Nico walks over toward him, meeting him near the back of my car.
“Pick your shit up. You know my mom doesn’t want to see that stuff,” Nico says, meeting the guy’s gaze. His visitor laughs through clenched teeth.
“Fuck that. You pick it up,” he says, his lips snarled to carry his threat. Nico doesn’t flinch, and I shift closer to my car, one foot inside, my keys in my hand.
After a few seconds, Nico walks to the butt on the ground and snags it between two fingers, walking over to his friend and holding it out. The man in the hat only continues to laugh, and eventually Nico lets his hand fall down to his side.
The man’s eyes move to me, and his lip raises again as he nods to acknowledge me. He’s in his thirties, maybe a little older, and his hands are covered in black symbol tattoos.
“You get yourself a white girl?”
My balance gives a little, and my heartbeat picks up fast. I look to Nico, who glances from me back to his visitor.
“What do you want, Cruz?”
Nico doesn’t even acknowledge his question about me.
The guy’s eyes linger on me for a few seconds, but eventually he turns his focus back to Nico, leaning forward and spitting on the ground between them.
“Your brother around?” he asks.
“No,” Nico’s response comes fast.
The two stare into each other for several seconds, until the man Nico called Cruz leans forward to spit one more time. He nods when his face comes back up and his eyes meet Nico’s, then he glances to me and back to his car.
“Vincent’s been gone a long time. You see him, you tell him I’m looking for him,” Cruz says, running the back of his palm over his chin as he takes a few steps backward.
Nico never agrees, but he nods enough to let the man know he heard him. Cruz walks back to his car, the engine still running and the music pounding so hard that it’s drawn Alyssa’s attention to the screen door. My eyes move to the little girl, and I want to tell her to say inside. I don’t have to, though. She stops with her hands flat on the screen, watching.
“White girl’s pretty,” Cruz says over the roof of his car. “Hey, baby. Don’t waste your time with a punk bitch.”
He stares at me for a beat, and though it’s only a second or two, it feels longer. Eventually, his attention moves back to Nico, who still doesn’t give him any reaction at all other than the hard line his mouth has been in for the last minute.
Cruz’s mouth curves again, and his chest shakes with a sinister laugh as he climbs back into his car and drives away.
I wait while Nico looks on, as if he’s making sure his visitor is gone, and then he turns and walks back up his driveway, stopping next to me, but never meeting me in the eyes.
“You should go,” he says, looking down at the joint held in his fingers. He gazes up to see his niece at the door. “Alyssa, get inside,” he says, his tone stern as he walks toward the house. The little girl disappears, and Nico pulls the screen open, steps inside and lets it fall to a close behind him.
I wait for a few seconds, wondering if I should go back inside and offer to help, though I don’t know what with. I wonder about that man—who he is. My stomach twitches with the beating of my heart, a rhythm that hasn’t stopped since the moment that man looked at me like I was his to take.
Eventually, I get in my car and do what Nico asked. I drive home, running through stop signs and turning right instead of waiting at the stop light on the way out of West End. I go two miles out of my way on the freeway just to leave faster. And when I get home, I bring my things inside, ignoring my mom and her party book at the table on my way. My brother’s room is still empty.
I collapse on my bed and let my equipment rest at my feet, then I pull my phone from my pocket and stare at Nico’s name, still up on the contact screen. My finger runs over the CALL icon, hovering without touching, until I let the phone slip from my hold completely, watching the screen while it fades and Nico’s name goes away.
10
I let my film consume me for the rest of the weekend; I even convinced myself there were too many shots in the can I needed to work on editing for me to spend time at practice today.
I was avoiding Nico, was the honest truth.
We’d sparred in class, which was nothing unusual, but for some reason, I couldn’t seem to pause long enough to even hear his perspective out. I resorted to name-calling.
I got kicked out of class.
That…that’s the real reason I am at home. My mother will never hear about it, unless someone whispers to someone else in a long chain of socialite telephone. Even then, the likelihood that each link in the chain would get the story right is incredibly low. I’ll take that gamble. My father, however, has probably already heard that his daughter called his new star quarterback an ego-driven dickhead.