“Paint can’t pay our rent, Marcus. I don’t know what you want me to do, say I forgive you? Don’t really matter if I forgive you when we don’t got no food to eat.”
“What you want me to do about that? I already tried with a job. Twice.”
I sigh, trying to wipe the blur out my eyes. “I went to see Mama. She don’t have Uncle Ty’s number, but he always liked you best.” I feel him seize, his body tightening. “Help me, Mars. I don’t give a shit what you gotta do, but I need you to try something. Find Ty or another job or anything. Please.”
“Fuck that.” Marcus kicks the ground with his unlaced sneaker. “You know he’s not helping us do shit.”
“Best plan I got.”
When Marcus turned thirteen, after Daddy came back home, he started skipping school to go hang out with Uncle Ty. This was before Uncle Ty left town, before he got signed to a major record label and bought his Maserati. He was just Daddy’s little brother, the baby of the family, our only connection to something bigger.
Uncle Ty’s the kind of person you wanna get as close to as you can, magnetic really. He don’t even need to speak. It’s almost like you can see the thoughts fly through him, the intensity of every belief, the way his eyes set on something and don’t look away. As kids, we thought Uncle Ty was magic and Mama thought it’d be best we didn’t talk to him much. Stopped coming to Christmas when I turned nine. Marcus cried that whole first Christmas without him, rolled on the floor of our apartment clutching his stomach like the distance bred physical pain. Maybe it did.
None of us knew Marcus was cutting class to spend time with Uncle Ty until the truancy notice came in the mail. For an entire semester, they spent most days together. When our uncle skipped town on us after Mama’s arrest, Marcus went around the apartment breaking whatever shit reminded him of Uncle Ty.
After Marcus heard Uncle Ty’s song at the club last year, found out about his fame, he came home drunk and teary and stroked my forehead, telling me about what they spent all that time doing. Besides bringing Marcus to the skate park, Uncle Ty was meeting up with lots of big men with bigger chains, getting high, talking shit, playing them his music. Marcus would sit in the corner, inhaling the smoke and waiting for Uncle Ty to take him back to the skate park. He said sometimes they’d go to these nice houses where rich dudes would offer him cigars and Uncle Ty would tell Marcus to try one out. Marcus would inhale when you really ain’t supposed to breathe in cigar smoke and end up vomiting in the bathroom. Even when Uncle Ty only brought Marcus grief, he loved our uncle more than anything. Worshipped him, really.
Marcus shakes his head. “You on your own.”
“Really? You can’t do this one thing for me?”
Marcus looks at me with that same scared look he gave me when Daddy tried to take my hand at the drum circle. He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”
I reach for my bike and all I can think about is getting somewhere that’s not so blue.
I’ve made the decision before I’ve even registered it in words, looking at Marcus still shaking his head. “Daddy would be real disappointed in what you’ve become. Feel free to go shoot your shot, Marcus, but I ain’t gonna give you a bed when you come home empty after all that big-boy shit. You wanna be on your own? Go live somewhere else. If you wanna stay with me, you figure your shit out and help me.”
I climb onto my bike, the seat still warm, and I start to pedal, harder, harder, until my legs are a blur of muscle and woman and sweat. I know I’ve sliced into something between us, ripped apart the treaty that was our apartment by saying this right after something so sacred. Maybe the mural will memorialize this day, take us back to before, back to each other.
Oakland’s sun faded to its usual mild hum. Alé hasn’t answered the phone since the skate park and I’m too scared to ask her if she still loves me like she used to. Every day I don’t see her, it feels like we are getting further from recognizable. I bet she has some new tattoos now. Maybe she even smells different.
Marcus is gone. It’s officially been a week since the mural and yesterday he picked up the clothes I washed for him. He must be staying with one of his boys, and I feel like the last survivor in our family, the only one left in this apartment.
I can’t stop thinking about the party Camila invited me to, about a disco. There probably won’t even be no disco, but the flash makes me wanna go, just to see if the shining would make me dizzy or if maybe this is the life for me. Maybe I can hold Camila’s hand every night, make enough money that Trevor never has a worry in his life, give up comfort for something stable and harsh.