Hold Tight

He shrugged, and Adam could see it. The red in his eyes. The thin coat of sweat. The way DJ’s body teetered.

“You’re high,” Adam said.

“So? I don’t get you, man. How could you tell your father?”

“I didn’t.”

Adam had planned it all out for that night. He had even gone to the spy store in the city. He thought that he’d need a wire like you saw on TV, but they gave him what looked like an ordinary pen that would record audio and a belt buckle that worked as a video camera. He would get it all there and then bring it to the police—not the local police because DJ’s dad worked there—and let the pieces fall where they would. He was taking the risk, but he had no choice.

He was drowning.

He was sinking and he could feel it and he knew that if he didn’t rescue himself, he would end up like Spencer. So he planned and was ready for last night.

And then his father insisted that he had to go to that Rangers game.

He knew that he couldn’t do that. Maybe he could postpone his plan a bit, but if he didn’t show up that night, Rosemary and Carson and the rest of them would wonder. They already knew that he was on the fence. They’d already forced him with the blackmail threat. So he had sneaked out and gone to Club Jaguar.

When his father showed up, his plan all went to hell.

The knife wound on his arm stung. It would probably require stitches, might even get infected. He had tried to clean it out. The pain had nearly made him pass out. But it would do for now. Until he could put this right again.

“Carson and the guys think you were setting us up,” DJ said.

“I wasn’t,” Adam lied.

“Your dad showed up at my house too.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. An hour before he got to the Bronx maybe. My dad saw him sitting in a car across the street.”

Adam wanted to think about that, but there was no time.

“We need to put an end to this, DJ.”

“Look, I talked to my old man. He’s working on it for us. He’s a cop. He gets this stuff.”

“Spencer is dead.”

“That’s not on us.”

“Yeah, DJ, it is.”

“Spencer was messed up. He did it himself.”

“We let him die.” Adam looked at his right hand. He made a fist. That had been Spencer’s final touch from another human being. His best friend’s fist. “I hit him.”

“Whatever, man. You want to feel guilty about it, that’s on you. You can’t take the rest of us down for that.”

“It isn’t about guilt. They tried to kill my father. Hell, they tried to kill me.”

DJ shook his head. “You don’t get it.”

“What?”

“We turn ourselves in, we’re done. We’ll probably end up in jail. We can forget college. And who do you think Carson and Rosemary sold those drugs to—the Salvation Army? There are mob people involved in this, don’t you get that? Carson is scared out of his mind.”

Adam said nothing.

“My old man says if we just keep quiet, it will be fine.”

“You really believe that?”

“I introduced you to that place, but that’s all they got on me. It’s your father’s prescription pads. We can just say we want out.”

“And if they don’t let us out?”

“My dad can apply pressure. He said it’ll be okay. Worse come to worst, we just lawyer up and not say a word.”

Adam looked at him, waiting.

“This decision affects us all,” DJ said. “It’s not just your future you’re screwing with. It’s mine. And Clark is involved. Olivia too.”

“I’m not going to listen to that argument again.”

“It’s still true, Adam. Maybe they’re not as directly involved as you and me, but they’ll go down too.”

“No.”

“No what?”

He looked back at his friend. “This is how it’s worked your whole life, DJ.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You get into trouble and your father pulls you out.”

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

“We can’t just walk away from this.”

“Spencer killed himself. We didn’t do anything to him.”

Adam looked down through the trees. The soccer field was empty, but people were still jogging around the circle. He turned his head a little to the left. He tried to find that patch of roof, the one where Spencer had been found, but it was blocked off by the front tower. DJ moved and stood next to him.

“My dad used to hang up here,” DJ said. “When he was in high school. He was one of those bad kids, you know? He smoked dope and drank beer. He got into fights.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is this. In those days you could survive a mistake. People looked the other way. You were a kid—you were supposed to blow off steam. My father stole a car when he was our age. Got caught too, but they worked out a side deal. Now my old man is one of the most law-abiding citizens around. But if he had grown up today, he’d be screwed. It’s ridiculous. If you whistle at a girl at school, you can go to jail. If you bump into someone’s chest in the hallway, you can be brought up on some kind of charges. One mistake and you’re out. My dad says that’s nonsense. How are we supposed to find our way?”

“That doesn’t give us a free pass.”

“Adam, in another couple of years we’ll be in college. This will all be behind us. We aren’t criminals. We can’t let this moment ruin our lives.”

“It ruined Spencer’s.”

“That’s not our fault.”

“Those guys almost killed my father. He ended up in the hospital.”

“I know. And I know how I would feel if it was my father. But you can’t go off half-cocked because of that. You need to calm down and think it through. I spoke to Carson. He wants us to go in and talk to him.”

Adam frowned. “Right.”

“No, I mean it.”

“He’s crazy, DJ. You know that. You just said it yourself—he thinks I tried to set him up.”

Adam tried to sort it through, but he was so damn tired. He had been up all night. He was in pain and exhausted and confused. He had spent the night thinking and really had no idea what to do.

He should have told his parents the truth.

But he couldn’t. He had messed up and gotten high too often and you start to buy that belief that the only people in the world who love you unconditionally, the only people who will love you forever no matter how you screw up, that somehow they were the enemy.