Free The Next by Rafe Haze

off.
    Have a good date, Princess. I hope he appreciates your perfection. He probably won’t, but he should. I do.

Chapter Nine
    Paul glanced at me with fear in his eyes.
    He was waiting for me to cue our escape from the crook of the tree overlooking Jessie on his knees and the boy standing over him, staring at us with rage in his eyes.
    The boy shoved Jessie to the side.
    “Go!” I commanded.
    Paul scrambled down to the ground as fast as he could, his feet searching for branches big enough to sustain his weight. He snapped the small ones, sending him down several feet as his arms flailed to find something to keep him from plummeting the rest of the way.
    The furious boy darted toward our tree, slowed only by his attempt to shove his still erect rod back into his jeans and zip them up without gouging it.
    “Hurry!” Paul screamed as he finally leaped five feet to the ground.
    My left foot found one branch, and I put all of my weight on it, but it snapped. I began to fall. I grabbed the root of the branch to catch myself, but the jagged daggers of splintered wood gouged my forearm, scraping a thick red line into my skin. All I could do was dig my tennis shoes into the bark and spread my arms out in the chance that a branch would catch and break my plummet.
    One branch hit my armpit, jolting my body with pain. I swung my other arm to grasp the branch, clinging fifteen feet above the ground.
    “Jesus, Paul! Run!” I ordered.
    In the distance, I heard Jessie cry, “Leave them alone!”
    Paul took off as fast as he could down the hill toward the stream just as the angry blond kid reached the base of my tree, the Swiss Army knife clenched tightly in his white knuckled grasp.
    Gentle Debussy arpeggios wafted down through the ceiling.
    I woke up in a sweat.
    Was it past three o’clock already?
    I’d spent the day trying to finish an old song before the sun set. This song was hardly the result of a burst of creativity and inspiration. I’d written it two years ago, but considered it too precious and hammy to put my name to it, so I deleted it, leaving many of the chords unspecified and the initial slapped-on baseline unchanged. However, I’d not emptied the trash and decided to unearth it. Indeed, “Paralyzed” had a cheese factor of twelve out of ten, but anything better was just a hop, skip, and jump the distance of about twenty Verrazano bridges away from me.
    I had been washing my underwear in the sink that morning when I found the card Marzoli had given to me. I could call him. But why? I couldn’t place exactly what I wanted from that sergeant, but he made me...damn it…he made me yearn. But yearn for what, exactly? Aside from that confusion, why for fuck’s sake would he want to return to a dump like this? To a dump like me?
    I hadn’t looked at myself in the mirror for months. No doubt I had tight abs when I was with Johanna, taking those damn core classes four times a week. It seemed a flat belly was one of the prerequisites to being the main squeeze of the queen and the fashionista long-haired skirts she called friends. A year ago I might have thought any woman, let alone a man, casting an eye my direction was earned and deserved. But it’d been a year since those glorious days, and I had absolutely no desire to feed my joy with lovely visions of increased flab and decreased tone. No thank you. I left the hooded sweater and dusty sheets draped over the mirror. What I interpreted as Marzoli’s attraction to me was, after all, just a Sicilian Puerto Rican’s street instincts to oil the machinery as he pumped a stranger for information. Right?
    And yet…
    As pathetic as I knew it to be, Marzoli’s attention was, in sad fact, the only indication of the arrival of the Next I had to cling to. It made no logical sense, but I needed to call him. I needed to pay my cell phone bill to call him. I needed to sell a song to get the money to pay the bill. I needed to revive this piece of shit song in order to sell