Free All American Boys by Jason Reynolds

really was none of my damn business. She was being super flirty, but not in the way I wanted her to meanit. This had happened before. Sometimes I got the feeling she thought of me more as a brother, but no dude wants to be thought of as a brother when he is sitting across from a girl who is not his sister and who makes his stomach flip when she says his name.
    While we were talking, though, things were getting a little heated over by the corner. A couple of guys had walked up to two other guys in line and started barking. They kept at it to the point where the rest of us outside couldn’t even hear ourselves. People started yelling around them, and when one of the guys pushed one of the guys in line, they broke into punches. I jumped up and stuffed Willy into the seat behind me. People yanked out their phones, calling the cops, but somebody must have called the cops already, because the berry lights flashed down the block. The guys in the fight tried to swing a few more punches, but people in the crowd had pulled them apart and locked them in arm holds. One cop car pulled up and then another and everything happened so quickly, we all just stood around watching like dumb idiots until the cops had grabbed the four guys who’d been fighting, pinned them to the hoods of the two cars, and cuffed them.
    I, of course, was back at the night before, when I’d seen Paul arrest the kid outside Jerry’s. But this was different. Another cop car pulled up and then another, then all eight cops started asking the crowd to disperse, only holding a fewpeople back to ask questions. This kind of thing happened all the time at Mother’s; it sat right between neighborhoods, and kids from one block might beef with kids from another or some other shit, and while I tried to stay out of it, it was impossible not to watch it explode right in front of you.
    The crowd outside Mother’s was white, black, Latino, Asian, just like Springfield. The four guys being cuffed were white. The cops, almost all of them were white, but two of them were black. It was impossible not to think about this as Paul slamming that black kid into the sidewalk the night before replayed in my mind. It wasn’t like watching one of my brother’s video games or a movie. You hear bone. You see real blood. And you taste the rust of it and it makes you sick.
    I broke into a sweat like I might puke. I turned to Willy and Jill. “Should we get out of here?” More people began to shout at the cops from the crowd. I was done with this. “We’ll walk you home,” I told Jill.
    We busted back down the street away from the scene and took the long way around the neighborhood to Jill’s house. I could tell Jill was as distracted as I was, as if we both had private conversations going on in the back of our minds, and we used Willy, sandwiched between us, as the focal point of conversation. But when we got to her house, she said over Willy’s head, “There’s a barbecue at my cousin’s tomorrow. You must be going.”
    â€œYeah,” I said.
    â€œWeird, right? The sudden party?” She looked at me, and I realized we might not have been having private conversations in our minds the whole way home. They might have been the same one.
    â€œYeah,” I said. “I don’t know, but I think I have an idea what this is about.”
    â€œMe too,” she said.
    As she jogged up her front steps, something ugly and awful was forming in my mind, but I couldn’t quite find the right words for it—or I didn’t want to. I wasn’t sure.

Sunday

S unday. I slept late and woke up to an empty room. Silence. No one. So nice.
    Sunday TV is just as bad as Saturday TV, so I left it off and laid there in the cold space, staring at the wall, thinking about everything.
    I was supposed to have been at Jill’s party on Friday. Me, English, Shannon, and Carlos—three-piece and fries. I was supposed to be all