Read Online Hot Pink by Adam Levin - Free Book Online

edges—and it’s not like I was really that tight with Gino, but we sometimes hung out when no one else was available, and I used to have some classes with him up till last year when we started the seventh and they tracked me into gifted, so I didn’t want to stand there and trash-talk his dad, but you can’t ignore Franco, so I had to do something, so I made a lippy face with my mouth and I shrugged.
    Franco shrugged back.
    Gino kept cooking. When the sandwiches were finished, he waxpaper-wrapped them, then stacked them in a bag and brought the bag to the register. He said, “Thirteen fifty.”
    â€œNah,” said Franco. “We don’t have to pay today.”
    â€œYou do,” Gino said.
    Franco took the bag. “Today it’s on the house,” he said.
    â€œIt’s not!” said Gino. “Pay me. Come on.” But what could he do? Franco was sixteen and Gino was my age, plus Franco was big—not tall, but big, and not big like me, but like muscled in a way I bet girls probably talked about. Almost like a man. His mustache wrapped around his chin and wasn’t wispy.
    He drummed his shaved skull a few times with his fingers, which looked like “I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” then took a frosted cookie from the cookie-tree display and crushed it in his hand inside of the wrapper. He undid the wrapper and dumped out the crumbs, grabbed another cookie, and told Gino, “What.”
    â€œFine,” Gino said. There were tears in his eyes. We were ripping him off in his own dad’s joint. He gave me this look.
    Franco flipped me the cookie.
    I stuck it in my pocket, mouthing the words, “I’ll pay you back soon.” I don’t know if Gino saw, but I meant what I mouthed.
    On our way back to the alley in back of his ma’s, Franco told me, “See? It’s all in the voice. That’s how you get stuff. Speaking with conviction. Makes you convincing. ‘Grilled cheese on the house, dog! Grilled cheese on the house!’ and dude’s like, ‘Fine, Franco. Fine, man. Good.’”
    â€œI don’t think you convinced him, though.”
    â€œWhat you sayin, nigga?”
    â€œI think you scared him cause your size,” I said. “And how you crushed that cookie and then grabbed another one like you’d crush that one, too.”
    â€œNo,” Franco said. “The cookie was whatsitcalled—the cookie was fleece—not fleece, it was flair. It was just a decoration—for my conviction. I got this grilled cheese sandwich with my voice. I did it with my words. And it’s a valuable lesson in life, my man, that words get you more than fists get you sometimes if you’ve gotta use the one or the other of them. Feel me?” Saying that last part, he tapped on his temple, which reminded me of a punchline—shot in the temple—and I got so hot to tell the whole joke, I forgot to tell Franco I was telling a joke.
    I said, “How do you know Abe Lincoln was a Jew?”
    â€œLincoln was a white, you big fatso,” said Franco.
    So I didn’t say the punchline cause being called a fatso got me too depressed. It was mean for him to call me it, jokey-voiced or not, but I think that sometimes Franco didn’t know when he was mean. He might have known then, though, and felt bad about it too, cause when we got back to the alley he was above-average nice to me for almost five minutes. He gave me a grilled cheese and got his bike, an old Yamaha two-stroke, out of the garage.
    He said, “I got something to show you, yo.”
    Hearing us, Franco III started growling. I hated that Franco III. She was a dalmatian-bull mix and Franco’d trained her to kill on command. It was against the law to have a dog that would kill on command. It was like having a killing machine where you just flipped a switch and someone got killed. You had to make the command secret