Free Good Kids: A Novel by Benjamin Nugent Page A

was Steven—he was jumping in his truck. He revved the engine. I scrambled to get out of his way, and then he was spitting gravel through the parking lot, spinning out onto the road.
    I looked down at myself to find I had some coffee splashed on my shirt. It didn’t seem like it was melting my skin. Apparently, a hot plate with an openmouthed pot didn’t maintain coffee at lethal temperatures, like the metal tanks at McDonald’s. I had envisioned the weapon in my hand as boiling pitch, like what you’d pour on a screaming Hun.
    Still: I had been in a fight. Khadijah, I thought, my love, my fellow soldier. See what have I become? I felt that Khadijah, if she had seen me, might have been overwhelmed by a desire to kiss me, because the smell of my sweat was mingled with Old Spice, and even without the Old Spice the smell was better than how it had been before—the sweat was earned.
    As we waited for the police, I leaned protectively against my father’s Subaru, which was immobilized, its rear tires slashed. My shirt clung to my chest. My triceps, which ached from wrestling with Steven for the pot, looked a little more like real triceps, distinguishable from the rest of my arms.
    I have been to war, my love . I mouthed the words as I watched the sunset spill red on the diner’s chrome. Maybe I only needed Khadijah to watch how I was changing, how I was becoming a man, for our bond to be sealed.
    • • •
    The police station in Worthington was not like Wattsbury’s. The room where my father was invited to make a phone call was never referred to as a conference room, and our exchange with the officers couldn’t have been termed a conference. But a progressive, Wattsburian spirit prevailed. The police told us that they would keep Steven off our property as long as we didn’t insist on lodging a criminal complaint; they felt pretty sure they could talk him out of lodging a complaint against us. It was true that my father had torn up his money order, and that I would have inflicted very mild burns upon him if he hadn’t seized the pot,but a young waitress had confessed that she was the one who had armed me, a minor, with coffee. (She was fired immediately.) It was Steven who had slashed our tires and instigated the conflict. As far as the town of Worthington was concerned, we only had to find a ride back to Wattsbury and call Triple A about the Subaru in the morning.
    At the little metal table where the white office phone waited for us, my father backed his metal chair against the wall. He leaned his head against a bulletin board and dialed a number from memory.
    “Give me a little space, all right?” His eyes softened. “Won’t you, Son?”
    I left the room and wandered down the hallway, to the holding cell. I took the bars in my hands. While my father murmured into the phone, I studied the metal bench that ran alongside the wall, the chrome toilet. These were the state’s tools for accommodating citizens who were helpless against themselves. A cage was not a place you would ever put my father, a great cat.
    After about five minutes, he came out to the lobby. “It’ll be two hours,” he said to the officers. “A friend of mine is on her way.”
    • • •
    We had long exhausted the game of Twenty Questions by the time Nancy arrived. I had seen my father kiss her, but now, for the first time, I saw the two of them embrace. He collected her in his big arms, her small, rigid body much the same as Khadijah’s, her avian eyes and nose Khadijah’s too, and soon they were sitting at the table near the phone, his head on her shoulder. These cheating old people had what Khadijah and I rightfully deserved.
    “Poor baby,” Nancy said. She kissed my father’s hair. “My poor churl.”
    “I don’t have any money,” he said as she ran a hand down his sideburn through his beard. When she was with him, holding him, he was unashamed to say it. “What am I going to do?”
    “We’ll figure something out,