I jumped at the snap-clink of a lighter flipping shut. Lonny perched on his saggy front porch, elbows on his knees. His tank top was moist at the neck, tattoos blooming like ghosts through the thin white cotton. He squinted at me, reaching slowly behind himself into the waistband of his jeans. He laid something between his legs. The silver barrel glinted in the sun. We stared at each other while he lifted the cigarette to his lips. His exhale felt like a bullet between the eyes.
A screen door slammed on the opposite side of the street. I turned slowly. TJ stood barefoot on his front step, holding a trash bag full of empty cans. His uncle was slurring and swearing through the open door, but TJ didn’t seem to hear. He looked at me with his brows drawn together, and then to the gun between Lonny’s legs. The two locked eyes. TJ set the trash down, but he didn’t go back inside. Instead, he watched.
I slipped quickly between the police car and my porch, and stood behind the two plainclothes officers. Lonny’d spent the night in jail because of Reece, and his girlfriend was dead, maybe because of me. He wouldn’t think twice about shooting me, but he’d think twice about doing it in front of two cops and a witness.
My mother stood in her robe in the open door. Her hands weren’t visible, and the detectives stood at the bottom of the porch, eyeing her cautiously. Sweat trailed over their temples and darkened their collars, their balding heads cooking pink in the sun. My mother kept her eyes square on their faces and said, “Nearly, get inside.”
I scrambled past the officers and under her arm. “Gentlemen,” my mother said sharply, “my daughter is a minor. I know her rights. You need my consent to ask her anything or to come inside my home, and I’ve no intention of giving it to you.” They couldn’t see her fingers close over the baseball bat she kept behind the door. “You’d best be on your way.”
The older one placed a toe on the stoop. “We just want a few words with her . . .”
The bat came off the floor, and my mother’s voice dropped low. “We’ve got nothing to say, unless you’ve got a warrant.”
The man paused, his foot creaking on the drooping wooden step. His eyes flicked to her arm where it disappeared behind the door, and he stepped back, slow and easy. Neither spoke, and when the silence threatened to extend indefinitely, Mona slammed the door. She kept one hand on the bat as she slid the dead bolt home and snapped the chain in place. Then she stood sideways at the window, peering through the curtain slit. She didn’t let the fabric fall until a cloud of gravel kicked up, bouncing off our aluminum walls like hail.
Mona paced to the kitchen, snatching her cigarettes off the counter.
“What do the police want with you?” Her voice was eerily calm as she slapped the box hard against her open fist.
I sank slowly into the scratchy vinyl chair. I couldn’t explain. I wouldn’t know where to start.
“Does this have something to do with that boy?” Mona asked through a mouthful of smoke. “I knew it. I knew he was nothing but trouble.” She shook her head, letting her ashtray clatter to the table.
“It’s nothing like that, Mom—”
“Don’t lie to me, Nearly!” She smacked the table hard enough to rattle me.
I looked at her hand and saw my crinkled trig exam—the one I’d used to wrap her Mother’s Day gift—smashed flat under her palm. I’d scored 100%, but I’d missed the bonus question, an impossibly tricky equation that no one in the class had bothered to answer. The bonus question was filled in, complete, in the same messy scrawl my mother used to write our rent checks every month.
“Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot,” she said.
I pulled the test toward me, my mind working over the numerals and letters, the logic sinking in. My mother, who climbed a pole for a living and scraped her paychecks from a stage, had finished my trig test.
“What are we doing here?” I whispered.
My lips parted, clearing a path for all the angry words I’d been swallowing for years. But I couldn’t squeeze all that bitterness through the knot in my throat. I balled up the test in my fist and shouted, “What are we doing here?”
My mother’s eyes were glassy, her lips pressed into a thin line. The cigarette smoldered away between her fingers.
“All this time you could do this?” I shook the test in her face. “And you kept us here?” Years of questions and anger burned to the surface. That test was like a match in my hands. I wasn’t supposed to be like her. I was supposed to be like him. The one who’d found a way out. “Why?”
She was crying, her eye makeup dripping in long black streaks down her face. “I never graduated high school!” she shouted, as though that were somehow my fault. “What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to take care of you? Your father left me nothing!”
I gritted my teeth, holding back the worst of the things I wanted to say. I wanted to hurl everything I had at her, to throw everything I knew now back in her face, but each word was a boomerang. I couldn’t inflict pain without hurting myself.
“You don’t get to lecture me on boys, or grades, or school anymore. You don’t get to build my future out of your busted, burned-out life! That was your failure. Not mine.” I took a last look at the trig exam before tossing it into the trash. “It’s too late for extra credit.”