* * *
—
I knew they believed in the white gun for real when I picked it up and pointed it at them. They flinched, put their hands up. Not Octavio though. He told me to put it down. There were no bullets in the gun, but I hadn’t felt in control for so long. I know guns are stupid. But that doesn’t mean they don’t make you feel in control when you’re holding one. Octavio pulled the gun out of my hands. He looked down the barrel, pointed it at us. That’s when it was my turn to get scared. Octavio holding it made it even more real. Made the white of it creepy—like some plastic message from the future about shit getting into the wrong hands.
* * *
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After the guys left that night, I decided to write my brother an email. I’d helped him set it up. A Gmail account. Manny barely used it, but sometimes he wrote me. And when he did he said shit he never would have said in real life. That’s what was cool about it.
I opened up my Gmail and replied to the last email my brother sent. No matter what happens you know I’ll always be here for you. He was talking about fights he was getting in with our mom. She kept threatening to kick him out after he beat that kid up. The cops had come. Way too late, but they’d come, asked questions. She could sense shit was getting more serious. A tension was building in him. I could feel it too but didn’t know what to say. It was like he’d been moving toward that bullet, toward the front yard, way before he got there.
I scrolled down to reply.
Hey brother. Damn. I know you’re not there. But writing you at your email, with that last message up there, it feels like you’re still here. Being around the guys feels like that too. You must be wondering what I’ve been up to. Maybe you see. Maybe you know. If you do, you must be like, what the fuck? 3-D printed gun? Shit. I felt the same way when I first saw it, just laughing like a crazy person when it came out. And I know you wouldn’t approve. I’m sorry but we need the money. Mom lost her job. After you died she just stayed in bed. I couldn’t get her out. I don’t know where rent’s coming from next month. We’ll get an extra month if we get evicted, but shit, we been in this house our whole lives. Your pictures are still up. I still have to see you everywhere in here. So we’re not just gonna go. We been here our whole lives. We don’t have anywhere to go.
You know what’s funny? I’m all, like, street and shit in real life. But online I don’t talk like that, like I am now, so it feels weird to. Online I try to sound smarter than I am. I mean I choose what I type carefully, cuz that’s all people know about me. What I type, what I post. It’s pretty weird on there. Here. The way you don’t know who people are. You just get their avatar names. Some profile picture. But if you post cool shit, say cool shit, people like you. Did I tell you about the community I got into? The name of the place, the online community is: Vunderk0de. It’s fucking Norwegian. You probably don’t know what code is. I got way into it after you died. I didn’t feel like going out or going to school or nothing.
When you spend enough time online, if you’re looking, you can find some cool shit. I don’t see it as that much different from what you did. Figuring out a way around a big fucking bully system that only gives those that came from money or power the means to make it. I learned from YouTube how to code. Shit like JavaScript, Python, SQL, Ruby, C++, HTML, Java, PHP. Sounds like a different language, right? It is. And you get better by putting in the time and taking to heart what all the motherfuckers have to say about your abilities on the forums. You have to know how to tell the difference. Whose criticism to take and whose to ignore. Long story short, though, is that I got hooked into this community, and I realized I could get whatever I wanted. Not drugs and shit. I mean I could but that’s not what I want. The 3-D printer I got was itself printed by a 3-D printer. No shit, a 3-D printer printed by a 3-D printer. Octavio fronted me the money.
Part of what kills me about you being gone is that I never really said anything to you. Even when you emailed me. I didn’t even really know how much I wanted to say to you until the day you left. Until I felt that feeling of losing you on the lawn out there, right on that same spot where that boy’s blood stained the grass. But you showed me. I knew how much you loved me. You did shit like, like how you got me that expensive-ass Schwinn. Probably used to be some hipster’s bike, you probably stole it, but still, you stole it for me, and in some ways that’s even better than if you bought it. Especially if it was from one of those white boys trying to take Oakland over from the West. You should know they haven’t made it to the Deep East yet. Probably never will. Shit’s mean out here. But everything from High Street to West Oakland, that shit seems doomed to me. Anyway, I mostly see Oakland from online now. That’s where we’re all gonna be mostly eventually. Online. That’s what I think. We’re already kinda moving in that direction if you think about it. We’re already like fucking androids, thinking and seeing with our phones all the time.