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“Here, this is Megan Rapinoe.” Ajax handed him the phone. There was a picture of a skinny woman with short pink hair. Kind of pretty, in an angular, not especially feminine way. That pink hair, though. Chicks like that were always trouble. He’d yet to meet one with pink hair, or blue, or purple, or fuckingrainbow, that wasn’t all mouth and up to her dyed roots in pain in his ass. That freakazoid hair was like a warning light.
Wanting to look like he was interested, he scrolled a little and found a stats list. He didn’t know from soccer stats, but the numbers looked impressive even to his untrained eye. “Looks like she’s real good.” He handed the phone back to Ajax.
Ajax smiled at the photo on the screen. “MVP of the women’s world cup this year. I think she’s the best player in the sport, man or woman.” He handed the phone back to his mom.
“Can I ask you a question?” Ajax asked him.
Eight always gave people shit for that question. Without fail, he pointed out that they’d just asked one. But this time, he forbore. “Sure.”
“How did you get the name Eight Ball?”
The answer to that was complicated and not entirely suitable for children. A glance at Marcella told him that, while she didn’t know the answer, she suspected as much. And she was warning him with blazing black eyes not to fuck up.
He cleared his throat a couple times, buying a few seconds. “I got it a long time ago. You know what an eight ball is?” When Marcella flinched, he added, “In pool, I mean. The game. Billiards.”
Marcella relaxed visibly. Jesus, woman. Did she think he was named after a fucking coke bag?
“Yeah, it’s the black ball. My Paps has a pool table in his basement.”
“So you play?”
“A little. He’s teaching me.”
“He is?” Marcella asked.
“Yeah. It’s fun.”
She looked like she had more to say about that, but she pulled back, sucking her teeth. Eight wondered what her malfunction was there.
“So you know you have to leave the eight ball alone, right? If you sink it before the end of the game, you lose.” When Ajax nodded, Eight continued, “You know the saying ‘behind the eight ball’?”
The kid shook his head.
“It means being … in a jam. A hard situation you can’t get out of without maybe losing big. Because that’s what it’s like on a pool table, when the ball you need to sink is behind the eight.”
“Oh. I get it.” His frown suggested he didn’t entirely get it. “So your name means … you’re … a hard situation?”
From over in Marcella territory, a very rhetorical throat-clear rose.
All this pussyfooting around was absolutely fucking exhausting. On a strike of impulse and impatience, Eight gave it up and said it straight. “Look, Ajax. This here, what we’re doing, we’re getting to know each other, right? So we can decide if we want to be in each other’s lives, right?”
The kid nodded warily. Marcella’s arms were crossed, her hands wrapped so tightly around her upper arms her knuckles were going pale. “Eight …” she said in soft warning.
Eight ignored her. “So this is me. I’m the president of the Brazen Bulls motorcycle club. I ride hard, live hard, fight hard. I solve a lot of my shit with my fists. And when somebody crosses me or anybody I care about, I make them regret it. That’s how I got my name. Yeah, I’m a hard situation, and somebody who gets in my wrong way is gonna lose.”
Now Marcella was rubbing her fingers over her forehead. Hey, at least he’d held back the rest of the truth: that he’d gotten his road name the night he’d shoved an eight ball into the mouth of an asshole hangaround who’d tripped one of the club’s sweetbutts with a pool cue, thinking he was hilarious. The guy had sent her flying face-first into a support post, knocking her unconscious, putting out four teeth, and breaking her cheekbone.
When Eight was done with him, he’d hardly had a tooth left.
“Oh.” Ajax looked dazed.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He’d blown it. Goddamn it.
Maybe it was for the best, though. He was that guy, after all. No sense pretending otherwise. No matter what, he’d never be able to keep up any kind of good-guy pretense.
“I’m not a good guy, Ajax. You should know that, while you’re trying to decide about me.”
For a painfully long time, none of them spoke. None of them kept eating, either. They sat together in a murk, letting the pizza get cold.
