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dog?” Bonds asked as I gave them both a pound, before pulling them in close for a hug. “You know those crackers can’t break a strong black man.”
    â€œI’m all right. I guess,” I answered.
    That’s when somebody’s grandmother, from a stoop across the street, called out, “Noah, God bless you,” and blew me a kiss.
    â€œYou a celebrity, Noah.” Asa grinned. “Everybody’s talking ’bout how you stand for something now—almost like Rosa Parks.”
    â€œNah, I’m just history in my own crib,” I said, looking up at Mom peeping us through the curtains of our third-floor window. “I’m the most famous dude under house arrest in East Franklin.”
    â€œI know it,” moaned Bonds. “My mom’s got the shackles out, too— Where ya goin’? Whataya doin’? Who ya be with?— meanwhile I’m thinking, my boy almost got killed. It’s time for war.”
    â€œNobody can touch them punks,” Asa said. “You know they’re in protective custody, each with a cell to himself. Cops can’t put those dudes in population. Niggas will tear their asses up.”
    That was the first time I’d heard that word nigger since Scat screamed it at me. And suddenly, I didn’t like it any better coming easy from Asa’s mouth.
    â€œOne of them’s out,” said Bonds. “It was on the radio before.”
    I felt the blood rushing to my brain, and all I could see was red.
    â€œWhich?” I asked.
    â€œOne whose father’s a detective, ratting out the other two,” answered Bonds. “The kid who kicked you. That Ra-O.”
    â€œOooh! Somebody needs to clap that cracker,” said Asa, throwing a right cross and stamping his foot on the steps.
    â€œSo his father’s got a badge,” I said, hawking a wad of spit onto the street and wishing I’d clammed it into the face of that white detective in the hospital who’d promised “nobody” would get a free pass.
    â€œSherlock Holmes to the bone. Everybody knows they take care of their own kind,” Bonds said. “But we didn’t come here to amp you up. We wanted to set things straight.”
    â€œSee-we-didn’t-know-you-tripped,” Asa said, beating a rhythm on his palm with the back of his other hand. “I was, like, fifty feet out in front of Bonds. I figured you was behind him.”
    â€œI seen that bat and I was too busy bookin’,” said Bonds, more serious than I’d ever heard him. “I thought I was bringing up the rear and you was way out in front, Noah. You didn’t call out or nothin’. And if you did, I didn’t hear it.”
    â€œWe’d have never left you one on three against them animals,” said Asa, pounding his chest with a fist. “We was on a mission together. That’s blood, right there.”
    At first I’d felt like a fuckup for falling and causing everything that night, and part of me still did.
    â€œPeople around here been busting on us for not having your back,” Bonds said, looking me in the eye. “I don’t need that kind of rep, ’specially when school starts up.”
    â€œI’m good with it,” I said, my stomach going tight into knots over that Rao getting turned loose. “That’s just the way it went down.”
    â€œYo, when the cops drove us around Hillsboro, we seen your old Air Jordans,” said Asa. “They’re still hanging right where you left them, almost four years now, over that phone wire in the Crackers’ Hall of Fame.”
    As freshman, for half a season, the three of us played JV football together for Carver, till our grades came out and we flunked off the team. One Saturday morning, the school took us by bus to play at the athletic field that connects up to Spaghetti Park. Our squad was mixed, and the Armstrong High team was all white. Their guys were