Secrets Uncovered by Amaleka McCall Page A

fuck off me! I hate y‘all! I hate all of y’all!” Eric screamed, kicking and flailing, as his eldest cousin, Poopie, finally pulled his arms behind his back. “I hate this house!” Eric screeched.
    Turning to Deena, he eyed his aunt with all of the hate he’d augmented over the years. “This is all your fault! You evil bitch! You just jealous because my mother had everything and you ain’t got shit!” he growled, pushing his aunt in the chest.
    â€œOh, God!” she implored, clutching her chest as she stumbled backward into a beat-up armchair. She had just narrowly missed hitting the floor.
    â€œUh-nuh! No, he didn’t!” Screams erupted all around Eric and the entire house reacted, thirsty for his blood.
    â€œYou ain’t gon’ be hitting my mother!” one of his less courageous cousins barked from a distance.
    There was no telling what Eric would do next. In a matter of seconds, the group converged as one large avenging angel. Blows started to land on Eric’s body. Somebody dragged him down to the floor and kicked him sharply in his kidneys. His breath escaped painfully, but he refused to show any other signs of weakness. Another blow to the top of his head made him see small streams of squirming lights behind his eye sockets.
    There was no way he could win against all of his cousins. Scrambling on the floor, trying to protect his head, Eric finally made it to the door.
    â€œLet him up! He wanna leave. Let the bastard leave!” Deena shouted, her face filling with blood and her double chin jiggling.
    Eric snatched the door open and ran out of the apartment. His nose was bleeding; his left eye was nearly swollen shut. His knuckles were raw, and he felt like he had broken a few ribs.
    Slamming the door shut behind him, Eric realized that he was walking away from the only family he had ever known. But not all families, in his estimation, were worth holding on to. He had survived all these years, and he would survive many more. At just thirteen years old, he may have been homeless, but he wasn’t hopeless.
    The first night his aunt kicked him out, Eric sat in a dark, dank space behind the stairs of the apartment building, nodding in and out of sleep. When he emerged from his hiding spot the next morning, his insides were churning from hunger. His body ached and his left eye was black and swollen shut.
    Eric walked three blocks to the corner store, praying that he wouldn’t run into any of his cousins. His plan was to sneak in the back of the store, grab a few bags of chips, to kill the hunger pains tearing out his insides, and then dip back out, unseen. He had been psyching himself up all the way to the store. He had never stolen anything in his life. As he turned the corner, he heard shouting and screaming. He remained hidden behind a large dumpster, silently watching two men punch, kick and stomp on the body of a man who lay on the ground, screaming and squirming.
    Eric had never heard a man scream like a woman before. He kept his eyes glued to the scene, but something in his peripheral vision caught his attention.
    A long, darkly tinted 1975 black Cadillac Sedan Deville, with whitewash wheels, sat parked in front of the store. The back window was halfway down and Eric could see the face of a man watching the brawl. The man wore a dark brown suede fedora with a red feather attached at the side. His face was the color of molasses, and a mustache covered his top lip with thick, coarse black hair.
    Eric turned his eyes from the man in the car back to the victim, who had stopped squirming and screaming. Judging from the amount of blood pooling on the ground around the man’s head, Eric decided that the man was probably dead.
    â€œThat’s enough!” the man in the Cadillac yelled out the window, snapping his fingers. Like well-trained dogs in obedience school, the men stopped beating the limp, lifeless man.
    â€œYou, kid!