They blamed almost every death that day on Jimmy. Well, except for Dermoody and Cap'n Joe. Those two got blamed on Dermoody, but that got kept real quiet. Every other death got pinned on Jimmy though, all thirty-six. It didn't matter that they had very little hard evidence. He was an easy target. So they found witnesses, and lined them all up against him. The kid with the reputation, that big old outsider. That slant-eyed kid with a different last name who would kill you as soon as look at you. See, the blond girl on the news didn't say it but her eyes did. And then she flipped her hair.
So even though he was seventeen years old, Jimmy was tried as an adult and got handed seventeen consecutive life sentences, one for each year he'd lived. He got incarcerated at a maximum-security prison and had to be isolated from the other prisoners because of his skills. He isn't allowed any visitors. He didn't appeal. During the trial and sentencing, Auntie Marin moved into our house. After all the drama ended, she was unable to move out. Guess she couldn't face the prospect of an empty home on top of everything. I wasn't able to convert Cue's room for her right away even though I had plans: new bed, new everything. She mostly slept in Dad's room with him. They got real close through the whole ordeal. She'll never be my mom though.
As for our cozy little family funeral, I don't feel like talking about it. I told Dad to sell all of Cue's old comics to pay for his burial and the body went right into Dad's plot next to Mom. Out of Cue's stash, I had Dad keep #337 and #394 of The Mighty Thor for me. I just liked the covers.
Things are real different. Dr. Vanez and a team of other doctors fixed me up and the victims' relief fund that got collected paid for everything, which was great, because otherwise I'd've been paying them off for the rest of my life. That really surprised me, so many people reaching out and donating money for us just because they heard what happened. I'm still grateful.
On a good day, a day that isn't cold, I have only 60% mobility in my hands. That pretty much means I can't really bend them at the third knuckle because of all the scar tissue across the middle. Had to have a graft on each palm. They look like smoothed-out funnel webs from those spiders. Flesh was harvested from my ass for that. They also gave me the option of lower back, but decided against it when they saw my tattoo. That whole thing was fun. They'd said it was going to be relatively painless. But I couldn't sit down for a week afterward, and when I could sit, it was on a big foam donut like the kind people with bad hemorrhoids get, and now I have huge scars where my legs connect to my butt. Like missing patches. All I know is that I'm real lucky. At one point, the doctors were considering amputating both hands supposedly. A nurse told me that more than three ounces of glass shards got removed from my head, neck, and shoulders. She said they actually weighed it before throwing it in the medical waste bag. She also said it was kind of weird because she'd never seen any doctors actually weighing stuff that came out of someone before so I guess they were just curious. Serious though. I was such a mess when I got to the hospital that it's possible they didn't get all of the chunks out when paying attention to my more immediate injuries and some of those wounds healed over and I still got some in me. I don't know. I do have some weird bumps on my head. And all those stitches? They aren't even worth counting anymore. For real. Turned out Donnie broke my shoulder blade with that kick. I had to have surgery for it. Pins got put in to encourage (doctors like to say that word a lot) the scapula to fuse back to itself. But there were complications, so I had to have another surgery and have the pins taken out and screws put in instead. Seemed like I was in a sling forever. I got real depressed. My arm motion still isn't back to normal thanks to me losing a little chunk of triceps in surgery and I've still got radial nerve damage pretty bad. I can't give a hitchhiker thumbs-up sign because I can't move my thumb so much or extend my wrist. A few muscles in my forearm don't really work anymore either. They took the bullet out though. It sits in a jar of marbles by my bed now, right on top of the one they took out of my ribs. The one from my arm looks like a bullet, you can tell, but the one from my ribs just looks like a melted-down bolt. They would've thrown them both away if I hadn't half screamed for them in the ambulance. I still can't believe they were inside me. The paramedics had to reinf late my lung and the doctors had to reconstruct my other two ribs that the bullet broke with a bone graft from my hip and some metal to keep them together. Like I got welded on the inside. Like my rib cage is part birdcage. I don't even know how many transfusions I got, at least two that I know of. So I have plenty of someone else's blood in me now. Got a bone graft from my other hip on two knuckles because the doctors said I punched them into dust and ruined the joints. No fluid in there. Nothing. Just desert. So I can't really use the index finger and middle finger of my left hand. I guess it's fuckin' ironic that it looks like I'm making a gun sign with that hand all the time. Do you have any idea how hard it is to eat and drink when you can't hold a glass or bowl properly without using both hands? Even a spoon or fork is tricky. I got to balance it between two fingers like chopsticks because my index and middle fingers won't reach my thumbs. A knife? Forget about it. Auntie Marin has to cut everything on my plate before I can eat it. I appreciate it more now. Putting a tampon in was fun too. I once had my time down to three minutes for that because I was too proud for a diaper-y maxi-pad. Fuck it, though. I use 'em now. I use my palm and a flat surface like my dresser to press them hard and flat into the little bridge of my chonies, a little defeat. They make crinkle sounds when I sit funny. I still get "lag" on my vision when I get up too quickly or get too tired and my brain can't process what my eyes show it. Like vertigo, but worse. I puke if it gets to be too much, that's happened a few times. Every night there's a big kitchen bowl next to my bed. Sometimes I forget it's there and tip it over. That's only happened once when it was full. Every so often my head feels like right after I've been hit: I get all loopy, with motion trails across my vision like comet tails attached to anything moving and sometimes stuff that isn't. It happens randomly. The doctors say this condition could go away at any time. They just don't know. I'm still doing physical therapy. Probably I'll be doing it for another year and a half I've basically come to grips with the fact that I'll never be normal again. At least, I think I have. I had to leave school for six months to heal. Before you go thinking that that's just two words, "six" and "months," put together and it's supposed to be a long time but doesn't mean anything, I'll just tell you that's about one hundred and sixty-eight days, give or take an afternoon or two, and roughly four thousand and thirty-two hours. That means one hundred and twenty days of daytime television, five hundred and four meals that came from a cafeteria that smelled like disinfectant, and only thirty-three visitation days when I was "taken out for a walk" but really, for the majority of 'em, I was just pushed around in a wheelchair that lapped the sidewalk skirting the manmade pond in the back of the hospital. The average number of laps Auntie Marin and me could do was sixteen in twenty minutes. Once, when she was mad about something, we did twenty-four. For the rest of that time, I was in a stupid bed, pretending to read but mostly just writing about things I could remember or drawing things I didn't want to forget. There was nothing else to do. Had to beg the nurse to help me tape the pen to my fingers with the same tape they use for IVs. She got used to doing it. Sometimes it was like I had a fingernail that I could write with. I asked for red pens only so I could pretend it was written in blood. I know, morbid. Slept all the time in between. The intensive care ward, long-term section, was where I turned sweet sixteen. I blew out all my candles from a reclining position. The nurse wouldn't let me eat any cake though, I wasn't allowed due to dietary restrictions. Doctor's orders. Had to watch Auntie Marin and Dad eat little bites in front of me and look sad and embarrassed at the same time. I lost a lot of weight, a lot of muscle. Had loads of vitamins and drugs pushed through my IV. Your veins can get tired of taking an intravenous line for too long. I got deep bruises and lots of swelling. Like a big, man-o'-war jellyfish died under my skin. The nurses had to switch mine a bunch of times, from arm to arm, up and down. By the very end, I had an IV in my leg and my whole body looked like a patch of sea for a school of spawning jellies.
I go to North High across town now, started in the fall semester. Remo helps me with my homework. The school board buses me to the new school. They changed the zoning after everything happened. I can wear dresses if I want to, but I never do. I stick to my flannels. They hide a lot of what's wrong with me. Auntie Marin trimmed up some of Cue's so I can wear them. She takes better care of Dad than I ever did, and he's improving, walking on his own more now, painting often. I want to graduate and move away to somewhere real sunny. Somewhere that doesn't make my joints feel like they're being squeezed every time I take a step or try and pick up the phone.
All in all, it's okay but sometimes, I can't feel things. Not just in my arm or my head or anywhere else but deep down. Like I don't have many feelings. Like my cousin pushed my numbness into me and I'm not so much cold anymore, just numb from the inside out. Still have all my ice though, frozen solid, going nowhere. If Jimmy was here to talk to, face to face, I'd ask him if he had ever learned anything about fighting damaging not only your body but your soul too. You know, just to see if they taught him anything like that in Hong Kong. Or maybe if what we did had anything to do with it. I guess I figured that the priests would talk to him about stuff like that, rules of life or something. How to stay pure in matters of karma, I don't know. I can't put that kind of stuff to him in letters either. It just looks wrong and stupid when I scratch it into the paper, so I don't. I'm pretty sure he'd never write back anyway.
I think about Cue's ghost though. My psychiatrist—nearly everyone has an appointed psychiatrist since that day, it's paid for by the victims' fund—says it was a hallucination, a product of extreme stress and shock because of my getting shot. I don't listen to her. Even though I can't explain it, I'm sure it was real. That it was his good-bye. I haven't told anyone else about it, especially not Dad or even Auntie Marin.
The Good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King High School, a.k.a. Kung Fu High School, got closed down. They tried to clean it all up but it just didn't work. So it was bulldozed and the city built a community center on the old foundation. Sometimes, I walk by just to see the old place, even though it's weird as hell to see kids playing there. My new school is so much different. It actually matters how you look at North, just like it matters what car you drive and who you're going out with. I don't know. Seems to me that it was so much more simple at Kung Fu. At least there I didn't have to remind myself on a daily basis that I'm "not allowed" to clock that blond bitch for staring at me, for calling me a poor, retarded Mexican when she thinks I can't hear her. She's got the impression my brain doesn't work because I get dizzy spells and my hands are funny looking. I still want to use them, though. To hit her. Right in her pretty little nose that leads to the brain that thinks anyone who speaks a little Español is Mexican. If I could make a real fist, I would. I'm not half anything to her. I'm certainly not white. I'm all different.
My psychiatrist says I'm still trying to figure a lot of things out. Find comfort in new, safer boundaries, she says. She also goes on about how I have reentry stress from the "real world." I don't know much about that, but I do know one thing. I know what happened to the little girl now. That little girl once captured by the Sand Witch. I figure Cue would've wanted me to finish the story for us, so here goes:
See, one day, the Sand Witch said, "All that I own is now yours. It is time for me to pass on." So she packed a small bag and took two very important possessions, her diary and her pillow, kissed the little girl on her cheek, and flew away into the clouds. For some time, the little girl was very lonely in the big temple and she tried very hard to be the new Sand Witch, but she couldn't do it with a clear conscience. She couldn't continue to eat the little boys that traveled along the road at dusk. It just didn't appeal to her. So she climbed down from the corrupted temple and she left everything behind: the spell books and the cauldrons, the potions and the magic recipes. The only thing the little girl took was a picture of the Sand Witch, who had been like a mother to her. When the little girl got to a city, she found a simple job, started a simple life, and blended in with the people that lived there. It was what she had convinced herself she'd always wanted. And though she gazed out the window sometimes, at the hills to the east where the corrupted temple was almost certainly being buried by the great sandstorms of the region now that no one was there casting spells to protect it, she did not miss her old home. In fact, she didn't miss flying ever again. Yet this knowledge did nothing to damage the little girl's persistent and reluctant craving for the sky. To her mind, it was a different matter altogether.