Bang! by Sharon Flake Read Free Book Online Page B

blame you. Nobody blames you.”
    I look at my dad. She takes my hand and we go into the kitchen. “He don’t blame you either.” She takes off her apron and opens the oven to check on the pineapple upside-down cake she’s making. “You know you can always come and live with me, if the road’s too hard here.”
    I stick my fingers in the icing for the blueberry muffins she made earlier. “I’m all right.”
    She sits the hot pan on the counter. Takes a knife and cuts me a big slice of cake. “One day everything’s gonna be regular again.”
    How’s it gonna be regular, I think, if Jason’s never coming home?

Chapter 16
    THEY KEEP KILLING people for no real reason. A boy walks out his house and goes to the store for milk and Bang! He’s dead. A little girl, Jason’s age, is jumping double Dutch on her front porch and Bang! She’s gone too. The grown-ups do what they always do; nothing. Last week the preachers held hands with the politicians and walked around the corner seven times. Nothing changed. Two people was still dead. Everybody else is just plain scared.
    We talk about the killings in history class. Our teacher says they’re random: done for no real reason.
    I raise my hand. I tell her that when I was little, I would bury pennies in the dirt. Ain’t have no real reason. I just did it because I could, I guess. “Good analogy,” she says.
    Then Rock, a kid sitting across the room from me, says maybe some of the dead people got what they deserved. “People do stuff,” he says, standing up even though the teacher ain’t tell him to. “They step on your new sneakers or touch your four-hundred dollar jacket.” He’s rubbing his arm like he can feel the leather.
    Mrs. Seigner says he’s being ridiculous.
    “Naw. Naw!” he says, jumping around. “You be riding in a car and they cut you off.” He punches his hand. “Somebody might have to die for that one.”
    Cheryl Keller don’t raise her hand. She just starts talking. “Little kids been getting killed too.”
    “So?” Rock says. Everybody stares at me. “They mighta did something.” He smiles. “You know how bad little kids is these days.”
    My little brother Jason had a hundred little green soldiers. Every day he sat on the porch and played with them. That’s what he was doing when the bullets found him.
    Mrs. Seigner keeps cutting her big blue eyes at me.
    “Sit down,” she tells Rock. But he’s got more to say.
    “Mrs. Seigner, you don’t know, because you don’t live around here. Everybody’s got guns.” He crosses his arms and leans against the wall. “And everybody knows they gonna die young.”
    Mrs. Seigner is white, with long blond hair and too much jewelry for a neighborhood like this. She stops, and the big gold cross around her neck keeps moving. “That’s ridiculous.” She goes to the front of the class and tells us to take out our notebooks.
    Rock ignores her. “I’m just saying, what it matter if you die at seventeen or seven? You dead regardless.”
    I ain’t notice I was rocking till I hit my spine on the back of my seat. Ain’t notice I was cracking my fingers and stomping my right foot on the floor neither.
    Mrs. Seigner looks back at me. “Mann, are you all right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay, class. Let’s change the subject.”
    “Seven-year-olds can’t do nothing to make you kill them,” I say.
    She tells us again to drop the subject.
    I’m walking over to Rock, knocking on every desk I pass. I push him. “Tell me. What a little boy do to get shot?”
    Rock jumps up and pushes me back. Good, because now I got a reason to knock his head off.
    The teacher steps in between us. “Break it up.”
    “Maybe your brother wouldn’t shut up or something. Like you,” Rock says, pushing so I stumble.
    I pick up Britney Allen’s history book, but the teacher takes it from me. Rock’s on his tiptoes, reaching past her, trying to get to me. “After class,” he says, knowing full well he’s gonna try