Everything Leads to You

“We don’t all have it figured out. We don’t all have internships and college all lined up and our parents’ credit cards.”


“I don’t have my parents’ credit card. I make my own money.”

“For some things, yeah,” he says. “But we don’t all have dens with pictures from the ghetto in frames on our walls.”

“It’s not like that,” I say. “That makes it sound terrible. My parents care about that stuff, they spend all their time teaching people about it. My grandfather—”

Jamal holds his hand out. I stop.

“I like your family,” he says. “Your mom told me about a lot of stuff I didn’t know.”

“And she called you handsome and graceful.”

“She did,” he says. “And I’ll always love her for it. But my point is that we don’t all have brothers getting us fancy jobs in movie studios.”

“I get it,” I say. And I do. But I still don’t want to hear it, don’t want to think about the conversations he and Ava must have about me when I’m not around to defend myself.

“What I’m saying is this: The shelter got me my job. And I finally got promoted so now I even get to work decent hours, on the floor, not doing stock. The deal is I work there until I have enough money saved up to get a place, and then the shelter hooks me up with an apartment. I keep the job, I pay part of the rent, and the shelter pays the other part. It’s not something I’m trying to get out of. It’s not just for the money, even though the money is something I need. I’ve seen the building where I’ll live. It’s cool. Near downtown on a quiet street. I need to start my own life and it can’t be here. I mean, look. This might work out for Ava, but I’m still a kid who’s only been to the beach one other time in my life.”

“You mean Venice Beach?”

“No,” he says. “I mean the ocean. I mean this.” He extends his arms toward the coastline. “This.”

“But you grew up here,” I say. “How did you only come once?”

“If you’d ever been to where I grew up, you wouldn’t call it ‘here.’”

“What’s it like?”

“Pawn shops. Check-cashing stores. Liquor stores.”

“Sure,” I say, because these places are everywhere.

He holds up his hand as if to say, Let me finish, so I shut up and look out at the dark sky and listen.

“Empty buildings,” he says. “Guys on the street all day. Fields covered in trash. Street signs full of bullet holes. Boarded-up windows. People who look decades older than they are. Grandmas who just take every tragedy like it’s expected, just take another kid into their houses and act like it’s not crowded already, like it isn’t a burden to feed another one.”

“All right,” I say. A concession. He’s speaking like he’s in a trance, like he could go on for ages, but also like it hurts him.

“Guns,” he says. “Guns everywhere. I got my first gun when I was twelve. A gift from my cousin. We went out onto the street and I shot it into the sky. Everything went silent.”

“So what happened?” I ask. “Why did you leave?”

“My grandma died. I was in the foster system once, before she got custody, and I sure as hell wasn’t going back again. There were plenty of ways for me to make a living in the neighborhood, but I didn’t want her looking down from above, shaking her head in disgust.”

“What about the rest of your family? Do they know where you are?”

“Pops is locked up. My mom’s dead.”

“So is mine,” Ava says.

I don’t know when she woke up, but she’s sitting now, pulling a hoodie over her legs, and Charlotte’s walking back toward us, sitting down next to her.

Jamal turns to Ava, eyebrows raised in skepticism, but she doesn’t elaborate.

“All right,” Jamal finally says. “It can be that way. But it’s the other way, too.”

“What do you mean?” Ava asks.

“I mean Caroline is dead, but Tracey is alive. That’s rough, but you still have one mother.”

“But she doesn’t want me.”

“I don’t know about that,” he says. “We’ll give it some time. Check back soon, you know?”

“When you really want to find someone, it isn’t that hard. I should have known all along that she wasn’t looking. I feel so stupid.”

“There’s nothing stupid about wanting to be loved,” he says. “Believe me.”

We sit together for a little longer, and then Charlotte and I get up to go home.

“You’ll help me decorate, right?” Ava asks me. “Figure out what to buy? After the filming is over, I mean. I went to this place to try to buy a mattress today but I didn’t know what I wanted, and it would have taken a few days to get delivered anyway, so after a while it just seemed pointless. I left without choosing anything.”

“Sure,” I say. “I’d love to do that.”

“We have the read-through tomorrow,” Charlotte reminds me.

“Right,” I say. “Ava, are you ready for that?”

She nods.