You're Next

Shep says, in his trademark hush, ‘I’m gonna let go of you. But don’t touch him again. Understand?’

The father nods. Shep releases him. Offers the boy his hand, helps him up. Says, ‘Don’t call me a loser.’

There are sirens. Shep’s mouth is Bomb Pop red, and Mike is quite certain his is, too.

At the station the desk cop says, ‘The Shady Lane boys, what a surprise.’

Mike and Shep are sent to different interrogation rooms. Alone, Mike stares at the wall, memories of similar rooms flooding back. You remember your mom’s name? Hello? What’s your mom’s name? A detective comes in, sits down, reads the report, sighs, and throws it on the wooden table. ‘You’re not worth the chair you’re sitting in, you foster-home piece of shit.’

Mike thinks, Make it your own.

‘You did about fifteen thousand dollars of damage.’

His stomach clutches at the figure. It might as well be a million. Mike knows at that moment: his life is over.

He looks down at his wrists, cinched in flexible plastic handcuffs – kid handcuffs – because the steel ones kept slipping off at the park.

‘Before we ship your ass to sentencing,’ the detective continues, ‘your victims want to confront you.’

Panic overtakes dread. ‘I don’t want to see them.’

‘Well, guess what? When you’re a lawbreaking degenerate, you don’t get to choose your options.’

Mike closes his eyes. When he opens them, the kid is there, freckled cheeks tight with disdain, the detective and the father at his elbows. The grandfather stands in the back, arms crossed. ‘You gonna apologize?’ the kid asks.

Mike knows it is in his self-interest to do so, but he looks at the kid’s ironed shirt, the smudge of chocolate in the corner of his mouth, and can think only, Never.

The kids points at Mike. ‘You’re a nothing. You wreck my stuff because you don’t have anything and you’ll never be anything. Well, guess what? It’s not my fault your life sucks.’

Mike closes his eyes again, for a very long time. He hears footsteps, the door creak open and click shut. When he opens his eyes, the grandfather is sitting across from him. Alone. The man says, ‘That was my car.’

Mike says, ‘I thought it was your son’s.’

The grandfather laughs. He has a white mustache, impeccably maintained. ‘That would have made it okay?’

Mike stares down at the wooden table. Someone has etched into it, POINT OF NO RETURN, MOTHAFUCKA.

‘I grew up in the Depression. You know what that means?’ The man waits for a response but, getting none, continues, ‘If we spotted roadkill on the side of the road, my pop used to pull over so we could cook it for dinner. For a time we slept in the car. We went two long years without a roof over our heads.’

Mike says, ‘You can’t have everything.’

The grandfather spreads his hands. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. People like us, we don’t get to.’

‘People like us?’

‘Like me and Shep.’

‘How about me?’

‘You have a Saab.’

‘I see.’ The grandfather folds his hands across his old-man’s paunch and nods. ‘How do you think I got that car?’

‘How would I know? That’s the first time I’ve been within ten feet of a car that nice.’

‘You’re the predator here, not a victim. Let’s be clear about that.’ His eyes are hard now, and Mike is awed by the force of his conviction.

Mike looks down at his hands. His thumb has a sticky blue streak from the Bomb Pop. He pictures that beautiful, spotless Saab (WINGATE DEALERSHIP: WE HAVE WHAT YOU WANT!), and for a moment the car and the man before him become of a piece; they become two elegant, polished parts of the same whole. Shep’s words come back to him: You can be whatever you want to be. Mike rethinks the question posed to him a moment ago – How do you think I got that car? – and he is speaking, softly, before his brain can catch up: ‘When I get out of juvie, I will work to pay you back for wrecking your car.’

The grandfather closes his eyes, his face beatific and soft, and Mike doesn’t understand his reaction at all. Then the man says, ‘No. You won’t. I’m not pressing charges. And you won’t be held responsible for the damages.’

Mike is certain he is being mocked.

‘I will pay to fix my car,’ the man says. ‘But I’m buying something for that money. Would you like to know what it is?’

Transfixed, Mike nods.

‘I am buying your not getting to feel sorry for yourself about this.’

Incredulous, Mike asks, ‘What’s that accomplish?’

The man says, ‘Wait and see.’

Mike and Shep walk out free men, and from that day forward Mike sees things a little differently. He and Shep remain thick as thieves, closer than brothers because they are all parts of a family to one another, though this remains unspoken. Because Shep did not bend and repent in that interrogation room, he has to work off the price of the boy’s bicycle by bagging groceries; he does this in double time by peddling cigarette packs he boosts from behind the counter.

As they grow older, they run liquor stores with fake IDs, get bulletproof drunk, and raise hell, but Mike is spending more time with his nose in textbooks – Michael dear, you’ll be my first to go to college – then studying for the SATs, taking practice tests, scoring somewhere between retarded and stupid. But slowly, over his junior year of high school, he has brought his scores up to average, and when the acceptance letter arrives from Cal State L.A., he doesn’t even tell Shep right away; he goes out to the backyard when everyone is sleeping and sits with it beneath the golden glow of the security light, reading and rereading it, cherishing it like hidden treasure.

For a few blissful months, the path ahead seems illuminated. The Couch Mother is proud; his plans for college reflect well on them both. Dubronski and Tony M, never deep on originality, start in with the nickname – Hey, College, you gonna grow a mustache like Alex Trebek? - and Mike recognizes their mocking as a form of flattery.

Every year more kids have come, young and damaged, but for the first time Mike realizes that he has become, oddly, a role model. And Shep has, too – a role model of another kind. As an almost-adult, Mike gains a different understanding of the workings of the foster home. How the Couch Mother gets money from the state for every kid under her roof. How on occasion she gets a birth certificate fudged with a little help from well-placed women of like minds and body type to ensure that her children are protected from abusive mothers or molester uncles. It strikes him how fortunate he is to be a cog in the wheels of this particular system.

For a high-school senior, he is young at seventeen. Shep has taken advantage of his first four months as an eighteen-year-old to rack up two strikes under the California penal code. A third felony will land him in jail for twenty-five to life, which seems a bit much for a stolen VCR and beating up some snot-nosed private-school kid who welshed on an arm-wrestling bet. But Shep, as ever, is not worried – Two strikes is nothing. You’ve seen me play ball.

One day Shep walks into the shared bedroom carrying what appears to be a wall safe, his substantial biceps bulging under the weight of it. Mike is rereading his worn SAT practice book, because he is convinced that he will arrive at college next fall and not know how to communicate with kids actually smart enough to be there. He hopes against logic that knowing words like ‘bedight’ and ‘acetate’ might help close that gap.

Incredulous, he looks up from the vocab section at Shep. ‘Where’d you get that?’

Shep says, ‘A wall.’

Mike conveys another bite of SpaghettiOs from can to mouth, using the flat edge of a butter knife since all the forks and spoons are dirty. ‘Shep,’ he mumbles around the mush, ‘you can’t do that shit.’

‘You get half of whatever’s in it.’