Free Black and Blue by Paige Notaro

down with her head resting on my shoulder, and my father wheezing but still breathing next to me.
    Maybe I came from here. Maybe I deserved to be here, but at least these people wouldn’t abandon me. If keeping them put took all my effort, then it was worth it.
    Once the food was done and I’d helped clean up, I gave Sarah a tight squeeze, clapped Pop on his shoulder and pulled away in my new SUV.
    I wasn’t headed home though. My fire had come back.
    I headed to the gym. My fight was tomorrow, but I wasn’t taking any chances. My fists might be all I had, but they weren’t without purpose.
     

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Gabrielle
    “He fights at these things?!”
    “I think so,” I said to Jada. “Maybe not this one, but one of them.”
    “No it’s definitely this one,” Jamal said. “His name’s right here on the flyer.”
    We were sitting in Jamal’s garage. He was packing up the guitar, but Jada sat on her stool, brushing her hands through her long braids and looking at me as if were confessing to crime.
    I looked at the flyer Sean had been left for me at Giuseppe’s. Maybe I should have trashed it, but that felt a bit too cruel. Now Jada and Jamal were hellbent on going. This just seemed like destiny. I’d already dodged it once, but this was a big one.
    “Your boy’s winning these things, right?” Jamal asked, with the Jamaican tinge brushing his words.
    “He’s not my anything,” I said. “I guess he won the night I met him.”
    “Yeah, this that boy then. It’s the biggest fight in the city this month.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    I remembered his sleek muscular body plunging into me again and again. Apparently that wasn’t the only thing it excelled at. I had no point of reference on what a city championship meant, but by the way Jamal’s lips were pursed in appreciation, it sounded big.
    So what, I should get with him cause he’s the best fighter out there ?
    We hadn’t texted in three days, but I still thought about him at least once every hour. Dad’s verdict hadn’t been an ultimatum, but it had dovetailed so neatly with my worries. Everything that made me want him also made him feel like too much risk to be worth it.
    “You ever seen him at work?” Jada asked. “You’ve got to come.”
    I sighed and looked at the two men on the flyer. They were just inviting me to see him fight right? It didn’t mean I had to talk to him. This fight was the perfect chance to watch from a safe distance.
    “Alright, fine.”
    They packed up and soon we were driving north. The suburbs we passed were old and rich and white - not all that different from Grosse Pointe.
    “Where exactly are we headed?” I asked Jada up front, when we left those burbs and started zooming up another highway.
    “You should have asked before you got in this car, yeah?” Jamal did an exaggerated evil laugh. “We are almost there.”
    ‘There’ turned out to be a community gymnasium that was out in the middle of nowhere. Now the parking lot was jam packed with pickups and muscles cars and beaters. We had to drive three blocks to find street parking by a house. People inside scowled at us as we climbed out and headed to the gymnasium, but there were no signs against us parking. I almost wanted to yell, “Don’t worry, we’re not like the others.”
    I had an idea of the sort of guy who watched this. Jamal was cool on the surface, but he had a bit of roughness under that smooth coating. The other guys packing in to the audience didn’t bother trying to hide it.
    Jamal bought tickets and I crowded in close to him and Jada, just to avoid the leers from the sausage party around me. The crowd was mixed: white, black, Latino. All had the same hungry look on their drunken faces. Hungry for blood, maybe, but that made other animal hungers rise up too.
    The three of us filed up into the bustling arena. The place had been filled in with a giant metal cage in the center and chairs had been added all around. We’d gotten seats closer to