Page 190 of Don’t Say Mafia

The others laughed, and one of them slapped the tailgate hard enough to make it rattle. I didn’t slow down or look over to see which one had said it. I kept my eyes straight ahead and shoved my hands deeper into the sleeves of my hoodie, pretending their words couldn’t actually hurt me.

There was a thud and a grunt, the sound of someone taking a punch, but I kept walking, and by the time I reached the end of the road, their laughter had already faded.

The park sat a little apart from everything else, a sad patch of grass and rusted metal tucked between the trailers and the highway. The playground equipment was old and sun bleached; the paint on everything chipped away to bare steel where too many hands had grabbed on. During the day, kids swarmed it. At night, though, it belonged to no one.

I stepped onto the packed dirt and headed straight for the swings.

It creaked softly when I sat, and the chains were cold against my palms. I pushed off with my toes, just enough to sway back and forth, a gentle rhythm that matched my breathing. The ground slid beneath me in slow arcs, forward and back, and then forward again.

Above me, the sky stretched wide and endless, stars scattered carelessly across as though someone had knocked over a jar of light. I tipped my head back and stared, letting my thoughts drift the way the swing did, aimless but steady. Out here it was easier to imagine . . . more. More of what, I wasn’t sure. But at least more than this.

“You couldn’t sleep, either?”

I startled, my head snapping forward, and I immediately smiled when I saw my best friend, Ryan. He was standing a few feet away, a cigarette burning between his fingers like he needed something to do with his hands. He took one last drag and flicked it to the ground, crushing it out with the heel of his shoe before looking back up at me. The streetlight behind him caught his face just enough for me to see it clearly. The familiar crooked smile. The softness around his mouth that made him look kinder than most people in this place ever tried to be.

My smile dimmed, though, when I saw that his eyes were red rimmed and glassy, a glaze that had nothing to do with nicotine.

“You’re smoking now?” I asked, not bothering to hide the disappointment in my voice.

He winced, clearly expecting me to say that. Then he shrugged one shoulder and smiled apologetically. “I was just taking the edge off,” he said.

I sighed and leaned back against the chains, letting the swing creak beneath me. “You know that’s what they all say.”

He scrunched his nose up at that. “Thanks for that,” he murmured, shaking his head as he sat down on the swing next to me. “Rough night?” he asked.

I snorted softly. “When isn’t it?”

He nodded, not needing to ask any questions to know exactly what I’d meant. Questions were kind of unnecessary when almost every night was the same.

“My dad threw another chair,” he offered after a second, his tone as casual as a weather update. “He missed her this time and instead put another hole in the wall. Mom cried anyway, like he’d actually ruined something nice.”

I was able to picture it easily. His parents’ fights never stayed behind thin walls or locked doors. They bled out onto the lawn, spilled across the cracked driveway, and rolled into the street until the whole neighborhood had to notice. Red and blue lights were a regular guest outside their trailer, and everyone was used to seeing bored, irritated cops leaning against their cruisers, taking statements they’d taken a dozen times before and weren’t going to do anything about.

Nothing ever changed.

This park was where we’d first met because of it.

Two kids slipping out of their houses on the same night, chased by different voices that sounded exactly the same. I’d been sitting on this very swing with my knees pulled to my chest, staring at the sky and pretending I wasn’t shaking when he’d appeared out of the dark with a split lip and his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

He’d dropped onto the swing next to me without saying a word.

Neither of us had asked why the other was there. We just sat in the dark and listened to the night instead of the yelling, the chains creaking softly as if they were keeping our secrets for us.

After that, it became our place.

Whenever things got too loud, too ugly . . . too hard to breathe through, we ended up here. Two lives running parallel, crashing into the same quiet patch of ground over and over again. I opened my eyes wider and looked at him now, older than that first time we’d met but still carrying the same weight on his shoulders.

Some things didn’t change.

“I think she’d started throwing beer bottles right before I snuck out,” I finally muttered. “Unfortunately, it didn’t knock him out.”

He huffed a quiet laugh, the sort that slipped out when something wasn’t funny at all but you laughed anyway because the alternative was screaming. “Classic.”

We fell into an easy silence after that, one that had been built from years of shared understanding and mutual exhaustion. The swing carried me back and forth while Ryan leaned back to look at the sky.

“Sometimes I think,” he said slowly, “that if I just stare at it long enough, something better will drop out of it.”

I tilted my head, trying to imagine what he meant. “Like what?”