Free All the Wild Children by Josh Stallings Page B

knife.  I’ve had some practice, the knife comes easier.  I carry a Buck lock blade knife in my pocket.  We play chicken after school.  You spread your legs apart.  The other guy throws the knife in the dirt between your legs.  You move your foot to where the knife stuck.  The space between your feet shrinks.  It takes more and more control to nail the dirt and not a foot.  Who ever quits first is the chicken.  Tomas and I should never have played.  Neither of us did back down real good.
    I hold the Buck knife.  There is less than an inch between Tomas’s feet.
    “Come on man, step off.”
    “No, you afraid to toss, you step off.”
    “I’m not afraid.”
    “Neither am I.”
    “Tomas, I don’t want to stick you.”
    “Then don’t.  Step off, let me win.”
    “You know that’s not going to happen, right?”
    “Just quit fucking around and throw the knife.”
    I do.  It sinks deep into his shoe and foot.  He doesn’t register any pain.  He leans down and pulls the blade out.  He wipes it on his pant leg then hands it back to me. 
    “You missed.  I win.”  He walks with a slight limp for the next week and a half.  He never complains.  When I say I don’t want play chicken anymore he calls me a wimp.
     
    Life is a tapestry of intersecting strings.  OK, mine wasn’t so much a tapestry, more of a rat’s nest of string.  The point is these lines intersect each other over and over again.  Each crossroad has the potential to change your life irrevocably.  Most don’t.  Most are impotent.  Turn left, turn right, same outcome.  Buy Levis or Sticky Finger jeans?  Converse or Adidas?  Seems so important at fourteen.  But in your heart you know it carries no real weight.  Then there are those moments you know can send your life spinning off the track.  You feel it somewhere deeper than your bones.              
     
    KSOL fills all of Ravenswood at lunch time.  A hundred kids with a hundred boom boxes.  Every car in the lot, all bring in the same funk driven soul.  Radio Free East Palo Alto, coming in loud and clear.  You are the sunshine of my life, Me and Mrs Jones we got a thing going on…  Smile in your face, all the time they try and take your place Back Stabbers...  Strawberry Letter 23...  Get the funk outa my face, get the funk outa my face.  Get. The. Funk.  Outa my face.  The music was reinforced with impromptu choirs and drums of every size beating out the rhythm.
    There are a gang of unofficial rules to learn if you want to survive the day.  Piss at home, you go in the bathroom here, you ain’t coming out.  Same goes for the locker room.  Never dress for PE, take the bad grade, it’s better than a beat down.  At the end of the school year, the last week.  You cut.  It is payback week, it is last chance to fuck up a White boy week.  Peter doesn’t listen, got sixteen stitches in his head.
    At lunch time, here are the options. 
    1) Go to the cafeteria and risk having your money taken or not have it taken and having to eat the crap they served. 
    2) Eat in the library with the other scared White kids, and be branded soft, an easy mark.
    3) Hang in the quad with all the drummers and dancers and singers.  Problem, that area is Black only. 
    4) Cross the quad fast, cross the no man’s land near the administration building, clear the gate and hit the parking lot, or the burger joint across the street, han g with the res t of the smokers and druggies.  Tomas and me, go with door number four. 
                 
    At the same time, Lark runs with Tanner, a skinny midget from Atherton.  No really, he is under five feet tall, rock star hair and clothes, cute as hell, girls love him.  But he is a midget.  Father is a doctor or some other cash machine job.  Never saw the father.  Saw the manse, they have big bank.  Tanner is a teflon junky.  Someone else always overdosed, someone else died or went to jail.  Tanner is bullet proof,