Living and Dying in Brick City Read Free

others suddenly had become real.
Never again
, I told myself. Never again would I spend a night sleeping behind bars on a razor-thin cot that smelled like piss. Never again would I have to listen to dudes being raped while constantly watching my own back. Never again would I look into my mother’s eyes and see the pain and disappointmentthat I’d put there. When I got out, I returned to University High for my senior year and started hanging out more with Rameck and George.
    I was playing basketball at the schoolyard one day during my probation when I ran into Snake and Duke. They were out on bail and hadn’t been sentenced yet. We shot hoops together for a while like we used to and tried hanging out in our old spot, but it was too uncomfortable. None of us mentioned our arrests, but the air was tense. They probably had heard I’d received probation and resented that I wouldn’t have to do serious time. We didn’t have much to say to each other. Things were clearly different. I was different, and I knew then that the friendship was over. I never saw Snake again. I later heard that as soon as he got out of jail, he returned to the streets. And then I hadn’t heard or seen his name for years—until now.
    T he half hour in the conference room zipped by in a blur. As soon as it ended, I asked a colleague to point the way to the Surgical Intensive Care Unit and ran down the hall in search of the room number that had been listed next to Snake’s real name on the board. I rounded the corner and noticed a small group of people gathered in the hall outside the room. Some were crying. A few of the faces looked vaguely familiar. When one of the women glanced up at me, my heart stopped. The lump in my throat felt like a boulder. It was Snake’s sister. I could see in her red, puffy eyes that she recognized me, too. What was she thinking? Did she resent me because I hadn’t gotten jail time like her brother had? Guilt washed over me, and I felt a sudden urge to explain. I wanted to tell her that I’d needed to let her brother go to find my own way. The family members’ eyes followed me. I could hear their voices inside my head:
Wasn’t he the one who used to hang out with Snake? Who does he think he is, coming here now? He thinks he’s so special
. Iwanted to pull up a chair, grieve with them, and assure them that it was me, the same old Marshall. I wanted to show them that I hadn’t abandoned Snake, that I hadn’t abandoned them, that if I hadn’t made new friends, if I hadn’t gone to college, I would have ended up here, too, right beside Snake. As I ambled up to Snake’s sister, I realized that I never even knew her name. I fumbled for the right words.
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    Snake’s sister nodded kindly. He had died the night before, she confirmed. I wondered for a moment whether I should hug her, but it felt too awkward. I asked her to pass along my condolences to the rest of the family, and I excused myself. I slipped past the crowd and into the room where Snake had been. It was empty and a bit eerie. The covers on Bed 6, where he once lay, were still pulled back, and a host of medical machines—ventilator, cardiac monitor, IV pump—sat motionless. Snake’s body had been taken to the morgue, but I still stood there in silence, looking around the room, thinking,
This so easily could have been me
.
    The swell of emotions was confusing: pain, regret, gratitude, guilt. I remembered Snake’s cool laugh, his witty remarks, his collection of baseball caps. I wondered if beneath all that bravado and rage he’d had dreams, like me, but had been too afraid to share them, or whether life had choked every bit of hope from him from the start. I wondered if I could have said something that might have made a difference. I wondered about all the things I never even knew or thought to ask him—what his mother was like, whether his father was part of his life, whether he’d ever had a teacher or counselor who’d told