Marcus slams the basket down on the bar and growls. “These motherfuckers tryna tell me I ain’t know what I’m talkin’ ’bout.” He’s pacing, his mumbles getting louder until the whole club recedes to silence in the wake of his shouts.
Lacy tries to grab his arm. “What the hell are you doing?”
Marcus shoves her away.
“Marcus, stop,” I say, and he looks at me, his snarl fully present in his mouth. He spits on the floor.
“I ain’t gotta take nobody’s orders.” Marcus grabs the wings and walks back around the bar, dropping them in front of the suited men, wings and ranch flying everywhere. Marcus turns around in a circle, opening his arms wide, and shouts again. “Y’all motherfuckers gonna know my name real soon. I’m Marcus motherfucking Johnson and I ain’t ’bout to be serving you shit, nah.” He shakes his head more than he needs to before strutting straight out of the door, not even bothering to ask if I wanna come with.
* * *
Walking home tonight feels like walking underwater. Like everything is thick and cold and moving, but I can’t really tell one block from the next. The way oceans make you glow until you remember that the glow is really just a reflection of your own skin and your fingers are wrinkled. It feels like that, walking tonight, the streets when it’s only me.
I should’ve known Marcus couldn’t handle it for long. He probably didn’t even make enough to pay for our groceries, and I’m less angry that he doesn’t know how to be a grown man than I am that I trusted he might actually try. I think he wanted to and I think that desire was mostly about me, but Marcus ain’t figured out how to stifle his rage to get a job done. At the same time, I can’t blame him. He’s spent years bottling up every feeling to take care of us and ever since he learned Uncle Ty’s made it big, he can’t keep himself from erupting. He doesn’t understand we don’t got the luxury of fucking up, not right now.
I apologized to Lacy and took the bus home. The apartment was empty and I changed quickly, texting my small list of men to see who was willing to pay tonight. I tell myself I’ll start looking for new job postings tomorrow, that this is what it’s gotta be for now, the only way we gonna survive. It ain’t that I’m not scared. I am. But I know we’ll lose so much more if I don’t keep us afloat, that suddenly Trevor won’t have nobody to make sure he eats and Marcus won’t have a couch to sleep on and I will be closer to my own funeral day than I ever have been.
One of Davon’s friends picked me up around eight o’clock and parked his car on a side street. He pushed the passenger seat down so we were horizontal and had me lie on top of him, the windows steaming just enough with our body heat that when the sirens roared past, the lights shone through the haze and somehow it made them brighter. I stopped, like if I froze I could prevent them from seeing me, from getting out of that police car and tapping on the window. I know the stories of what happens when the blue-suits find someone like me doing something like this. The man beneath me asked me why I stopped and I didn’t answer, still waiting for a cop to jump out and turn on his flashlight, blind me with it.
The sirens receded into the night, and nobody came tapping on the window, but I couldn’t get the image out of my head of them zip-tying my wrists and shoving me into the backseat of their car, so I got off the man and he started throwing a fit and calling me a bitch and I thought he might try to hit me, so I opened the car door and fled.
Now I’m walking, the streetlamps looking like spotlights and I feel like I’m being followed, even though I know the ocean makes you believe things when it fills you up and tonight I am brimming.
Part of me hopes Alé might be out this late and run into me, find me on the streets, and take me home with her. I don’t want her to have to see me like this; she probably wouldn’t even look me in the eyes, but at least she’d take me somewhere safe. At least her arms would be warm. But Alé isn’t gonna find me and since I haven’t been answering her calls anyway, she probably wouldn’t want to.
Alé’s always dreamed big and lived small.
I met her when I tagged along with Marcus to the skate park and decided she was the only thing worth watching. Marcus and Alé hung out too, but then Marcus entered high school and suddenly she was too young to be his friend. Even in middle school, she was pointing out plot holes in every movie and questioning all her teachers, thinking beyond this city, but still living in it more fully than the rest of us. Alé’s graduation was the most breathtaking and devastating day of my life, watching her do something Marcus and I didn’t have the bandwidth or maybe the bravado to do. The entirety of last year I was waiting for her to tell me about whatever college she was gonna go to, bracing myself for her departure, but halfway through her senior year her mother had a small stroke and I think that stopped Alé in her tracks, made her stay when she probably shouldn’t have.