Free Ridiculous/Hilarious/Terrible/Cool by Elisha Cooper Page B

usually wears, she’s wearing a loose green sweater over a small belly. She’s pregnant.
    There’s also something missing at Payton. Something in the atrium. There, on the bench under the stairs. A space. Someone who is not here. A few days pass, a few days more. Zef Calaveras did not come back to Payton this semester.
    A tray clatters to the floor in the cafeteria, sending a spray of mashed potatoes everywhere. The heavy girl from whose hands the tray fell stares at it— the nerve! —then keeps walking. A security guard sees her and barks, “No you don’t!” As he points at a broom leaning against the wall, the girl stares at him, at the broom, at him. His arm does not lower an inch. She takes the broom—the students at the tables nearby have stopped chewing—and swipes at the linoleum. After she leaves, the security guard throws a towel over the remaining mess. He shakes his head. “ Oooeee! You can really hurt yourself on mashed potatoes!”
    Not noticing any of this is Anthony Johnson Jr., back against the cafeteria’s rear wall, surrounded by girls. Anthony is wearing baby-blue sweatpants, a baby-blue sweatshirt, and blindingly white sneakers with baby-blue trim. On top of everything, the green turtle shell.
    He’s trying to explain some situation to his cousin, who is sitting across from Anthony and leveling a stare at him so blistering it could warm the french fry dangling from his fingertips, which he seems to be holding up between the two of them in an attempt to ward her off.
    Something happened with his cousin’s wallet. She left it on the floor of the cafeteria yesterday. Anthony picked it up. He meant to bring it to her but then he ran into The Girl. The Girl wanted to go to her home on the South Side. Anthony went with her, and his cousin’s wallet went with him. He called his cousin from the train and told her he’d come back to school and bring her wallet after he was done with The Girl, but when the cousin called back to find out how long that would be Anthony didn’t answer the phone.
    He didn’t answer because he was listening to The Girl on her cell phone—she’d gotten one since the missed meeting at the McDonald’s in the fall—talking with The Dude. The Dude, from what Anthony could overhear, was pressuring The Girl to have sex with him. She was saying no. Anthony tried to be supportive, telling The Girl in between the times she hung up on The Dude that she should “straighten out her situation.” He was being a good friend, he says.
    Anthony’s cousin rolls her eyes.
    â€œPress Pause!” she shouts, her forefinger jabbing an imaginary button an inch from Anthony’s nose (the protective french fry has since disappeared into his mouth). Then she tells the other girls at the table what really happened: Anthony took her money. That is all .
    The cousin gets up and stalks off with a backhand wave. Anthony keeps explaining his side of the story to anyone who will listen. There were extenuating circumstances. He and The Girl were in the middle of an important conversation. They were working things out. And, she was slapping him.
    It all started because of what happened back in the fall, that time they ditched school and went to his house. Around that time Anthony had been talking with some guys in the neighborhood who knew some other guys who set him up with some dope to sell. But he couldn’t move anything, so he enlisted his younger brother. Business picked up.
    The Girl didn’t like him dealing. When they arrived at his house that day, he told her he needed to bag some of the pot in the room he shares with his brother, the room with the huge poster of the scantily-clad aerobicizing black women from the late ’80s. The Girl went to his bedroom. After he was done bagging, he walked in and there she was lying on his bed. A girl on a bed. What was he supposed to do?
    â€œIf we don’t