Truth is I don\u2019t know if he was <\/em>a friend.<\/p>\n There\u2019s this photo of the homeboys at a BBQ at the Santa Fe Reservoir: the white sun is shining, the grills are smoking, and there\u2019s all this good food out and coolers of Coronas, and Lumpy says, Smile! and all of us repping in gray and black, the kids too, get together to throw up the hood and pose for it.<\/p>\n But him.<\/p>\n He\u2019s still sitting back there by the benches, his rotten arm tucked up in that rotten sling, and the one that didn’t\u00a0get hit reaching past all <\/em>our plates to snag that last drumstick rattling in the bowl.<\/p>\n Look. I\u2019m not talking about him snatching that chicken. That chicken is good. But check his face though.<\/p>\n While we\u2019re all happy and shit?<\/p>\n Only he\u2019d<\/em> look like that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It all comes out, no matter how many years later.<\/p>\n He hated that photo, but it was telling the truth.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nobody said, Listen up, but when it was time to drop Dougie, we all knew. He\u2019d been hanging around too much. He\u2019d gotten too comfortable, laughing at his own jokes and arching his too-thin eyebrows.<\/p>\n He had to go.<\/p>\n We had him meet us at the park on 2nd, by the benches, where we silently gathered. Little Tim had swapped out his fat Adidas laces for skinny black ones. He tightened them carefully. We didn\u2019t bother dressing up or putting on monster masks. We were 13. We were what we were.<\/p>\n We\u2019d told him the plan for Halloween\u2014kicking pumpkins and snatching candy sacks from the kids\u2014so he arrived ready for pranks, rocking a lit-up devil horns headband, and saying Boo! and laughing: at us.<\/em><\/p>\n This only confirmed our opinion of him.<\/p>\n At the first house, he ran up the porch steps before anyone and booted that pumpkin into pulp and shrapnel, always so eager, trying so hard.<\/p>\n While we walked away from the light, Little Tim said, Ay. You got pumpkin on my pants. Dougie was still laughing. Sorry. You see that though? That pumpkin fucking blew up.<\/p>\n Yeah, said Little Tim, blew up all over my pants.<\/p>\n Then he hit Dougie in the mouth.<\/p>\n Hey what the hell?<\/p>\n Timmy hit him again, and we circled the two, to keep the fight fair, we said. But Dougie didn\u2019t fight very hard. We didn\u2019t have to do anything. He dropped on his own.<\/p>\n We stepped away from him curled on the sidewalk: a spit-out thing. He didn\u2019t say, Fuck you guys, or ask why. He seemed to know. He must\u2019ve been heartbroken.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These days, he works in sales. In his Facebook photos, he\u2019s always in suits, always smiling. In the end, he had turned out OK it seems, better than we had\u2014just as we\u2019d suspected he might all along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It all comes out, no matter how many years later. He hated that photo, but it was telling the truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1589,1220,2621,764,1588,347,361,1590],"class_list":["post-14456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-asian-gangs","tag-asian-american","tag-fiction","tag-friendship","tag-gang","tag-lost-innocence","tag-masculinity","tag-teenagers","writer-steve-chang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14456"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14642,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456\/revisions\/14642"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Halloween, 1992<\/h5>\n