DON’T NOBODY believe nothing these days which is why I haven’t told nobody the story I’m about to tell you. And truth is, you probably ain’t gon’ believe it either gon’ think I’m lying or I’m losing it, but I’m telling you, this story is true. It happened to me. Really. It did. It so did.
MY NAME IS Will. William. William Holloman. But to my friends and people who know me know me, just Will. So call me Will, because after I tell you what I’m about to tell you you’ll either want to be my friend or not want to be my friend at all. Either way, you’ll know me know me.
I’M ONLY WILLIAM to my mother and my brother, Shawn, whenever he was trying to be funny. Now I’m wishing I would’ve laughed more at his dumb jokes because the day before yesterday, Shawn was shot and killed.
I DON’T KNOW YOU, don’t know your last name, if you got brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers or cousins that be like brothers and sisters or aunties or uncles that be like mothers and fathers, but if the blood inside you is on the inside of someone else, you never want to see it on the outside of them.
THE SADNESS is just so hard to explain. Imagine waking up and someone, a stranger, got you strapped down, got pliers shoved into your mouth, gripping a tooth somewhere in the back, one of the big important ones, and rips it out. Imagine the knocking in your head, the pressure pushing through your ears, the blood pooling. But the worst part, the absolute worst part, is the constant slipping of your tongue into the new empty space, where you know a tooth supposed to be but ain’t no more.
IT’S SO HARD TO SAY, Shawn’s dead. Shawn’s dead. Shawn’s dead. So strange to say. So sad. But I guess not surprising, which I guess is even stranger, and even sadder.
THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY me and my friend Tony were outside talking about whether or not we’d get any taller now that we were fifteen. When Shawn was fifteen he grew a foot, maybe a foot and a half. That’s when he gave me all the clothes he couldn’t fit. Tony kept saying he hoped he grew because even though he was the best ballplayer around here our age, he was also the shortest. And everybody knows you can’t go all the way when you’re that small unless you can really jump. Like fly.