For some reason he expected sirens, though he knew that was stupid. He ran a few steps, then slowed to a jog, then walked, one hand pressed against his chest like an old man. He kept moving east, sticking to the tracks, watching cars move on the nearby streets, looking for the green Chevy. When he had a gone a few more blocks, he threw himself over a fence into some weeds and lay down, overwhelmed for a minute by the luxuriant smell of leaves and long grass. The sun was going down, and lights snapped on at the familiar-looking highrise he could see over the tops of the trees ahead. After a minute, he realized he was back on the grounds of the Youth Study Center. He bolted up, threw himself over the fence, and ran back west, laughing.
He walked slower and slower the closer he got to Ridge, dropping down the narrow, canted streets, stopping to glance back up the hill behind him and keeping his head down. There were people out on the stoops, kids coming out after dinner to play until they couldn’t see anymore. He remembered that, stubbornly standing in the street in the dark with a hockey mask on, chasing up and down until it got so black they’d lose the puck.
It was full on dark when he stopped at the last driveway on Eveline and made his way behind the stores and restaurants that fronted Ridge. The first two buildings were unoccupied, and he could see through the empty first floors to the street in front of the Imperial. There was an ambulance in the driveway of the firehouse, its strobe lights flashing crazily and turning the street red and blue and white. There were cops in uniform stringing that yellow tape they always show on TV and guys in suits with badges hanging from their pockets. Everyone was pointing, making notes on clipboards, or talking into radios. Stunned by the sight of it, Jimmy forgot for a minute why he was there and wondered what had happened, figuring there must have been an accident.
When one of the cops shined a flashlight into the store, he dropped like he’d been shot and scuttled along the gravel to the end of the building, then ducked into the alley that led to his fire escape and pulled it down, wincing at every metallic groan and breathing through his mouth, his face hot, his hands slick with sweat.
Upstairs, he dropped onto his bed, breathless, and watched the lights from the cop cars and ambulances flash onto his ceiling. He got up slowly, keeping his head down, slid along the floor to the bathroom, and closed the door before turning on the light. He splashed water on his streaked face. He looked in the mirror, angling to see his T-shirt, now gray with dust. Inventoried his scrapes and bruises, the open cut over one knuckle, and his torn jeans. He patted at his face and hands with a dirty towel, shut the light off, and stepped out into the dark room. Strange, plasma-like shapes floated in his eyes and seemed to climb the walls. A moment later he saw someone near the bed. Grace Lei.
She was standing over the bed, motionless. The lights from the street played over her white shirt and pale face and the bag. She looked like the robots in his dope dreams, catching the pulsing light, breasts swelling as she breathed. She peered at him, and then the bag, and then him again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “The door was open.”
“It’s okay.” He pointed toward the street. “What happened?”
“Luis got stabbed. Tiger stabbed him.”
“Jesus, because…?” He pointed at the bag.
“Maybe. Who knows what it was about? There was so much blood.” She put her hands over her face. “Tiger came in and said something to Luis, and Luis said something back. And then he pushed Tiger, and Tiger just stuck him. It was fast. I never even saw him get the knife out, he just…” She made a motion with her hand, the knife going in and out, in and out. “Boys like Luis? Tiger? They’re so angry all the time, who knows? You can’t talk to them.”
Jimmy walked over to the bed and they looked down at the bag.
“He said something stupid,” Grace continued, “and Tiger just stuck him. So Luis took off running into the street and Tiger went after him, and this pickup came zooming through and just, you know.” She swallowed. “Just wham. I never saw nothing like that. The truck went right over Luis. I got sick. Tiger’s friends just took off. Two firemen from across the street ran him down, Tiger. They held him until the cops came and took him away. They had all these questions, and I didn’t know, so I just came up here.”
“Did you say anything? About, you know, me? And the bag?”
“No, I didn’t even think about it, really. Until I was in the room just now.” She looked at him, or seemed to. It was tough to tell in the dark. “I knew you’d be all right to talk to. That you aren’t like Tiger, or Luis.”
They both stood, not saying anything for a while. The bag was dotted with grit from the gravel bed and smeared with Jimmy’s fingerprints. They could hear the police talking to each other in the street, doors slamming.
Finally, Grace squared her shoulders and reached for the bag. Jimmy smiled and she stopped and stared at him, her body taut, arched like the picture he had seen at his aunt’s house, and he thought, yeah, he was the wrong kind of Kelly, but maybe she was the right kind of Grace.
Her slender fingers closed on the bag and he smiled wider, so she said, “What?”
He said, “What if it’s sesame chicken?”
She smiled back, and for the first time he saw her teeth, white and even. “Then,” she said, “we’ll eat.”
A CUT ABOVE BY LAURA SPAGNOLI
Rittenhouse Square
Beth pinched the skin between her thumb and index finger almost hard enough to draw blood. She took every step to the beat of a mantra-Don’t cry, don’t cry-and every step placed more distance between her and Tinto, a tapas bar where she’d left Kyle, who was the latest man to think she was a great girl (a girl? at thirty-four?) but who wasn’t ready for a relationship. It’s not you, it’s me.
What an actor. Literally. And Beth had to see him again to rehearse their final scene. She’d signed up for an acting class at the suggestion of therapists and friends alike, who urged her to find an artistic outlet for her emotions. And they were right. She had a knack for acting. It was just bad luck she and Kyle were doing a piece from The Glass Menagerie in which, ironically, she’d be pitied for lacking gentlemen callers.
Now she needed to focus on another scene: Walnut Street on a lovely August night, with her in a lovely white dress. It was eleven o’clock. Anyone who saw her might think she was heading out to canoodle with someone at a sidewalk café and not that her evening was a failure. She concentrated on an actable objective: to be in a rush to meet a date. Glancing at her watch for emphasis, she began to believe it. She walked east on Walnut confidently, passing packs of college girls in skimpy dresses and college boys in untucked button-down shirts headed toward the Irish Pub. Some boys followed her with their eyes as she passed. It was working.
She continued alongside shuttered boutiques and the oddly empty dirt lot north of Rittenhouse Square, where neighbors rejected development ideas as tacky or liable to attract an unwanted element. She sailed through the north entrance of the square when, suddenly, she slipped and fell. It was the heel of her right shoe, purchased last month at the Payless on Chestnut Street, now jutting out at a sixty-degree angle from the rest of the sole.
This latest twist plunged Beth into despair. She couldn’t focus on counting to ten or any of the calming self-talk she’d been taught. The lights in the square blurred and came back into focus when she blinked, then blurred again, but somehow she stood up. Carrying her shoes, she continued along a paved path. She nearly jumped when nearby automatic sprinklers surged on, then nearly jumped again when a woman screamed. The woman screamed a second time, but it was followed by laughter.