Adam Silvera - More Happy Than Not

We make up our own start and finish lines and crouch like we’re pros. “I’m thinking pistachio,” I say. “FYI.”

Three.

Two.

One.

GO!

Thomas takes the lead, putting all his speed into these first few seconds, whereas I know to be fast but to also pace myself. After about ten seconds, he’s already winding down. He may be a month or two away from a six-pack, but I’ve been running relay races with Brendan since the better part of my childhood. My feet pound against the pressurized rubber, and the sneakers are way too tight on me, but I run, run, run until I pass him and I don’t stop until I leap over the discarded water bottle we marked as the finish line. Thomas doesn’t even finish; he just collapses onto the grass.

I jump up and down until my rib cage hurts. “I dusted you!”

“You cheated,” Thomas pants, catching his breath. “You have a height advantage. Longer legs.”

“Wow. That’s going into the Bullshit Hall of Fame.” I fall face-first next to him, and the grass stains the knees of my jeans. “Maybe don’t choose a place next time where you’ll get your ass handed to you. Why here anyway?”

“I’m used to quitting things—”

“Really?” I punch him in the shoulder.

He punches me back. “Yeah, really. But this place rejected me from becoming someone and that was a first.”

“Way to make me feel guilty for proving how slow you are.”

“Not at all. It’s not like my heart is in running or anything like that, but at least I learned that you can’t always choose who you’re going to be. Sometimes you’re fast enough to run track. Sometimes you’re not.” He tucks his hands behind his head, still catching his breath. “Anyway, it’s a pretty chill place to just remember and think, you know?”

I do now.

We don’t go and get ice cream. We wait for our rib cages to stop killing us, counting overhead trains go by, and then we race up and down the bleachers before flopping onto the grass again.

When I get back to the block, my friends are sitting on a brown picnic table, their bikes surrounding them. When we were younger we would play Shark here. The game starts with one person (the shark) trying to drag you off the table (the raft) by your ankles. Once you’re off, you become a shark too. Sometimes when there were too many sharks, some players would hop on their bikes and just circle the survivors in a menacing way.

“Hey. You guys game for manhunt?” I’m pretty drained from running around before, but if I can find a decent hiding spot it won’t matter.

“I think we’re going to ride bikes instead,” Nolan says.

“We played manhunt already,” Deon says.

“And smoked too,” Skinny-Dave says, laughing.

“I’ll go upstairs and get my rollerblades,” I say, and I turn to run upstairs when Nolan stops me.

“Bikes only, dude.”

I look over at Brendan. I don’t know why I expected him to defend me but that was stupid. He’s obviously still pissed I brought up Kenneth and Kyle. He obviously told the guys. “It’s cool. I’ll go home and read Scorpius Hawthorne or…”

They don’t wait for me to finish. They mount their bikes and pedal away from me.

Yes, it took Brendan three whole days to get over his little bitch-fit. If he had waited one more day, it would’ve been his longest grudge since we were fourteen — when he got mad at me for not choosing him as my partner for a gaming tournament on Third Avenue. Basically, Brendan thinks that if you’re not with him, you’re against him. It’s ridiculous, but whatever. I’m just glad he grew up just in time so I could rush out of Yolanda’s Pizzeria with him and the other guys.

Me-Crazy is fighting some twentysomething in the middle of the street.

I was nine when I got into my first fight with someone who wasn’t my brother. I didn’t know how to make a fist so Brendan had to help me. Every time the kid, Larry, would hit me, I would run back to Brendan to ball my fists for me until I couldn’t take it any longer.

Yeah, I lost my first fight over a plastic whistle to a kid named Larry.

But learning how to make a fist helped me later in a fight against Nolan. We were all wrestling and he slammed me too hard against the mat. I got pissed and clocked his jaw. I lost again, but I got a couple good swings in before Brendan broke it up.

No one is breaking up Me-Crazy’s fight, and, well, Dumb Son of a Bitch asked for it. That’s what I’m calling him because you would have to be a dumb son of a bitch to pick a fight with Me-Crazy. It’s true: Me-Crazy bumped into the guy at the pizzeria and didn’t apologize. But Dumb Son of a Bitch shouldn’t have called him a “homeless waste of life” just because Me-Crazy has bad acne, yellow teeth, and smells like he hasn’t showered in over a week. To be fair, there’s no way Dumb Son of a Bitch could’ve known the word “homeless” is Me-Crazy’s only soft spot since he and his family have been evicted twice. But let this be a lesson to all never to fuck with someone who looks like they may not have a future outside prison.

So, Me-Crazy hit Dumb Son of a Bitch in the face with his own food tray and dragged him outside at the owner’s request.

Dumb Son of a Bitch’s nose is bleeding, not because of the tray… no, that’s because Me-Crazy slammed the poor guy’s face into a buy three slices, get one free drink sign.

“Someone should break this up,” Thomas says with an urgency I’ve never heard from any of my friends.

“He had it coming,” Skinny-Dave says. He’s bouncing around like he has to piss, and I would know because he has a habit of holding it in so he can just have one great piss later in a staircase of his choosing. Strange kid.

“No one deserves that,” Thomas says after Me-Crazy punches Dumb Son of a Bitch in his balls repeatedly.

I mean, he’s right.

Cars are at a stop now and honking their horns; some drivers get out to yell at Me-Crazy, others to watch the fight. Luckily for this guy, we’re close to a hospital because, shit, I’m positive there’s no way he’s ever had his ass handed to him like he has today. Me-Crazy tackles him against a parked car and before he can smash Dumb Son of a Bitch’s head into the window, we hear police sirens.

“Go! Go!”

“Run, fuckers!”

Even if we never touched Dumb Son of a Bitch, we also never tried to stop the fight. There’s no way in hell the cops will find Me-Crazy once he goes into hiding, and none of us want to find ourselves in the situation where we’re forced to either go to jail or rat out Me-Crazy’s identity, so we run. Thomas follows me, and he runs way faster than he did during our race three days ago, and I lead him down into the garage where we camp out behind a silver Mazda.

Thomas asks, “You do this a lot?”

“Not really.” It’s clear he looks down on us all fighting, so I avoid telling him how we sometimes run into other projects so the cops will look for the suspect — usually Me-Crazy — there instead of our block. “How many fights have you been in?”

“Just one,” Thomas says.

“How is that possible?” Even Baby Freddy has been in more than one fight and he’s a total pussy.

“I don’t go around picking fights.”

“I don’t either, but I have to fight back if someone comes at me. Right?” I’ve been exposed to fighting my entire life, and I never really stopped to think that there were alternatives to being laid out. But I like this idea that Thomas grew up never needing anyone to teach him how to make a fist, and I can’t help but feel like we’re all doing something wrong for always turning to ours.