Britney’s voice was muffled by the pillow. “H—hi, Victor.”
“See, Britney-baby? We are here for you and we love you. You don’t have to be upset.”
“But… I’m so sad.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” my mother sang like a mollifying nursery song.
My father threw open the door and rushed to the other side of the bed, dropped to his knees, and kissed Britney on the head.
For a few moments, the only sounds were the creaking of the bed and Britney’s sniffles and coughs.
“Victor, do you mind keeping your little sis company while I speak with your father?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thanks, pal,” my father said as he gave Britney one more kiss on the head. And they both left the room.
I slid up the bed and placed a hand on Britney’s shoulder. She was hot, like she had pneumonia all over again—I brushed her hair away and placed a hand on her forehead. I had failed her—God created brothers to protect sisters.
The light that had crept through the window shade had left with the sun, casting the bedroom in a lavender twilight. I lay down atop the covers and curled up next to Britney, my mother’s warmth still resonating where she sat only a few moments ago.
“Is this a dream?” Britney asked, still muffled by the pillow.
“How about we pretend it was?” I said.
“Okay, Victor.”
I wanted to cry but realized that wouldn’t help anyone but myself, so I fell asleep next to my sister, further retreating from the inevitable pain that seemed to be slowly flooding West Road from all directions.
I woke up curled in a ball on the pullout couch in the basement. I had no recollection of descending into my cave and figured my father must’ve carried me down while I was asleep, like he used to do when I was a child when I’d fake it so I wouldn’t have to move. The television was blinding, brighter than usual, so I rubbed my eyes to focus. Tom Jones Cleaver was sitting in his cream white suit in front of a crackling fireplace, almost as if he was waiting for me to wake up before he started to talk.
“Welcome back.”
I sat up on my elbows, trying to grasp whether it was night or morning. The curtains were pulled down and the digital clock on the cable box read 6:29. I threw off the sheets and went to splash some water on my face at the wet bar, but when I dried it with a paper towel and instinctively read the list of Prominent Italians framed at eye level, my forefathers’ names—Modigliani, Michelangelo, Machiavelli—had been replaced with Stone, Stone, Stone, Stone, Stone.
The analog clock struck three, a huge discrepancy from the digital clock in the cable box, a rarity in the Ferraro household—my father practiced priest-like dedication to their timeliness.
“Rise! Rise! Rise!” Tom Jones Cleaver shouted from his throne, disrupting my concentration as I instinctively attempted to figure out the time in Arizona.
Why didn’t Dad wake me up for school?
“Eeeek tal’alla mande, eeeek tal’alla mande!”
I threw on jeans and a white t-shirt and ran out to the garage, ducking under the slow- moving door, and hopped into the Jeep. I tore down West Road in the direction of the B’nai Deerfield section of town and called Carina on my RAZR.
“Hello?”
The sun burst bright through my windshield, causing me to drop the visor and hunch over the steering wheel to focus like I was drunk.
“C! It’s Vic.”
“Victor? Are you okay?”
“C! I need Pierre and Henri’s number. I need to talk to... to ask them something.”
“Oh… actually, they’re here right now. We were about…”
“Great! Hold them there.”
“We aren’t going…”
“Okay! I’ll be right there!”
The Jeep screeeeeeeched into the DeVallos’ driveway and I left it with the engine running. The front door at Tank’s was always unlocked, so I flung it open, ran through the kitchen, and jumped up the flight of steps in search of the Haitians. Laughter came from behind Tank’s old bedroom door, where a sliver of light sliced through the darkness, indicating “Enter” like I was in a video game.
A plume of smoke enveloped me as I swam through the hot bedroom air. I could finally make out Carina, sitting on the bed, toking on a pencil-sized blunt, as Henri and Pierre looked upon her from the floor—their legs tucked into their chests—as if she were the Messiah.
“I need a gun,” I said, getting straight to the point.
“A gun?” asked Pierre.
“What he say?” asked Henri.
“Vicky, baby, hit this.”
“I said I need a gun.”
“Nigga, why you think we’d have a gun? That’s some racist…”
“What he say?”
“I’m not kidding. You guys always said how you’re ‘strapped.’ I just need to borrow it.”
“Strapped? Yo, Slim Shady, we were just fuckin’ witchu back then. We’d say that so you Short Hills white boys would give us free drugs and shit. Our black asses were already targets in this racist-ass town. You think me and Henri would carry around a gun so the Five-O…”
But I was out the door and up the stairs before Pierre could finish his polemic. I tore through the snaking back roads of Short Hills until I popped out onto White Oak Ridge Road—one of the town’s main arteries—and followed it to the mouth of West Road, where I pulled into the Geigers’ driveway, leaving a trail of fire behind me.
I rapped on the door that opened directly to the basement and watched through the window as Karl threw off his headset and got up from the computer.
“Yo,” he said, barely finishing the one-word sentence before turning back to his lair.
“I need to get up in the attic.”
“What? Why?” My disheveled appearance and frantic tone still didn’t take his attention away from the computer screen.
In my haste to find a weapon, I hadn’t thought of a cover for the unusual request. “Baseball cards!” I blurted.
“Baseball cards?”
“Yeah. Didn’t your dad collect baseball cards?”
“What? No.”
“Yeah, I think I saw some up there last time.”
“Last time? When the fuck was the last time you
