pass, but before he can decide, the man with the shaved head cuts his eyes right to where Luis stands. He taps the dark-haired one on the arm, and smiles, his teeth so big and white and square they shine at him with mean delight—save for one of the teeth, which glints coppery-gold. They cross toward him, their chains thumping against their chests, and Luis braces for what’s next. He could try to run, but last time they caught him, and it only made things worse. There’s a cop car parked in front of a bodega, windows down, but the cops just watch and never help. Gold Tooth runs into him hard, in the chest, so hard that his teeth crash against one another. The dark-haired one grabs his arm tight, the way you might do to a friend, then closes his grip until it shoots a pain into his shoulder. He jerks his arm away, shakes his head, no. It’s been like this for months now, ever since one of them caught Luis staring at a woman in a tight pink dress. She had reminded him of someone he knew once, a daughter of his grandmother’s friend, but there was no way to tell them that. The next thing he knew, the men were shoving him to the ground, kicking him in the ribs. That’s how it’s become around here—there are certain women who belong to men, women who are owned.
The cops come out of the bodega with paper cups of coffee, see the scuffle, smile, and shake their heads. One of the officers calls out to them, which makes the other one throw his head back and laugh. He tries again to pass, but Gold Tooth hooks a foot behind Luis’s knees, sends him crashing to the ground. Luis looks over at the cops, who stare at him, smiling. More rage surges through his limbs, and he extends a leg and kicks the bald man in the ankle. He knows to brace for it—bam—another slap upside the head. His jaw slides sideways. His temple throbs, and his whole spine feels bruised.
The men leave him on the sidewalk and one of the cops spits a chewed piece of gum out the window. Even with their eyes masked behind mirrored glasses, Luis can tell that they’re laughing at him, the corners of their mouths curling up. His heart flutters like a bird trapped in his chest.
He brushes the gravel out of his palms. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a needle in the gutter, a busted plastic lighter, a shimmering film of cellophane. He shudders, stands, brushes more gravel from the knees of his pants. He’s been thinking of ways to avoid the men and the cops who do nothing. But what he wants most is violence, to take a swing at those big, stupid grins, grind their faces into the ground, a swift kick to each of their guts. But he knows what would happen then: his hands twisted behind his back, the silver cuffs biting into his wrists. The rules are different for him. And it wouldn’t be his first arrest—in the spring he was caught in the parking garage of the old Taj Mahal. They must have thought he was up to something bad, but he was only curious. What it looked like empty of all those cars. It makes him feel better to think it, that they don’t know the half of it—if only they knew how often he is somewhere he isn’t supposed to go. If only they knew how frequently he made himself invisible, how closely he could watch.
As he limps home, he thinks about the way the whole city is dying around anyone who is left; slowly, though, like a large animal falling to its knees. All he can see are the ghosts of the places they used to go when he was a boy. The shop where his grandmother bought meat for the week, the one where his grandfather bought him his first bike. He can still remember when the boardwalk was lined with old hotels, beautiful redbrick and decorations that reminded him of frosting on a cake. His grandfather had brought him to the beach to watch as one of the bigger ones was destroyed. He and his grandfather pressed up against the plastic fence and watched the old hotel slide out from under itself, bloom into a cloud of rubble and dust. Other people around him covered