“And if I tell you the truth and it turns out I did something bad?”
“Then we’ll arrest you.”
“And I won’t have to walk back out that door?”
“Not until you make bond.”
“You’ll be safe and sound in a nice comfy jail cell. We’ll even throw in a pillow.”
Rum takes a long drag and a longer exhale, staring up at the ceiling. Then he says, “He did run into the train, he did bounce off the wall. It knocked him out and he, like, laid on the platform all shaking and shit, and then he stopped shaking, so we thought he was dead.”
“But he wasn’t?”
He shakes his head. “I mean, we thought he was, but...”
They wait.
After a while, Bobby says, “Help us out with ‘but.’”
When the black guy banged his face into the train, they all laughed, George Dunbar the loudest. When the guy bounced back into the wall and then dropped to the platform like he’d been dropped from a helicopter, they laughed harder. But then, as the car doors opened, they noticed he was having this weird seizure, as if he’d been electrocuted. His heels hammered the ground, his arms flung out and back to his sides, his head rolled from side to side, and his eyes pinned themselves so far back into his skull they looked like egg whites.
The four of them stood over him so that it would be hard for anyone passing by to get a clear glimpse of what they were standing over.
The train left the station.
George said, “Fuck you looking at?” to one couple, and they hurried off the platform.
The black guy went still. A single strand of white foam trickled out of the side of his mouth. Blood leaked from his ears.
Rum noticed an outbound train departing from the opposite track and saw one guy walking away from it with his head down. Big guy, not one you’d want to fuck with, but he clearly knew the score around here — if you don’t see it, no one can ever make you say you did.
Suddenly, they were all screaming at one another. Rum can’t, to this day, tell you what exactly was said, but he knows George was worried about witnesses, and Brenda was worried about her parents finding out, and Jules was screaming — really screaming — about how this is their fault, they’re going to prison. Rum remembers pointing out that aside from kicking him, they hadn’t really hurt this guy. He hurt himself. Rum had beat up a couple kids in his life, and he knew the difference.
Brenda slapped Jules to get her to stop screaming. Then George called Rum a fucking retard and said, “Let’s book.”
