I remember – or think I do – that everyone turned when my father, well short of the stop sign, shifted the station wagon into reverse and slammed his foot on the gas. Dumb luck kept him from colliding into another car pulling out of its driveway. Then he banked the steering wheel and hit the brake at the spot where he’d left me only a moment earlier. The other kids at the bus stop fell silent even before he stepped out of the car. Still, my father strode right up to Eric, and pointed a menacing finger so firmly at his face, it seemed that Eric – reduced to a rangy teen, trembling behind his wraparound sunglasses – might pop just like a balloon. Until my father opened his mouth. 

“No!” he shouted. “You leave alone boy!” My father didn’t seem to notice the confused looks on the faces around him. “You hear?!” Met with silence, he withdrew his finger from Eric’s face and trained it at the trombone case. It lay lopsided on the sidewalk; a dirty footprint in its back from where Eric had kicked it over. When my father leaned forward and yelled “You pick up now!” his fleshy frame shook so hard that one of the several plastic pens in his breast pocket took flight and crashed on to the pavement in front of him.

I didn’t move, nor it seemed out of the corner of my eye, did anyone else. Only my father, laboring to breathe, knelt into a wobbly crouch as he reached over his stomach for the pen. I couldn’t look at him. When I looked away and saw Michelle Anastasia rolling her eyes at Heidi Fleishman, I bowed my head and waited for the sidewalk to fissure and swallow me in a torrent of fire. But the only crack I saw contained a dingy puddle. Around it, a cloud of drain flies were vying to quench their thirst. 

After what felt like minutes, I lifted my eyes to see my father back on his feet, catching his breath. Having apparently forgotten his demand that Eric pick up the trombone case, he marched back to the station wagon, yelling over his shoulder “No touch things!” Then he opened the door, hoisted himself into the driver’s seat and peeled off. It was the first time in days I was thankful he had not said a word to me.

In his wake, my father left a hush so deafening I could hear the squealing of a seesaw and the carefree giggling of toddlers flying down the tube slide on the far side of the park. But before the car was out of sight, while a miniature me likely still floated in the rearview mirror, Eric’s shoulders had already slackened. “Wha-at…” he thundered, blowing out a nasty cackle “…the shit was that?!” 

I looked down again at the drain flies, their wingbeats faltering in the shallow pool. A burst of laughter struck my ears just as I realized that the flies were all drowning. I heard Tony bellow “That was awkward as fuck!” Then more guffaws, followed by finger snaps and back slaps.

“Yo, Saddam!” My cheeks burned so hot I felt they might melt from my face, though I didn’t look up. “Saddam!” Eric persisted. “Was that – ” He was interrupted by his own sniggering. “Was that your daaaaaaddy?!” When he bent over, convulsed with laughter, his shadow fell across the pool of corpses at my feet.

A voice feigned an impression, “Y-you no t-t-touch!” before it also tittered uncontrollably. My mind cast about for something to say, some way to deflect. But when the words arrived, they flew, not out of my mouth, but from Tony’s. “He wasn’t stuttering, shit-for-brains.”

“Yeah, dumbass,” Eric added. “He’s not a retard. He’s just a fat ol’ raghead. Ain’t that right, Saddam?” 

To my surprise, Heidi responded for me. I’d met Heidi in the second grade when Ms. Morton sat us at the same desk clump. One day, after watching me scissor symmetrical rings out of construction paper, Heidi nudged me and said, “That’s cool. Can you help me do that?” And when I was done, simply “Thanks.” I, on the other hand, was too smitten to speak. Since then, I’d assumed that she didn’t know my name, never mind how to pronounce it. And for five years, through grade school and now middle school, the anonymity I’d imagined allowed me to dream small dramas about how I might introduce myself, say her name, hear her say mine. Which is why hearing it for the first time that day at the bus stop felt caustic, like lemon on a paper cut, though all Heidi said was: “His name’s Saddiq.” 

◆

“Big whoop!” Pascal was lying on his side, his head propped idly on the hand of an arm whose elbow was pressed into the earth. I’d spent the entire bus ride to school and all of first, second, and third periods trying to forget what had happened. So, by the time I was in PE with Pascal, I’d nearly convinced myself the episode hadn’t happened and wasn’t going to bring it up, even with my best friend. With his free hand, Pascal mindlessly tore one clutch of dry grass after another from the athletic field. “So your brother gets a trip to Long Beach,” he continued. “So what.”

In the distance, the rest of our class was milling about as Coach D and Eric returned from the athletic shed with three overstuffed mesh bags. “Thank you, Eric,” Coach D intoned, before turning his attention to the other students, nearly all of whom didn’t return it. “Now listen up! Since it’s the week before Spring Break, I got a little surprise for you all…That’s right!” Coach nodded theatrically, flashing a serial killer’s self-satisfied grin. “Ultimate Frisbeeeeee… Or flag football. If you still want to play that. Now come on up, grab your gear. Football on the field to my right. Frisbee to the left. Let’s break into teams!”

I stood up, ready to obey Coach D’s command. But Pascal was unfazed. He just lay there, slowly expanding the bald spot he’d fashioned in the earth. “I mean, who cares if he gets his own hotel room… eats room service… swims in the pool… It’s Long Beach, am I right?” Pascal stopped tugging at the field and looked up at me, lifting his free hand to shield the sun from his eyes as his mouth stretched into a smirk.

“Gee, Pasc. I feel better already.”

“C’moooon, I’m kidding.” Pascal leapt to his feet and pressed his hand to my shoulder. “You gotta relax. You came in fifth! That’s better than lotsa kids in that science fair. And what did Hamza get for coming in first? Not money, not any kind of priiiiiize… He got another science fair. And what’ll he get if he wins that one?”

I sighed. “Another science fair.”

“Another science fair! Only that one’s in Ex-cramento… And if you thought Long Beach was bad.” 

“Yeah.” I chuckled. 

 “Point is, you’re smart. You got good grades. And you’re a helluva lot more fun than your dweebie older brother… So what if you’re not the most good looking guy?”

“Hey, screw you!” 

Pascal dodged my sham punch then slapped me on the back. “Oh! Remember: Warhammer at the community center on Sunday. My Chaos Space Marines are gonna whoop your Xenos.”

“You’re on.”

Pascal’s eyes widened until his scleras molded into intact halos. His feet undertook a slow retreat. He murmured “You’re going doooown…” Then he brandished an imaginary rifle from behind his back and blew shotgun fire sounds from his mouth, pulling on an invisible pump action, recoiling each time as he did. “Oh look!” Pascal cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted over my shoulder. “Hey Norman!” I turned around to see Norman Saylor toss a frisbee in the air. It crested just above his chin, then fell, brushing the tips of his fingers before colliding with the ground. 

I’d known Norman since the third grade. We’d met in Cub Scouts and bonded over our love of Marvel comics (never DC). He introduced me to roleplaying games, then video games. Red Dwarf and metal music. I spent so much time at his house, his mother gave me a key. Still, it was years before I realized there was anything different about Norman. To be fair, when we first met, he had only an endearing gait, a funny lilt in his voice. By seventh grade though, Norman could hardly stand straight. Too burly to blend in with the class, his head was always cocked to one side, like a marionette with a broken string. The last time I saw him, I was flying home from college and spotted him across an airport terminal with a woman I didn’t recognize. He was bound to a wheelchair and seemed unable to speak. I was too embarrassed to say hello. I knew by then it was ALS. 

Norman screwed his face at Pascal but offered no other sign he’d registered his name. 

“Hey Norman!” Pascal repeated, a half octave higher as if he were preparing to belt out a ballad. “Why aren’t you dressed out for PE?”

Norman looked down at the grass-stained jeans his parents had probably dressed him in that morning. “I told you, Pas- Pascal.” He sniffled, then rubbed his nose into the sleeve of his worn green Lacoste shirt. “Coach said I don’t have to dress out.”

 “And why is that again?” Pascal asked wryly, pointing at Norman, and flashing an exaggerated smile.

“ ‘Cause!” Norman mirrored Pascal’s grin, then worked his hand into a fist and pressed a thumb to his chest. “I’m super cool!” 

Pascal expelled a loud hoot, replying “The coolest!” but locked eyes with me as if to confirm my part in a conspiracy I’d never explicitly agreed to. “Shall we get our fris on, Norman?”

“Yeah!” Norman roared a little too loudly, upping the ante on an enthusiasm he didn’t realize was histrionic. Then he leaned forward, striving not to lose his footing, and grabbed for the frisbee. But with his arm unable to extend, Norman could only claw at its edge, spinning it in compact pirouettes. 

Pascal ran up to him. “Here, buddy, I got that” He then snatched the frisbee without looking and took several jogging strides in reverse. “Go long, Norman!” 

At first, Norman appeared stunned, looking around as if to confirm there was no other Norman on the field. But when he wheeled back around, his eyes had narrowed. Then he squared his jaw and widened his stance. When the frisbee took flight, Norman stepped back to catch it, but slipped gently to the right just as the frisbee roared past him – a few feet to his left. It landed inaudibly in Tony’s hands. 

“Ohhhh!” Pascal yelled. “So close, Norman. Sweet catch though Tone!”

Tony shot back. “Eat a dick, Pascal!”

“Language, Rivera.” 

“My bad, Coach. Respect.”

“Tony! Tone!” Norman called out. “I’m open.”

Tony cocked the frisbee in Norman’s direction once, twice, three times, then sailed it well out of Norman’s reach to where it struck Heidi Fleishman in the arm. 

“Ow! What the fuck, Tony!”

“Language, Fleishman.”

Heidi rubbed the ruddy stamp that the frisbee had left on her arm, her stunning “fuck” still lingering in the air. Though she’d dressed out for PE, her ringlets of hair were pinned up as they always were, as if she’d had thirty minutes to change instead of the three that were afforded to everyone else. When she looked up and her eyes met mine, my Adam’s apple dropped on to my larynx, plugging my breath like a stopper on a sink drain. Helplessly, I stared, slack-jawed, as her lips formed by degrees a delicate crescent. It wasn’t until she raised her uninjured arm to track the rim of her ear with one finger, and said, “Sorry, coach” that I realized that her smile had been meant for Coach D.  

“Forget it, Masliyah.” I looked over to see Malcolm standing just to my left. Not quite five feet and with a dark growth of fuzz fortifying its position along the top of his lip, Malcolm seemed to be the only seventh grader encumbered with more considerable curses than mine. “She’s out of your league. At least for now. What you gotta do is wait until she goes out with one of the jocks. Once he screws her around a little, shatters her ego…” Malcom sighed dramatically, wrapped his mouth around an index finger flecked with Doritos dust, and pressed his glasses to the crest of his nose. “Yeah, that’s when you go in for the kill.

Heidi picked up the frisbee and lofted it into the air, where it took a doglegged arc over Norman’s head and came to rest in Pascal’s hands. Pascal twirled in place theatrically as if the frisbee had sent him spinning on his axis. By that point desperate, Norman shrieked, “Pascal! Pascal!” but Pascal seemed not to hear. Instead, he was pointing at me. 

I waved Pascal off. So he pivoted and lobbed the frisbee at Evan, who tossed it to Kelly and then Marshall. Jason and then Paola. Every second or two, someone else would join the circuit, launching the frisbee in shifting orbits across the field. What caught my eye though wasn’t the frisbee. Instead, it was Norman always at the orbit’s center, grasping impotently at the air, pulsing like a small goldish that had been poured out of his bowl.

◆

My father lowered wearily to his knees and just under his breath counted to three. “Wahid, aithnayn, thalatha…” For twenty minutes, he’d scrutinized the piles of clothes tidily folded in front of him the way a cook might survey each of his burners. His sausage fingers ticked off numbers of underwear, socks, then t-shirts. “Wahid, aithnayn, thalatha… Wahid, aithnayn, thalatha…”

Hamza observed him from the couch, his mouth screwed into the shape of a bewildered worm. “Abi, it’s only three days. Do I have to take this much stuff?”

My father rolled his eyes at Hamza’s English before responding as he always did in Arabic. “Yes, Hamza. We can’t predict the weather. Even in Los Angeles. You need pants and shorts, short sleeve and long sleeve, a good jacket” my father advised. He then added, “You need pajamas,” but used the English word pajamas. 

“That means I have to carry all of this. And my science fair poster.”

“ – aithnayn, thalatha… Yes. And you will thank me later.”

Hamza’s face toppled into his hands. “But do I have to take this… ? I don’t even know what this thing is.”

“That thing? That thing is a very expensive piece of Samsonite luggage. Do you know that you could throw that luggage from a two-story window, and it wouldn’t have a scratch?”

“How would you know that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Hamza repeated. “How do you know that?”

“Because, Hamza,” my father paused for emphasis. “Everyone knows that. Also, your mother bought this luggage for me. You should be honored that I’m letting you use it.”

From my place on the floor, I bent my face toward the open, still empty luggage. The tawny, seemingly counterfeit satin of its interior issued a scent of pipe smoke and cardamom tea, the redolent scents of all the goods my parents had spent years transporting through customs. 

“What’s for dinner?” I asked. 

My father continued counting to himself. Then he sighed wearily, pressed both hands to the nearby coffee table in order to push himself to standing, and lumbered out of the room. When he came back, he was holding a cable knit sweater from my brother’s chest of drawers.

“Did you hear what we said?” my brother asked.

“No. What is it, Hamza?”

“Saddiq asked about dinner.”

My father again descended deliberately to his knees, then leveled his face toward the dinner table in the other room. “I made him scrambled eggs already.”

“I thought…” The whisper of my own voice caught me off guard, as if my throat had mutinied without warning. “I thought that was just a snack.”

My father emptied his lungs and pressed a pile of underwear into the stomach of the ancient Samsonite, addressing his words more to the white stitches of cotton than my brother, let alone me. “I cannot make multiple meals every night.”

“When is mom coming back?”

“I don’t know, Hamza. Your grandmother left the hospital.” My father picked through the pile of socks to find pairs, then stuffed each one inside its twin. “But she could be readmitted at any time. And your mother can’t travel back and forth from Karachi every month.”

No one came to meet me at the bus stop the day my mother left home. Instead, I walked the near mile back to my house. I remember the end of my trombone case thwacking the ground as I lugged it, hoping its contents would dent, spoiling the horn so that I had an excuse to stop playing it. When I arrived home, I could hear in the other room my mother yelling, calling my father names – “idiot,” “weakling” – and my father pleading, begging for her to calm down. The other Samsonite – the twin to the one my father was packing for Hamza – was sitting just inside the front door, already packed.

Unsure what to do, I slipped out of the house and walked around the block several times, past the Kennedys’ house and the Takahashis’. At the end of the Amadors’ driveway, I saw Mr. Amador setting the table for a dinner on which Mrs. Amador was probably just putting the final, loving touches. After he spotted me through the window and waved, I decided I had to go home. When I walked through our door again, I closed it loudly so that my mother’s yelling would stop. Then my father walked into the room and, without looking at me, told me that our mother would be leaving for a while. 

“I wish you could come with me.” By switching to English, Hamza seemed to be suggesting his words were our secret, though our father at least knew that much of the language. “I hear there’s a pool at the hotel.”

“Hamza, where is your toothbrush and toothpaste?” 

My brother answered him by rising from the couch and heading toward the bathroom down the hall. When he left, my eyes drew to my father, wheezing through the slit of his mouth. Before too long, I realized that I’d been staring, but his face never lifted to meet mine. Years later, I thought back on this moment as I watched my father – wrapped in a white blanket, tubes snaking up and down his arms – take his last breaths on a hospital bed. He wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t quite awake either. Then, as later, I wondered if he even knew I was there, sitting right in front of him.

When Hamza returned from the bathroom, he was palming in one hand his deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss, while in the other he studied something I couldn’t make out. “Abi, look what Saddiq made.” Hamza dropped his bathroom items into the open suitcase, before gently laying the other object on the coffee table next to my father. It was the last Xenos figurine I’d painted. It had taken weeks to shade the green of its skin, which blanched around the bulge of its muscles, as well as the black of its tentacle hair. Then there was its mechanical foot and clawed hand; multiple hues of umber and steel. I’d spent two days at least applying the static grass at the alien’s feet. But at that moment, out from under my tabletop magnifying glass, it suddenly seemed too puny for all my brother’s attention. 

“I don’t understand.” My father peered at but didn’t pick up the figurine. “Saddiq made that?”

“No, I uh… I just glued the – ”

Hamza laughed. “Well, he didn’t carve the plastic. But look how he painted all this…” Hamza rotated the figurine as if it were on the display of a luxury sales floor. “…and added all this stuff. Isn’t it fire?”

“Hmm…” Our father plucked the toiletries from the mouth of the suitcase and tossed them into a matching handbag. “No time for his studies, but he has time to play with dolls.” He expelled the word for dolls – aldumaa – as if it augured heartburn. Hamza shrugged his shoulders and stopped turning the figurine. 

“I wonder, Saddiq,” my father began to orate. “Do you think the other students would still bully you if you weren’t spending so much time with this nonsense?”

“No,” I swallowed. “I mean, yes. They don’t care about any of that.” 

“Saddiq, what I did today…” My father folded the last pair of underwear, brought his hands to rest on his thighs with a slap, and collapsed his chin to his chest. His arms, with elbows locked, seemed to be the only things keeping his head from rolling to the floor. “…what I did this morning, I cannot do that again.”

“I don’t need you to do anything.”

“What are you guys talking about?”

My father’s face tightened, then he raised the flat of his hand in Hamza’s direction, as if Hamza’s concern was a flow of traffic he could detour. I could practically see a whistle dangling from his lips. “Please… Saddiq, every morning I see that kid, what is his name?”

“Eric.”

“Yes, him. Every morning I see him knock into you. And today he kicks over your trombone.”  

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, dad.”

“I know. I see it with my own eyes. These boys. They see you and think they can push you around. So they do.”

They’re laughing at you, I wanted to tell him. Those too small, short-sleeved dress shirts, breast pockets sagging with excess pens; the chaff of hair he grew long and swept around his head like a turban to try to camouflage his baldness; and most of all, his English. We’d moved to Las Vegas when I was still in preschool. I couldn’t remember living anywhere else. And still, my father pressed me to speak for him every time we had to order food or ask a store clerk for directions. 

“Is someone bothering you at school?” Hamza asked, almost urgently.

The traffic cop hand reemerged. 

“You have to be strong, Saddiq. Show them that you will defend yourself. I cannot come to your aid every time that happens.”

“It’s fine, dad. I’ll walk myself to school.”

My father’s face cracked a kind of smile. It was worn and weary, not borne of the satisfaction that his wisdom of the world exceeded mine, but of the plain and undeniable fact that he simply needed a break. “Do you think you can spare me the worry by keeping out of my sight?” 

I wanted to look him right in the eye, to convince him of my authority, of the gravity of my words by meeting his gaze. But I couldn’t even look in his direction. When I spoke, the words tumbled out of my mouth like gumballs from the miniature door of a vending machine. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

As I looked down, I ran my finger along the side of my calf, finding the gnarled mark left by a bicycle chain that had come loose from its sprocket while I was riding the other day. The scab under my finger felt dry, but not brittle, the size of a nickel. I skimmed its surface, coarse and gravelly, and tapped at its edge to test its defenses. Then I clenched my teeth until my jaw muscles pressed out from the insides of my head, and I dug my fingernail against the plate of dead skin. 

I don’t remember feeling my father place his hand on my shoulder. But I heard the words “I will always worry about you,” as the scab slowly peeled away. A million slow motion bee stings shot through my leg, my eyes spouted tears, and without meaning to, I shrugged off my father’s hand. 

“What’s wrong with you?” my father asked.

“Nothing.” I sniffled. 

“Well, it’s time for bed. Go brush your teeth.”

I wanted to speak, to talk to him, to find any reason not to get up and leave. But before I could find the words, he had already returned his attention to the packing. I stood without saying anything more, as if a puppeteer had pulled me up by strings tied to the ends of my shoulders. It was not until I was halfway down the hall that I realized my father had spoken to me for the first time since my mother had left home.

◆

Teachers had been debating the topic all morning. The main concern was injury. But the hail had stopped overnight and wasn’t expected to return. And by mid-morning, the beads of rain had disappeared from the monkey bars in the lower grade yard. So, despite an irregular rumble of thunder, the school decided, just before recess, to let us all outside. I made straight for the bleachers where I laid down on the lowest bench. I was staring up at the sky, imagining the world was nothing other than a dense thicket of leaden cotton, when I heard my name.

“He-hey, my man.” I swiveled my head to see Norman at the foot of the bleachers. He was wearing a paint-spattered smock that he’d borrowed from the art studio, probably after realizing he’d left his jacket at home. “Look what I just got.” In his hand, he fiddled with a Rasta-colored hacky sack that I suspected his mother had crocheted for him. “Last one at the skate shop.”

“Awesome,” I offered, just as my eyelid snapped at a drop of rain and I sat up impulsively. 

“Want to play?”

“No thanks, Norman.”

“So…” Norman bobbed anxiously from one foot to the next, his arms stirring at his sides as if he were impersonating a penguin. “I hear you and Pascal are playing Warhammer at the cuh-community center Sunday?”

“Oh… yeah. Not much else to do. If it rains.”

“Yeah,” Norman nodded, then shifted his gaze to the sky. “I might come too. See if I can get a GURPS campaign going.”

I smiled toothlessly, trying to feign enough curiosity to be polite without earning an invitation I’d have to turn down.

“Hey,” Norman continued as he sat down beside me. “Remember when you made that mutant character with p-prehensile hair?”

I didn’t. Not at first. But then the memory flooded back. We were nine years old, sitting cross-legged on the few square feet of Norman’s bedroom floor that weren’t filled with role playing game manuals, reading through every superpower a character could have. It was a time before Eric and Tony, before any bullies really. “Kinda?”

“Y-you don’t remember that? He was 14 and he had never cut his hair. And then one day, he found out he could use it to pick things up.”

“Oh yeah! What was his name? Was it – ”

“Captain Hairnet!”

I laughed out loud. “Oh man! I remember that. And his nemesis… he was really fat, right?”

“I mean…” Norman blew a raspberry. “He could asphyxiate people in the f-folds of his flesh. But that doesn’t mean he was fat, right?”

“Suuuure,” I answered, nudging Norman with my elbow. 

“Aww… look at the faggot lovebirds!” I looked up to see Eric holding court near a basketball hoop at the far end of the blacktop, his thumb gesturing in our direction. “It must be spring!” At that, Tony bent over laughing, revealing Heidi standing behind him.

“Vuh-v-very funny, Eric!” Norman shot back.

“How do you put up with that?” I muttered. 

“What do you mean?”

“The way ev – ” Everybody. The way everybody makes fun of you, I wanted to say. I waited for Norman to fill in the blanks, to show me he understood what I was trying to say, to stop pretending I wasn’t ashamed to be his friend. But when I looked at Norman, he just sat there looking back, a vaguely, untroubled expression on his face. 

“The way what?” Norman asked. 

“Eh…” I trailed off. “That guy’s just such an asshole.”

“Who? Eric?” Norman swatted at the air as if perspective wasn’t real and Eric was in fact as small as he seemed at that distance. “He’s just kidding.”

“Now that’s funny.”

“I mean it,” Norman insisted. “Eric’s cool. We’re friends.”

“What?! Since when?”

“I – we just are. We tease each other all the time.” 

“You tease Eric Messini?”

“Well… yeah. I cuh-could. Anyway, it’s cool. Let’s play hacky sack.” Norman rose to his feet, dropped the sack to the ground, and kicked it to where it landed right in front of my toes. I sat there for a while, feeling the tops of my teeth gnash against each other and a tightening in my chest. It was one thing to be oblivious; deaf to derision and insult. But for Norman, of all people, to insist hatefulness didn’t exist, or – like my father – suggest I was the problem, that I was asking for it, that put me over the edge. 

“C’mon, man,” Norman insisted. 

“You want the sack?” I scooped it up, then jumped to my feet. “Come and get it.”

If I had some idea of what I looked like in that moment, it’s only because I could see it reflected in Norman’s face. It was something I’d never seen before in anyone’s eyes. He looked at me as if I was waving a gun in the air. 

“W-What are you doing?” he asked.

I screamed back at him. “Come get it, I said!” 

Norman took a cautious step towards me. But as soon as he did, I took off running. 

“Wait!” Norman pleaded as he tried to keep up. “Y-you have to kick it to me.”

I circled back around and ran past him, waving the sack in Norman’s face as I did. Around me, I could feel other kids taking notice, drawing close. But Norman seemed more confused than upset. Then he cracked a crooked little smile, as if he were pretending to be in on a joke he didn’t understand. When I ran past him a second time, I swiveled to face him. “What’s the matter?” I cried. “Too fast for you?” 

Catching me off guard, Norman leapt at me, falteringly but close enough to almost grab at my arm. I took off running again, this time in circuits hemmed in by what seemed like an ever-growing crowd. When I switched back and cut across an open space, the mob seemed to part for me. And then it happened. I remember feeling the ground completely shift on its axis. My face slammed with a rattle against wet metal, something I could taste in my mouth. Though it was warm. When I opened my eyes, I saw the slate aluminum of a bleacher bench and a budding pool of blood. 

Someone cried out “Oh fuck!” But when laughter followed, someone else exclaimed, “Shut up y’all! That guy’s shit is jacked!” Face down on the bleachers, I managed to free the arm that was trapped under my chest. But when I tried to push myself up, a bolt of pain shot through my leg, like a cattle prod, and I fell back flat on my face. I closed my eyes and begged myself not to cry. Just don’t. Fucking. Cry. 

“Oh, man. I’m so sorry, Saddiq.” I couldn’t see the voice but knew right away it was Norman. “Here… give me your arm.”

“I can’t,” I whimpered, blood spattering out of my mouth. “Can’t move.”

“Yes, you can. C’mon.” Norman took hold of my left arm and leg – the one whose foot hadn’t snapped in half – and gingerly rolled me on to my back. It arched in pain.

“Oh fuck fuck fuck!” 

“It’s – we’re… we’re g-gonna get you to the nurse. Put your arm on my shoulder and hold on to my neck.” Before I could protest, I felt Norman’s muscular arms slide under me. He counted “One…two…” and on three, Norman was standing. To hide my tears, I pressed my face to his smock. Around us, I heard gasps and other sounds of shock ripple through the crowd, even as it parted to make way. But Norman sounded perfectly ordinary, almost peaceful. “Coming through,” he announced calmly but urgently. “C-coming through.”

Slowly, the crowd fell away until I could hear only Norman’s voice, talking only to me. Across the blacktop and around the gym, all the way to the nurse’s office, he whispered over and over, “It’s okay. I got you.” I never opened my eyes. I just kept my face buried in his chest and tried to think of anything to distract myself from the pain. What came to mind was the last time anyone had held me like that. I was probably five or six, coming to the end of one of those desert hikes my family used to take. I’d been complaining for hours, begging my father to carry me the rest of the way. And when he finally relented, he said, “I’ll carry you now, but one day you have to return the favor. When I can’t walk.” I laughed, but he didn’t. He just held me tight to his chest, as tight as Norman held me as he rushed me toward the nurse. I passed out in his arms believing, at least for a while, that if anything happened, there was no way he was dropping me. We were both going down together.