Rob Hood

 

 

    I saw someone get killed once. It was two days before my seventeenth birthday, and a day after my first French kiss with Samantha Parker.  Funny how, years later, things like that stick out--like the little knobs on old potatoes that sit too long in the dark.

    We were walking home from the gas station, all of us carrying white plastic bags filled with stuff that we’d planned on stuffing in our mouths before getting home, ruining our dinner appetite, but lying and saying that “I ate a big lunch.”

    Brandon led the way like always did, swinging his bag back and forth with one hand, and drinking a Mountain Dew with the other. Tommy and I walked behind him, always.  Maybe it’s because Brandon always walked fast, which was unusual because he was so short, or maybe it was what my Dad told me was ‘fate’. Either way, fast walking or fate is what killed Brandon Telling on a Thursday afternoon in late April.

    Our houses were only a mile up a long hill. We’d always take the wrong bus home so we could stop at Super America and load up on “s**t food”--what Tommy’s Mom would say to us when she asked us what we wanted for dinner when we spent the night at his house.

    “What would you boys like for dinner?” She’d practically sing.

    “Pizza and some Cokes”, Tommy shouted, never letting his eyes leave the Play Station game we played in his room.

   “No s**t food!” She’d shout down the steps into the basement.

    Tommy would shuffle in his seat, irritated, “Sandwiches then! Geeeez Mom!”

    Then we’d all sit at the table and eat plain ham and cheese sandwiches with milk, while she doted in the kitchen listening to Christian music and wiping the already clean countertops for the fourteenth thousandth time.

It’s pretty much safe to say, we didn’t spend the night at Tommy’s for the food.

    It was, rather, for the huge T.V. he had in his room, the play station, and the awesome bean bag chairs. Oh-- and the pretty decent collection of dirty magazines he’d steal from his Dad’s bathroom, under his bed. These were the things that drew all teenagers to Tommy Grimes house.

    When Brandon stepped off the curb into the street, he wasn’t paying attention. His head was turned to me and Tommy and he was saying something about one of our teachers, Mr. English, who taught geometry.

    When the car hit him, going entirely too fast, it bent Brandon into a shape that I’ve yet to get out of my mind, even years later. He folded at the hips, with his torso violently stretched over the hood of the car, and his legs and hips being crushed underneath it. His white plastic bag flew about fifteen feet into the air and his Mountain Dew bottle went sailing all over the windshield, along with sickening large amounts of Brandon’s blood and pieces of his face and teeth. And, just like that, he was dead.

It took maybe five seconds.

    When the car lurched to a stop, leaving skid marks that later, the Hempstead police would measure with tape measures, Brandon didn’t come off the car right away, it took a few seconds. What was left of him slid slowly off the hood and fell into the middle of the road, where, by this time, several passersby and other cars had stopped to look on. He fell in a heap, like a bad ending to a movie.

    I remember Tommy throwing up right where he was standing.

    I just stood there, looking, with my mouth open and feeling frozen, or like somehow, somewhere somebody pressed a ‘Stop’ button to time itself.

I remember my face going numb for some reason, and I had ringing in my ears.

Brandon didn’t move, and you could just tell that he was 'in' himself anymore.

    Looking back now, this is when I believe my life turned in a different direction, and might explain the reason for where I was right now-- Which was on the roof of a bank, in the middle of downtown Phoenix, dressed all in black, at midnight.

Who would’ve thought?

I grabbed my sack, and thought of my Dad.

I thought about fate, too, as I made my way down into the cold dark.