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“What about you?” Malcolm asks.
“Same.”
“Do you . . .” Malcolm stops. It’s not like when Malcolm was helping Tagoe defeat writer’s block as he was working on Substitute Doctor and was shy about his pitch about the demon doctor wearing a stethoscope that could read his patients’ minds—that was a great idea. This is something sure to piss him off.
“I wouldn’t look for my mom or find out how my dad died,” Tagoe says.
“Why not? If I knew more about the asshole who burned my home down, I’d get into my first fight,” Malcolm says.
“I only care about the people who wanna be in my life. Like Rufus. Remember how he was nervous about coming out to us because he didn’t wanna stop sharing a room with us since we had so much fun? That’s someone who wants to be in my life. And I wanna be there for his. However much of it is left.”
Tagoe takes off his glasses and lets his neck run wild.
KENDRICK O’CONNELL
10:03 a.m.
Death-Cast did not call Kendrick O’Connell because he isn’t dying today. He may not be losing his life, but he’s just lost his job at the sandwich shop. Kendrick keeps his apron, not giving a shit. He leaves the shop, lighting a cigarette.
Kendrick has never been lucky. Even when he struck gold last year, when his parents finally divorced, it wasn’t long before his luck ran dry. His mother and father were as good a fit for each other as an adult’s foot in a child’s shoe; even at nine years old Kendrick recognized this. Kendrick didn’t know much back then, but he was pretty sure love didn’t mean that your father slept on the couch and that your mother didn’t care when her husband was caught cheating on her with younger girls in Atlantic City. (Kendrick has a problem with minding his own damn business, and could possibly be happier if he were a little more ignorant.)
The first child support check came just in time since Kendrick needed new sneakers; the front soles of his old pair had split, and his classmates made fun of him relentlessly because his shoes “talked” every time he walked—open, close, open, close. Kendrick begged his mother for the latest Jordans, and she spent three hundred dollars on them because Kendrick “needed a victory.” At least that’s what she told his paternal grandfather, who is a terrible man—but that’s not a story of any importance here.
Kendrick felt ten feet tall in his new sneakers . . . until four six-foot-tall kids jumped him and stole them off his feet. His nose was bleeding and walking home in his socks was painful, all resolved by this boy in glasses who gave Kendrick a packet of tissues he’d had in his backpack and the sneakers off his feet in exchange for nothing. Kendrick never saw him again, never got his name, but he didn’t care about that. Never getting his ass kicked again was the only thing that mattered.
That’s when Damien Rivas, once his classmate, now a proud dropout, made Kendrick strong. It took Kendrick one weekend with Damien to learn how to break the wrist of anyone who swung at him. Damien sent him out on the street, unleashing him like a fierce pit bull onto other unsuspecting high schoolers. Kendrick would walk up on someone, clock them, and lay them out in one hit.
Kendrick became a Knockout King, and that’s who he is today.
A Knockout King without a job.
A Knockout King with no one to hit, since his gang disbanded after their third, Peck, got a girlfriend and tried to live his life right.
A Knockout King in a kingdom of people who keep taunting him with their purposes in life, straight begging to get their jaws dislocated.
MATEO
10:12 a.m.
“I know I’m not supposed to have any more ideas. . . .”
“Here we go,” Rufus says. He’s riding his bike alongside me. He wanted me to get on that death trap with him. I didn’t do it before and I’m not doing it now. But I couldn’t let my paranoia keep him from riding himself. “What are you thinking?”
“I want to go to the cemetery and visit my mom. I only know her through my dad’s stories and I’d like to spend some time with her,” I say. “That phone booth graveyard did a number on me, I guess.” My dad normally visited my mom alone because I was too nervous to make the trip. “Unless there’s something else you want to do.”
“You really wanna go to a cemetery on the day you’re gonna die?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m game. What cemetery?”
“The Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn. It’s close to the neighborhood where my mom grew up.”
We’re going to take the A train from Columbus Circle station to Broadway Junction.
We pass a drugstore and Rufus wants to run in.
“What do you need?” I ask. “Water?”
