I turned my head. Looked down at the gray streak of road. It hit me somewhere in the middle of my chest. All that she’d said was true. It hit me in the middle, where it all comes together like a knot.
“Six have a box?” I said even though I knew.
“You know he does.”
“D’you help him make it?”
“That boy never let me help him make anything,” she said, her voice breaking. She wiped her eyes. “He thinks he can make it all up himself, but look where that got him.”
“I been meaning to tell you. I went over there to see him.”
“How did he seem?” Fina asked real quick like she’d been waiting for me to bring it up.
“He was all right. But we drank. And then he brought me to the basement, started talking about giving me some shit, lighting this plant in a shell, and then he blew some powder stuff in my face.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like I wanna fucking kill him. For real.”
“Why?”
“What you mean why?”
“He didn’t do any of it on purpose,” Fina said. “He’s lost.”
“He fucked up.”
“So did your brother.”
“Six was part of that too.”
“So? We all fuck up. It’s how we come back from it that matters.”
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do then. I can’t get him back, I can’t get them back. I don’t know what the fuck any of this is about.”
“You’re not supposed to,” she said, and rolled down her window.
It was getting hot. I rolled mine down too.
“That’s the way this whole thing is set up,” she said. “You’re not ever supposed to know. Not all the way. That’s what makes the whole thing work the way it does. We can’t know. That’s what makes us keep going.”
I wanted to say something but couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed both right and like the wrongest shit possible. I stayed quiet—the rest of the car ride and then for weeks after that. And she let me.
Daniel Gonzales
THE GUYS LOST their shit when I showed them the gun. Pushed each other and laughed like they hadn’t done since forever ago. Everything got so fucking serious after Manny died. Which it should have. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have. But he would have loved to see them like that. He would have loved the gun too. It was a real gun. As real as any gun. But it was white, and plastic, and I printed it from a 3-D printer in my room, which is the basement, which used to be Manny’s room. I still can’t think of him as gone. For now Manny’s not here or there. He’s in the middle of the middle, where you can only be when you can’t be anywhere.
The gun only took three hours to print. My mom made tacos for the guys while they watched the Raiders game. I stayed downstairs and watched the gun spool out in layers. When they came down we watched the last of it get printed in silence. I knew they wouldn’t know what to think. That’s why I had a YouTube video pulled up to show them. A thirty-second time-lapse of a guy 3-D printing then firing a gun. Once they saw that, that’s when they all lost their shit. They yelled and pushed at each other like they were kids again. Like it used to be over simpler shit like video games, like when we used to have all-night Madden tournaments and someone would win at four in the morning and we’d be all loud and my dad would come down with that little metal bat he kept by his bed—it was the bat he taught us to hit with when we were younger, an aluminum bat—and he’d hit us with that shit too, that same bat we got for free at that A’s game where they were giving them away and we showed up early to be sure to get one.
* * *
—
Manny wouldn’t like that Octavio came over so much after he died. I mean, in a big way it was Octavio’s fault. But he’s our cousin. And him and Manny had become like brothers. All three of us had. It’s true, Octavio shouldn’t have run his mouth at that party. For a while I hated him for it. Blamed him too. But he kept coming back around. Making sure we were okay. Me and my mom. Then the more I got to thinking about it, it wasn’t all on him. Manny’s the one who fucked that kid up. It was on all of us really. We turned our heads. Looked the other way when Manny fucked that kid up so bad on the front lawn. The blood stained brown on the yellow grass there until I got the mower out and cut it. And then when it was good, when money came in, before Manny died, we didn’t ask where it was coming from. We took the TV and the random cash he left on the kitchen table in envelopes. We allowed the shit in and only wanted it out when it took him from us.