All Involved: Day Four by Ryan Gattis

Author:Ryan Gattis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

9

I need to get to Irene’s so I pick up the pace. I can’t be out like this much longer. I sniffle and look back up at the airplane again, right before it passes out of sight. I wonder who’s on it anyway, and why they would fly into L.A. at a time like this. Maybe people who already had their vacations scheduled and couldn’t miss them. I didn’t even know people like that actually existed until I went to L.A. Southwest College for the crime scene stuff. I’d only ever seen those people on TV before that. Really, school is a whole other world.

And seeing it, navigating in it enough to get some new people skills I didn’t even know I needed, has me feeling like I’m two different people now. There’s me the homeboy, Clever, down for whatever, and there’s me the student, Robert Rivera. Mr. Rivera, as Sturm calls me. I’ve got a wall between those sides of me now. It’s kind of like I’ve got a double life.

In a way, I grew into it. Coming up as a little homie, eager to prove myself and be somebody, anybody. I dropped out of school at thirteen because Lu did. School for me was boring and slow. I picked stuff up quick and then had to sit around and wait for everybody else to get it. At home, my mom was never around but that’s not really an excuse, just a fact. I hung out with Lu instead of being alone and we did all kinds of dumb shit.

I might’ve kept doing that if Fate hadn’t seen something in both of us, if he hadn’t told me I was too smart to be banging how other homies were banging. I had to use my mind instead because it was a more dangerous weapon. He set it up so I could get my GED, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing for high school equivalency before he said so.

He got me a tutor and everything to help catch me up. That tutor was Irene. Four days a week she worked with me until I was reading better, writing papers, finding out there was a difference between spoken and written English, that I couldn’t just write however I wanted and make sense, that there were rules. She even had me doing algebra in no time. If it wasn’t for her and Fate, I’d still be running the streets and nothing else. They changed my life. I owe them both for that. I owe them everything.

I started at Southwest last year, because that’s what Fate wanted and he fronts the cash for it. I was scared of it at first, because I’d never even been out of the neighborhood before, but I found out I really like it. I found out I’m good at it. Maybe that’s dangerous, though, because it’s had me wondering every so often what a life outside the neighborhood would look like, or what I would even do to get it, but I’ve never told Fate that, Lu neither.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.