Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America. Ibi Zoboi
found myself in a long, darkly tiled hallway that ran the length of the restaurant. So familiar with the mall layout, I knew if I punched through the outer wall to my right, I could snatch a Father’s Day card for my pops off a shelf in Hallmark. Beyond that, a hobby shop. Crafts, and paint, and artist papers. Beyond that, my jam, GameStop.
Whenever I wrote stuff about the mall, it always struck me how all of it, all of us, were connected even if we didn’t know it—or didn’t want it (looking at you, Far East Emporium). A bunch of stores, and people, and reasons for being there underneath the big Briarwood umbrella.
Pushing into the men’s room, I tugged my phone from my back pocket, intending to jot that down, and … what the entire hell?
Inside the harshly lit bathroom was a party separate from the soft-open celebration.
A couple of infamous weed heads from the Regal 14 Theater puffed a blunt right under the smoke detector that now dangled, deactivated, from a single wire. Beyond them, Amir, DeMarcus, and other guys I knew from the mall grind. DeMarcus threw a pair of dice in a way I’d never seen dice thrown—overhand, flick of the wrist, something like a Navy SEAL tossing a knife at his enemy’s throat. The dice bounced off the wall beneath the plastic folding baby-changing table, settled on a piece of cardboard in the floor.
“Seven!” DeMarcus whooped over the collective groans of those on the losing end of that bet. He snatched his winnings, a loose grouping of fives and ones.
“How long y’all been shooting craps?” I asked.
Amir said, “You mean how long we been winning? Awhile. How else we gonna afford this expensive-ass food. How things go with Dayshia?”
Before I could answer, Cologne Kiosk Cameron exited the big end stall reserved for disabled customers. “Great!” He smiled, his spit-slick canines like fangs. “I think me and her really hit it off.”
My head whipped toward the entrance. I’d left him in the booth. He hadn’t passed me in the corridor. Where’d he come from? How?
If he wasn’t the devil, he was certainly in the training program.
The bathroom was oversize. Mr. Beneton must’ve expected a lot of drink sales, thus, a lot of pee. I used the ninth urinal in the far corner, away from the dice game and the funk permeating the air. Not the usual bathroom funk. A toxic mix of colognes Cameron was getting dudes to sample in the accessible stall, his new makeshift kiosk.
“I’m telling you,” Cameron droned, sales pitch cranked, “people sleep on Trump’s Empire cologne, but a true connoisseur will recognize those velvety oaken notes as the literal smell of money. You got a lady you interested in, this be like a hostile takeover of her nose.”
The telltale bottle spritz sounded like a cobra spitting venom. Jarrel from the Books-A-Million burst from the stall, clawing at his eyes and throat.
Cameron followed, grinning, holding the Empire bottle like a smoking gun. “My bad, homey. Guess the nozzle was turned the wrong way.”
At the sink, Jarrel thrust his whole head beneath the faucet, frantically waving his hand near the motion sensor, with no luck triggering the water. He convulsed over to the next sink. That motion sensor didn’t work either. He went for the next.
I finished at the urinal and washed my hands. Cameron watched me in the mirror.
He approached the movie theater guys, their blunt burned to the midpoint. “Let me hit that.”
High and generous, they passed the stubby cigar to Cameron, who took two puffs and never gave it back. “I’ll hook you up with something that’ll cover the smell so you don’t get in trouble with your boss. Be a shame if he caught a whiff of this, right?”
Neither of the theater workers seemed to love involuntary cologne-for-ganja barter, but Cameron moved on before they objected. “Shawn”—he jerked his head toward the stall—“come here.”
“For what?”
“You want to see this.” He held the accessible stall door wide, blunt dangling on his lip, its tip fiery red.
Everyone else continued their activities—craps, rolling a new blunt, eye-flushing—as if in a different reality from me and Cameron. I entered his domain cautiously.
Inside the stall, resting in the corner farthest from the toilet, was an open bag of assorted cologne bottles. Various shapes, sizes, colors, and levels of fullness. Label-gun stickers reading “Sample Not For Resale” were affixed to at least half of them.
Cameron rummaged through the bag, his goods clinking together. Streamers of earthy smoke snaked from his nostrils. He produced a white bottle adorned with a green crocodile from the stash. “She’s a Lacoste Blanc lady. I can tell.”
Removing the cap, he angled the bottle away and triggered a fine mist that drizzled over the U-shaped toilet seat in a citrus burst. “Smell that? That’s you getting what you want. Only cost you twenty bucks. Steep discount, my dude.”
Was twenty bucks for a stolen half bottle of cologne a good deal? Didn’t know. Didn’t want to. “Naw, I’m good.”
It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since I came in. That was five minutes too long. Dayshia could be gone, and I was screwing around with Bargain Beelzebub. I exited the stall, on my way out.
Cameron said, “Think you dropped something.”
I turned and felt the full horror of that demonic asshole’s power.
He had my phone.
Reflexively, I patted my back pocket, praying for the familiar bulge that meant what he held only looked like my phone. Naw. How many Rick and Morty iPhone cases were really in circulation at Briarwood? My heart bulged against my sternum, dragged me forward with my hand extended.
He scuttled back, staring at the screen. “And it’s unlocked. Yo, you a writer?”
“Give me my shit, Cameron.”
The rattling dice, the betting cheers, went silent.
Amir said, “Shawn.”
He straightened in my peripheral. As did DeMarcus. I made a chopping motion with one hand. I got this.
Did I, though? My hands shook. My vision vibrated with the force of my slamming pulse, making Cameron bounce in front of me. Most of my fighting was done from a PlayStation controller, but I’d never felt more like punching someone in. My. LIFE.
Cameron inhaled around the nearly gone blunt. “Why you acting so aggro? I like reading. Unless you’re really frustrated about something else. Ole girl from Nordstrom?”
I willed my face still. Held eye contact past the point of discomfort.
Cameron wasn’t fooled. “Wow. For real. Bro, this the mall. I take advantage of this week’s coupon, you catch next week’s sale. Feel me? Nordstrom got plenty for both of us.”
I smacked that blunt from his mouth. The ashen tip blazed gray and molten as it flipped end over end, its trajectory unknown.
At the time.
“Ohhh!” The bathroom morphed into a fight-night crowd.
Despite his slick talk, the shady comments, Cologne Kiosk Cameron seemed uncertain. His eyes cut quickly to all the witnesses. Mine, too. The mouths that would carry this story to every corner of the mall and beyond. They were from different neighborhoods, and schools, and cities. All anticipating the birth of a new “yooooo, remember that time …” story.
My last fight had been on the playground in second grade. I lost due to an inescapable full nelson, and it was horrifying to learn the ritual hadn’t changed. There was a tipping point after the trash talk, after personal space had been violated, when a physical gesture so offensive was made that to not fight was dishonorable. A punk move.
“Steal on him!” DeMarcus, the most lighthearted of my friends, ordered