Chapter 1: The Cage
As he swam through the crowd that moved out of the train station, people bumped against and brushed past him as if he wasn’t there. He couldn’t fight the feeling that he would drown in the mob of human bodies. It seemed like everyone else was in a hurry to get where they were going and he was caught underneath a human tidal wave. Their strides were steady whereas he seemed to be stumbling. As he climbed the staircase that lead to fresh air, the sun and sky, Tyler looked at the stone faces that passed him. As he reached the last few steps he walked faster because of the stench of stale piss at the entrance that flooded his nostrils. His feet crunched against broken glass as he slipped on a broken beer bottle. He stepped out into the sunlight and squinted with eyes that had become accustomed to the darkness below. As he made his routine journey home, he exchanged thoughts with people he knew and hard stares with those he didn’t. He could smell chicken and grease as he passed “Mr. Chan’s Chinese Restaurant” flooded with children whose mothers never cooked. Fried chicken wings, oily rice and French fries were the staple of their diets. As he looked at his dirty brown building two blocks away, he nearly bumped into little Linden who had five fingers full of hot sauce and a wax paper bag full of fried chicken wings. Tyler looked at the chicken and shuddered as he thought about the black grease it had been fried in; old enough to make you sick and dirty enough to look like engine oil. It probably hadn’t been changed in weeks because Mr. Chan and his workers knew how to save money as well as how to make it.
“What’s up Tyler? You got a quarter?” he asked as he licked his fingers and then stretched his hand out. “I wanna buy a juice.”
“No problem,” Tyler answered and reached into his jacket pocket to pass him a dollar.
“You want change right?” Linden asked.
“Naw, that’s a’ight. Just buy a soda and leave that paint and water, quarter-water shit alone.” Linden took the money, dodged a car and disappeared into the corner store across the street. Pappo, who paid Jose peanuts to work long hours in his Bodega, would have become a dollar richer but Linden had sticky fingers and would probably steal more than he would pay for. Only twelve and already the youngster was a hustler.
Tyler smiled and moved on. He adjusted the knapsack on his back which used to be filled with books before reality grabbed his life by the throat. Of course the government offered financial aid for those individuals who were unfortunately poor but still academically inclined. However, there were too few provisions for mothers who needed their children to work full time just to continue to suffer barely above intolerable limits. So, the knapsack on Tyler’s back that used to be filled with college textbooks now contained his work uniform. Since four o’clock in the morning Tyler had been on the ramp of John F. Kennedy airport loading and offloading airplanes. He could feel his mind shrivel away as he performed robotic, monotonous tasks where it had once burrowed into books and challenged professors. Now, his knapsack was stuffed with a blue uniform he hated. It was rank with sweat as well as jet fumes that probably caused cancer, along with every other man-made element in the modern world. Also inside his knapsack was a pair of dirty work boots that hurt his feet but were cheap enough to get worn out on the job and not be missed when they had seen their last days of service. Most importantly, right next to those articles of clothing lurked a machete with a short blade because the streets never ever respected nine-to-five wage earners. Tyler would be damned if he had slaved all day just to get robbed of his tiny salary on his way home.
Cigar trash littered the front of building 1003 as wise men sat and stood, here and there, engaged in marijuana induced, green haze meditation. Bush clouds crowned their heads as they stared blankly into oblivion, engrossed in silent contemplation. It was a circle of soldiers on break from the battles they fought diligently every day. Their battleground was the streets in which they waged war every day in a conflict they’d been losing forever.
Every soul in the Brooklyn apartment building was supposed to be broke but a pearl white Lexus was parked right behind a black, convertible Mercedes Benz would lead strangers and the N.Y.P.D. to believe otherwise. Tyler stayed with them for a while to find knowledge not found in any college and then passed through the thick clouds of smoke to get inside. The hand railing on the staircase rattled as if it would break and he found himself looking down to avoid steps weakened by cracks. He exchanged “What ups?” with little men who pretended to be bad guys and little girls in the halls with raggedy, blonde-haired dolls. Reaching the second floor he saw Tracy from the fourth floor tangled up with a stroller in her right arm and her daughter, Stacy, in her left.
“Need help?” he asked and took the stroller out of her arms.
“Yeah, thanks. We need a damn elevator in this building,” she sighed and daintily wiped a few drops of sweat from her forehead with her fingers. She secured little Stacy in her arm as she reached for her keys in her skin-tight jeans pocket. She walked up in front and made Tyler almost stumble more than once while he stared at her full, shapely, lower half. He would always laugh and tell her that she was lucky to be too young for him to touch. Somebody else however had decided that age really wasn’t anything but a number because at sixteen, she already had an eighteen-month-old daughter. Actually, her baby’s father was the twenty-nine-year-old owner of the Lexus parked downstairs. He felt that her fruit had been ripe enough to pick sooner than anyone else had. “Better me than the next man,” Remy would say whenever anyone commented on him sleeping with a fifteen-year-old girl. “At least I can take care of her and I don’t hear Tracy complaining.”
“How come Remy ain’t help you upstairs?” Tyler asked but then wished he had bit his tongue. He really wanted to mention that since Remy more than helped her get pregnant, he should have at least helped her upstairs with their child. Remy knew how far she had to drag the stroller and the baby but Tyler decided that it was best for him to mind his own business. Apparently she agreed because she uncomfortably acted as if she didn’t hear the question.
APARTMENT H6. The baby started crying as Tracy smiled, thanked Tyler and closed her door. Tyler lived on the third floor in the apartment directly below hers so, after standing there for a few seconds after the door slammed hard in his face, he turned and walked downstairs. The little girls must have been jealous of Tracy because her baby doll cried, wet diapers, ate food and breathed for real.
APARTMENT G6. It was a tiny apartment with too many people home and truthfully, outside on heated streets was the closest thing to being alone. He turned his key in the lock and the click echoed down the dirty, dingy, poorly lit hallway. As he pushed the heavy door, Tyler noticed that the chain held it shut. That was a sign that somebody was home which meant that he had no intentions of staying there for long. Annoyed, he rang the half-dead doorbell and waited for someone to answer. He saw the peephole go dark and then met his mother’s angry, stress-filled face as she opened the door.
“Why are you so late and where’s your brother?” she asked as he walked past her with his head down. An argument was inevitable. As he stepped into the living room he watched his step because the only source of light came from the twenty-seven-inch television that sat on a not-too-stable stand against the far wall. A horror movie must have been on because even the scene on the screen was dark.
“I don’t know. I ain’t seen him since this morning,” he answered, and threw his jacket on the beat-up, gray sofa/bed that had been there for as long as he could remember. It had become a permanent fixture in the room just like the paper-thin, sheet-rock walls, the almost impossible to open windows or the creaky wooden floor underneath the heavily trafficked, dusty Oriental rug.
“Where’s your belt? Why your pants gotta be hangin’ off your ass?” she asked. Tyler pretended not to hear her and dragged them down another inch. He didn’t bother to take off his boots as he walked across the rug en-route to the bathroom. His bladder felt like it weighed a ton as he pushed open the squeaky bathroom door. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him because the lock didn’t work properly and he might have been standing in a puddle by the time he got it to close. He didn’t bother to lift the seat either. Growing up in apartments with his mother, and at one time grandmother and two aunts, he had learned to just aim straight rather than the alternative; getting in trouble for leaving the seat up.
“Why is it that the closer you get to the toilet is the more it seems like you have to use it?” Tyler asked himself as he struggled with the button, then the zipper on his jeans. As he used one hand for aim and the other to lean on the cold tiles on the wall, it seemed like he had been standing there for ten minutes already. Finally, he pulled his zip up and turned around only to face his mother behind him with his jacket in her hands.
“You must think there’s a maid around here to pick up all your shit?” she yelled and threw the jacket at him. While he tried to fix his pants, he had no free hand to catch it so it landed on the cold bathroom floor. He looked at the jacket, paused then looked up at her as if to question her sanity.
“Well? Pick it up!” she shouted as he made an attempt to step over and leave it right where it had landed.
“Bitch,” he mumbled, knowing he would live to regret uttering the word. If no one else, she would make sure that he did. It was a term considered taboo when referring to one’s mother.
“What? Who’s a bitch? …,bitch like your father,” and on she went. Once she got started it would take something dramatic to stop her. Sometimes she would start late at night, fall asleep and then pick up where she left off in the morning. As he left the bathroom and grabbed his walkman from inside his jacket, he wished she would just hit him and get it over with. The physical pain he would feel after she was finished was something he could deal with but her mouth, along with the words that erupted from it, were the biggest threat to his sanity.
“…call me bitch,…where was your father when,…brought you into this world,…clothes on your back,…food in your mouth,…you can get the fuck out,…you and your piece-of-shit brother!” Now, besides the hurt he lived with every day, he felt a huge lump in his throat. For every curse that spewed from her mouth he had an answer but to argue his point of view would only make the situation scarier. Just as he knew better than to let her hear him call her a bitch, he also knew that he shouldn’t let her see him put on his earphones given her current frame of mind. He knew this but sometimes, it was the only form of rebellion he was brave enough to attempt. Also, besides his girlfriend, (who had recently become his ex-girlfriend), the music was the only thing that kept him sane. He closed his eyes so he couldn’t see any mad faces in what he considered an insane place. Through his eyes he only allowed a taste of what existed outside them as everywhere curses were mixed with his name. Even though the familiar voices and drums in his ears were too loud for him to hear her coming, he could feel her stomp heavily towards him.
“…when I’m talking to you,” was all he heard as she slapped him so hard that the earphones flew off his head. Before they hit the ground he was up and eye-to-eye with her, his fists clenched tightly. The stinging sensation he felt let him know that if he was as fair-skinned as she was, her hand would have printed out on his face like a violent, primitive, signature. However, he was as dark as his father so the slap only left marks on his spirit, which had already been scarred by bitter memories of a flawed father he didn’t miss. Tyler’s mother looked into his eyes and knew that he was heated enough to hit her back but she also knew that he would never touch her. That would have made him just like his father; something she knew he feared. Although her conscience told her that she was wrong to carry things so far over something as trivial as where he put his jacket, she continued the one-sided argument.
“Oh, so you wanna fight somebody? You wanna hit somebody? Go ahead! Be a little bitch like your father!” she yelled. He didn’t answer. He just put on his jacket and went back into the bathroom. This time he decided to take the time to close the door behind him. The click of the lock sounded like a note of music more powerful than an entire concert. Tyler turned to look in the mirror to see if he was bruised or if she had split his lip.
“If I didn’t look so much like him,” he thought. He hadn’t seen the man in years but he still remembered what his father looked like every time he looked at his own reflection and he was sure that his mother did too, every time she looked at him. As he examined his face he thought about how his father’s friends would always remind him of the resemblance.
“…just like his father,” they would say; alcohol heavy on their breath. If his mother were under the spell of the bottle it would have made it easier for him to accept the way she acted. He knew that somewhere within her sometimes psychotic, always depressed, soul was the woman who used to cradle him in her arms while his father tried to destroy their world. Tyler knew she didn’t mean to act the way she did. He only wished that sometimes they could whisper and still hear each other but she had nowhere else to direct her bitterness. She had to remain humble at work where she was the manager of a clothing store or it would mean the loss of her job and more problems she didn’t need. Rose knew that neither of her sons would hit her the way their father had so many times. Through watery eyes they had seen her beaten bloody and sprawled out in pools of tears too many times. For what she suffered and for her scars, (seen and unseen), she sometimes inadvertently made the physical reminders of her abuser pay for the sins of their father.
“If you leave you better go live with your father ‘cause you ain’t comin’ back in here you ungrateful bastard!” she yelled as Tyler brushed past her and opened the apartment door.
“Yeah, whatever. You say the same shit every time we leave,” he mumbled as APARTMENT G6’s heavy steel door slammed shut behind him.
He stepped out of the dark building and into the darker night. It hadn’t taken long for the sun to abandon the sky. The steel and glass apartment building door slammed noisily behind him. Heavy Hip-Hop baselines pounded from the sound system in Remy’s trunk and practically shook the ground as Tanya, Jasmine and Nawana leaned against the sparkling, recently washed Lexus. In front of the car, an assortment of petty crooks, gamblers, wanna-be-players, thugs and hustlers were engaged in a ritualistic dice game. The dice clacked against the concrete inside the iron circle of players. The longer the dice clicked, clacked and rolled inside the ring was the bigger the dice game became. The dice game was like a beast and just like a beast it became more dangerous as it increased in size. And, just like a beast, if it was touched the wrong way it became deadly and people got hurt. Hard earned money was squeezed to death inside sweaty palms and lost to hot hands. As Tyler waved to the girls he could hear June’s high-pitched voice above everyone else’s as usual.
“ . . .see, the way I see it, bitches ain’t shit. To the day I die I’ll stay sayin’ and believin’ bitches ain’t shit because they stupid.”
“Why you always talking ‘bout ‘bitch this’ and ‘bitch that’?” Nawana asked while she rolled her eyes at June in disgust.
“That’s why I hate his ass,” Tanya added, and turned her head so she didn’t have to look at him. “He just mad ‘cause he don’t get no pussy!”
“Ain’t you got a mother and four sisters? They bitches too?” Jasmine asked and sarcastically waited for his response.
“Well, first of all, I can’t stand my sisters so yeah, they bitches too. Y’all don’t know what it’s like to be the youngest and the only boy. Shit, with all they fat asses around I had to practically fight for food.”
“That must be why you so skinny, you ugly bastard. Look at you, tight white T-shirt and them tight-ass brown jeans, lookin’ like a dirty cigarette,” Nawana laughed loudly and slapped Jasmine on the leg.
“A’ight. What about your moms? She gave birth to your dirty ass and you would stand there and call her a bitch?” Jasmine asked, feeling like she had gained leverage in the debate over ‘bitchery.’
“First of all, I said that by nature bitches is stupid so hell yeah, she a bitch too. I mean look at it. My pops was a player and she knew it and she still went out of her way to fuck wit’ him. She got pregnant for him not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, BUT FIVE TIMES before she stopped fuckin’ with him. She be talkin’ ‘bout how he was her first and she was in love with him but to me she was a dummy ‘cause he ain’t give a shit about her. Matter of fact, my sisters learned how to be bitches by watchin’ her so that makes her the ‘Queen Bitch.’ Matter of fact I shouldn’t even call them bitches ‘cause women is dumber than dogs. A dog got sense enough to bite a master that ain’t treatin’ ‘em right.” At the end of his dramatic, philosophical, politically incorrect speech, every man broke out in roaring laughter while the women twisted their lips and wore frowns.
Tyler moved closer to the center of the circle and watched as Steve, Remy’s right-hand/general, took everybody’s money with a gold grin. Out of vexation one man threw down his hat but picked it right back up when Remy gave him a look that must have made his blood stop running. Tyler watched as Steve shook the dice in his closed fist, released them gracefully and watched them hit the gritty concrete landing four, five and six. Tyler’s thoughts began to wander and he thought about all he could do with the money on the ground. Just then, an arm around his shoulder interrupted his thoughts and brought him back to reality just as fast as one of the gambler’s guns would have. He turned and saw June smiling next to him.
“What the deal baby?” the infamous woman-hater asked. Tyler also knew that June was a troublemaker so it was more than wise to avoid him whenever possible. More than a few people ended up in bad situations because June planted the seeds of stupidity in their brains.
“Ain’t nothin’. What’s goin’ on?” he answered and tried his best not to pay June too much attention while he hoped he would just go away. Tyler just kept his eyes trained on the dice game and all the money at stake.
“Who me? I’m just here fuckin’ wit’ dese bitches. They gonna be the death of me yet. Anyway, I ain’t tryin’ to be nosy or nothin’ but I noticed that you ain’t been to the other end of the block all week. What’s the matter? You tired of fuckin’ Deborah already? Oh wait, my fault. It must be period week. You doin’ the right thing. Stay away from them when they on that shit man. They get all evil and shit. Likely to try some crazy shit like tryin’ to cut a nigga dick off and then I would get on some even more crazy shit and kill a bitch. You know how I get down.”
“Me and Deborah don’t talk no more.”
“Why not? Wasn’t you the one tryin’ to sell me that, ‘… when you fall in love,’ shit just a week ago?”
“Yeah I know. Guess you was right and I was wrong. Fuck it. She got on some ol’ stuck up, ‘You’re not what I’m looking for in life,’ shit so I don’t fuck wit’ her no more.”
“Damn, that’s fucked up. Well I guess it’s a good thing you don’t talk to her no more anyway.”
“What?” Tyler asked while he tried to decipher what June was getting at. “What you mean by that?” he asked and made it clear that he didn’t like the direction the conversation was going. Here he was, telling June that he just broke up with the woman he loved and here was June telling him that it was a good thing. Tyler was in no mood to play head games with anybody. His brain had already been in the blender long enough for one day and if June was trying to be funny, Tyler didn’t see the humor or appreciate the taunting tone in the slender man’s voice.
“Well, I mean that I just saw Patrick goin’ up in her crib.” June answered.
“Who?” Tyler asked with his voice heavily saturated with an intoxicating dose of surprise mixed with traces of jealousy.
“Patrick from around the corner. You know, ‘Mr. Model’ all these bitches around here keep talkin’ about? Pretty nigga always lickin’ his lips?”
“What the fuck he doin’ goin’ upstairs?” Tyler asked himself, barely loud enough for June to hear.
“Ain’t that just like a bitch?” June answered purposely adding a fresh clip into Tyler’s mental machine gun. “Tell you they love you but break up tomorrow and they openin’ they legs fuh some other nigga. DAMN! She probably been plannin’ to fuck that cat for the longest time. That shit ain’t right. See what I’m talking about now? All bitches is FUCKED UP!” That was enough to make Tyler snap and in his insane world, Tyler knew only two reactions to pain. He could either walk the way of silence or become violent. Youth blinded him to any other way. The path of silence left him lost upstairs with his mother only a few minutes before and his blood was too hot for him to stay calm. There was only one way for him to deal with how he was felt. June smiled as a man with a full belly and an easy mind would. He had lit the fuse and now all he had to do was play the back and watch the fireworks. June just disappeared into the crowd as Tyler pushed past those in his way and marched up the block with blood in his eyes and grim determination in his step.
The closer Tyler got to the private houses on the opposite corner was the redder his eyes got. All he could see through that red haze was Deborah hot, naked and wet underneath some pretty boy who probably had something to do with the way she was thinking lately. His heart pounded in his chest and he breathed heavily as he got closer to her house. He thought about how surprised he was on that first day she gave him her own invitation and let him inside. Every other man tried to get her but she actually approached him and let him into her life. From the dirty looks and stares shot tastelessly in his direction, he could feel the jealousy like a bad cold that wouldn’t go away; even among those who called themselves his friends. When they were together, the eyes and expressions on everyone’s face said plainly, “Why him?” or “What’s she doin’ with him?” Now, as he walked up the block without saying anything to anyone, he did notice that all eyes seemed to be a slightly lighter shade of green. Some came to their fences like children at the zoo or aquarium. The streets always had a habit of minding other people’s business. The block either watched closely with envy or felt fortunate to not be in a similar situation. Whether or not they seemed nosy didn’t matter to them because they weren’t going to miss tonight’s main event. He became even angrier at the whole situation when he thought of how he must have been under everyone’s malicious scrutiny. It was as if the neighbors had been conducting some kind of sick, social experiment in which he and Deborah were the test subjects. Patrick now served as the catalyst that would give the spectators the explosive results they desired.
Tyler walked up the steps to Deborah’s house, rang the bell and waited impatiently for someone to answer. After he looked through the three panes of glass in the front door and saw no one come downstairs, he sat down on the top step with one hand on his chin and the other in his jacket pocket. The longer he waited on the cold concrete step was the more his imagination became infected with wild thoughts. Deborah’s bedroom was in the back of the house on the second floor but he could almost swear that he could hear her moaning softly. His ears joined the madness of his mind and imagined they could hear Deborah’s headboard knocking rhythmically against her bedroom wall. He thought about how she would lean her head back and bite her bottom lip when he would hold her. He could almost taste her full lips and as the chilly night breeze blew, he thought he could smell the incense they would burn whenever they made love. That directed Tyler’s thoughts towards Patrick upstairs touching her in ways that brought a burning, fiery feeling to the depths of Tyler’s soul. His blood ran cold even though he could feel his heart pounding as if it would explode out of his chest. He could actually hear it beat like a thousand drums in his ears. Just then he heard footsteps on the stairs inside and he stood up to face the door. As he heard the wooden door at the foot of the stairs inside open, he took a deep breath and waited for whoever would step out to meet him.
The front door opened and Denise, Deborah’s sister, stuck her head out. Her ears still buzzed with the infectious tunes from the cross-cultural, mainstream, happy-go-lucky, music video show she walked away from to answer the door. She was only wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt so she didn’t step all the way into the night air that seemed to grow colder as the night grew older. Tyler almost wished Patrick answered the door so he could have beaten him to death right there without going inside to do it.
“Oh, hi Tyler,” Denise greeted him uncomfortably and tried not to look him in the eye. She focused instead on her pink, fuzzy, open-toe slippers and her freshly painted pink toenails. She twisted one of her pigtails nervously while she chewed her bubble gum. Tyler stepped closer to her and noticed that, from the way she held the door, she had no intentions of letting him inside.
“Where’s Deborah?” he asked dryly without a hello, good morning or goodnight just to let her know how serious he was. He moved so close to Denise that he was nose-to-nose with her but she still did not move out of her “guard dog” stance.
“She can’t come out right now. She’s sorta busy,” she told him. There couldn’t have been a more wrong answer short of, “ . . .she’s upstairs fuckin’,” and Denise realized this when a wild look suddenly engulfed his eyes.
“Doin’ what? Who’s upstairs?” he asked and gripped the doorknob to prevent her from slamming it in his face. It was impossible for him not to notice how uncomfortable she was answering his questions, which served only to push him closer to the edge. Once Tyler fell from there, he would want nothing less than blood.
“Me and Deborah,” she stuttered as Tyler moved forward as if she wasn’t there. Denise felt herself rapidly lose ground in a battle that was only the prelude to a larger, more terrible war.
“Who else?” he asked as he pulled the door completely open and pushed her aside. If he was fighting his way into Hell, an army of demons could not have held the gates against him.
“My mother is home too,” she shouted in desperation as he ran up the carpeted stairs without looking back. Denise stood at the front of the stairs with the house door wide open, afraid to even follow him up. To make things worse she remembered that she left the upstairs door unlocked when she came down to answer the doorbell. She wanted to scream as Tyler disappeared through the doorway but found that she was frozen in place without a voice as her stomach twisted in torturous knots.
“What the hell is this? What’s going on?” Deborah’s mother asked as Tyler passed her in the living room sitting on her cellulite-covered ass; on top of her cream, three-thousand dollar leather sofa; in front of her big screen, plasma television; all of it sitting on top of her wall-to-wall, plush carpeting; without wiping his feet on the “welcome” mat. Mrs. Henry got right to the point and, unlike Denise, skipped the plastic pleasantries. Although he hadn’t looked at her face for more than an instant, he did notice that she no longer wore the “merry” mask she usually put on whenever he was around. Tyler wondered if he was seeing her true face because she wasn’t wearing her wrinkle-hiding make-up or because her true self finally leaked from the inside.
“Good! There we go,” Tyler thought to himself. He had always wanted to slap the fake, forced, grin off her face and he felt that this was close enough. A part of him was glad to finally see what her face looked like under the mask and to finally understand how her real eyes saw him. There was also another part of him that mourned the passing of the illusion. That piece of him would have shed tears if it hadn’t become consumed by wrath, obsessed with the destruction of any tea parties and the burning of dollhouses. Tyler knew he was wrong for practically breaking into the Henry’s house but he didn’t care because he had already made himself an unwanted “guest” when he first started seeing Deborah. Besides the anger that now consumed him, he also felt like a fool that tried to belong to something that would never understand or welcome him. Tyler had forced himself into a circle that was never meant for him and he didn’t know what to do when he found himself cast back to the very same place he had tried to escape.
He didn’t bother to search the rest of the house because if Deborah and Patrick weren’t in the living room, he knew exactly where they would be. As he walked up the hallway towards the bedrooms, Mrs. Henry walked briskly in his direction.
“ . . . son of a bitch, . . . knewhewasnothingbutapunk, . . .never liked him, . . .,” she roared. Tyler stopped as he heard giggling coming from inside Deborah’s slightly ajar, bedroom door. He had been with Deborah for almost two years and still, her parents had never allowed him in her bedroom, even if they were home. He wasn’t even allowed near the house when they weren’t home. It was months before Deborah herself let him sneak in and here was Patrick, all relaxed like he lived there. As much as Mr. and Mrs. Henry pretended to like him, Tyler always found himself sneaking in to see their daughter like a thief. He stood there like someone had just dropped a bucket of cold water on his head, not only to wake him but also to ridicule him. Mrs. Henry cursed at her younger daughter for letting this, “ . . . street thug, good-for-nothing, bastard,” into her house. He stood on the brink now and the pressure of the situation almost made him turn around and leave but the devil on his left shoulder strangled the angel on his right shoulder while whispering that it was too late to turn back now. The voice whispered that he would never again be able to sleep if he didn’t look inside the bedroom. As Tyler lifted his foot and kicked the door wide open, a jeep passed by playing music so loud that it shook the walls and unknowingly served as a grim herald for his arrival. All the laughter stopped but the sudden quiet that replaced it was louder.
“Tyler?” Deborah gasped and looked at him as if he was the Grim Reaper himself. Her mouth hung open while she fumbled for words and realized that none were the right ones. A jealous boyfriend who had recently become an ex-boyfriend foaming at the mouth plus a potential replacement in her bedroom at the same time could only equal disaster.
“Sorry,” was the only thing she could think to say after the silent, dead air between them became unbearable. She suddenly felt guilty and ashamed. Lately she had found every way to avoid Tyler but as she watched him standing there quietly without saying a word, mixed emotion washed over her. She knew that she had once loved him in her own way but she didn’t know if she still did. Deborah understood that once you love a person, even if you fall out of love, that person still haunts your heart. She simply didn’t know if Tyler haunted her enough for it to matter. It wasn’t as if she and Patrick were having sex but she imagined how it must have looked and how Tyler must have felt. She knew how she would have felt if the situation had been reversed. Her eyes fell to the ground and as she stared at the ocean-blue carpet on her bedroom floor, Patrick chose the worst possible time to prove he was a “tough guy.”
“Sorry? Sorry for what?” he asked her. “Who does he think he is running up in here and disrespecting your parents’ house like this? Fuck him!” he shouted and flashed his hand at the man standing in the doorway like, “Death.” Tyler’s mind flashed back to the events of his particularly disastrous day. He had kept the beast caged behind bars that had started to bend long ago. Now there was space enough for it to fit through and only five feet of air stood between him and “Mr. Model.” Now, Tyler would make it his job to show Patrick why wild things were best left sleeping on the opposite side of the gates. Tyler glimpsed at his own reflection in Deborah’s bedroom mirror and barely recognized himself.
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