Chapter 1 Chapter 1 AUGUST 11, 2016 It''s school so it gets crowded, there''s noise. But even when it''s loud, it''s a healthy loud, people wanting to express their opinions. It''s a peaceful loud. --Tio Tio A young man wearing a navy blue collared shirt and khaki slacks walked north along Juniper Street. A light backpack was strapped tight to both shoulders, and he tucked a battered, much-decaled skateboard between his forearm and hip. His hair was carefully treated to form a slick vertical wave off his forehead, and he walked with a slight limp gained from a skate park crash the previous afternoon, his last of summer. He''d lost purchase on his board during that weightless instant between upward momentum and downward fall; he''d also heard a popping sound within his knee upon contact with the asphalt but thought little of it. His skin was bronzed by both his Mexican heritage and the myriad afternoons spent skating over the past June and July, and his body was lean and strong.
At the corner of Juniper and 103rd Street, he tossed his board to the sidewalk pavement and jumped on in a fluid, propulsive motion. At seven thirty in the morning, the sun already blasted down at a steep slant and he quickly sweat through his shirt. The summer''s heat wave felt fixed and eternal. Gingerly, he pushed himself from his family''s current bungalow, past the bowed stucco apartment complex they used to live in and the lot where at another point they''d occupied a trailer home for a time (Tio had spent his entire life on Juniper Street). He proceeded in a stairway pattern alternately left and right, west and north, along busy Compton thoroughfares and quiet residential streets, passing the elementary school at Ninety-Second and Grape Street, then the tall electric towers standing over dense weed entanglements on Fir Avenue, the Rio Grande Market on Eighty-Eighth, the Church of God in Christ on Milner. Cars made hard right-on-red turns in front of him despite the solid white walk signs giving him the right of way. Soon he met the massive concrete anchors of the blue Metro line connecting downtown Los Angeles with Long Beach along Graham Avenue, and he made his way due north, parallel to the tracks, toward school. Thousands of young men and women were making their way around the South LA gridwork of streets.
Many, like Tio upon his skateboard, wore muted colors beneath their backpacks: navy and khaki, maroon and khaki, white and khaki. They were headed to school as well, usually moving in small groups for reasons pertaining to both companionship and safety. Others on the street wore baggy shorts and sleeveless undershirts, brightly colored baseball caps tipped at odd angles, and multiple tattoos to signify allegiances or aesthetics or both. If those guys were out this early, it meant they''d probably been out all night--working--and were on their way home to sleep, too exhausted to bother anyone. Traveling alone and by skateboard put Tio in an inherently vulnerable position in this stretch bridging the neighborhoods of Compton (where Tio lived), Lynwood, Watts, South Gate, and Florence-Graham (where Tio went to school). The in-between spaces made the dominant gang entities harder to ascertain. But he''d been getting to school this way since fifth grade, after he bought his first used board, much preferring the wobbly platform to the cramped, loud buses lumbering through Los Angeles traffic. Aside from witnessing a man take a fatal shot to the head from a car window when he was eleven (five steps away with a female friend, Tio had crouched and pushed her against the fence with his lanky fifth-grade body shielding her, relieved when the squeal of tires signaled the shooter''s flight), he''d never had any trouble beyond the occasional empty taunt.
Schoolboys were mostly left alone. Even the most menacing types tended to be respectful if not admiring of the aspiration required for young people--mostly poor, mostly black or brown--to trek to school early each morning. If any sketchy person approached, Tio just said, humbly, "I don''t bang," and kept rolling. Police had halted him now and again, as skateboarders were generally associated with drugs and truancy. Usually they would just ask if he''d seen any suspicious activity or tell him to stay in school, stay away from drugs and bad sorts, stay off the street after a certain hour: all the tired commands he''d been hearing since toddlerhood. He figured that throughout the course of his youth, ninety-nine out of one hundred transits had been uneventful, so Tio always moved casually in the context of the ninety-nine while maintaining a modest alertness for the prospect of the one. At the Firestone Boulevard Metro station, dozens of teenagers wearing the same navy/khaki binary streamed down the steps from the elevated train stop, past a colorful mosaic wall depicting a human body in prayer. Tio pivoted through and around them across the intersection, sometimes playfully tapping the head of someone he knew.
He rolled past a long row of small furniture restoration and auto repair storefronts, really just one-car garages open onto the street, facing the tracks, replete with detritus. A right on Eighty-Third Street followed by a quick left on Beach Street brought him to the front gate of the one-story, modern building that was Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School. Students who''d already arrived kicked soccer balls or loitered in the narrow, paved space between the fence and the school''s glass door, or splayed themselves along the row of white picnic tables occupying the grassy side lot. The principal, an unflappable white man in his late thirties, gently ushered students inside with his kind, calm demeanor in advance of the shrill PA announcement indicating five minutes before first period. Beach was a relatively quiet street, residential on the east side with single-story stucco bungalows on small plots sporting citrus trees, laundry lines, and the occasional fuselage of a decades-old car resting dormant. On the west side, where the school occupied the southern corner, stood a row of tall warehouses guarded by bent gates. A collarless Jack Russell wandered in and out of the driveways. The train tracks heading to and from downtown Los Angeles, four miles north, cut a graveled swath a few meters behind the school grounds.
Tio kicked up his board and limped inside. Ahead, he recognized a thicket of hair resembling an unmade bed atop a tall, wide, shambling frame. He yelled, "Yo, Luis, you got fleas in that thing, bro!" Luis turned around, gave him the finger, and replied, "You know that because you can hear them talking?" This dig was in reference to Tio''s large, protruding ears. He had heard variations of the same joke since elementary school, including from elementary school teachers, and found them uncreative. He didn''t even bother with a rejoinder. "Why you limping, bro?" Luis asked with more humor than concern. "Ah, I fucked up my knee. Like maybe I severed some nerves or something? It''s fine.
" "People get surgery for that." "Nah, nah, I''m good." Carlos "Shut the fuck up," Carlos whispered to Tio in AP Calculus class later that morning. "I''m sorry, man. I just can''t handle that it''s August eleventh," Tio replied, exasperated. "They can''t even say school starts in mid-August anymore. This is early August." He shook his head in unaffected grief, big ears rotating side to side.
"I''m just not down with this." Two hours into the year, they''d all gained a foreknowledge that the novelty of new classes and teachers would stale by the end of the week, and thirty-five more weeks would follow, and Tio could not help but express his dismay--his exhaustion with being seventeen--vocally. (Tio knew this wasn''t a charming quality of his.) "Just chill," Carlos said. He was slight in stature, five foot four with narrow shoulders. The growth spurts that had elevated Tio and Luis and so many others toward six feet and beyond since ninth grade had passed him over, and presumably wouldn''t loop back around since he was already taller than his father. His voice was slight as well, though he deployed it with authority: "Pay attention." "You''re just as depressed as me, admit it.
" Carlos paused before saying, a little mournfully, "Yeah, I am." Tio kept muttering jokes under his breath, trying to make proximate kids laugh; Carlos knew that this was what Tio did when the material or something else caused him stress. He elbowed Tio gently and told him to shut up, again. "But we''re talking about rate of volume change in a can of soda--what does that have to do with anything in life?" "That''s a good point." "Right?" "But you still gotta quit fucking around." "What would you do without me fucking around?" Tio asked. "You''d be so neglected and sad." "And I would have finished this problem set fifteen minutes ago.
" A week earlier, Carlos had been walking around the familiar streets of his Compton neighborhood with his older brother, Jose. They were wearing street clothes, eating fast food, in no rush to be anywhere or do anything, lamenting the end of summer while talking about girls and music, the school year ahead and the things each needed to organize in order to be semiprepared. His brother''s company had always had a grounding effect on him, and so in their light talk he could harbor a sense of confident equanimity with the moment he inhabited, this quite lazy and aimless moment on the precipice of the most consequential stretch of school--and hence life--thus far. He had a premonition that elements would align o.