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shopping after for a bit then headed to Jamal’s garage for the jam session. He was a tall, reedy guy with dreads and a green Rasta cap. I always knew him to be chill in the year he’d been dating Jada, but he was apparently pretty sharp to. He took one look at me and gave me a thumbs up.
    The two of them jammed out like the White Stripes. Even though I was the only audience in the garage, it wasn’t long before I was up on my feet. They grinned, thinking it was their music, and partly it was. The dance floor was one place where I’d always allowed myself to be free.
    In my mind, I wasn’t here on the floor though. I was laying on my back, twining with Sean, watching his emerald eyes bore into me. It was a strange feeling - clinging deep to the memory of a person, but being afraid of getting close to them again.
    Well, I wasn’t going to seek him out. Time would take him out of my system, and that would be for the best.
    Wouldn’t it?

CHAPTER SIX
    Sean
    I lounged on the couch with a fight on the TV, not really watching. I usually slept like a drugged baby after fight days, but I’d had messed up dreams last night. Some were bad ones about the last look Gabi had thrown at me. The worst one was about finding her sleeping in bed next to me and then finding it was all in my head. I’d woken up spooning my other pillow. It was fucking pathetic.
    I’d downed some pills with coffee and a couple of boiled eggs and now that roiled in my stomach. The shades were drawn on the far end of the living room. In the dimness, the place didn’t look like my fancy apartment by the river. It looked like the ratty house where I’d grown up.
    I’d tried taking a girl like Gabi there once. Marcia Goodman. She was one of the richest girls in school - which for our shitty neighborhood meant that she wasn’t living on welfare. I’d already been hitting most of the hot chicks, but I felt a special pleasure in getting this rich girl wound around my finger. She’d taken one look at the overgrown lawn and the flaking blue paint on the house and cut herself free.
    Things had only gotten worse in the place. Right about now, my old man would be sitting on a shittier version of this couch, sucking at his oxygen or maybe a cigarette. The doctor had yelled at him to stop, but he was as stubborn out of the ring as I was in it.
    “Earned this, Boy,” was all he’d say whenever I would threaten to knock it out of his hands.
    “Ain’t earning shit now, Pop,” I’d remind him, pinching it out and crushing it in a bowl next to a dozen other spent butts.
    He might growl a bit, but he knew it was just a matter of waiting me out. I could barely stand to stay there anymore. Course that just made me feel guilty about leaving Sarah there. I’d tried to get her so many times to at least come test drive living here. I wasn’t a poet to put this place into words she could understand, but I’d gotten Troy to come in and give it his best shot.
    “Kid, it’s beautiful,” he’d said. “You’re high up over the river, above the trees. You’ll feel the sun, smell the water, hear the birds and people chirping. It’s a whole other world your brother’s living in. Let him take you to see it.”
    See it.
    He caught himself and backtracked, but not before I could elbow him in gut. To his credit, he’d barely flinched, but nothing escaped Sarah. She’d laughed that sunshine laugh of hers and told us she couldn’t leave Pop in the darkness. What he had done to deserve that sort of loyalty, I could never understand. He’d put food on the table and kept the roof mostly patched up, but that was it. The bare essentials of being a father.
    Well, I could pull off the bare essentials of being a son by showing up a couple times a month. But goddamn, did I hate leaving Sarah there in that world. I knew she was comfortable knowing exactly where everything was without having to feel or tap it out. I knew our neighbors set aside their craziness to treat her like