“The train. Tell her about the train,” Miles whispered from the other side of their dorm.
“And that’s why I’m calling and not Miles, to tell you that we were stuck on the train. I think somebody jumped or something…yeah…and Miles had to poop the whole time, so when we finally got off…I mean…Mrs. M., I swear I’ve never seen someone run so fast.” Ganke covered his mouth, stifling the laughter. “But we made it safely. And yes…he made it safely. Uh-huh. Okay, I’ll tell him to call you when he’s out. Okay, bye.” Ganke tapped the screen on his phone to end the call. “Boom. That’s how you do it.” He pretended to drop the cell phone as if he were dropping a microphone.
“Thanks.” Miles stretched his fingers, slowly squeezing air, his knuckles cracking.
“It’s the least I can do.”
“It’s cool, man.”
“Hey, I know things got a little crazy at the court, but can you at least admit that it was fun?” Ganke stood up, pulled his shirt over his head, then pulled down the white tank top he had on underneath. Miles didn’t budge. Not even a smirk. “Seriously? You mean to tell me you didn’t have a good time, not even when you slammed that last dunk and shattered the glass? Miles Morales, the stress box who everybody knows at this school, but nobody really knows, the geek with a razor-sharp hairline and the clean kicks…uh, most of the time…You didn’t enjoy being the man? Really?”
Miles sat on his bed scratching the back of his hand. He had kicked off his shoes and pitted his big toes against each other, one on top of the other. Ganke stared expectantly at him. Waiting for it…waiting…waiting…until finally a smile slipped onto Miles’s face.
“I knew it!” Ganke cheered after seeing the grin.
“Relax. You make it seem like dunking a basketball was a day at an amusement park. Maybe it was for you, but I’m the one who had to do all the work. Not to mention, I almost had my bag stolen and had to fight. That ain’t fun.”
“Okay, so maybe not the bag almost being stolen and the fighting part. But the rest of it…gold.”
“Ganke, it—”
“Gold.”
“Dude. Seriously, it—”
“Gold!”
“Okay, fine.” Miles sighed. “It was gold. It was freakin’ gold.”
Ganke burst into laughter. “Now that we got that settled, next order of business: I need to find out who Bruce Bruce is,” he said, pulling his laptop from his bag.
“Well, mine is getting in the shower. Wash Benji and the Bear off me.”
Miles sidestepped Ganke and headed for his closet where he kept his shower caddy. His and Ganke’s room was small, a tiny box, only a little bigger than Miles’s bedroom at his folks’ house. There were two twin beds, one on either side, desks in front of the beds, a closet along the back wall (with an added hook for Miles’s caddy) and a poster of Rihanna on the front wall that was tacked above a small table with a television on it. Under that table, a mess of wires and video game consoles. Old-school. Nintendo. Sega. An Atari they couldn’t get to work. All controllers maxing out at four buttons. They were Miles’s and Ganke’s fathers’, passed down to their offbeat kids who had a love for eight-and sixteen-bit games. Games that were all fun and no stress. No shooters, no monsters—nothing, for Miles, that was real.
The games needed a closet of their own.
The showers were no better than the rooms. Everyone on their floor shared a big bathroom with toilets on one side, sinks in the middle, and shower stalls on the other side. Tiny cells with slimy walls. Thankfully, the bathroom was empty when Miles got there. They’d gotten back late, so most boys—at least the ones who actually took showers—had already come and gone. Miles set his caddy on one of the sinks. Looked at himself in the mirror. No marks on his face, which was all he really cared about. He knew he had to be careful to not leave evidence of fighting. His knee was a little puffy, but it was fine.
But as he put toothpaste on his toothbrush and jammed it in his mouth, Miles couldn’t stop thinking about what they said about him, why they wanted to beat him and Ganke up so bad anyway. That he had hustled them. Brush, brush, brush. And…he had. He knew that he could do things they couldn’t do. That there would be no way they could win the bet. He took advantage of them. Brush, brush, brush. And then after he took advantage of them, he beat them up. And that also wasn’t right. They had a right to be mad. Everyone gets mad at hustlers, especially if you’re on the victim side of the hustle. And Miles knew hustling was in his veins. You’re just like me.
Ugh, he thought, splashing water on his face. Whatever. He turned the shower on, his flip-flops slick on the floor from a week’s worth of soap scum. Someone’s hair was in the drain, gluey from mixing with a piece of soap the size of a skipping stone. It was fun, though, Miles thought. Even that part. That’s why…whatever.
When Miles got back to the room, Ganke was sitting at his desk, flipping through a notebook, his laptop frozen on a clip of a comedy series from the nineties. Miles put on a pair of shorts and sat back on his bed to massage his knee. “So what’d I miss?” he asked, pointing at Ganke’s notebook.
“Since you been in the shower?” Ganke joked. “I did some breakdancing. Showtime!” He rolled the top half of his body.
“Come on, man. I can’t go back to class tomorrow ice-cold.”
“Aight, aight.” Ganke turned his chair around. “Here’s your briefing. I feel like your trusty sidekick, by the way. Or your hype-man.” Ganke shook his head. “Anyway, so the two days you were gone…” Ganke thought for a second. “One thing is, Mr. Chamberlain is crazy.”
“Uh…yeah.” They had just started their unit on the Civil War in fifth-period history. Everyone figured this was Mr. Chamberlain’s favorite subject to teach, because he had been talking about it the entire month that school had been in session.
“I mean, I know you know. But he’s like…nuts. So he keeps talking about how the Civil War was like this beautiful, romantic thing. He talks about it like it’s a video game he loves to play. But the weirdest part was on Friday, when he finally started talking about like, y’know, the nitty-gritty stuff—slavery, and how the Confederacy didn’t want to end it, and all that—he was going on about how, depending on how you look at it, slavery was kind of good for the country.”
“Wait, he said that?” Miles asked, grabbing one of his web-shooters from under his bed.
“I mean, basically. You know, Chamberlain. He does the whole talking statue thing, acting like it’s gonna make him seem smarter or whatever, but that’s what I took from it.” Miles fired the shooter at the TV, a wad of web turning it on. Ganke shook his head. “So lazy.”
“What? I’m exhausted from saving your ass,” Miles joked, shooting a splat at Ganke as if it were Silly String. “Anyway, okay, Chamberlain’s trippin’ as usual. Blah-blah-blah. Anything else?”
“Well, yeah. This right here.” Ganke struggled to peel the web off his arm. He eventually just quit and held up his notebook.