1

All of the adults are in various stages of crying. You squirm, uncomfortable beneath the many layers of dress suit your mother has applied to your torso and the unending parade of sad eyes lapping at your face like cat tongues. You do not yet fully understand what it means for your father to be dead. You barely grasp the concept of holding up three of your fingers to tell people how old you are. Sometimes your daddy has to bend your pinky down to make the proper shape. It shouldn’t look like a comb and not bunny ears either. The right answer is the shape that lies between them. But you muddle this up as often as you get it right.

What you do understand is that you have to wait in your seat at the front of the church until your mother says it’s time to go. You look down at your feet in brand new dress shoes and focus your ears on the music. You do not know the word “dirge” but you feel its meaning. Collectively, the organ sounds and the eyes and all the flowers and the black clothes—it all points to “dead” being something very bad. You hope dead will be over soon, only partly because you have been promised McDonald’s. You want to leave dead behind, let your mom go back to the past few days’ flurry of activity and guests that allowed you to play with your toys uninterrupted for hours on end. The trucks are your favorite. Your dad gives them to you sporadically. You wonder what truck he will get for you next.

Weeks have passed now, and your dad has still not returned from “Heaven,” which is where he went to after being dead. You are turning four now. This is a new hand shape, and you are ready to show it to him. Your aunt is in town from the city she lives in far away. You wonder if this place is close to Heaven. She smells like springtime and breezes, and her skin is somehow always cool to the touch. “Cold hands, warm heart,” she likes to say. Today she brings you a present. You unwrap it to find an item as chunky as a box, so you shake it. She smiles, cracks the box open for you like a magazine. The inside has large shapes on each thick page that she tells you are “letters.”

“Do you know what this is? What about this one?”

You do not know, so you call out names of the pictures instead. Vehicles and animals and fruits that shine like patent leather.

“In pre-kindergarten, you can learn to read all the letters. Won’t that be nice? Do you want to go?” your aunt asks.

If you want to go, turn to 2.
If you don’t want to go, turn to 3.

2

You tell your mother about pre-K. “It’s school,” you explain through a mouth full of Kraft macaroni and cheese.

“I know what it is.” Your mother rolls her eyes. “Next time, stick your hand out and ask your Aunt Kenya how much she got on it.”

Turn to 3.

3

At night, you listen to street sounds and think about Heaven. It must be nice there for your father to stay away so long. Outside, people are talking loudly, yelling over music being played from a car. You can’t make out what they’re saying, but you hear in their tones that there is anger rising like steam from a pan of water on the stove. The male voices are like big barking dogs; the female voice is a thin needle piercing through the commotion. Tires squeal. Glass shatters against the ground. The voices cool gradually until they disappear behind a slammed door.

Meanwhile, above you, every footstep is a bass hit. Someone turns on the television. An audience roars with laughter in response to the man who is speaking. Your mother yells, retrieves the broom and beats the end of it against the ceiling. She is tired all the time now and speaks to you sharply. “You better not be in there playing,” she says as she passes your darkened doorway.

“I’m not,” you call back. “I’m in bed.”

You don’t talk about pre-K or Heaven with your mother. You think it wiser instead to dream quietly beneath the bass and the treble, the booms and the crashes. You will practice being four until your daddy comes back. Then you will ask him to take you with him next time.

Turn to 4.

4

The leaves have turned brown for three more autumns since your daddy died. You know now that “dead” is the same thing as gone and you wonder why that’s not what they said to you in the first place. Rahim’s dad was gone. So was David’s. Whatever the details were, the result was the same. Well, almost. One time Rahim saw his daddy in a car on Canal Street. Or at least that’s what he said. He said his daddy was in a tricked-out Dodge with a woman that had diamonds in her teeth. You aren’t sure which part of the story sounds the most fantastical. You say to him, “Boy, you lyin’. Your daddy so poor, burglars broke in his house and left him money.”

You’re funny in your classroom, too. Second grade. When the answer to a math problem was six, you asked the class why six was scared of seven. “Because seven ‘ate’ nine,” you quipped. You have lots of other jokes, too, that you like to fire off when the room is silent with classmates reading or doing a worksheet.

Today, after you were especially funny, the teacher holds you by your shoulder as your classmates get up to go home for the day. She has to hunch slightly to do this as she is a mountain of a woman. You don’t quite know how heights work yet, but you’re sure she’s putting up an NBA-caliber stat. She kneels down and looks you in the eye. “You’re being disruptive,” she tells you. “It’s becoming a real problem. You have two choices right now: I can handle it my way or you can turn this behavior around on your own.”

If you decide to change your act, turn to 5.
If you don’t cave in to the warning, turn to 6.

5

It’s the next day. Recess. Story time. Lunch. Even math. You make it through all of these without causing any problems. Then you sit quietly through the reading lesson, which is followed by a worksheet. The top of the page reads “Compound Words.” You know this because the teacher said it several times. Com. Pound. Words. Below this title are lines of instruction:

Some words are maed up of tow toher words. When tow shrot words meak one nolg word, the lgno word is claled a ….

Your classmates have picked up their pencils and are entering answers on their worksheets. The tap and scrape of children writing is the only sound in the room. You rub your hand across your face like a grown man starting third shift hours at his second job.

Write the two worsd bolew wihotut a sapce btweeen htem to mkae one pocmonud word, kile hits: foot + blal = fotolabl.

You pick up your pencil and tap your neighbor with it. “Ay,” you say, “what did the pencil say to the paper?”

Your teacher bolts her ten-foot frame out of her chair like she’s calling a foul.

Turn to 6.

6

“Suspended?! While I’m out here busting my ass to keep food on the table and clothes on your back you over there joking?” Your mother’s eyes are wild. They dart around in her head like cartoon pinballs. She is possessed, and the woman speaking through her has a much higher voice than your mother, who is still a young woman and moves like it, flowing into the next room without missing a beat of her high-pitched speech. “You think this is all a joke?” she continues from behind the wall, “I’ma show you a joke! Stay right there and we ‘bout to find out what’s really funny…”

There is a frenzied sound of metal sliding across metal on the other side of the wall before, moments later, your mother re-emerges, still sermonizing in soprano but now with a wide leather belt dangling from one hand.

It is your turn to go wild-eyed.

“Mama, I’m sorry!” you plead. She has popped you with a hairbrush before and one time she swatted you across bare legs with a slipper, but she has never beaten you with a belt. You have heard stories about this—about belts, extension cords, flexible branches ripped from bushes—but never imagined starring in one yourself.

Her first swing is reckless, catching you on the arm across several feet of distance. You yelp and instinctively beat a path to your room with your mother a few steps behind you.

“Boy, you better come take this beating like the man you seem to think you are.”

“Mama, please—I won’t do it no more! I’m sorry—I learned my lesson!” You are holding the door to keep her from following you into your room.

“I know you not trying to close my door on me!” You release the door, and she enters, pursuing you across the room as you back away. “Boy, you have clearly lost your natural mi—”

—a bullet clips off the end of her word.

The occasion of gunfire in the neighborhood is always a sharp crack exploding through whatever came before it. From outside, gunshots crescendo like the last minute of a fireworks display. Your mother dives and pulls you to the floor with her. She moves low and fast across the room, half-dragging you, and reaches up to open the closet door.

“Go!” She pushes you inside and follows you in, swinging the door shut behind you both. “Fuck!” she exclaims. “Are you alright?” Her hands bump against your face and body in the dark until she has assessed your positioning, at which point she hugs you to her like the minutes prior to the closet never happened. Her hands find your head and clutch it, her thumbs stroking your cheeks. “You alright?” she says again, her voice back in its normal key.

“Yes, ma’am,” you say.

The shooting stops, but you both sit still in the closet, eyes adjusting quickly to what is, for some reason, only a semi-darkness. Your mother looks up to find where the light is coming from. There is a bullet hole in your closet door.

If you think you should tell your mom about your dreams of moving away,
turn to 7.
If you keep your dreams to yourself, turn to 8.

7

The next day, you accompany your mother on a trip to the corner store. Inside, you see your friend David at the candy section and head over. He is studying intently.

“You got some money?” you ask him.

David turns to you and secretively shows you the inside of his pocket, which houses a neatly folded $10 bill. This is a lot of money for a kid, and your eyebrows raise accordingly.

“My Big Ma hit the number,” he confides. “Everybody got a little somethin’ somethin’. She nice like that.”

“Whatchu gon’ get?”

“Just one thing, I think. Ain’t tryna spend it all at once.”

“That’s whassup.”

“You gettin’ something?”

“I doubt it…it ain’t payday. I could ask, I guess.”

David picks out a King Size Snicker bar and holds it up in both hands like he is presenting the Lion King. “She the one.”

You see your mom at the counter and quickly grab a Moon Pie and follow David to the front.

“It’s already too high,” the man behind the counter is saying. He is some kind of foreign man, and the English language sounds like it’s too thick for his throat. He is showing your mother a page of scrawled writing in a notebook.

“I always pay on it,” she says, lowering her voice mid-sentence as she notices the children approaching from the corner of her eye. She shifts her body just enough to block their view of the counter.

The man also flicks his eyes at the children. “Choose,” he says. “Only two.”

Your mother pushes forward two items. The man picks up a pen and writes in the notebook.

You look down sheepishly at the Moon Pie in your hands and make a move to turn on your heel, but David grabs the package before you can go.

“I gotchu.”

The man behind the counter places a loaf of bread and a package of lunch meat into a black plastic bag and hands it to your mother. He sets the leftover items to the side to be returned to the shelves. As you turn to follow your mother out, the man closes your dreams away in the notebook and tucks it behind the cash register, just out of reach.

Turn to 8.

8

Mr. Bruno’s face is fatter than his body. If someone saw him only from the neck up, that person would think he was an obese man. But Mr. Bruno is normal sized. He wears tidy button-down shirts that tuck smoothly into crisp khaki pants and, on his feet, sneakers with either a Z or a sideways N on the sides. His beard is neat, and his combed-back hair waits obediently behind a pair of sunglasses with oil-slick-colored lenses.

Mr. Bruno shakes his head as he pokes his finger through the hole in your bedroom window. “About all I can do for you is patch it up,” he says to your mother.

Lines appear on your mother’s face. Side-to-side in some places and up-and-down in others. “Whatchu mean that’s ‘all you can do’? You can replace the window.”

“Patching it up is the same result. If I replace this window, I gotta charge you for it, and that’s a couple hundred dollars. But I can patch it for you, no charge.”

“Why would I have to pay for a window that I didn’t break?”

“I didn’t break it either. Why should I pay? The only difference between patching up this hole and putting in a new window is how it looks. If you want it pretty, then you can pay for that. But all I owe you is a window that doesn’t leak. And that’s what you’ll get if I patch it.”

Your mother pokes out her lips. If someone saw only her mouth right now, that person might think she was about to kiss someone. But your mother is mad. This is a mad face. It comes with matching mad arms and mad hips.

Mr. Bruno shrugs. “You want me to bring the tape? Or not?”

Turn to 9.

9

In sixth grade, you have gym class instead of recess. There are gym class uniforms that you change into in a locker room with the other boys, all of whom are now shorter than you. You can’t help but take advantage of this while the unit for this marking period is basketball, which you’ve been playing since you could stand. You swoop and soar above these kids for half an hour every day. Buckets on buckets until the whistle blows to send everyone back to the locker rooms. Today Coach Evanson calls to you as you pass: “Come see me in my office after you get changed,” he says.

Coach Evanson’s office is a windowless cinderblock cave carved out of the school basement. It sits between the locker room and the weight room and smells accordingly.

“Coach E?” You poke your head around the doorframe.

“Come on in.”

He waves you to a seat in front of his desk, and you immediately have flashbacks. Teachers, principals, guidance counselors, always inviting you to a bad news seat just like this one.

“As you might know,” he begins, “I coach the basketball team here…”

You didn’t know.

“…and I’m interested in having you try out to play on my varsity squad.”

You brighten.

“But…”

You dim again.

“…I checked into your records, and it looks like you’re not doing too good in school. It’s late in the year, of course…can’t really turn it around at this point. Technically, I can’t play you if you failed. What I’m trying to say is…well…I talked to your guidance counselor, and she can pass you on to 7th grade, even though you didn’t really pass on your own. It’s called ‘social promotion.’ Then you just have to pass five classes the first semester and keep up a C average after that, and I can let you play. So, I said I’d talk to you myself and see what you want to do.”

If you want to repeat 6th grade and try to pass on your own, turn to 10.
If you want to be promoted to 7th grade, turn to 11.

10

The following week, Coach pulls you aside again. “I respect your decision…” he says.

You sink into the bad news chair waiting for the “but.”

“…but I just wanted to make sure you have the full picture, which is this: you already repeated 4th grade. If you repeat another grade, you’re gonna wind up too old to play for some of high school. Now, if things are going well for you in sports, that’s gonna really mess you up. If you’re not playing senior year—and you will be too old to play senior year if you stay back—you won’t get scouted for college sports. So that’ll be the end of it. Not putting any pressure on you—just wanted to make sure you have all the information before you decide.”

Turn to 11.

11

Like debts in a ledger, the numbers in your life keep getting higher and higher—your age, your height, your grade. Everything goes up except your reading level. You are 6′2″ tall now and, one social promotion leading to another, you’re in 10th grade.

Your middle school basketball career was short lived because you couldn’t maintain the required GPA, but there’s a lot more value in having a 6′2″ center on the varsity team in high school. The stakes are higher, the coaches more aggressive. When necessary, they bend the rules and push the bent ends through loopholes. Or sometimes even find ways to make sure you get the grades they need you to get.

Your new coach got you a tutor right away as a freshman. Tasha is somehow one grade ahead of you but two years younger. At your height, all high school girls seem small to you, but Tasha is downright tiny. You tower over her even while seated alongside her at the study room table.

She wears round glasses and plain clothing and helps you get through homework by reading out loud to you. You look down at the lesson on the biology textbook page—intrelan antaomy—and pretend to keep up, marveling at how her voice dances across the sliding, shifting letters without ever stumbling.

“Olfactory lobes, where odors are processed…cerebrum is the frog’s thinking center…optic lobes, which function in vision….”

There is a worksheet on the table between you. It has a diagram of a frog’s head on it, and Tasha points each new area out as she reads.

You are able to focus and memorize the words. You could always remember what you hear. You remember every joke you’ve ever heard. Classes like this one and social studies—where arrangements are sometimes made to let you take an oral exam instead of a written one—give you a chance to gain some ground.

“Hey—what animal has more lives than a cat?” you ask, as Tasha finishes the reading.

She shakes her head.

“A frog—cuz he croaks every day.”

Her mouth twists awkwardly. She has metal braces that wrestle with her lips for ownership of her smile. Her lips win this round.

She spins the worksheet to face you, points at the first region on the diagram. “What’s this?”

“Olfactory lobes,” you respond, then, “cerebrum, optic lobes, cerebellum, medulla oblongata, spinal cord.” You point them out as you recite.

“It’s so cool how you can do that,” she says. Her eyes reach yours for a fraction of a second before darting back down to the pages on the table.

“I couldn’t do it without you,” you lean down to tell her this.

Elbow on the table, she hides her face with one hand.

“What does corn say when it gets a compliment?” you ask.

She peeks over. Despite herself, her lips part in anticipation of the punchline. “What?”

“Awww, shucks,” you say, giving her a bashful shoulder shove. “Get it? Aw, shucks.”

Vanessa sounds like a name for an adult to you. Who could look at a baby and call it Vanessa? Vanessas have juicy lips wet with gloss and hips that have to flare out to the sides to accommodate the mass they carry behind them. Vanessas are brazen. They wear tight clothes that advertise their curvy lines and slip notes in your locker telling you in big, bubbly letters that they want All The Things done to them just as bad as you want to do them.

Vanessa is a year ahead of you but your same age, and she already has her driver’s license since her parents had the money for driving school. She even has a little old car that you ride with her to the mall in. The two of you hang out there until the sun turns its back a bit, and then she drives to a ducked off spot by the levee and offers you things your growing-up body tells you it requires.

“I’ll meet you in five minutes,” Tasha has dropped by your locker to tell you.

“Oh, snap—I forgot to tell you I got plans after school today. We good for Thursday, though.”

“You sure?” She looks concerned.

“Yeah, I’m good,” you reply. “Go have fun and stop worryin’ ‘bout me, girl.”

Vanessa appears behind you and gives Tasha a blank stare.

“That’s my tutor,” you explain.

She looks around you at Tasha, looks her up and down. “What grade she in?” She asks you this instead of Tasha, as if Tasha isn’t standing right there to answer for herself.

You look back and forth a moment, unclear about who should respond. Tasha’s face is a popped balloon.

“Eleventh,” you put in on Tasha’s behalf.

Vanessa laughs at this.

You are missing tutoring sessions, and it’s showing in your grades. A few zeros on homework make a fast impact on an average that was low to begin with. If you dip below a 2.0, you can’t play.

“Just ask that little nerd girl to do it for you,” Vanessa suggests when you turn her down to work on a paper that’s due in a week.

“What? I can’t do that.”

“Why not? She’s in 11th—she probably already did it last year. Just give her some money to, you know, change it some and give it to you. I got the money. Let’s pay her.”

At your pace, you won’t be able to finish it on time anyway, and every string that can be pulled for you is already as tight as a tripwire.

If you agree to cheat, turn to 12.
If you try to manage on your own, turn to 13.

12

“Just write it for you?” she seems dumbfounded by the idea and closes her locker like she’s in a daze.

“I mean…ain’tchu already wrote one like this?”

“Yeah, but….”

“Just, you know, make some changes. Dumb it down some, right?” You smile sheepishly.

“I don’t know….”

“Come on, Tasha…please?” You feel like you’re watching in slow motion as your hand involuntarily extends from your arm and lands on her tiny shoulder where it proceeds to squeeze a bit and stroke with its thumb. From this out-of-body perspective, you realize that this is something your hands learned on their own recently, unconsciously.

Tasha’s cheeks flush and her braces crack open the blinds for a nervous peek. In the end, she draws the line at taking your money.

A whole market for cheating reveals itself to you after this first time, and things get easier for you in school. You’ve stayed on the team, gone to States, and made it to 11th grade this way. But ahead of you lies the 11th grade state assessment, and there is no way to cheat on this test. You are the last student to turn in your bubble sheet each day, and as you release it to the top of the pile, you feel your grip on the future release along with it.

No one, especially you, is surprised when you fail. It’s 4th grade all over again.

You take the bad news seat in front of your guidance counselor’s desk.

“At this point, rather than have you repeat 11th grade, I’d like to go ahead and promote you and then get you on a GED track once school starts,” the woman says.

“I could still play ball?” You are pushing back against the heavy door closing between you and your plan to squeak into a smaller Division I college and then shine your way into the pros.

“Well…no. You wouldn’t meet the eligibility requirements for sports once you’re in the GED program, but you would actually finish school—not just on time but early if you do it, which wouldn’t be a bad thing based on your age. You could finish before 19 if you go this route.”

The heavy door continues its grim path. You focus on the skinny crack of light that remains. “I mean…can’t I take the test again?”

The woman makes a face like she tastes something sour. “Well…yes. Yes—you can take the test as many times as you want, but….” Here she shrugs and her hands hang empty in the air in a display of pointlessness.

If you insist on trying again at the assessment, turn to 14.
If you agree to go for the GED, turn to 16.

13

Everything’s slipping backward now, like trying to climb up a sliding board in socks. You feel it like a dropping sensation somewhere in your core. For the half of the paper you got done, you got half a score: 50. Between the coaches and Tasha, you get another chance, and you limp your way to 11th grade between them.

You think about the half a million guys just like you, only about 1,500 of which will play Division I college ball. Then after that, only 60 will get drafted up to the league. You don’t know how to do the math to put a number on these odds, but you do know they’re slipping out of your grip like dreams do when you wake up. By March, your GPA is 1.9 and you’re staring down the barrel of the 11th grade state assessment exam, which you have to pass to go to 12th grade and get one last shot at a basketball career. You try not to think about it.

“Whatchu wanna do about prom?” you ask, your fingers curled around the passenger door handle of Vanessa’s Honda in the school parking lot. At 6′5″ now, you tower over both the girl and the car.

She stops moving entirely. Doesn’t unlock the door. Instead, she sighs and lets her backpack drop down her arm. “We need to talk.”

The slipping feeling stirs inside your chest.

She looks over the car at you, keys jingling in one hand. “I don’t think we should go out anymore.” She’s shaking her head as she says this, shaking her head no. Like she’s answering every question you could follow up with, and right then and there, you stop fighting the slide.

“Okay.” You look over at the busses pulling out and release the car door handle. “It’s okay. I’ll walk home.”

“You ain’t gotta do that,” she says.

But you know that you do.

When April comes, you sit for the state exam like everyone else and are the last student to turn in your bubble sheet each day. As you release it to the top of the pile, you feel the last of your grip on the future release along with it.

No one, especially you, is surprised when you fail. It’s 4th grade all over again.

You take the bad news seat in front of your guidance counselor’s desk. It is uncomfortably close for you at your grown-man size. You want to push the chair back, but you don’t. Instead, you angle your body to try to find space.

“Listen—you can take the test again,” the woman says. “I’ll get you all set up. Most students will score better the second time around.”

“And if I don’t do it again? What happens?”

“Well, you have to do it again,” she says.

But you know that you don’t.

Turn to 22.

14

You’ve seen the test once now. You didn’t even get halfway through any of the subjects, but you can remember what you saw, so maybe you can move a little faster this time. English, history, algebra, biology. Tasha helps you prepare, provides you some tips. You think of it as a basketball strategy. A Princeton offense maybe since your opponent—in this case, the clock—is fast. You will look through the whole test, mark the questions with the least reading, do those first. Jab, pump, and go. Any time left? Fill in all the blanks. CCCCCCC. Algebra, biology, history, English. You sit in the room with a dozen other kids. Pencils scraping. Pages turning. Watches ticking. History, biology, English, algebra. CCCCC. Time is up. You release the sheet of paper again, return the pencil to the proctor.

“Knock-knock.”

The man squints, cocks his head to one side.

You try again. “Knock-knock.”

“Umm…who’s there?”

“Broken pencil.”

“…broken pencil…who?”

“Never mind,” you say, “it’s pointless.”

If you attempt the test a third time, turn to 15.
If you give up and go for the GED, turn to 16.

15

Your mom has worked two jobs since you’ve known what a job is, but she’s still a renter. Still grinding. Still one car breakdown away from losing her grip on the ends she makes meet each month. Her daytime job nowadays is in an office, then she has a shift at Walmart most evenings and some weekends. That’s when you’re playing basketball—after school practices in the evenings most days and some weekends. Games in between. This is what you do instead of earning some money, which would make her life easier.

When you turned fifteen, she gave you a pair of Jordans for your birthday. To this day, you don’t know how she got them. You slept in them that night, knowing it was the only time you would get to wear them. In the morning, you tucked the cardboard and the laces back into the shoes and placed them solemnly in the box like Moses’s mother about to send him down the river Nile.

You could have had a work permit at 14. The twins two doors down are just a few years older than you, and they’ve already been working in fast food for years and thwarted a robbery. Their faces were on the wall of the restaurant for three months after that until the other employees complained about how long the employee-of-the-month bonus—a Walmart gift card—was being handed over to them.

You place the Nike box in front of your mom on the breakfast table.

“What’s wrong? They don’t fit?” She looks distressed.

“I can’t keep these,” you mumble.

She looks confused.

“It’s too expensive.” Your head is so bowed you look like you’re apologizing to your feet. “I’ma get a work permit. I’m old enough. I should be working.”

Your mom’s face uncrinkles, smooths into a smile. “Awwww—no. Nuh-uh, I don’t want that. You already working—real hard. You keep doing whatchu doin’, my baby. I believe in you—you got the genes, and I see you got the work ethic. So that’s where I’m putting my bet.” She slides the shoe box back toward you. “I’m betting on you to make it.”

When it’s time to take the test again, you run the same drills, the ones Tasha taught you. Jab, pump, and go. Step and slide. BIOLOGY, HISTORY, ENGLISH, ALGEBRA. This time: BBBBB. B for basketball. B for believe. B for betting.

And then:

B is for boom—you pass this time.

You pass with nearly the lowest score possible.

But you pass.

Turn to 18.

16

Your feet still in basketball sneakers plod heavily to your GED class. You brighten a little to find that two of the other three other guys drafted there are from around the way. Nicholas-called-Nico and Tareq Smith. The third guy is quiet, bespectacled, and unknown to you. He does his work and stays to himself. Your new trio calls him Dexter. It is agreed that this refers to both the nerd from the cartoons and the serial killer from the TV show.

The bleakness of your deflated dreams is lifted slightly by the new classwork. It is as if someone had been pressing a pillow to your face for years and finally released you. You can breathe again—there is so much more air on the pages of the worksheets you are handed. The instructions so much shorter. The math problems simpler. Long paragraphs of reading have become single sentences with one blank to fill.

A few weeks on and you realize you are also no longer choking on an endless cycle of grading periods, an endless pursuit of Nothing Worse Than a C—by any means necessary. Here, your worksheets are accepted without grades until you are promoted to the Adult Ed Center, which you and Tareq ride to with Nico since he is the only one with a car.

“Vanessa broke up with me,” you share on the ride there one day.

“She won’t nothing but a gold digger, man,” Nico yells back over the engine of the old Pontiac Grand Am, which roars angrily everywhere it goes.

“Here, hit this.” Tareq offers up the joint he is smoking in the back seat.

“Nah, I’m cool,” you say.

“I’ll take that shit.” Nico reaches back over his shoulder, and a careful hand-off is made.

On instinct, you look around for the police. “Hey,” you say, “how do police like their coffee?”

You look from one guy to the other. Both shrug.

“Black with a couple of shots in it.”

Nico passes the joint back over his shoulder. “Damn, nigga,” he says, “that was dark.”

You are returned back to your regular classes after the GED test. About a week later, the GED teacher arrives at your math classroom door. She summons you from the hallway, bubbly and fizzy like a shaken soda.

“You did it!” she bursts once you are alone with her. “You passed!”

Turn to 17.

17

All of you passed. You find each other at lunch and share this news over honeybuns, toasting chocolate milk cartons to your still-hazy futures. You and Nico pack up to head back to class as the lunch period ends.

“What’chall doin’?” Tareq asks.

“Whatchu mean? Lunch is over,” Nico replies.

“So you going back in the classroom?” He shakes his head. “Y’all stupid.”

“Oh, shit,” you say, “this fool right. Which is wild cuz his mama so dumb, they had to burn the school down to get her out of third grade.”

“Ain’t you failed fourth grade?” Tareq retorts.

“Shut up, fool,” Nico interrupts, “we all did.”

The three of you head out to the Grand Am. A limitless April sky spreads above you; below, the earth is warm and waiting.

“Now what?” you ask.

“Let’s celebrate,” Tareq suggests. “Let’s get fucked up!”

This isn’t what you meant, but you allow them to send you into the corner store for booze—6′5″ in the middle of the day on a Thursday. No one bats an eye. You emerge with three 40s of Olde E in brown paper bags and, hungry now, your trio hits a drive-thru for burgers. Nico drives to the flat square of rec department park that sits between your neighborhood and the school, the one with no basketball courts but with picnic tables and a little-kid playground. You all shoot the shit for a while, drink your beers, eat your burgers.

Full of both, Tareq stands on the picnic table and wolf-howls into the empty park then cups his hands around his mouth and yells, “We’re FREE!”

Inside your stomach, the burger begins treading water in the beer, and your question from earlier floats back to the surface: now what?

Turn to 22.

18

The final seconds tick off the clock of your high school basketball career as the opposing team’s three-pointer soars through the air. You watch its arc and wish you could stop not just the clock but actual time. The ball sinks humbly through the hoop, knowing it isn’t enough to change the outcome: the buzzer sounds, and your team’s fans explode out of the stands and onto the court. You are now a member of a state championship basketball team. All around you, kids and parents alike are screaming, running, chest bumping, high fiving. Meanwhile, your heart feels like that basketball. Sinking quietly. You are 19 years old, 6′5″, and quite possibly at the end of the line. Because the next step, between you and making it, is the 12th grade End of Course exam. Without passing this exam, you can’t enter a Division I college. Or any college at all.

Turn to 19.

19

The top of the school district letter reads: “Congratulations!” You passed the exam. Everything is a happy whirlwind after that. You haven’t even finished a celebratory dinner with your family on Friday before you get word of an offer from a Division I school. It’s all happening—just like you planned it. You feel lightweight, as if you can climb the air like a staircase rising above your opponents’ heads. You climb these stairs right to the NBA. Cameras flash your name in lights. You exit arenas and the good life is right outside the door waiting for you. Your chest swells, filled with this good air. It courses through you, even as you wake the day after you failed the exam. Even as you wake, grasping at arena doors made of air.

Turn to 20.

20

“You ready?”

Your mom is waiting to drive you to the school board office for the second time this summer to take the 12th grade exam for the fourth time. She’s on her way to work, so you have to take the bus home. Two transfers.

The sun immediately blinds and burns you as you step out of the office building in the late afternoon. Your fingers are cramped from bubbling in Scantron sheets, and your head is swimming with letters.

You mount the bus stairs, pay for your transfer, and head toward the seats.

“Mmm-mm…you a tall drink of water on a hot day, ain’tchu?” The woman is speaking to him from the second row of seats. “Whatchu? Like, 6′3″?”

“Six-five,” you correct her.

“Big baller!” she exclaims. “Come sit by me, big baller. You hoop?”

You sit across the aisle from her in the first forward-facing row of seats. You rest your head on the window and stretch your legs out on the empty bench of Priority Seating for the Elderly or Disabled.

“Who you play ball for?” the woman persists.

You will never see this woman again. “Southern,” you reply over your shoulder, naming a Division I school you had hopes for.

She leans up toward you. “Okay, okay! Y’all went to the, um, the…March Madness? Y’all was in the…the sweet sixteen?”

They didn’t go this year, but she won’t know the difference, so you lean, too—into the fiction. “Yeah, but we only made it to the second round. Don’t matter, though. I’m finishing up next year, getting scouted now. Probably gonna go to Charlotte.” The words immediately feel childlike coming out of your mouth. Like saying you’re gonna be president of the United States or go to the moon.

The woman picks up the pile of bags and belongings on the seat next to her and moves up a row to get closer. “Where you going right now? You wanna go get a drink? We could get off by the Quarters and go to, like, the casino or something. Whatchu think?”

You can smell the alcohol on her from across the aisle, and now you look over at her. She looks worn, and you can tell her whole story from a glance. She was pretty once, but drinking and drugs have chipped away at it. A missing tooth here, a scar there. Hair not taken care of. Nowhere to go and never been any farther than these buses could take her anyway.

“Nah, I can’t,” you answer. “I gotta get somewhere. I’m already late.”

The form letter you receive three weeks later feels wrung out and tired. “You have received a passing score on your 12th Grade End of Course Exam.” This would have been cause for celebration two months ago. Now you blink dully at the letter and wonder what to do with it.

“Don’t be like that,” your mom says. “You did it, baby. I’m so proud of you. Why don’t you call Coach E and tell him? He had something for you a month ago. Maybe it could still happen.” She rubs your arm as she speaks.

You’re sure that a month might as well have been a century, but you call him, and he says he’ll ask around. Two weeks later, he calls you back. There’s a Division II school that’s looking for a power forward to round out a team.

Division II. A while back you had thought about your odds of going pro—it was something like 60 out of 1,500 starting D1 players. How much longer were the odds of first getting pulled up out of the D2 mud and then still making it to the draft after that? Long shots getting longer.

Coach E clears his throat on the other end of the phone. “You still there?” he asks. “You can call me back, but they’re gonna want a decision as soon as possible.”

If you decide to give it your all and pray to get called up to D1, turn to 21.
If you consider this the end of the road athletically, turn to 22.

21

The buzzer sounds and the final score of 53-64 marks the end of the season for your team, which makes its sweaty and somber way back to the locker room. You sit in the bleachers and wait for the crowd to thin before you rise, feeling self-conscious about being in a body that was clearly supposed to be helping to win on that court. It’s your brain, though, that won’t cooperate. You’re two semesters in now, and all of your classes still start with a 0. Math 010. Science 005. Foundations of this and Basics of that. These are pre-college or “developmental” classes—also known as remediation. And pre-college classes don’t count toward college, so you’re not even technically a freshman yet, which means you’re not eligible to play.

It would be one thing if you were acing these classes, but you’re not. You’re still struggling. And there are no more strings left to pull.

Turn to 22.

22

It’s strange not having anywhere at all to be on weekday mornings. Not school. Not summer school or basketball camp. Not anywhere. You hide in bed listening to your mom get ready for work. You know her routine by heart. Microwave beeps followed by shower sounds. The flop and drag of slippers changing to the solid sound of shoes. The layer of stillness that falls over you when she turns off her air conditioner. Her keys jingle, and the front door closes. The lock clicks. The car starts. And only now can you show your face.

You turn off your own air conditioner, too—thinking about the electric bill—and you head to the kitchen. In front of your seat at the table are a twenty-dollar bill and the classified ads. She must have brought them home from work because you all don’t receive the newspaper. You imagine her skimming these over lunch at her office job, circling things in her mind. Help wanted. Now hiring. The hundreds of lines of tiny print on the pages rearrange themselves into a maze you’ll never find your way out of, so you leave both items on the table and head back to get showered and dressed.

Later, at the front door, you sigh deeply and turn around to grab the money before you go.

The trip to the store feels like a perp walk even though you haven’t done anything wrong. The windows on the houses are eyes, judging you, and disgust rises like heat off the occasional elder watching you walk by from a porch. You’re glad to turn off onto the shortcut to escape the onlookers thinking you were supposed to amount to more.

The back road has far more trash than houses or people. Car bumpers, lawn furniture, tires, and every abandoned thing you can think of litter the corners and sides of the jagged-edged street. Most of the houses back here have mercifully had their eyes covered with plywood. If you hadn’t lived here your whole life, you would be uncomfortable to walk this road, and rightly so. Across from a house with no wood on its windows, a man leans on a car much nicer than anything in its circumference and watches you approach.

“What’s good, youngblood?”

“Whassup, Maurice?” you answer. You dap each other up.

“You what’s up, player. Whatchu doin’ here, man? I thought sure you was gon’ ball your way out the ‘hood.” He mimics a free throw.

“I mean…,” you mumble and hang your head.

“Naw, don’t be like that, man—it’s all good.” He pats you on the back. “The ‘hood gon’ see you straight. You lookin’ for work?”

You are literally on your way to fill out job applications, but you answer, “Nah, not right now, chief.”

The man, a decade or more older than you, scratches the stubble on his cheek with one hand while he considers you. Then finally, he shrugs. “Aiight…get at me whenever.”

“Fa sho,” you respond. “Lemme get on to this store. It’s hotter than a mug out here. I’ma see you.”

The man nods and watches you walk away.

At the Family Dollar counter in front of you is a girl, slender and red. A certified redbone. Red with brown freckles covering the bridge of her nose and her cheeks. She’s about your age or maybe younger, and you are trying to decide in the moment if you find her quirks attractive.

“Hello? Can I help you?”

“Oh—yeah, my bad. Y’all hiring?”

“Depends. Who’s asking?”

“Me. I’m asking.”

She cocks her head slightly. “You sure you don’t wanna work somewhere with, you know…,” she looks around, “…taller shelves?”

You crack a smile.

“Maybe they’re looking for somebody to install light bulbs on the moon,” she quips.

You laugh out loud at this. “Yoooo…you know what? You don’t even wanna do this cuz my jokes…they gonna go right over your head.” Here you use your hand to slice through the more than foot of space between your heights.

“Shouldn’t you be attacking Japan right now?”

“Hmmm—what did the mole say to the freckles?”

She squints her eyes at you.

“Weird flecks, but okay. See, that’s flecks like f-l—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it, Sasquatch.”

“Damn, are you…Grumpy?”

“Oh, gosh…no…”

“Oh? Well which one are you? Definitely not Bashful.”

Her whole face transforms as she gets the joke. “You know what…?” She shows two straight lines of crooked teeth as she laughs and swats at you with a notepad of job applications. “You still want this?”

“I’d rather have your number. Crystal.” You make this out from her name tag. “Whatchu doin’ for lunch?”

“…and that’s how I wound up here,” you finish telling Crystal over a burger and fries at Rally’s. “Way I see it, I got three options: get a job, go to the Army, or start hustling.”

If you get a job, turn to 23.
If you decide to enlist, turn to 25.

23

You get the job at Family Dollar, and it’s made all the easier by Crystal, who can’t believe it’s your first job. She’s on the schedule pretty much every day because she’s trying to save money to go to community college after she graduates next year. She wants to become a licensed massage therapist. You think this is amazing and make googly eyes at her as you stock the shelves and break down boxes and the like.

Contrary to popular belief, you were never out in the streets having sex willy-nilly. Crystal is special to you. The nights you are both scheduled to close the store are magical, like something out of a movie. Like children with chores, you turn on music, dance and sing together, and race each other up and down the aisles with wide dust mops. Then, like adults with nothing to lose, you pretend to leave with the manager then sneak back in through the rigged back door and make love in the storeroom on top of whatever soft inventory is available—towels, socks, kitchen linens. Once an inflatable pool raft.

Crystal turns 18 next week, right before she starts her senior year. You save up to take her somewhere nice to eat for her birthday. She plans to finish school, but the baby is due in late April, so it’s going to be tough. And you’re going to need to do a whole lot more saving up.

If you try doing music on the side, turn to 24.
If you start slinging on the side, turn to 26.

24

There was a time when you and David were making tracks together. Really simple stuff—beats from a Casio keyboard and a basic MPC acquired, respectively, from the Goodwill and the pawn shop. He stuck with it, growing his bedroom studio and learning to use Fruity Loops while you grew into your basketball physique. His mix tapes—still under the name y’all came up with together, Big Baller Boyz—get respect on the street, and local artists drop verses on his tracks. You stop by to discuss bringing your old rap persona out of retirement.

David’s room is in the back of the house, and his blue-nose pitbull follows you happily, jumping up to sniff at your hands for possible treats. Her toenails clack along on a linoleum floor that looks a hundred years old.

“Been a long time. Maggie missed you,” he says, taking the dog by the collar and ushering her to a bed in the corner of the room. The windows are covered with dark bedsheets tacked to the frames and, behind these, black plastic trash bags attached with duct tape. A large computer monitor and a small desk lamp on a bookshelf are the only sources of light.

“So how does it work?” you ask, settling into the chair he offers next to his desk.

“Whatchu mean?”

“Like, say I drop a verse right now… and it’s fire, of course… and you put it out on one of your mix tapes. How do we get that money?”

“You gotta sell that shit, baby. Masta P style. Street team and shit. Hit up the right spots. Hopefully the right person hears it. And then everybody wins.”

“That’s real. Aiight. You putting something together now?”

“Always.”

“I brought my rhyme book.” You hold up an old composition notebook covered in hand-drawn graffiti.

“Ohhhh, shit—I remember that, man. Can’t believe you still got that.”

“Of course.”

“Okay, but listen—this shit don’t happen for free. I’m not charging for studio time like it’s the Hit Factory over here, but for me to make something to sell, it’s not just my time—I also gotta get art and layout and pay for the discs an’ shit. So anybody tryna get on a track gotta put something on it, you know what I’m sayin’?”

You balk at the cash outlay he names.

“Gotta spend money to make money, cuz.”

You’re not sure that’s true.

Turn to 26.

25

“You from around these parts?” the Army recruiter asks as he shows you to a seat. He sounds like he is neither “from around these parts” nor from around this decade. You are reminded of the dad from “Leave It to Beaver” or some other black-and-white show from another era. He sits down beside you at a table and leans back in his chair, crossing one leg over his knee. You imagine him with a pipe in his mouth looking over a newspaper and giving wise advice to a son who really looks up to him.

He goes on to ask you lots of questions about yourself, after which he says to you, “Well, it sounds like you qualify for service, absolutely,” and then he asks you about your goals.

You shrug. You haven’t really thought about it, so the man talks about what you can do in the Army, painting a picture with lots of happy trees and happy clouds and happy endings. “You can learn any of these careers in the Army,” he tells you, and you honest-to-God can almost feel yourself there, in his painting, with the sun smiling on your face.

“So…what happens next?” you ask.

“Well, tell you what—if you have 30 minutes, I can have you do a practice test right now and then we can take that information and move you along in the process. We’d do a more formal screening—medical history, police records, things like that—and if everything’s good, we’d schedule you for the real test and the physical and all that great stuff.”

Test is the only thing you hear. You feel the happy clouds turning gray, and your head grows heavy on your neck. “Test?” you say.

“Yes—the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB for short. It’s what we use to figure out your strengths and abilities…math, science, language…things like that. It’s just a multiple-choice test, like what you would have already done lots of times in school.”

“Last test I passed was a drug test,” you tell the man, who cocks his head to the side momentarily, calculating a response. You finish your joke before he needs to speak again: “My dealer had some explaining to do.” You lean back in your chair and execute a rimshot on the table, making the cymbal noise with your tongue against your bottom teeth.

The man tips his head back exaggeratedly when he laughs, which sounds like a machine gun firing the word “ha” at you. “Well, I wish sense of humor was something we tested for because you would pass with flying colors,” he says when he’s recovered. “But seriously, have you got time for a practice test right now?”

If you agree to take the test, turn to 27.
If you bail at this point, turn to 23.

26

You’ve taken this shortcut a thousand times and never seen inside the only house on the road without boards over the windows. Never had cause to be in a trap house before. But Maurice is happy to see you and lets you in.

On the other side of the door, there is no air and little light. The milky eyes of the windows are covered with sheets and dry yellowed roller shades. A strong smell of burnt plastic is stirred by every move you make. Maurice leads the way and, as your eyes adjust, you make out enough furniture for two or more houses this size, most of it misplaced. Mattresses and a kitchen set and microwave in the front room. Multiple sofas in every room in the back—some still wrapped in plastic as if they were lifted directly from somebody’s mawmaw, some occupied by people sleeping. And countless tables, most littered with a mix of recognizable and unrecognizable items. Fast food packaging, bottles, ashtrays. Loads of some kind of plastic caps, devices.

Maurice brings you to an even darker back room and offers you a seat across a desk from him. “So…what we doin’?”

You are reminded of your school days. Guidance counselors and coaches and principals sitting across from you at a desk. “Well, my girl pregnant,” you begin.

“Oh, shit—congratulations, man. Your first one?”

Your first one. There is a flash in your mind of backyard barbecues and turning on the sprinklers for freckling kids to run through on a hot day. The kids. The wife. The house. The yard. “Yeah.” You smile.

“Soooo…yeah, that Family Dollar paycheck ain’t gon’ cut it.” He issues this as a statement, not a question.

Your smile fades. You nod.

“Mmph mmph mmph,” Maurice temples his fingers, transforms into a cat with its paw on your mousy tail. “So you wanna come work for Mo now.”

“I mean…I’on’t know…I ain’t sure what to do…,” you trail off.

He purses his lips and looks at you over his fingers. You squirm a bit, feeling confined by the chair, the room. The world.

It gets easier. You spread the word among friends and, after a few weeks, the back side of Family Dollar, which is walled off from the road and has no cameras, becomes known as a good place for friends of friends to make transactions. Your weekly take-home is doubled, and you start to feel confident.

You are two months in when a man in the store says he knows Rahim. You accept his $100 bill in a handshake before fishing a dime bag out of your locker and heading to meet him out back. As soon as the package releases from your fingers to his, a slip-sliding feeling you used to know returns to your chest as if a hole is opening beneath you in the ground. It’s something about the man’s eye contact with you in that exact moment.

“You have the right to remain silent,” the man says.

Turn to 28.

27

Each letter twirls independently on the screen as if you were Neo seeing The Matrix. Your vision rejects the words and instead you make eye contact with your reflection and see how dumb you look in the monitor. A burning sensation rises up the inside of your neck and makes the water almost boil over from your eyes. You push your chair back roughly and the feet scream against the floor. The recruiter re-appears.

“Everything okay?”

You shove your emotions behind your back as if they were stolen property, and you can’t come up with a joke fast enough. So you tell the truth instead. “I just…I can’t read the screen,” you say. “Letters all jumbled or something. I don’t know.” You shrug.

“Hm,” the man looks at you with his eyes squinted. “Are you…dyslexic?”

You blink back at him. You’ve never heard this word.

“Did you ever get any special testing or help learning to read? Or any…accommodations? To help you read better?”

You shake your head and leave a blank slate where your face should be.

“I’ll tell you what,” the man says. “Forget I mentioned that. Let’s just…I’m gonna make arrangements for you to try the test on paper instead at one of our MET sites. What do you think?”

“Can’t be worse than this” is your answer.

“Do you know what ‘diz-lek-zick’ is?”

You have lunch with Crystal almost every day now, and it never stops amazing you how easy she is to talk to.

“Sure,” she answers, “it’s when somebody mixes up letters or numbers. Like, ‘Oh, I wrote down 789 instead of 897. I must be dyslexic.’”

You chew on a french fry.

“Why?”

“You think you could ever love a guy that’s disleksick?”

“Why…do you know one? How cute is this guy?”

You put the backs of both hands under your chin and bat your eyelashes at her.

Two weeks after the test, you receive notice of your score. It is the lowest score possible to still be eligible to enlist, but you are eligible. It feels like you’ve been inside a pressure cooker for nineteen years and someone has just taken the lid off. You are about to army crawl your way into a respectable paycheck that comes with the next eight years all planned out for you.

You jump happily from the pressure cooker into the Army’s alphabet soup: after your enlistment at the MEPS, you’re an E-1 off to South Carolina for BCT followed by AIT in Missouri for your MOS. A year in, you come home—clean and proud with some insignia on your uniform—for Crystal’s high school graduation. You’re stationed in Virginia now, and she’s coming back with you. She’ll get her massage certification up there, and you two will make a real go of it. It’s not long before she’s pregnant and you’re married and then you’re the proud parent of a little boy who looks so much like you it leaves you speechless.

Turn to 29.

28

You keep falling for days, weeks, and months. You can see Crystal and your mother clinging to the edge of the same hole, but you can’t do anything to help them. You fall through the court and then you are falling through time and then you are falling through a hail of blows until you fall—hard—against the steel corner of a prison table and finally: you are not falling anymore. You are in a hospital and you have landed on a cloud.

For the first time in not only months but in years—maybe in your whole life—you feel completely, 100% relaxed. Your injuries don’t matter. The ankle monitor doesn’t bother you. You’re not even fazed by the fact that Crystal is due in less than a month, you have at least eight weeks recovery time ahead, and even if you could walk out right now and look for a job, you now have a felony to report on any application you fill out. None of this affects you anymore when those meds kick in.

Before the hospital sends you home to finish your sentence on house arrest, the doctor comes in and asks you some questions. On a scale of 1 to 10, what number is your pain level today? Have you had a bowel movement? Can you do this? Can you do that? “When you take the Tramadol, do you experience a high from it?”

“No,” you shake your head lightly, don’t want to oversell it. “No, sir. Just takes the pain down.”

He jots notes on his pad, and you’re on your way.

The baby comes early wearing a thin crown of slick, soft hair that makes the top of his head smell like Heaven. You put a pillow on top of your clamshell brace so he can lie on your chest, where he eventually falls asleep and soaks the pillow with his little baby drool. Your mom fusses about the added work of a baby, but her face is a sunrise every time she holds him.

“You got physical therapy at five,” she says to you, lifting her grandson’s dumpling-soft body off your chest. “Crystal knows, right?”

“Yeah, Ma. She coming after summer school.”

Your mother lays the baby down in the crib and strokes his warm cheek with her thumb. “You know,” she says over her shoulder—she blinks a pair of slow deliberate blinks before continuing, “you gettin’ around pretty good now.” She turns back to the sleeping child. “Bills gettin’ real high.” She gives the rail of the crib a pair of light taps then turns to leave for work.

Her car sounds fade and the clamshell around your torso seems to tighten with each minute you lie still, so you grab the lever and tip the recliner upright. You stand carefully but without wincing, miles away from where you were eight weeks ago. Back in your room, you pick up your prescription bottle from your dresser and rattle the few remaining pills before reading the label for the hundredth time. Refills: 0.

Your mom is right. Even though your medical costs were covered, you still have the fines from your conviction and the mounting baby expenses. Plus, you, Crystal, and the baby need a place of your own and everything that goes along with it. You need a lot of money and soon. Absent-mindedly, you shake the pill bottle again.

You pick up your cell. Calling Maurice will be like hitting two birds with one stone.

Turn to 30.

29

Up or out. That’s the rule. Four years in the Army now and you’ve maxed out at E-4 because you can’t read well enough to get education points and, as it turns out, being dyslexic is a disqualifying condition for the Army, so you can’t even seek any help. But it all turns out okay. You’re honorably discharged, and you made friends in the area who steer you in the right direction. You accept a good job as a route manager for a vending machine company with great contracts.

The pay is good, and you get to use your personality to win new clients. You are heading to just such a meeting on a college campus in need of a new vending company when—

Woop-woop!

You look into your rearview mirror and see the police car. This is the third time this year. Groaning, you pull over, knowing you will be late for your meeting now. You roll the window halfway down and put your hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, waiting for an officer to approach.

“Hey, how you doing,” the officer asks. He is a university police officer, and you wonder if they have the authority to give traffic tickets. “The reason I pulled you over is you’ve got a brake light out on your passenger side. Can I ask you what your business is on campus today?”

He runs both of these together as if they are related. You scoff slightly at this.

“You asking everybody driving through here that or just people that look like me?”

“Keep your hands on the wheel,” the officer says before speaking briefly into the walkie on his shoulder. He has one hand on your window while he talks; you observe the handprint from the movement of his fingers and, instinctively, you reach over and press the button to lower the window the rest of the way so his hand will no longer be on the glass. The movement of the window startles the officer, who turns his attention back to you while simultaneously reaching for his weapon. “Both hands on the wheel—now!” he barks.

You return your other hand to the wheel. “License, registration, and proof of insurance!” He is still yelling. It seems obvious to you that the last instruction is the command to be obeyed, but you have also been told twice to keep your hands on the wheel. You take a moment to contemplate your next move.

If you reach for your license, turn to 31.
If you keep your hands on the wheel, turn to 34.

30

“You might can’t have no gun but you can have a damn driver’s license,” Maurice says. He pays for you to go to driving school and take the test and everything.

As unbelievable as the thin rectangle of plastic with your photo on it feels in your hand, the feeling of driving a car is ten times better. You’re not even sure you’re touching the ground when you get going fast on the deserted side road by the railroad tracks. If you close your eyes, everything—everything in the world—hits different. Brighter, scarier, stronger, faster. Sweeter. All by yourself, you close your eyes for a few seconds on that quiet road, bear down on that pedal, and you’re on a rocket to the moon.

The road shrinks away in your rearview mirror now. Your conviction is behind you. The baby’s gonna be two soon. Crystal is finishing community college, and the two of you have a place. All of this is really thanks to Maurice. He hooked you up with a legitimate, on-the-books job at a friend’s hardware store and pays you off the books to work for him.

All you have to do is drive and then block the door and look intimidating while JB does the talking or looks for something to take that might cover the debt. Usually, people cough something up. Some cash, a PlayStation maybe. Sometimes women offer some ass.

You take your pay in cash and pills and wish you had done this in the first place.

You’re often surprised by the people you and JB visit for Maurice. It’s never people in your part of town, with its houses dingy, crooked, and randomly spaced like the last teeth in a bad smile. Rotting stairs and peeling paint. The edges of everything rough and ragged. Instead, you usually drive down toward the river and into crowded neighborhoods full of character and absent of litter. There, the candy-colored houses stand up straight and wear cutaway wood trimmings that look like lace. But when you stand in the doorway, the insides never match the outside. They are filled with milk crates and ratty futons, dirty rugs and dirty dishes, and people who smell like they’re wearing clothes that were left wet in a pile. And even though the floors are filthy, these people—stringy-haired women and men with ghosts in their eyes—are always barefoot. That’s how it is usually. But today is different.

Today, your head swivels like a toy doll’s as you travel wide streets with houses, lawns, and driveways so crisp every line looks like it was sliced with a razor. You’ve been to hospitals less clean than this neighborhood, where the streets are still and no one sits outside on a porch watching things gradually fall apart. You park behind Percy, who is driving Wood in the lead car, and you and JB get out. Wood delivers the instructions as the four of you make your way toward the corner on foot.

“This here,” he says in a low voice, nodding his head toward the street, “this actually the back of the houses. These houses lookin’ at each other, not the street. Now after we get in this back gate, Percy—you go ‘round the side and keep an eye on the front. JB, you and me going in, and kid—you stay inside the gate and keep lookout. Everybody clear?”

Nods all around.

“It’s this one.”

The gate is a door cut into a white wall, and on its other side are a pool and lounge furniture, an outdoor kitchen, and a house that is more glass than walls. Everything is cleaner than a new pack of paper, even inside the house, some of which is clearly visible from where you stand.

Percy peels off along the side, and, to your surprise, Wood and JB, now standing by a glass door that leads into what looks like a family room, put on gloves and masks. As hot as it is outside, tiny bumps rise on your skin as if you were suddenly cold. There is a quick cracking sound as Wood punches through the glass of a locked door and reaches inside for the handle.

A sheen of sweat ushers the chill away from your skin as they disappear inside the house, and you feel compelled to look around you, as if something might be sneaking up on you in the dark. You strain your ears, desperately leaning on the one sense that might be useful to you. You listen hard: cicadas shriek in the trees. An occasional crow squawks. There is a periodic glug and flap from the pool. Nothing sounds. Nothing sounds. Then…a something sound. Muffled but something.

You look up in its direction. There is movement behind a window covering. A lot of movement. Your feet shuffle involuntarily and your legs tense to move. You put your hand on the gate but you keep looking toward the house, and then you see two things happen simultaneously: a flash of something at Percy’s side of the house—a pink foot? Two pink feet? Lifted maybe? And in the other direction, the sight of JB and Wood bursting back through the door at a run. It takes everything in you not to run before they reach you, but you do it, holding the gate open, watching a beat for Percy, and then leaving yourself, pulling the gate closed behind you. The three of you pierce the air like you were launched back to the cars by slingshot. JB and Wood jump into the car with you, and Wood calls out orders from the back seat, directing you to go straight ahead, where you eventually hit a main artery, make a left, and arrive back among the masses. The others are unmasked now, and JB tells you to pull into the shopping center, so you do. You pull into a parking space deep in the lot.

JB exhales loudly and puts the seat as far back as it goes.

You lean forward and hug the steering wheel, waiting for your heart to settle. You turn the air conditioner up to a roar and point a vent directly down your shirt, letting the air evaporate the sweat from your chest.

“You alright, young?” JB is asking.

“I think….” You pull the neck of your shirt up over your face and use it to mop your forehead. You re-emerge and finish your thought. “I think I saw something. What…what happened to Percy?” You look back over the seat at Wood, who says nothing.

You look again at JB, who shakes his head. He sits up momentarily, retrieves a baseball cap from the dashboard, and lies back down, placing the cap over his face.

By morning, news of the kidnapped girl has soaked through every source of information—papers, phones, TVs, radios. By evening, the police have come for you. They got a clean print of yours off the gate handle. You don’t know anything about the girl, but you’re now an accessory to kidnapping. And if she turns up not alive: felony murder.

The police want you to give them names of who else was involved.

“You’re really fucked here, kid,” they say. “Nobody else to pin this on, so it’s all on you right now. This is your one and only shot at improving your situation.”

If you snitch to help yourself, turn to 32.
If you refuse to snitch, turn to 33.

31

You’ve heard Black people say “common sense ain’t common” many times in your 24 years of living. Common sense says that the new order overrides the old one. So you use your common sense. What follows next happens to you over and over again, in fast and slow motion, as your left lung fills with blood: You remove your hand from the steering wheel. You reach behind you and extract your wallet from your back pocket. The officer yells “gun,” unholsters his service weapon, and shoots you in the chest.

You remove your hand from the steering wheel. You reach behind you and extract your wallet from your back pocket. The officer yells “gun,” unholsters his service weapon, and shoots you in the chest.

You remove your hand from the steering wheel. You reach behind you and extract your wallet from your back pocket. The officer yells “gun,” unholsters his service weapon, and shoots you in the chest.

This is a loop. It plays fast and slow, fast and slow, fast and slow for the remainder of your life. Just like it will for the remainder of your son’s life. Your son. Who is only three.

Turn to 1.

32

You can’t believe you even considered this. You ain’t no snitch.

Turn to 33.

33

You spend the first bit of your sentence craning your neck looking behind you for everything you lost in that rear view mirror. You keep it together, though, because you’re in a dorm with 70 other men, one of whom sees you bent face first over a toilet and recognizes you. Says he knows a friend of yours that’s inside, too, and he takes you to the other side of the dorm to meet him. That day, you and your friend are reunited, and your friend sits in the palm of your hand reminiscing with you about how good you used to feel together. You turn the pill over and over with your thumb.

If you start using again inside to dull the pain, turn to 35.
If you decide to get clean instead while you’re in, turn to 36.

34

“Officer”—you say this calmly, and you don’t look at him when you say this, and you say it with all the gathered wisdom of your years of training combined with an even longer tenure of being a Black man—“officer,” you say, “you’re giving me two contradictory commands. Now I’m going to go ahead and keep my hands on the wheel where you can see ‘em. Okay? Cuz you seem a little nervous. And I don’t want you to be nervous. Matter fact, how about a little joke to lighten the mood?” you offer. “How do cops like their coffee?”

“License! Insurance! Registration!” The hand on the windowsill of your car fumbles for the handle and opens your car door. The other hand remains on the gun at his waist.

“Okay, you don’t like jokes.”

A second police car pulls up from the other direction and another officer jumps out, indistinguishable from the first.

This officer doesn’t hesitate. He runs over, reaches across you, releases your seat belt, and drags all six feet and five inches of you out of the car. He pushes you down to the ground on your stomach, lifts his knee, and places it on your upper back before moving it up to the back of your neck. It all happens so fast you don’t have time to react or resist.

“Stop resisting!” the officer commands as the first officer moves in and wrestles handcuffs onto your wrists. “You’re under arrest, guy.”

A shiver of panic vibrates through you and you recollect your wits. “I’m not resisting, officers. Okay? I’m down.” Half your mouth is rubbing against the pavement, but you are trying to de-escalate the situation even as the first officer drives his knee into your back.

The second officer talks into his radio while squeezing the road into your throat. You take thin breaths as you are able, the weight on your chest and neck making it increasingly difficult.

“I’m having a hard time breathing,” you attempt. You aren’t yelling when you say this; you lack the lung capacity. Minutes pass, both fast and slow, while the voices and radio sounds continue above you. You feel yourself getting lightheaded. A universe of stars populates the edges of your vision before the theater goes dark and the movie starts.

It is a short movie about your son on his most recent birthday. You and Crystal had put together a small party in the park that day. There was a grill that you used to char hot dogs and burgers for the guests—friends of Crystal’s and yours who brought their young kids, all of whom play together on the jungle gym and swings, returning to the picnic table intermittently for sodas and food before Crystal lifts the cellophane window from the cake and calls everyone back over. Your son is so filled with energy and happiness that he can’t sit still; he dances and wriggles through the entire birthday song then blows on the number 3 candle when instructed. You lock eyes with Crystal over the delicate curl of smoke. There is a feeling of fullness in your chest.

Later on, you carry your son out of the park, showing him how many fingers to display for three. You can practically feel his warm weight in your arms and smell his sweet little boy smells. That was nearly a year ago now. He will be four soon. You imagine your giant hands folding down his tiny thumb while you say “this many is four.”

Yes, you think, that is what you would say.

Turn to 1.

35

The concrete path to and from the commissary gleams under the fluorescent lights, beckoning like a yellow brick road. On your way back to the pod, the cellophane around the ramen packets crinkles as you walk until you shove them under your t-shirt to shut them up.

“Yo, what’s good?” you greet the man folding shirts on his bed.

He looks up and smiles wide. “Big dog,” he replies. “Got a special for ya today.” He looks around first then displays to you a collection that looks like a handful of movie candy.

“What’s that?”

“It’s oxy, fool. See?” He shows you the familiar M stamped into the surface of the pill. “Two for one, player. Taste the gotdamn rainbow.” When he grins, you can see that he is missing two teeth on one side of his mouth.

You leave the ramen on the bed and take two pills in your son’s favorite color: urnj. He turned three about a month ago, and he’ll have at least four more birthdays before you get home. Be about the age that little white girl Percy took was. They found her alive, and she went home. Percy sure didn’t, though.

You take the first pill and think about going home. You pocket the second pill and think about what happens if you don’t, about the up down forward backward of your life. Like a jack rock spun and dropped from someone’s fingers. Up down forward backward. Bumping into things, changing course.

You sink, perhaps more quickly than usual, into a familiar comfort that feels like drifting to sleep on your mom’s bed as a child and her pulling your grandma’s afghan up to cover you, but instead of this act taking a few seconds, it lasts and lasts. Warmth spreads through you and around you as if you were being bathed. Then—as if you were being suffocated. Something is wrong.

When you breathe, it is warm syrup filling your chest. Your eyes close, and everything is brighter, scarier, stronger, faster. Up down forward, your eyes roll back into your head, where you see behind you in the rearview mirror. There, your loved ones smile and wave goodbye to you. Stronger, faster, sweeter. Crystal, your mom, and your little boy. Your little boy, who is only three years old.

Turn to 1.

36

Truth is, you never did stop falling back in the day—you just couldn’t feel it anymore. Besides, Crystal is pregnant again. She’s gonna need you to come home better this time. You drop the pill into the toilet and throw up again right behind it. You feel everything.

At 4:30am, you are up and out with a long line of men headed to the chicken processing plant. Your job is to check pieces of chicken for any bits of knuckle, bone, or cartilage, which you remove with scissors for hours on end. The smell is nauseating. But the alternative is eight hours in the field like a slave, so you keep it together and dig your fingers in the raw bird flesh.

You memorize the 54 rules of the prison, and you adhere to them. You keep your head down and bide your time. No write-ups, no trouble. Three years on good time, in and out. Clean and sober. Fair and square.

The reunion with Crystal is awkward. The years apart while she raised your children are like mountain ranges formed between you. She is a 22-year-old woman now with major responsibilities; the ease of her geography has changed. You aren’t the same either. There were lightnesses about you before, things that were both bright and airy that have clouded and filled. In between this land and this sky that remains is where you are trying to make a home.

A big piece of that is going to be getting a job. With two felony convictions to your name. You beat your head against this rock every day now. You are more than five weeks out without a solution yet, which is just enough time to worry but not enough time to panic. Stepping outside, you squint up at the blurry edges of a white sun in a white sky as you set out to the corner store for a pineapple Big Shot, one of the many things you missed while in prison. You’ve been re-introducing yourself to small treats like this—Huckabucks, CheeWees, praline candy—ever since you got out. Every little thing you were denied tastes sweeter, saltier, stronger, and better than you remembered.

“Oh, shit!” Maurice exclaims as soon as you hit the corner, where he and another man have just stepped out of the store.

You stiffen.

“My man! I heard you was out but ain’t nobody seen you around!” Maurice daps you up and pulls you into a one-armed hug.

“Whassup, Mo,” you respond. “Yeah, I’m a free man.”

“I know that’s right, baby—how you living? How’s the family?”

“We good. Me, Crystal, and the babies all staying by my mama house right now.”

“Okay, okay…well, you know—it’s a damn shame how everything went down. Shit was crazy. Fa real, yo—I’m sorry as fuck you got mixed up in that shit, playboy.”

You nod and chew one side of your lip. “Thanks, man,” is all you can think to say, and in the moment you spend hoping it’s enough to end the conversation, a sharp crack splits the air. This is immediately followed by a furious spray of bullets that pierce through the store glass, lodge in the walls, and strike down the two targets of the men shooting from the car. Maurice and the other man are both on the ground in awkward positions, one nearly on top of the other, with blood pooling darkly onto the sidewalk. Your own pain introduces itself to you slowly, gives you time to lean one shoulder against the wall and ease yourself down to the ground. You are not sure how many times you have been hit or where, just that you won’t make it out of this one.

That’s when it occurs to you: a Moon Pie, you think—that’s what I should have come for. You wonder if the baby has had his first Moon Pie yet. After all, he is only three.

Turn to 1.

Jan Miles worked as a children’s book editor for several years. Her first adult work, The Post-Racial Negro Green Book, is a nonfiction examination of contemporary racial bias against African Americans. She is currently working on a second volume of this book as well as a collection of short stories.