A couple of my friends were working on an AP science project—they’d made an enzyme they thought would break down polyethylene at room temperature—and I’d promised that I’d help them after school. Walking home past Verdugo Park, I ran into some more friends sitting in the grass and chatting, so I sat with them, watching the kids on the playground and the dog-walkers and the swordfighting class boffing each other with foam swords, and hours slipped by.
By the time I headed home, the sun was low and the day was finally starting to cool off. I remembered that I’d forgotten to pull the blinds before going out and imagined how hot and stuffy the house would be. Maybe Gramps had gotten back early enough to lower them. Otherwise, I could lie in the backyard in my hammock and do some reading while I waited for the house to air out some.
The blinds were drawn. I went in through the back door and dropped my bag on my bed, stripped off my tee and pulled on a fresh one, and headed to the kitchen for a snack.
“Gramps?”
He didn’t answer, which I figured meant that he was playing his podcasts through his hearing aids. They were supposed to be smart enough to pass speech through, but they struggled with people shouting from other rooms. I grabbed some more iced coffee and went into the living room.
Gramps was sitting in his spot on the old sofa, staring out the window. “Gramps?”
He didn’t look around. I moved into his line of sight and then drew back. His face was set in a mask of rage I hadn’t seen since I was a kid and came to live with him, the face he’d make before he’d hit me. He hadn’t hit me in a long time, not since he’d raised a bruise where one of my middle-school teachers could see it and she’d called CPS on him. They’d made him do a month of mandatory anger-management classes.
“Gramps?” I reached for him but didn’t touch him. He was quivering.
He fixed his gaze on me. Glared.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
He stood up. He was shorter than me now, and couldn’t quite straighten up, but it still felt like he was towering over me. “Kid, you know exactly what’s wrong, and don’t pretend otherwise.”
Oh.
“Gramps, he could have killed me. I saved his life. I know he’s a friend of yours—”
“Shut the fuck up about that, kid. Don’t talk about my friends. Don’t talk about who I know and who I don’t know. You know what that dumb asshole Mike Kennedy is up against? Forty years. Seven felony counts. Most of ’em to do with you: kidnapping, assault, attempted murder. Death penalty shit. Don’t think that the DA isn’t going to use that, the feds have got a hard-on for anyone who doesn’t toe the line on their Green New Deal bullshit. They’re gonna tell him that either he testifies against his friends or he’ll get a lethal injection. Kennedy’s no genius, either. He’ll cave. You just watch.”
“Gramps—”
“Shut up, I said. You think saying my name on your viral video is gonna help anything. Shit, kid, why didn’t you just turn me in yourself?”
“Come on, Gramps. I didn’t plan this, Mike did.” I wanted so badly to leave, but Gramps was between me and the door. “Tell you what, let’s go visit him. They’ll let him have visitors in lockup, right?”
Gramps sagged back down into his chair. “Kennedy’s not in lockup. They let him go an hour ago.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that sounds good, right?”
He shook his head and gave me a disgusted look. “No, kid, that doesn’t sound good. That sounds like he ratted everyone out already. In which case he’s a fucking dead man.”
I took a deep breath. Gramps was clearly on the brink of losing it altogether and telling him he was being overly dramatic would definitely push him right over the edge. “If that’s true, then maybe you should talk to your other friends, or maybe him—”
“Just shut up, okay? Don’t talk about shit you don’t and can’t understand. Look, if Kennedy sold out his friends, then he’s got what’s coming to him and besides, there isn’t a damned thing in the world I could do to stop it. But what’s more likely is that he didn’t say a word, but they’ve put him on the street so that people get the impression that maybe he did, and now he’s in fear for his life and the only way to save his skin is to run back to the station house and start talking. It wouldn’t be the first time they tried that stunt. And the fact is, it doesn’t matter which one it is because he’s gonna get shut up before he can do that, because everyone understands what’s going on here and what’s at stake. So me calling that sad sack now would just make me the last person who spoke to the victim before he turned up dead.”
“That’s terrible.”
“No, kid, that’s life. What’s terrible is that my own grandson is involved in this ugly stupid mess, and that every dumbass on the internet is trading clips with my name in them, doxing me, associating me with this ridiculous garbage.”
Now I was starting to get mad. “I didn’t do it on purpose, you know. Your friend threatened to kill me. I didn’t tell him to get up on that roof or fill his Super Soaker with hydrochloric acid.”
“Yeah, you didn’t, that’s true.” He picked up a beer from the table next to him, finished the last swallow, set it down. “You didn’t. But you were and you did and now—” He shook his empty beer. “Ah, shit. Brooks, listen, you know that my friends are okay, but some of their friends…”
I knew. I’d sometimes spot Gramps’s friends marching with the Maga Club groups, carrying ugly signs, conspiracies and racism and “demographics are destiny.” Or set up with a table on Magnolia on Food Truck Friday, showing videos about “the great replacement” and “socialist tyranny.”
“I know who you mean.”
“None of ’em ever liked you. They didn’t like your father even before he went to Canada with that woman. When he did, well, that sealed it for ’em. To leave America and go work for the socialists? Kid, it’s a good thing he never tried to come back here, I’ll tell you that much. Far as they’re concerned, the only good thing that rabbit flu did was kill a bunch of foreign commies, agitators, traitors, and climate bed wetters. By which they mean your father and mother. And by extension, that means you. Your sex thing doesn’t help either—”
My head filled with that buzzing sound I heard whenever Gramps tried to talk to me about sexuality. The fact that I wouldn’t call myself straight made him crazy. The fact that I wouldn’t say “gay” or “bi” or any of those old-fashioned terms made him absolutely bugfuck. “Queer” was okay with me, or “pan,” but honestly, who the fuck cared? Why would my grandfather need to know which people I wanted to fuck and which people I did fuck? I’d explained this to him calmly and I’d had shouting matches with him about it. My other friends had problems with this stuff, sure, but their parents were able to at least pretend to understand. Gramps was a generation older and not only didn’t he understand, he didn’t want to. “Just pick one, kid,” is what he’d say, and then I’d overhear him saying worse to his friends when they took over the kitchen to play poker or the living room to watch a game.
“Jesus, Gramps”—that buzzing sound was blood, of course, coursing in my ears as my rage built and built—“would you just shut up about that bullshit? I don’t care what your asshole friends want. In case you didn’t notice, one of them nearly murdered me last night—”
“Shut. Up.” Loud, in that boss voice he used when he was getting everyone else to listen to him, whether it was on a jobsite or during an argument over cards. “Yeah, one of my friends just about murdered you last night, but he didn’t, did he? You know why? Because of me. Because of who I am in this community. Our name, Palazzo, it goes back a long way in this town. We’re Lockheed originals, thanks to my own dad. That counts for something. You’re safe because you’re my grandson, that’s what I’m trying to explain to you. But it’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. You’re not untouchable.”
“Thanks for letting me know.” I hated it when Gramps acted like he was in the Mafia because he and his friends were the kinds of assholes who periodically got drunk or disturbed enough to commit some act of idiotic vandalism.
“Kid—” he started. I left.
* * *
Look, I had weeks to go until graduation. I had a life to live. I had stuff to do.
Gramps and his friends would stew and shout. Idiots on the internet would make dank memes out of Mike Kennedy and deepfake him into a million videos, turn him into a main character whose image would be around long after he left the world.
I just had to keep my head down, collect my diploma, and get the hell out of Burbank. I’d already been provisionally accepted for a Blue Helmets AmeriCorps spot down in San Juan Capistrano, helping to rebuild the city’s lower half a mile inland, up in the hills. I was going to do a year of that and then go to college: I had applications in to UCLA, Portland State (they had a really good refugee tech undergrad program), and the University of Waterloo, where my mom did her undergrad in environmental science. They’d let me declare my major in my second year, so I could take a wide variety of courses before settling on something, and if anything, Canada’s free college was even more generous than the UC system or Portland’s, with a subsidy for dorms and meals.
To tell the truth, I’d be glad to go. My senior year hadn’t been anything like I’d anticipated. Gramps’s health had gotten a lot worse the previous summer and his shitty sexist and racist remarks chased away any home help worker Burbank sent over within a week or two, so I’d been trying to keep my grades up while picking up after Gramps, getting him to take his meds, washing his sheets and cleaning his toilet—not to mention making sure he made his doctor’s appointments and even bringing him into the office a couple of times a month for the kind of exams you couldn’t do by telemedicine.
I wasn’t sure what Gramps would do without me to take care of him, but at that point, I was running out of fucks to give. Let his asshole Maga Club buddies look after him, or maybe Gramps could figure out how not to offend everyone that came over to wipe his ass and do his laundry. He was—as he was fond of pointing out to me—a grown-ass adult, and this was his house, and he was in charge. So let him be in charge.
I put myself to bed stewing about all of this, thinking of San Juan Capistrano. Some of my older friends had graduated the previous years and had gone down there and I’d followed their relocation of the old mission on their feeds. It looked like hot, sweaty, rewarding work, the kind of thing where you could really measure your progress.
* * *
For the second night in a row, I was woken up at 2 a.m. This time, it wasn’t my screen, it was Gramps, who’d stumped into my room with his cane, flipped my lights to full on, and started shaking me and calling out, “Get up, kid, get up!”
“I’m up,” I said, getting up on my elbows and squinting at him. He was shaking, and he reeked—of both booze and BO, and I felt a flash of guilt for not getting him in the bath that day.
“God dammit,” he said, and staggered a bit. I leapt out of bed, pulling the sheets off with me, and steadied him at the elbow.
“Calm down, okay? What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right. No one is all right. Fuck all right and fuck you.” I’d had Gramps tested for early dementia the previous year, by showing his doctor videos of moments like these. The doc had run a battery of tests before pronouncing, “Your grandfather isn’t senile, he’s just ornery.” Which was undeniable, and also pissed me the hell off. “Ornery” was a polite word for “asshole.” What the doc was telling me was that Gramps didn’t have to be cruel. He was cruel by choice.
I untangled myself from the sheets and piled them on the bed. “What is it?”
“It’s Mike Kennedy, that asshole. Someone shot him.”
“What?”
He shoved his giant screen into my hands. I tapped the video window. It was from the POV of a car cam, that weird fish-eye view of a self-driving car, split-screen with the passenger in the front seat, and it was Mike Kennedy, looking even worse than Gramps, bloodshot and trembling, with that under-chin camera angle that makes everyone look like they’re half dead.
I tried to watch both halves. There was Kennedy, whispering something. There was the cul-de-sac he was parked in, false-lit with IR from the cameras. The timestamp was 1:17. Less than an hour before.
Then the external image flickered for a second and resolved itself into a man, who phased in and out. He was wearing a ghillie suit like the one Kennedy had worn on the roof, covered in telltale CV dazzle stripes, designed to exploit defects in the computer vision system. You had to wear a different specific pattern for every algorithm, but if you got the right matchup, the computer would simply not see you. The man was flickering into existence when his posture crumpled up the ghillie suit and made the pattern stop working, then out again when he straightened up.
He straightened and disappeared and Mike Kennedy’s eyes widened as he noticed the man for the first time—computer dazzle worked on computers, not humans—and he started to say something and then a round hole appeared in his forehead, his head snapping back against the headrest, then careening forward. The flickering phantom appeared again as the man in the ghillie suit turned and disappeared.
I dropped the tablet to my bed.
“Jesus Christ, Gramps, I didn’t need to see that snuff movie—”
He tried to smack me then. I was ready for it. I was faster. I stepped out of his reach. I was shaking, too.
“You don’t get to hit me anymore old man. Never again, you hear me?”
He was purpling now, and a decade’s worth of fleeing and defusing his rages rose in me, made me want to apologize. After all, I rationalized, he’d just seen a friend murdered.
But I’d seen that friend murdered, too, videobombed with a snuff flick at 2 a.m. without warning or consent. It was a traumatizing, selfish, asshole move. I’d be watching that movie on the backs of my eyelids for years to come. And the friend who’d died? He’d been ready to kill me. Gramps had no right. He was a grown-ass adult. He had no right.
“Listen to me, you little shit, you think you can live under my roof, take my charity, and talk to me like that? Now? With all the shit that I’m going through? No sir. No. Get out, you little bastard, get out now. Get out before I kick your goddamned teeth in.” He was vibrating with rage now, literally, actually shaking so hard his wispy hair swished back and forth across his forehead.
I didn’t say another word. I picked up some jeans and a jacket, put a pair of socks in a jacket pocket, and jammed my feet into a pair of sneakers without bothering to unlace them. I shouldered past him—still vibrating, stinking even worse—and banged out the back door and stomped through the nighttime streets.
My feet automatically took me up to Verdugo, and then across the empty road. I turned toward school—as I did every morning—and autopiloted in that direction. By the time I reached the Verdugo Aquatic Facility I had calmed down enough to realize that there was no reason to go to school at two thirty in the morning, so I stopped and headed for the playground in the park behind the pool. I sat down on a bench and kicked my shoes off and shook out the playground sand, pulled out my socks and put them on, then put my shoes back on properly. I was still furious, but now I could think straight and my hands weren’t shaking.
Gramps and I hadn’t had a blowup like that in years, mostly—okay, entirely—because I’d backed down every time we’d been headed in that direction. I wasn’t in any mood to back down. Not ever, to be fully honest.
“Hey,” someone hissed from beneath the climber and I nearly jumped out of my seat.
“Jesus,” I said, and it came out as a loud bark that echoed down the empty street.
“Shhh,” the voice said. “What are you doing out there, man?”
“I’m sitting on a bench. What are you doing in there?”
“Wait, Brooks?”
“Yeah. Who’s that?”
A person climbed out of the climber, then another. As they drew closer to me, I recognized them as Dave and Armen, two goofballs I’d known since grade school, and I knew exactly what they were doing.
“Are you assholes out here in the middle of the night tripping balls?” I couldn’t help but smile, though. It was so them.
“No,” Armen said, and then Dave spoiled it by dissolving into giggles.
“Just some shrooms,” Dave said. They were everywhere, whenever the rains came, all over the hills and even on the verges between the sidewalks and the roads, popping up faster than the city could send out workers to pick them and destroy them (or, rumor had it, to dry them out and offer them for sale, if you knew the right person).
“On a school night?”
“Yeah. Only a month to graduation. What’s it matter anymore? The dire is cast.”
“The die,” I said.
“Die,” Armen said. “How morbid.” They both dissolved into more giggles. These guys. I mean, they were high af, but they had been like this since the third grade. They were silly, and not all that smart, but they were nice, never mean to anyone, never on anyone’s side in any kind of feud, even the ones where everyone took a side. Armen and Dave were like goofball Switzerland, neutral and always in a corner making each other laugh.
To be honest, they were exactly the guys I needed to see at that moment.
“Got any more shrooms?”
* * *
We stayed up all night tripping balls and eating more mushrooms whenever we started to come down. About three thirty in the morning Armen suggested we walk up to Brace Canyon, which is a long-ass walk, but Armen insisted that the sunrises from Brace were incredible so that’s where we went.
It turned out he was wrong. It was sunsets that were great from Brace Canyon. The sun rose behind us, staining all of Burbank—the airport, downtown, Magnolia Park—pink as it crested the hill behind us, and Armen was embarrassed to have gotten it backward and tried to convince us to climb farther up, try to get over the hill and see the sun rise on the other side before it was fully up, but Dave pointed out that the last time they tried that they got stuck because of the monster houses on top of the hills with high fences, and then I pointed out that he was talking about a thirty-minute run and the sun would be over the hill in five minutes, and then Armen pointed out that we’d been tripping and walking all night and we were all tired, so we lay in the grass and watched the city brighten by degrees.
Then it started to get hot, and we were coming down and dozed a little, but then the mosquitoes came out, and then the dog-walkers, and so it was time to drag our asses back down out of the hills.
They walked with me down to Glenoaks, then we split up. There was no way I was going to school that day. I knew the guidance office would give me an excused absence after my traumatic events and all, so I bumbled home slowly, my legs filled with lead, my eyelids drooping. People passing by on bikes or on foot gave me a wide berth that let me know I was giving off walk-of-shame vibes.
I got home and paused in front of the back door. Did I dare go inside? Would Gramps still be awake and “ornery”? Would he be out with his Maga Club buddies planning Mike Kennedy’s wake? Or would they be in the living room, ready to give my ass the beatdown Gramps could no longer administer himself?
Hell with it. I was so tired I was about to fall over. If Gramps hadn’t calmed down by now, then he and I could just have another fight. I’d let him win. Why not? I was tired and graduation was weeks away.
I let myself in. The house was spooky-quiet. What was spooky about quiet? It was always quiet when Gramps was out, or when he had his headphones on to listen to his podcasts, while he played large-format solitaire on his huge tablet.
But it was spooky. I think I must have known. Otherwise, why wouldn’t I have just gone to bed? I mean, I was really tired.
I didn’t go to bed. I called out “Gramps?” as I moved from room to room, and I saw that his keys were on the kitchen table and that his shoes were by the door, so I went to his bedroom and whispered “Gramps?” and knocked softly, as though he was asleep.
But I think I knew, even before I opened the door. Otherwise, why would I have peeled back the covers? Why would I have reached out to touch the exposed skin of his neck, felt how cold it was? Why would I have turned him over, boneless and limp, and put my ear next to his mouth, knowing there would be no breath sounds?
I called the nonemergency number and told them my grandfather was dead, that he had died in his sleep, and then I filled the biggest glass in the kitchen with cold brew. I was going to need to stay awake for a while yet.