In Summertime Saga

I waited until the house was dark and then I waited longer because Debbie got up for water sometimes and I didn't want to explain where I was going because I didn't have an explanation that made sense. Going to the park to rap battle. At night. For stats. In a town where a drug dealer worked the left bench and Russian gangsters were collecting on fake debts. Great plan.

The front door closed behind me with a click and the night air was warm and wet and smelled like cut grass and the neighbor's jasmine bush that Debbie always complained about. The streets were empty. Streetlights made orange pools on the sidewalk and between them it was dark enough that the stars were visible, which was a thing I'd never thought about when Summerville was a map screen I clicked through.

I walked.

The neighborhood was quiet. Erik's house was dark. Tammy's window was closed, curtains drawn. A sprinkler was running somewhere, the chk-chk-chk of a rotating head hitting the end of its arc and swinging back. I walked past the school, which looked different at night, bigger somehow, the windows black. I walked past a house with a dog that barked once and gave up.

The park was different at night. The fountain was still running but the sound was louder without everything else, the traffic and the birds and the people. The big tree in the center was a black shape against a sky that was purple at the edges. Pilly's bench was empty. Even drug dealers go home.

The rap circle was at the far end, past the fountain, near a stretch of walkway between two lamp posts. Four guys. A bench. A speaker sitting on the armrest playing something with a heavy bass that was too loud for the speaker and rattled on the low notes. The guys were my age or younger, standing in a loose half-circle, and one of them was in the middle talking with his hands while the others were nodding along. A couple of girls sat on the bench behind them, watching, sharing a vape pen.

I stood at the edge for a minute. Nobody acknowledged me. The kid in the middle finished whatever he was doing and the circle clapped, halfhearted, the applause of people who'd heard the same guy do the same thing for the fifth time that night. One of the girls on the bench yawned without covering her mouth.

I stepped up. "Can I get in on this?"

Four faces turned. Looked me up and down. Skinny. New. Nobody they recognized. The girls on the bench looked up from the vape pen. One of the guys, a scrawny kid in a backward cap with acne scars on his cheeks, shrugged. "Sure. You and me. Two bars each. These guys judge."

"Works for me."

He squared up across from me. The speaker rattled through a bass drop. One of the other guys turned it down slightly, which was the most respectful thing anyone had done for the audio quality all night.

The scrawny kid went first. He straightened up, cleared his throat, and delivered two lines about my shoes being old and my shirt being Goodwill. The delivery was fine. The guys in the circle laughed and nodded and one of them went "oh shit" even though neither bar warranted it.

My turn.

The circle shifted. The scrawny kid stepped back half a step. The girls on the bench stopped passing the vape. The speaker was playing something slower now, somebody's SoundCloud track with a beat that was mostly hi-hat, and the night was warm and the lamp posts were making their orange circles on the walkway and I was standing in one of them.

I was twenty-five in an eighteen-year-old's body. I'd spent the last decade talking my way into bedrooms and out of consequences. I'd smooth-talked married women while their husbands' cars were in the driveway. I'd convinced a bouncer in Atlantic City that I was on the VIP list by describing the inside of a club I'd never been to. I'd talked a parking cop out of a ticket by making her laugh before she finished writing it.

I wasn't a rapper. I didn't have bars. What I had was timing, and volume control, and the ability to say a thing at the right speed with the right pause before the punchline, and ten years of reading rooms and knowing which words land and which ones float.

I looked at the kid in the backward cap. Took a breath. Didn't rush.

I gave him two lines. I don't remember exactly what they were because they came from somewhere in the back of my throat that was pure instinct, but they were about his cap being backward because forward was too much pressure, and the second line tied it to his bars going the same direction, and the delivery was slow and even and I held eye contact the whole time and dropped the last word like I was setting down a drink.

The circle went quiet.

Then it went loud. One kid grabbed the arm of the kid next to him. Another one covered his mouth. The scrawny kid was staring at me with his mouth open and his hand was on the brim of his cap, adjusting it, not knowing he was doing it.

They voted. Unanimous. I won.

I bumped the scrawny kid's fist on the way out because he'd been a good sport about it and he said "yo, come back tomorrow, that was crazy" and I said "yeah, maybe" and I walked away from the circle and back toward the fountain.

The Charisma gain wasn't a number. There was no notification, no ding, no floating text. But my jaw was looser. My shoulders sat different. My spine was straighter and it hadn't been a decision, it was just how I was standing now, and my hands were in my pockets and they were comfortable there in a way they hadn't been an hour ago. I was confident. I'd always been confident. But now the body was starting to catch up.

Charisma, barely above zero. But above.

The park was dark on the walk back. The fountain was a silhouette. The lamp posts made their orange pools. I passed Pilly's bench and Pilly was there now, hood up, phone out. He looked up when I walked past.

He nodded. I nodded back.

Pilly sold product that was going to ruin a cheerleader's family and I knew it and couldn't do anything about it yet. But I'd remember the nod.

The house was dark when I got back. I let myself in through the front door and closed it soft and stood in the hallway for a second while my eyes adjusted. The living room was black. The TV was off. Upstairs, silence. Debbie was asleep. Jenny was-

The kitchen light was on.

I went around the corner and Jenny was standing at the counter in an oversized t-shirt, bare legs, hair messy, eating cereal out of a bowl with one hand and scrolling her phone with the other. Midnight cereal. Her thing, apparently. The kitchen was bright after the dark hallway and she was squinting against it and the t-shirt had ridden up on one side and I looked at the cereal instead.

The cereal was Lucky Charms. She was picking out the marshmallows and leaving the oat pieces, which was the most Jenny thing I'd learned about her so far.

She glanced up when I came in. Didn't put down the phone. Didn't stop chewing. But she looked at me and her eyes stayed on me for a beat longer than they had in any interaction we'd had so far. A beat. That's all. Like she'd noticed a piece of furniture had moved and was trying to figure out when.

"Where were you?"

"Out."

She chewed. Looked at me. Looked at her phone. Looked at me again. Her eyes narrowed. She was wearing the pink choker from the game, the one she wore even to bed, and it sat on her throat above the stretched-out collar of the t-shirt.

"Huh."

She went back to her cereal. I got a glass of water from the sink and drank it standing up and the kitchen was quiet except for her chewing and the refrigerator humming and the tap dripping once into the basin.

"Night," I said.

She didn't answer. I was halfway up the stairs when she said "Night" back, quiet, like she'd had to think about whether to say it.

I went to my room. Closed the door. Sat on the bed.

The jaw was still loose. The posture was still different. I felt taller, or at least like I was taking up the right amount of space, which was new because I'd been apologizing for myself since I'd moved in.

Jenny had looked at me. For a full beat. She'd noticed I was different and she didn't know what was different and she wasn't going to think about it because thinking about me was not on her list of things she did, but she'd looked. And she'd said "night" back. She'd never done that before.

I lay down. The bed was comfortable. The ceiling was the same popcorn white. Through the wall, Debbie was breathing slow and steady in her sleep.

Day 3. Strength: barely above zero. Charisma: barely above zero. Everything else: still zero.

I closed my eyes.

Tomorrow, Tony's.