You Don't Even Know Me Read Online Free PDF

“You have to put it back, Kareem.”
    â€œBut Pokei shot Mr. Jenson.”
    â€œYou don’t know that.”
    â€œMaybe he ain’t do it. But I bet he knows who did.”
    Since I came here last month I’ve been wanting whoever took out my grandfather to be dead too. Getting even, that’s what’s been on my mind; in my dreams. I can’t talk to my parents about it. They’d say nice boys don’t think that way. I can’t tell my grandmother because she’s got her own problems. My uncles are lawyers—two of them, anyhow. If I say something like this to them, they’ll tell me that the law gets even for people. Only Llee and Kareem know what I think. They know what I want, what we all want: for someone to do what the police can’t or won’t. I swallow. I tell myself that people like me don’t do stuff like this. But I ask for the bullets anyhow. “How do you put them in?”
    He wants to show me. “Just tell me,” I say.
    His father goes hunting, and takes him sometimes. He showed him how to load and unload last year. Kareem shot a possum, a raccoon, and three mice—nothing human, he tells me. But he’s ready to, he says.
    I dig down deep until I feel metal. The barrel. The neck. The handle. Then I grab the bag and start running. Kareem follows, like usual.
    We run up the street and into the store, locking the garage door behind us. The bag goes on the counter. We sit on stools, staring at it. It’s real, that gun. “And it kills,” I say, watching my fingers shake. I look inside. When I pick it up it feels like it’s mine already. I relax a little.
    â€œYou can do it,” Kareem whispers.
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œThey do it all the time on TV; around here, too.” He’s got his fingers in the egg jar again. “I ain’t scared of nobody . . . nothing. So when I’m your age and somebody mess with me, they gone.” He pulls his dripping wet hand out of the jar and turns it into a gun. “Let me show you how to do it.” Pink water drips on the stool like blood.
    â€œDo what? I say.
    â€œShow you how to kill.”
    I sit myself down—so I don’t fall down. Kareem keeps talking, asking if I think my grandfather’s in heaven.
    Before I answer, he’s on to Llee. “I let him hold it once.”
    I look at him.
    â€œLlee’s afraid of guns. But he ain’t gonna be soon.”
    Everything stops—the hum from the cooler, the water dripping from Kareem’s fingers, even the ant sneaking across the floor. I think about Llee and Kareem all by themselves with guns and nobody to stop ’em from shooting each other.
    Kareem can’t keep quiet. He’s been thinking, he says, asking me to promise not to tell nobody what he’s about to tell me. But before I can promise, he’s talking. His father’s gun spent the night with Llee one time. “By accident. I forgot it. We play with it over there sometimes, but don’t nobody know. I’m the cowboy . . . ’cause it’s mine.”
    All of a sudden, my bowels get so loose so fast I almost don’t make it to the bathroom. I’m in there so long; Kareem knocks on the door three times, asking what’s wrong.
    By the time I finish and figure out what to do, Kareem is done eating half a box of donuts. I sit at the counter with him, telling him to wipe his mouth. I stare at the gun, and then at the frame with the dollar in it. I ask Kareem if he wants it. I don’t know why. Then I hand it to him. “He never hurt anyone, Kareem.”
    â€œI know. That’s what I like about him. He was nice.”
    I wrap the gun up in brown paper, like sausage, and put it in the bag. I do the same with the frame, making sure Kareem understands that he’s got to take care of it. “Let’s go,” I tell him.
    He jumps down and follows me. He knows a shortcut to Pokei’s place,