what he was about to tell me, what it would change. For him, for me. For this thing between us.
But of course, he took my words wrong. He hadn’t looked at me since he’d blurted out his confession, and he still didn’t look at me as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his car keys.
“I won’t hurt you. I’d rather die than ever hurt another person, especially you. Take the keys. Leave if you need to. I get it.” He tossed them onto the corner of the picnic table closest to where I was standing.
I hardly even glanced at them. “Hendrix, tell me what happened.” I didn’t want to know, but I had to know.
He swallowed and released another big breath, his lips trembling. “Back in New York, I told you the kind of school I went to, the kind of people I hung out with. We got away with so much because our parents were so influential. The teachers were too afraid to discipline us. We all thought we were untouchable, invincible. But we all had this . . . ” He shook his head. “. . . this restlessness. Me most of all. Something inside me was constantly screaming and thrashing, and the only time it would quiet down was when I was driving my fist through something. Or someone. Those guys and I, we started getting into fights. At first it was against each other, betting obscene amounts of money on the outcome. Eventually we started hanging out with people who were intimately acquainted with the darker side of the city—people who were more than willing to take our money and hook us up with other sad fuckers looking to beat the shit out of anyone.”
He stared at the ground beneath his feet and opened his mouth a few times, but he couldn’t seem to get the next words out.
That restlessness he described, the screaming on the inside—I felt that in my bones. I moved forward to stand directly in front of him, and that seemed to snap him out of his inability to speak.
“There was this guy at my school.” He leaned back against the picnic table, his hands hanging between his knees. “He wasn’t like us. He wasn’t rich, didn’t walk around like the world owed him something. The school was bigger than Fulton, more students. I didn’t know everyone, hardly cared enough to know my so-called friends. Anyway, there were several scholarship students and . . .” He choked, his lip trembling again. “Austin was one of them. We used to get into it sometimes. He had his own group of friends—we didn’t move in the same circles—but he wasn’t scared of me like almost everyone else. He always had a comeback to any bullshit taunt we threw his way, and he never seemed bothered by it. Like he knew he was smarter than all of us combined, and we wouldn’t matter in a couple more months. He was probably going to cure cancer or some shit. It had never gotten physical between us. The guys and I, we kept the fights discreet, off school property. We may not have cared about punishments from teachers, but we sure as fuck cared about pissing off our parents.
“The thing is, I’d been getting less and less capable of holding back that restless fury—that thing that writhed inside me all the time and was only silent when I was hurting, or hurting someone else. The most fucked-up thing is that I don’t even remember what led up to it. It was after school, the guys and I had just walked around the corner, Austin was there, and one of my friends said something to him. Austin shot a comment back. I have no idea what it was, but it enraged me. I let it bring that monster out. I didn’t care that we were in public, in our school uniforms, with teachers just around the corner. I just lost my shit.”
He paused and looked up to the sky. Tears slid down the sides of his face, but he didn’t try to wipe them away.
For the first time since he’d started talking, he looked at me. Each word that followed was a struggle, forcing its way up his throat. “I threw a punch that landed on his jaw. He wasn’t expecting it and lost his balance, fell backward, hit his head on the pavement. He never got up again.”