What's Mine and Yours(84)

He told her about Ray. He didn’t say, It was an accident. He didn’t say, He passed on, because nothing about the way he’d gone was natural. He told her he had been killed.

“He loved me,” Gee said. “Even if I don’t remember him much. That was his picture on the wall. Did you see it?”

Noelle listened quietly, her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin on her knees.

“You were five?”

“Six.”

Noelle reached for Gee and pressed him to her chest. She said nothing as she held him, and Gee felt himself wilt pleasantly, his body losing form against hers.

When she pulled away from him, her face was serious.

“I’m going to help you,” she said. “Now let’s run those lines.”



It was Beckett who saw them together. He’d snuck into the auditorium through the rear to look for a pair of headphones he’d left at the last rehearsal. He knew Noelle and Gee were spending time together, but not alone, not like this. He saw them onstage, too close. He slipped into the wings to hear.



The next day Gee was walking to class when an anonymous white boy shoved him against the lockers. There were two others with him, neither of whom Gee recognized, and they took turns slamming him against the wall. He spoke without thinking, the words spewing out of him. What the hell are you doing? and Get off me. It was a reflex, too, when he pushed one of the white boys back.

He couldn’t see the span of the hallway, the figures of the other students. There were only these three before him: their cursing faces, their collared shirts. They called him a thug and said he didn’t belong at their school, his father was a gangbanger and that’s why he was dead. They said he ought to stay away from other people’s girls. One of them pushed him so hard Gee’s head snapped back, made contact with the steel locker. There was a ringing in his ears.

He swung at one of the boys, landed a punch on his cheek. Gee had scuffled with other kids when he was young, but they had been play fights, and you could quit, complain if someone hit you too hard. You were never in a corner. This was different—clumsy, rough. No way out. They pinned him to the wall. They shook him by the collar, grabbed him by the straps of his backpack, swung him to the ground. Gee collapsed on himself defensively, felt himself being kicked, stomped. They pummeled any part of him they could reach. He heard a girl scream, someone call for a teacher, but Gee couldn’t imagine that help would arrive, that anyone would intervene. There was only this moment, the feeling of pressure in his stomach, blows to the side of his face, his shoulder, his groin. The sensation of air being pushed out of him. One eye closing and then another. The boys above him blotting out the light. He tried to get up, but they held him down. He was drowning, and they were water. He struggled, until all went dark.



At the hospital, Jade asked every nurse who came to check on Gee when she could expect an officer to arrive to take down a report. It shouldn’t be taking so long; it was protocol. There had been a crime, and they’d better be ready to treat it like one.

They had Gee in the ER, a room sectioned off with hanging sheets. He sat up in the bed, his cheeks swollen, one finger set in a splint, his speech slurred at first from the painkillers. There was a cut over his eye, another on his hand that had been stitched up. Jade had seen a hundred patients, more, receive sutures in places more tender than their hands, but she had still gagged as she watched the doctor seal his flesh with wire.

You’re a lucky young man, the doctor had said because all of Gee’s X-rays had come back fine. Jade had started yelling and requested a different doctor. They were waiting now for someone new.

Through the haze of the medication, Gee watched her. She was agitated, pacing the small stall. She hardly looked up when another doctor swept aside the privacy curtain and came in. He had gray hair and light eyes, round spectacles. He introduced himself as Dr. Henriquez.

“I used to work with your mother.” He offered his hand. “I’ve always wanted to meet you. I’m sorry it’s like this. How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right,” Gee said. “When can we go home?”

Jade asked to speak to the doctor privately in the hall, and they stepped beyond the curtain. Gee couldn’t make out their back-and-forth, and when they came back in, Jade was wiping her eyes. Dr. Henriquez said he’d find out as soon as he could when Gee could be released. He promised Jell-O and a fresh round of painkillers in the meantime. He winked good-bye and let the curtain fall.

Jade sat in the lone chair next to Gee’s bed. “I’m going to kill whoever did this to you,” she said.

Gee wanted to warn her she shouldn’t be saying that kind of thing—maybe someone was listening, maybe, after everything, she would be the one who wound up in trouble—but he let her rant and rant. He was numb, his head foggy. He knew lots of people who had been beaten up before, but he’d never been one of them. He had survived it; it was over; he was on the other side of it now. What had stuck with him was the feeling of being overpowered. He had been feeble, trapped. There was nothing he could do but give in. He remembered that.

He wasn’t expecting to see Noelle when she appeared in the makeshift room, parting the curtains suddenly and thrusting herself among them. She was crying and started crying harder when she saw his face. Gee wondered how beat-up he looked; he hadn’t wanted a mirror.