The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason Reynolds Read Free Book Online

in the bodega. He’s over on Albany, standing outside the liquor store with that fool Cork.”
    Cork was the youngest Ray brother. He was the brother who they let help out whenever he was around, which was almost never, mainly because he was always staggering up and down the street with a wet spot in the front of his pants. To say it plainly, dude was a straight-up drunk. I don’t know what his real name is, but everybody calls him Cork because he drinks a whole lot of wine, and because his face looks like a cork with all the holes in it, which my mother said comes from too much liquor. I knew that if my father was hanging out with him, nothing good was happening.
    â€œWell, I’m still gonna save it for him,” I said, now a little mad.
    We sat for a while longer watching ladies push carts filled with groceries and laundry, and kids bopping down the sidewalk talking loud, kicking whatever wasn’t nailed down, until suddenly the streetlights started to buzz and flicker.
    â€œMan, I’m gonna go ’head home,” Chris said. “You know I don’t play with the night.”
    Chris almost never stayed out past dark. Even though he was old enough to hang out later, he still went in when the streetlights came on, just like when we were kids. Not because he had to, but because when it got dark, the stoop in front of his building became a base for those dudes I talked about before, who loved to give anyone and everyone a hard time. Just like those losers in Cluck Bucket—looking for a target, somebody to mess with.
    There was this time when me and Chris were like seven, and my folks were trying to have some alone time for Valentine’s Day. Chris’s mother said she’d babysit me. My dad walked me down there, and when we got to the building, all the guys stood out front, purposely blocking the door.
    â€œExcuse me,” my father said to the one standing directly in the way.
    No response. Just flat out ignored him.
    â€œExcuse me!” This time my father said it louder and got real close to the guy—the dude was just a teenager, but when you’re seven, teens seem way older and much bigger. The kid had no choice but to move or my father was going to, as he put it, “bring Baltimore out on his ass.”
    Though everyone was always afraid of what was happening outside of Chris’s building, that night me and Chris learned thatmaybe we oughta be scared of what goes on inside , too. That was also the night, by the way, that Chris and I went from good friends to best friends. Here’s what happened. Chris and I were lying in the bed laughing like crazy. We were lying head to foot, like we always did, but that night Chris’s feet smelled like he’d been soaking them in toilet water. They were so bad we couldn’t stop laughing about it, fake gagging and pretending we were going to puke up his mom’s way-too-tomatoey spaghetti. (Now that I think about it, it just needed some garlic powder.)
    Despite covering my face to protect it from Chris’s toxic toes, and laughing like a maniac, I heard something—a bunch of noise suddenly coming from outside. But not outside the building, just outside Chris’s apartment door. In the hallway. A couple was arguing. The man was doing most of the yelling, even though we couldn’t really make out anything he was saying.
    Chris and I stopped joking and lay still, listening through the walls. I really wanted to get up and peek out the front door to see if I could hear better or even see something. I don’t know why. I guess I was just nosy, especially since this kind of drama never really went on in my house, where nobody lived but me and my parents. But in Chris’s building there were tons of families, and most he didn’t even know. He knew the lady across the hall, Ms. Rogers; the old man next door, on the left, with the barking dog and the weed habit, Mr. Staton; and the girl on the