How It Went Down

by Kekla Magoon

The spilled milk seemed wronger than the blood, somehow. I keep thinking that.

We took this class in school last year, about how to save a person’s life. I guess I should have signed up for it again this year. I didn’t know enough. I couldn’t save him.

Cops got a special way of knocking at the door. With the meat of the fist. Sets the whole wall a-shaking. Next thing that comes—it ain’t never good news.

But you can’t walk into the job fresh off. You got to choose the life and then you got to rise through the ranks. I gave Tariq the same advice Sciss once gave me: Don’t come till you’re ready, and then come all in. T was ready. He proved that last night on the sidewalk. He was ready.

I can’t blame the women for crying like gulls. Any young boy’s death is a slice across the pristine circle. It is a tragedy.

Someone came along and hosed down the bloodstain, but you can still see it. Real faint. I’m ninety-four, but my eyes are still good enough to see that. It is the first time in my life I ever wished my body would act its age. I have come to the point, at long last, where I have seen too much.

It made me feel weird, that they were looking so close, but it made me feel good, too, because I could tell they were liking what they saw.

“Ty, my man,” he goes. “You so much bigger than one letter.”

It’s fascinating, maddening, a train wreck you can’t pull your eyes away from, however morbid.

It’s scary to go to sleep now. The sounds in my room are the same. The look of the dark is the same, And the glow of my Smurfette nightlight. But if there are monsters under the bed, I won’t know about it. I won’t be safe. Tariq cast a magic spell to keep them out. I don’t know how long it will last, Now that he’s gone.

I tag walls and windows, mailboxes, manhole covers, sidewalks, doors, poles—anything that doesn’t move, plus buses and boxcars, which do. You ask anyone in Underhill whose tag is hottest. They’ll know. My scrawl is up all over this town—the curls behind an M sharp like mountains with a Z cut like a lightning bolt. I once overheard someone saying it’s the most recognizable tag to come along in a decade. Every night I’m out spraying. I own these walls. I own this ’hood.

No one knows who I am, but everyone knows me. I like that. It’s my way of putting my stamp on the neighborhood. This is where I’m from, and I miss it. These streets are still a part of me. I don’t want Underhill to forget me.

I am no longer grasping great handfuls of time. A year seems long again now, not because so many stretch before me, but so few.

“Let’s give away all the other people,” I say, “and get Tariq back.” It’s a good idea, but it makes Mommy cry.

When I was young, I knew I could be anything. My skin wasn’t going to hold me back. Will doesn’t have that feeling, and all I’ve been trying to do is instill it in him. Everything I am, everything I do, is not because of my race, nor in spite of it … it’s regardless of it.

She doesn’t know being smart isn’t enough. Working hard isn’t enough. I gotta get real lucky, and before I even get a chance to be the right kind of lucky, I gotta get lucky enough to live. I got dreams. I don’t want to pack it up and settle into the streets.

He doesn’t fit anywhere in the photo album of my life up until now, barely even a blur in the background or on the fringe of some forgotten frame. There’s just this one thing that binds us. I was leaning over him when he died. My hands on his chest. My palms felt his last breath move inside him. His chest rose and fell and then kept falling, like it could carry us both straight down through the earth. I didn’t stop pushing, but I knew. Right then. I was breathing hard myself. My lungs probably took in the last air Tariq ever exhaled. It can’t possibly be in me anymore, but it feels like it is. Like it’s weighing heavy on my chest with every breath I take, even now. That’s it. That’s all we have. No other memories. No previous touch to cover up the feel of his hand against my arm, lightly clutching. No long-ago look to take the place of the desperate glance we shared, or the hollow stare from his dark, empty eyes an instant later. My lips never so much as brushed his cheek before. Nothing to eclipse the kiss I refused to give him that would have been his last … or could have saved him. His breath is in my chest, still now, and I never even tried to give it back to him.

Mom’s ifs were always about the future. Mine are all about the past.

Mommy says Do it for Tariq But Tariq would not have made me

“Fuck,” he screams, in a rage against the sky. The hooded people turn and stare, in a wave, like a thousand grim reapers. This march is much too morbid, I realize, everyone clad in Tariq’s death shroud. Noodle’s fury is more right, more real. Losing Jennica rips him. Losing Tariq rips me even deeper. Because it’s definitely forever.