came outside in the pizza joint’s parking lot.
“Yeah, come on. It’ll be fun,” added Jessica, who had wild, mascara-rimmed eyes. “Or do you have to go home and ask Mommy?”
“Of course we’ll go,” Brian said before Eddie could open his mouth.
Then Claire sent a text message, and this guy, Bill, a long-haired dude with tattoos and those freaky flesh- tunnel earrings, rolled up in a rumbling black Mustang convertible. It was hard to tell how old he was. At least twenty. Eddie had gotten into the backseat with Brian and Claire, and now here he was, roaring through these wild country roads with the top down and Mac Miller blasting from the stereo.
Who knew life could get this cool? Eddie thought.
“Hey, you dudes havin’ fun?” Bill said, turning down the stereo. “Jessica tells me you boys are from New York. That right?”
“Yep,” Brian said with gusto. “New York, New York. Born and raised.”
“Big Apple in the house!” Eddie tossed out, but then shut his mouth as Brian gave him a glare.
Bill nodded and looked at them in the rearview mirror. He had a long, weird-looking face, Eddie thought, like one of the elves from
“That’s cool,” Bill, the tattooed elf, said. “I love the city. It’s good to meet people who are down. Hey, I have an idea. I know a spot over in Newburgh where they sell some primo smoke, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Jessica started giggling in the front seat. She stopped as Bill gave her a long cold look.
“Problem is,” Bill continued, “I don’t like buyin’ on my own. You guys mind if I make a stop there and have ourselves a party? If you don’t, that’s cool, too. It’s a pretty hairy, scary block. I just thought it’d be no biggie since you were from New York and all.”
The girls grinned at each other then turned and stared at Brian expectantly. Eddie stared as well, his stomach getting a strange, light feeling in it, as though he were in the first car of a roller coaster right before the first drop.
“Let’s do it,” Brian said, pumping a fist.
Eddie sat there, blinking, trying to catch up. Everything was blurring by faster than the roadside trees. What had Brian just agreed to? To go buy weed? Dad would kill them. Hell, he was a cop. He’d arrest them first and then kill them. But never mind that. Brian was an athlete. He wouldn’t know one end of a cigarette from the other, let alone what to do with a joint if he saw one. He was just doing it because he liked the girls, Eddie realized.
Eddie opened his mouth to say something, but Brian glared him down again.
The Mustang slowed and then chirped to a stop. Eddie slid against the door hard as Bill the elf did a dust- raising U-turn.
“All righty, then, homies. Newburgh, here we come,” Bill said.
THE MUSTANG FLEW over a couple of tiny back roads and then bumped over some railroad tracks onto a real road that had businesses on it. A BP gas station, a T.G.I. Friday’s, a Home Depot.
As they rolled up a hill into the city where they’d gotten hot dogs, Eddie’s stomach dropped again. He wanted to ask Brian why the hell they were doing all this, but when he turned, he could see why. Brian was busy kissing Claire. Great.
Eddie took out his new cell phone and saw 8 NEW MESSAGES pop up on the screen. They were all from his dad, he knew. They were already in trouble. He slid the phone back into his pocket. This wasn’t fun anymore. It was crazy.
The Mustang swerved onto a side street that headed steeply down toward the Hudson. They passed old houses. One of them had plywood nailed over its windows. Was a hurricane coming or something? Eddie thought.
Bill turned down the radio before they pulled onto a narrow road. It looked like something out of Grand Theft Auto IV. Sidewalks strewn with couches and tires, abandoned cars, graffiti all over everything.
When they suddenly stopped, Eddie felt his lungs seize up. On both sides of the street, sitting on parked cars and the stoops of crumbling, haunted-looking houses, were a dozen or more really muscular black dudes. Most of them were wearing red-red ball caps, red do-rags.
These are gang members, Eddie thought with sudden terror. Actual real-life gang members.
Jessica, in the front seat, laughed as she lit a cigarette.
Bill jumped out of the car and walked over to one of the black kids and slapped hands. They talked for a second, and then Bill came back.
“He says I have to follow him into the backyard for a second to do the buy. Will you come and watch my back?”
Staring at Bill, the evil elf, Eddie realized that he was even older than twenty. More like thirty. He was like a junkie or something. Junkies and gangbangers! What the hell had they gotten themselves into?
“Don’t do it, Brian,” Eddie whispered to his brother. “This is bad.”
Brian looked as scared as Eddie.
“Yeah, Brian. Don’t do it,” Jessica whispered and laughed again.
Brian bit his lip as he looked at her. Then he climbed out of the backseat onto the sidewalk.
“It’s okay. Stay here, Eddie,” Brian said, blinking nervously at the gangsters across the street.
“No way. I’m not staying here by myself,” Eddie said, hopping out after his big brother.
Eddie tried not to make eye contact with any of the gang people as they walked across the street. Bill and the dealer or whoever he was crawled through a hole in a rusted chain-link fence. Following Brian through the fence into an alley strewn with broken bottles, Eddie smelled what he thought had to be weed. He felt like crying. He would never listen to a rap song again. This was so wrong.
They’d just come to the end of the alley, between two crazy dilapidated wooden houses, when it happened. There was a yell, and then Bill and the black guy just bolted, suddenly running behind the house on the left.
Stunned, Brian and Eddie just stood there as a new guy, another black teen, jumped off the back porch of the crumbling house on the right. He had a do-rag tied around his face like a cowboy bad guy. Like everything else he wore, it was red. Red basketball shorts, red Nike sneakers, red tank top.
Blood-red, Eddie thought as the black youth raised his hand, and they saw the gray-and-black gun he was holding.
“Eddie! Run!” Brian said, pushing him back in the direction they had come from.
The guy just started shooting. No warning. No “Get out of here” or “Gimme your money.” It was like a nightmare somehow made real in the middle of that bright and sunny summer day. Someone was actually shooting at them!
Eddie fell to the cracked concrete as Brian collapsed next to him, screaming. Eddie put his arm around Brian and felt wetness at his back. No! What? Brian was bleeding! He was shot. They were getting killed. How could this be happening?
Hovering over his brother and trying to get out his cell phone, Eddie shook as the gun cracked again and again. He’d actually gotten his phone out and opened when he felt something hot and sharp tug at his left shoulder. The phone clattered on the cement as Eddie fell facedown.
He cradled his throbbing arm. It felt scary and weird, like it was hanging on by a string, like it was about to fall off. When he looked up, Brian was hopping toward the street, the back of his white T-shirt splattered with blood and dirt. He fell through the rusted gate and started crawling over the sidewalk, screaming wildly. Eddie had never heard his brother scream so loud. He’d never heard anyone scream so loud.
What had they done? Eddie thought, looking up at the scary house beside him. He cried as he took in its graffiti, its high empty windows. He looked for his phone and saw it ten feet away, its screen cracked, its battery lying on the ground.
