Hulk’s chest, Mike walks in, unfolds a metal chair, and just sits and listens to me and Kamau talk. No hi. He doesn’t say what’s up to me. He doesn’t introduce himself to Kamau. It is mad awkward. He just kind of sits on the edge of us and eavesdrops.
Kamau looks weirded out and shoots me a look like, You know this guy?
To make the vibe less awkward, I introduce them. “Kamau, this is Mike.”
Mike says mad salty to Kamau, “I’m his brother.”
Kamau reaches out to shake his hand.
Mike just looks at it, sucks his teeth, and stares at the floor. “What’s good?”
Me and Kamau try going back to what we were discussing but Mike is killing the vibe.
Mike just sits there, staring at his kicks.
Between sentences, me and Kamau keep looking over at Mike like, What’s up with him?
Soon, Kamau’s parents come over.
“Say good-bye to your friend,” his father says. “We are leaving.”
“Nice to meet you,” Kamau tells me. He turns to his parents. “Are we coming back here?”
“No.” His mother smiles. “We have everything we need. Everything will happen soon.”
Kamau looks happy about that but disappointed me and him won’t see each other again.
“Okay, Human Torch,” he calls me. “See you.”
I call him that back. “Yeah, Human Torch, I’ll see you too.”
I watch him and his parents leave Ma’s job, and as soon as they are out the door, Mike says, “Y’all sounded mad giddy and kiddy.” He mocks us, whining, “‘Okay, Human Torch.’” He lets out one fake laugh. “I felt like I was watching a chick flick and you two were breaking up.”
I swear. If we weren’t at Ma’s job and she and her boss weren’t right there across the room, I’d snuff him.
“You calling me soft?” I ask him.
He chuckles. “My bad, Bryan. That’s foul of me. For real.” He looks sorry. Like he means it. “For real.”
I chill a little and remember what Ava said about people who bug out not being all bad.
Mike keeps on. “I’m just tight you flat left me at dismissal.”
I relax some more. I feel myself deep-breathing.
I decide to forget how he just acted and accept his apology.