Chapter Thirty-Nine

The boys couldn’t get enough of the photo Douglas had snapped in the alley. In their eyes, Douglas was a regular beast who’d even beat an old man for the sheer pleasure of it. And Douglas played it up that way too, acting as if the very act had made him sprout wings and fly. But there were odd moments he didn’t like so much like when his mother made him go get some milk from the corner store and his stomach got weak with the feel of hammer against flesh. He thought about vomiting on his shoes and then quickly forgot it when the clerk gave him a look. He knew that look. He’d been getting it since he was twelve.

But it was the clerk’s lucky day. Douglas didn’t want to steal anything. He just wanted the bad feeling to go away.

It got worse as each day strayed into the next, which was almost an anomaly. He had seen his own mother cry a certified river when her mother left this world for the next. But each day the tears ebbed, and she became more like the woman she used to be, give or take a few pounds from all that wailing. But then of course, she found them again.

But Douglas’s angst only got worse, and he figured it was because he wasn’t mourning as much as he was sweating. It was like the old man was a ghost who watched his every move, and even at night, he’d wake up from hooping and hollering, his father Edwin at the ready with his old Louisville slugger. Douglas played it off—a bad plate of nachos, sour milk in his cereal—but he knew it was whatever lurked underneath his surface, boiling beneath his skin.

He wanted to discuss this with someone, but Kelvin and Antonne were too stupid for words, and Travis was locked away due to the very thing that plagued Douglas in the first place. It was what his English teacher had once called “ironic.”

Douglas tried not to investigate it too much, but still, it was always there. The day Franklin had come over to talk with his father, the feeling was intensified, like whatever was inside of him could sense it and willed itself to get out. Franklin had told him a story like this once, about some guy with a million demons in him, and when he saw Jesus, the demons started to freak out, asking Jesus what he was up to. It was a weird story to tell a little boy, but Douglas liked it at the time. He felt like a grown up trusted him enough to tell him grown up stuff. But now he just felt exposed.

He thought about telling Franklin, but his uncle was no impartial party. If Douglas even hinted he was involved in Travis’s arrest, there would be hell to pay. His uncle was like that, a silent man. But you didn’t want to stand opposite him once that silence was broken.

So, Douglas stood now in between the living room and kitchen, his right foot in one room, his left in the other, feeling as if he were motionless between two worlds. His body stiffened with the anticipation of movement, but he was stuck not knowing where to go or what to do. But then he heard tires and a car door slamming in the driveway. His father.