The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason Reynolds Page B

scratching scratching scratching his butter knife against his toast, the sound making me cringe inside. It was like the screeching sound the train makes when it pulls into the station. It pushed me over the edge. I had to say something. Maybe not everything, but something.
    â€œDad?” I turned around to face him.
    â€œYep?”
    I thought for a moment.
    â€œLast night . . . ,” I started. He instantly stopped scratching at the toast, but he didn’t look at me. He just looked down at the half-black, half-brown bread. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t zing him like I wanted to—and trust me, I really wanted to—only because, well, we were both messed up, hurting, and it would’ve just been a wack thing to do. Just . . . mean. So I flipped the scriptand continued with, “You weren’t here when I got here, and I wasn’t sure if you ate or not, so I bought a sandwich for you. It’s in the fridge. You don’t have to eat burnt toast.”
    He took a deep breath, obviously happy I didn’t say what he thought I was going to say.
    â€œOh.” He exhaled, looking at me, finally showing some signs of embarrassment. “Thanks.”
    Uh-huh, I thought to myself.

    It was another one of Brooklyn’s crappy fall days, where the clouds make nine in the morning look like six in the evening, but the rain just won’t come down. Instead there’s a constant mist like someone or something is continuously spitting on you. Gross. And to top it all off, I had on the most uncomfortable shoes in the world—stiff, clunky dress shoes, cutting into my ankles, forcing me to walk like my butt hurt.
    â€œMan, you should’ve just left without me,” I told Chris, as I waddled up to the bus stop. He stood there with a gigantic umbrella, way too big for such puny raindrops.
    â€œYou said to treat you like normal,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “This is normal.”
    I laughed and nodded to him.
    â€œBut this big-ass umbrella ain’t,” I joked.
    â€œNeither is that monkey suit you got on,” he gave it back.
    I laughed again. “It’s for my job. Remember? At the funeral home. Where I touch dead people,” I said, pretending like I wasgoing to touch him. “And anyway, I don’t even know why you talking. You probably don’t even have a suit. Probably can’t even tie a tie.”
    â€œYou right. I don’t have a suit. But what I do have is an umbrella.” He pulled the large umbrella farther down over him.
    The funniest thing was when the bus came and Chris tried to close the umbrella up. He couldn’t get it to snap and lock in place, and it kept flying open every time he tried to step into the bus. He kept cussing and trying and cussing and trying until finally I just turned around and did it for him. People on the bus sniggered. Even the driver. I could tell Chris was embarrassed, but even he knew it was funny.
    School went its usual way. I bumped around from locker to classroom, dodging varsity jackets, chicks with fresh doobie wraps peering into cheap, stick-on locker mirrors, making fish faces while applying lip gloss, gossip hanging above our heads like cigarette smoke. I was sure my name was somewhere in it, especially since I was shuffling around in an all-black suit, looking like some kind of secret agent with bad feet. My classmates probably just thought the suit was some sort of grieving thing. Like I was making some kind of point, which I’m sure they all thought was weird. But I didn’t really care because, like I said, high school seemed like nothing to me now.
    I sat in Mr. Grovener’s class and listened to him read Old English stories, where the way they talked was weirder than Shakespeare’s language, and I faded in and out of writing notes and scribbling squiggly lines in the margins. All I could reallythink about was the day before. Not just my