for ABIGAIL
So I didn't handle the mugging as well as I could have.
I would have known what do to if I'd been the victim. Hand over everything quietly. Run away as fast as possible. Go for the eyes if I was cornered. I'd passed the optional SafeStrong girl's defense seminar at school with flying colors.
But we'd never covered what to do when you see six grown men stomping the utter hell out of a boy your age in broad daylight. It was a Tuesday morning, for god's sake. I was on my way to school, the kid was down on the ground, and the muggers were kicking him like their lives depended on it. They weren't even trying to take his money.
"Get away from him!" I screamed. I swung my backpack around by the strap like an Olympic hammer thrower and flung it at the group.
The result wasn't exactly gold medal–worthy. The pack, heavy with my schoolbooks, fell short and came to rest at one of the assailants' heels. They all turned to look at me.
Crap.
I should have made a break for it, but something froze me in place.
It was the boy's eyes. Even though he'd taken a beating that should have knocked him senseless, his eyes were perfectly clear as they locked on to mine. He stared at me like I was the only important thing in the world.
One of the men threw his cigarette on the ground and took a step in my direction, adjusting his trucker cap in a particularly menacing fashion. Crap, crap, crap.
That was as far as he got. The boy said something, his words lost in the distance. The man flinched like he couldn't believe what he was hearing, and then turned back to resume the brutal pounding.
Finally my legs remembered what they were good for. I ran away.
I should have been worried that the assault and battery would turn into outright homicide, but I kept going without looking back. I was too freaked out.
The last sight I had of that kid was his gleaming white teeth.
"You shouldn't have bothered in the first place," Yunie told me in homeroom. "He was with them."
I lifted my head up from the desk. "Huh?"
"It was a gang initiation. The older members induct the new ones by beating the snot out of them. If he was smiling at you the whole time, it was because he was happy about getting 'jumped in.' "
"I don't think there are gangs that hang out in the Johnson Square dog run, Yunie."
"You'd be surprised," she said as she thumbed through her messages. "Some areas past the Walgreens are pretty sketch."
Maybe she was right. It was easy to forget in the bubble of Santa Firenza Prep that our town wasn't affluent. A competitive school was really the only thing it had going for it. We were hardly Anderton or Edison Park or any of the other pockets of Bay Area wealth where the venture capital and tech exec families lived.
On the other hand, that kid couldn't have been a gang member. It wasn't the kind of detail you focus on in the heat of the moment, but looking back on it, he was wearing rags. Like a beggar.
Ugh. I'd run across a group of assholes beating a homeless person for kicks and wasn't able to do anything to stop them. I groaned and dropped my forehead to the desk again.
"Flog yourself some more," Yunie said. "You told a teacher as soon as you got to school and spent all morning giving the police report, didn't you?"
"Yeah," I muttered into the veneer. "But if I wasn't such an idiot, I could have called the cops right there." The skirts on our uniforms didn't have pockets. So of course I was carrying my phone in my backpack. That is to say, I'd been carrying it.
It was going to be a long haul, re-creating the notes from my AP classes. My secret weapons—all of the practice exams that I'd hounded my teachers into giving me—were gone. Studying by any method other than active recall was for chumps.
And my textbooks. I wasn't sure what the school policy on replacements was. If the cost fell on me, I'd probably have to sell my blood plasma.
But while I'd never admit it, not even to Yunie, what hurt most wasn't losing my phone or my notes. It was the fake-gold earrings I'd pinned to the canvas straps. The ones my dad had bought me at Disneyland, even though I'd been too young for piercings back then—too young to remember much of the trip at all.
I'd never see them again.
The bell rang. Something heavy fell past my head to the floor, and I bolted upright.
"Hey, jerk!" I yelped. "That could have hit me in the—whuh?"
It was my backpack. With all my stuff still in it. Minnie Mouses unharmed.
Mrs. Nanda, our homeroom teacher, stood by her desk and rapped her EDUCATOR OF THE YEAR paperweight to get our attention, punctuating the air like a judge's gavel. Her round, pleasant face was even more chipper and sprightly than usual.
"Class, I'd like to introduce a new student," she said. "Please welcome Quentin Sun."
Holy crap. It was him.
