“That’s what I wanted to ask about,” I said. “The joining us part. What do you mean, exactly?” Jay did say some messed up stuff, but still it had shocked me when Stella had called her brother a skinhead. In the days since she’d said that, I had been looking at things a little differently, noticing that there were all sorts of signals out there, like graffiti and action films and bumper stickers and stuff the guys said to each other at school. And what we’d done to Toshi—what Jay had convinced me to do to Toshi—I had told myself that Jay couldn’t be what Stella had called him, because he had a best friend who was Asian, but the night before, it was like Jay had made Tosh less than human. It had been so easy for me to follow right along.
“All I mean is,” Jay said, “if you want to be a part of my family, then be a real part. You got to believe what we believe and do what we do and have the right mindset and all.”
“Okay, sure,” I said. “And is all that stuff, I mean would you consider it to be, or have you ever called yourself a skinhead?”
Jay snatched up a handful of a bushy-looking plant. “You’re thinking about this wrong.”
“Okay.”
“Did Stella tell you this shit? You have the wrong attitude.”
“I didn’t know.” It was crucial that Jay and I stuck together: we’d done it, we’d kicked Toshi out of our group, we could never be a crew after what had happened—and so we were all each other had left.
“‘Skinhead’—that’s not it. That’s not it at all. The real name we call ourselves, if you have to know, is the Eye Whites. But ‘skinheads’ makes you sound like those hate people. Makes you sound like those people who call us racist, and then they get all mad when we just want to hang around with our own and mind our own business. If anything, we’re race realists, and it’s everyone else who thinks they’re superior and above all that shit. Like they’re so great they can’t even see color anymore. We’re all about reality.”
“I just didn’t know,” I said, my mind turning over that curious phrase race realists, still feeling no closer to understanding, but not about to push Jay with more questions.
“You’ll figure it out. I’ll help you.”
“Okay,” I said, though I knew Jay wasn’t the best at explaining: one time, he’d tried to tell me that they found swastikas on Native American pots from hundreds of years ago, and this proved something about God and purity and the future. He went on and on for half an hour, but I never did understand what he meant.
“It’s so obvious that Stella is jealous.” Jay ripped up something that looked like a weed, roots and all. “The fact about women is, they only belong to their father’s family for a little bit. Then, they go off and belong to their husband’s family. So she doesn’t get as much attention as me, you know? The family can’t put as much into her as they do me.” He shook the plant vigorously to dislodge clods of dirt from the roots. “So she gets the wrong idea. Don’t listen to her.”
Once Jay decided that we had enough plants for breakfast, we sat down. I waited for Jay to eat some green thing before I put the same type of thing into my mouth.
“Sometimes you got to abandon everything else for principles,” Jay said. “And in today’s world, that is more necessary than ever. I think, for a little while at least, we’re on the run.”
“On the run? Really?” I tried to tell myself it was the weird green food making my stomach lurch like that, but I felt afraid. Saliva stung the back corners of my mouth. “We didn’t…”
“We didn’t do anything that bad, no way, but sometimes people get all coxo sensitive. It’s stupid. My thought is we let the shit cool down for a little bit. Get out of town for a little bit. Have ourselves an adventure, sort of, while Toshi forgets this whole thing. Besides, there’s nothing for us at school, now that I can’t play soccer anymore. No point.”
I couldn’t believe he’d said Toshi’s name out loud; I never wanted to say it, not ever again. “But where would we go? How do we get there?”
“You can hitch anywhere,” Jay said, “in this great big country of ours. It ain’t hard.”
Ideas like this were why, throughout our friendship, Jay had always been the visionary. Thank god Jay had known, before I had even realized it myself, the one move that appealed to me: clearing off to a place where nobody knew my name or my social status, knew anything about my dad, where nobody would find out what I’d done to a person I had considered my friend.
“You really think they’d look for us?” I asked Jay. “Like who? The police?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. Tosh is a little wuss, and you can’t put it past him to narc.”
The decision to just leave, run away, felt unreal, which is maybe why I didn’t have that hard of a time making it. This would be one more step in the dream I was having.
“You don’t want to go to jail,” Jay said. “Or juvie, or whatever.”
That clinched it for me; it felt so easy to nod my head along. I needed a break from all the madness that had been swirling through my life.
“What about Florida?” I said, swallowing hard on the bitterness of a fern. “I think I can get us somewhere to stay with my mom down there. We’ll just go for a little while. Until all this blows over.”
Jay spit out a stringy piece of plant stem. “Whatever. Florida sounds far. Just as good as any other place.”
After Jay marched up and down the road for maybe a half hour, his thumb stuck out (apparently he wasn’t worried about being clipped by a passing side mirror—his movements were loose and a little reckless, and more than once a horn blared as he stepped too close to a car), a little red pickup pulled over and the man inside told us to get in. Jay yanked open the door, and I scrambled after him. Everything was fine: I had been about to head to Florida anyway, and by going now, I would have Jay for support; I wouldn’t be leaving everything behind. I was taking matters into my own hands rather than being shipped off to my mother like an unwanted package, like an assortment of old clothes she’d forgotten to pack when she’d left us.
My leaving this way would be the punishment my father deserved.
The driver was bound for somewhere in North Carolina, which was closer to Florida than I had ever been. Incredibly, our plan was really working; I hadn’t quite understood there was a possibility we would actually get out of Delaware, that this whole thing wasn’t some sort of charade. The asphalt zipping away beneath the floorboards of the truck felt like a miracle, and I pressed myself down into the middle seat to better absorb the vibrations of the road.
“So,” the driver said. I’d barely looked at him, and now I was positioned almost too close to his body to get a good view; he smelled of barbecue potato chips and coffee. The pudge of his arm, pink and freckled, sometimes brushed against my shoulder. “You boys are headed to Florida. Land of opportunity?”
“That’s right,” Jay said. “We got jobs lined up down there.”
“Just so long as you’re not deserters,” the driver said. “I picked you up awfully close to the base, didn’t I?”
“We’re not deserters, sir,” I said; this was a very good sign: to this man, we looked old enough to be eighteen.
“No, sir,” Jay said, “I would never run out on something that important.”
“Sure.” He caressed the wheel. “Sure, is that right. Then you boys don’t yet understand this world. You know that? Wouldn’t run out on anything important….” The radio devolved into static and he switched it off; on their way back from the dial, the tips of his fingers brushed my knee, which was propped up to a high triangle against the console. I tried to pull myself in tighter.