“Colson, come on,” she said.
“Just a minute.” He dug a spiral-bound notebook out of the backpack, felt inside for a pencil. He tore a sheet out, spread it on the roof, and began to write. “We got to do an important public service here.”
Aisha cast a glance at the strip mall. They were parallel with the coin-op, the brightest storefront in the whole row. The door was propped open with a cinder block, and they were close enough that she could hear the sound of tumbling dryers. She was sure at any moment someone would appear in the doorway and yell.
She crept toward him. She wanted to grab his hand and pull him along, but when she got close enough to take his sleeve, he yanked his arm free and kept writing.
As he scribbled away, he began to read. “‘Dear Sir. It has come to our attention that you neglected to lock the doors of your mint-condition Alfa Romeo this evening. We have taken the liberty of locking the doors for you. Please be aware that this neighborhood is full of smelly, ungroomed hoboes who might have used your vehicle for a toilet. If you are not currently sitting in a puddle of stanky wino piss, you can thank the Promoters Of Normal Urination team. Support your local P-ON-U squad today!’”
In spite of herself, Aisha laughed. Colson drifted from one moment that belonged in a play to another, with a serene, spacey calm that approached indifference.
He folded the letter and placed it on the dash. When he drew his arm back, the sleeve of his denim jacket caught a CD and knocked it to the floor. He picked it up, considered it, then set it on the roof of the car. He grabbed up his note and began to write again.
“‘Pee Ess,’” he said. “‘We have taken the further step of absconding with your copy of Pocket Full of Kryptonite to protect you from the Spin Doctors—’”
“Colson!” Aisha cried out, heartsick to go.
“‘—who can be harmful to your hearing. Please replace with Public Enemy and treat yourself with daily doses until you are less of a lame-ass.’”
“Colson!” she shouted again, almost screamed. It wasn’t funny anymore. It had never been really funny, even if he’d tricked a giggle out of her.
He slammed the door and wandered on, her backpack hitched over his shoulder. He had a finger through the hole in the center of the CD. Rainbows shimmied across the surface. He went three yards, then paused to look back with a certain impatience.
“We going or not? Don’t yell at me to hurry up, then stand there like you can’t remember how to move your feet.”
When she began to run after him, he turned and walked on.
Aisha chased him down, grabbed his wrist, set her heels, and pulled.
“Put it back.”
He stopped, looked at the CD on his finger, then over at Aisha’s hands on his right wrist. “Naw.”
He walked on, mostly dragging her.
“Put it back!”
“Can’t. This is my good deed for the day. I just rescued someone’s ears.”
“Put! It! Back!”
“Can’t. I locked the door so no one steals something actually worth stealing, like the gold St. Christopher medal hanging from the rearview mirror. Come on, now. Quit it. You’re ruining my buzz.”
She knew why he took it: not because he was a thief but because it was funny, or would be funny when he told his friends. When he told them about P-ON-U, the CD was his proof it wasn’t just a story. Colson needed stories to tell like a gun needed bullets, and for the same reason—to slay.
But Aisha also knew about fingerprints and felt it was only a matter of time before the police dropped in to arrest him for grand theft Spin Doctors. And he wouldn’t get to go to London and be Hamlet, and his life would be ruined, and hers, too.
He grasped her hand, and on they went, around the corner, along a buckled side road in even worse condition than the main parking lot. He led her to the back corner of the lot and into the weeds, to a sagging chain-link fence, half smothered by the high grass and undergrowth. By then she was weeping steadily and silently, drawing deep, shaking breaths.
Colson bent to help her up onto the fence—and seemed genuinely shocked to see the tears dripping off her chin.
“Hey! What’s going on, Twinkletoes?”
“You! Should put! It! BACK!” she shouted in his face, hardly aware of how loud she was being.
He bent backward, like a bush in a gale, and opened his eyes wide. “Whoa! Whoa, Godzilla! I can’t! Told you. I locked the dude’s car.”
She opened her mouth to shout something else and sobbed instead. He caught her shoulder and held her while she shook and made big, racking sounds of misery. He used his tee to wipe her face. When her vision came unblurred, she could see him smiling with a kind of bewilderment. All you had to do was see him smile to understand why Juliet would die for him.
“No one cares about a Spin Doctors CD,” he said, but she already knew she had won and was able to catch her breath, hold her next sob in. “Damn, girl. You’re going to ruin a perfectly good joke, you know that? You’re like the joke police. Going to write me a ticket for being flagrantly amusing? How about I go back and put the CD on the roof of the car? Will that make it better?”
She nodded, didn’t trust her voice. She told him she was glad by hugging him instead, throwing her wiry nine-year-old arms around his neck. For years afterward she could close her eyes and bring it back, exactly what that hug had felt like, the way he laughed, one hand between her shoulder blades. The way he hugged her good-bye.
He rose, turned her toward the fence. Her fingers found the chain-links. He scooped one hand under her butt to help her over the top, and she dropped down onto the other side, into the thick brush.
“Wait for me,” he said, and slapped the fence.
He went, still unconsciously carrying her Little Mermaid backpack over one shoulder, the CD hanging off the index finger of his right hand. The disc flashed silver in the darkness, as bright as Romeo’s bodkin. In a moment he had disappeared around the corner.
Aisha waited in the velvety darkness, a night orchestra of insects playing their sleepy lullaby in the undergrowth.
When Colson came back, it was at a trot that accelerated to a sprint when someone yelled. He’d been gone only a few seconds, half a minute at most. He darted along the shattered side road, head down, backpack slapping against his shoulder.
A man came running after him, a man in a heavy belt with things rattling and jangling on it. The night lit up in a flurry of silver and blue lights, flashing like a simulated thunderstorm in a theater. The man in the belt was slow, panting for breath.
“Put it the fuck down!” screamed the man in the jangling belt—a police officer, a white kid, Aisha saw now, not much older than Colson himself. “Drop it! Drop it!”