“I don’t believe in Christmas either,” he told me. “It’s a bunch of crap. Do you want to be friends? We can beat up Tom after school.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Let’s beat him up.”
As he passed the information through class that I was challenging Tom to a fight in the alley between two brick buildings, I could hear myself describing the victory to my father. But an hour later, walking into the alley, I began to tremble.
Tom was with his friends, their shirts rumpled, wet with the interminable winter drizzle. Rain beaded along Jamil’s hair as he stood at my side, saying, “Go! You take him!”
Tom shoved me in the chest. I got him in a headlock. We stumbled against the wall, the bricks rasping our clothes like sandpaper.
His friends tried to jump in, but Jamil blocked them. He kept slapping them in the face, dancing from side to side as if guarding a volleyball net.
“What’s wrong, pussy?” he shouted. “Tom can’t fight for himself?”
Tom popped out of the headlock. From behind me, he tried to dig his fingers into my eyes. I rammed him backward into the bricks. I threw my body against him again and again until his head struck the wall with a wooden sound.
I spun and punched him. He just stared, his nostrils too large and dark. Blood began to drip from one of them. His eyes teared up. He ducked and grabbed his backpack and ran. He disappeared down the alley, his jacket flapping.
I had blood on my lip from one of his fingernails.
I hurried to the pickup zone. My brother was on the sidewalk. His eyes went to mine and then, like a switch, dropped to my mouth.
“What happened?”
“I got in a fight.”
Kids gathered around, pushing between us. They told him about it, speaking quickly, pointing here and there.
My mother’s brown van swerved from the traffic and pulled to the curb. I got in, and she reached across the space between the front seats and took hold of my chin.
“Are you fighting?”
Her blue eyes glared at my cut.
“I had to.”
“Fighting is wrong. You don’t fight. You talk to people. And if you can’t resolve the problem through talking, you tell your teacher. You tell the principal. You tell me. Do you understand?”
I just sat. It was pointless to argue. What she was saying would ruin me at school. I’d have to fight constantly.
My brother spoke from the seat behind us.
“Everyone said that Jamil helped you.”
“What?” she asked.
“It’s not true,” I shouted. “He just made sure no one else hit me.”
I tried to meet her gaze but felt blinded—sunlight flashing on seawater.
“Listen,” she said. “I don’t want you to fight again, but André is going to ask what happened. When he does, don’t tell him that you got help. He’s not going to like that.”
✴
MY FATHER WAS so busy with his shops that we hadn’t seen much of him, but that night he was taking my brother, my sister, and me to dinner. By the time he picked us up, my mother had already left for one of her meetings. My father hardly spoke, not even in the restaurant. He called for coffee and then noticed my lip.
“Did you win?” he asked, his eyes suddenly still.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You did?”
I nodded, trying to hide my anger. The story was almost perfect. The confrontation in the alley, the kids gathered, the rain falling along the narrow slice of sky. As far as fifth-graders went, Tom was a bruiser. But with my brother sitting across from me, I couldn’t tell it right.
“What was it like?” my father asked.
I glanced once at my brother and hesitantly described how I’d knocked Tom into the bricks, spun, and hit him, giving him a bloody nose.
“That’s good,” my father said.
My brother was watching me, nervous and confused. I pinned my gaze on my hands, but it was too late.
“What is it?” my father asked. “Why are you looking at him like that?”
When I didn’t say anything, he turned to my brother.
“Come on. Let’s have it.”
My brother shrugged. He could never lie. I was doomed.
“Deni got help,” he finally said.
“No I didn’t,” I shouted. My tongue curled in my mouth, son of a bitch caught in it, trying to get out as I clenched my jaw to keep it in.
“What help?” my father asked.
Reluctantly, my brother explained, but he was telling it wrong. He hadn’t even been there, and all he described was Jamil protecting me. He had the details right, but the way they went together wasn’t. Tom had almost clawed my eyes out! I’d banged his head against the bricks all by myself. It was a close call!
My father glared at me. “From now on, you stand up for yourself. You can handle a couple of kids, you hear me?”
I wanted to remind him how he and his brother had watched each other’s backs in their village. But there were creases beneath his eyes, and the bones of his skull seemed close to the skin. A look came into his eyes, like that of a dog about to bite.
“Anyway, we all know you’re not too smart,” he said, his lips smiling thinly, showing his upper teeth. He began to say something else, but my tongue came loose and I yelled, “Shut up!”
The room tilted and blurred. I had blood on my lips again. My brother and sister stared into their plates. I felt dizzy and didn’t speak.
As we were leaving, my father kept sighing and rubbing his face and looking over at me, but I ignored him. What he had taught me, I knew, was what I had done. If I could have told the story my way, he’d have understood.
“That fucking bank,” he said to himself. “It’s ruining my life. I’m going to dump a load of manure on their steps.”
I sat near the window, cold radiating from the glass. If the end was inevitable and there was a new beginning, why not get it over with? I’d had enough of my parents’ rage, of them crying out like animals in the night.
The next day, I told my mother that I wanted to leave.
✴
SHE PACKED OUR lunches, but instead of taking us to school, she drove us to the house of one of her friends and told us to stay there and play Dungeons & Dragons.
When she returned, it was almost noon. Everything we owned was inside the van, boxes and blankets crammed to the walls, her favorite German shepherd lying between the seats. Her white horse trailer had been hitched up, both horses inside.
She hurried us into the van, saying she’d explain soon. We drove to the border.
On the interstate, she told us that we would stay with our aunt in Virginia.