Read Palo Alto: Stories for Free Online Page B

please don’t.”
    Ronny lowered his slingshot.
    The cat squeezed under a wooden fence. Ronny shot a rock after the cat, but it just hit the fence.
    I was happy for the cat, but I suddenly felt very lonely.
    Farmers, Italians, and sociopaths kill cats. Sociopaths piss in their beds. French people use piss as perfume.
    I had a black and white cat named Toby. When he was young, the neighbor cut his balls off for eating fish from his pond. I wasn’t born when that happened.
    We walked across town and ended up at Mitchell Park.
    Mitchell Park was big, with baseball fields, and soccer fields, and playgrounds, and a pool. Next door was our junior high school, J.L.S. J.L.S. was far from all our houses because it was the only junior high in the city.
    I used to play soccer at Mitchell Park when I was younger. When I was ten, my team, the Blue Scorpions, got into the intercounty championship. The playoffs were at Mitchell Park. We won and won, and got to the finals. I played defense and defended a lot.
    My dad yelled like crazy until one game the ref told him to leave.
    In the finals we played an East Palo Alto team, the Red Bullets. They were all black kids and we were all white. They were all bigger than we were. They just kept getting by me.
    At night the park was empty. There was nothing to shoot, so we wandered around the dark park. We walked through the playground. There were some animals on springs that little kids could ride. A horse and a seal and a lion. We kicked them until the lion lost his face; it was bent inward, the eyes all wrong.
    There was a municipal shed in the middle of the park. Saul and Ronny and Ami boosted me up to a transom that was cracked open. I pulled the transom open and scrambled through like a squirrel. I dropped down into the dark and then opened the door from the inside.
    There was nothing in there but a bunch of basketballs, and footballs, and soccer balls, and cones, and stuff like that. We took the balls out and threw them into the air and shot them, but they didn’t pop. Then we kicked them all over.
    We walked across the park and went to our school. It was called J.L.S. after J. L. Stanford, the guy who built the university. At night the hallways were dark, and the walls were gray and grim.
    We shot pellets through the windows. The pellets made little mosquito bites in the glass. We would be able to admire our work on Monday.
    We carved with rocks into the window of Mr. Shepard’s Social Studies classroom. I wrote FUCK HOMER because we were learning about the Greeks. Ronny carved a swastika. Weall told him he was stupid. Saul and Ami were both Jewish, and so was I, but I wasn’t raised Jewish.
    Ronny just thought the swastika was funny.
    We kicked over some trash cans, and then walked back toward Saul’s along Middlefield Road.
    We passed Simone Chris’s house. She had been my girlfriend in fourth grade. I fought Sam Tuttle for her. He was tall and thin like a scarecrow, and said that he liked her. One lunch, everyone gathered behind the elementary school library, and Sam and I got ready to fight. I kicked Sam in the shin and he fell to the ground holding his leg. I felt awesome.
    But I got in trouble, especially because I took karate at the YMCA, and karate was supposed to be for self-defense.
    Then Simone broke my heart. She left me for Rio Gereaux, a gymnast. It was fourth grade, but it was still a big deal. I mean, when are things supposed to start mattering? Now, and now, and now.
    Before we hit Loma Verde, we passed Unity church. It was where my mom took me when I was little. She was Jewish, but she went to church because she liked the minister, a smiley guy named Stan.
    One time at Sunday school I won a Bible in a raffle. It had all of Jesus’s words written in red. Fish, and loaves, and the first will be last, and thy neighbor, and Caesar, and an eye for a tooth, and he killed the fig tree because it wouldn’t give him fruit.
    We shot BBs at the Unity church. The BBs made little