Chameleon Read Free

laughed and pointed at Andre in his underwear. Young boys whispered among each other, knowing the same could happen to them at any time. A pair of gray-haired men playing checkers shook their heads and continued playing. Battered, bruised, and broken, we got out of Dodge with our confidence bubbles burst.
    Staring down at
my
dark blue shorts, I replayed that scenario in my mind — only in my replay, each of us whipped up on one of the Pirus:
Lorenzo snatched the red off them. Trent shut the hyenas up. Andre poured the forty over 40’s head, and I whupped him with his cut-down club while I screamed, “See what you made me do. I didn’t want to have to use this, but you made me do that. You made me do that!”
    Judging by the fire in my boys’ eyes, I wasn’t the only one remembering and changing the ending of that movie.
    Yeah, I remembered that day. I remembered it well. How could I forget? Piru red was branded into each of us forever.

MY BRAIN WAS BLAZING, memories tightening my back and marinating my mouth with the taste of dirt. The breeze caressing my scalp did nothing to cool my thoughts.
    “Come on, Shawn, let’s go change your shorts. Your auntie’s house is on the way,” Lorenzo said, slapping me on the back.
    Unfortunately he was right. My watch ticked ten minutes to noon. That meant ten minutes to Aunt Gertie’s favorite soap opera,
All My Children.
That meant that a pint of the brown stuff had already been polished off.
    How could anybody drink that crap in the daytime?
    How could anybody drink that stuff period?
    “Shoot! You know what? . . . I forgot, I don’t have any extra shorts at my auntie’s house. . . . Mine are all at my house,” I said.
    “I don’t know how you do it, Shawn. Going back and forth and everything. I would get too mixed up,” Andre said. He paused at the curb.
    My house is about twelve miles away, in Carson, but with nobody there to watch me, Mama always drops me off at Aunt Gertie’s before work and picks me up after. I go to school here and spend most of my time here, so I hang with my boys whenever I can. It’s a lot of back and forth between Carson and Compton, but I always know where home is.
    Red light. We stopped. Stood still. Waited. Gray Cadillacs, red DeVilles, blue Impalas, burgundy Regals, and primered Pintos paraded past us in a procession of traffic. Lorenzo tugged at his waistband, the ball between his legs. Trent tied his Stars. Andre scraped gum from his Ponys with a sharp stick. My nostrils twitched at the scent of burnt hair and fried fish floating on the breeze.
    “So what now?” Andre said. His right foot scraped against the concrete like a baseball batter digging his cleats in for a pitch.
    “You got some shorts that’ll fit me?” I asked Andre.
    “You know I live back the other way, Shawn.”
    It was bad enough that Auntie might be drunk, but worse if she was passed out. The fellas still don’t know about her, but I think they gettin’ hip to me, because in all the years we’ve known each other, they still haven’t been there. I always manage to come up with some excuse. I don’t want them to see the bottle or hear the slurred words as she repeats the same stories over and over and over again:
    “I’m glad he’s gone . . . thas right . . . I’m glad. . . . He wadn’t goo’ fur nuthin’. . . . No, he wadn’t. . . . That goo’-fur-nuthin’ durrty dog . . .”
    I still haven’t figured out who “he” is.
    I didn’t want them to see her limp body sprawled across the couch, hand clutching an empty glass. I didn’t want them to smell the stench of the whiskey-splashed carpet from days past, memories lost, and fights forgotten. I didn’t want them to hear the constant moaning or the endless drunken sighs.
    “What about you, Lorenzo?”
    “I know your skinny butt is not asking me to borrow some shorts. Shoot, you and a twin could fit into a pair of my shorts, skinny as you are, Shawn.”
    “Why can’t we just go back to your