Read Online So Shelly by Ty Roth - Free Book Online Page A

of citrus. I wasn’t sure if he was in pain or angry until he let go a cough, and a tiny cloud of smoke passed his previously pursed lips.
    Pot. He was smoking pot with these guys! I didn’t know—still don’t—if Gordon somehow had known them previously or if he had just met them that day, but they were calling him G. There he was, already more a part of the neighborhood than I was, and I had lived there my entire life. That’s just Gordon. Most people fell in love with him right away. There’d be a glorious honeymoon period, and then, given any length of opportunity, he would wear his welcome out.
    “S’up, Keats?” Gordon turned to me before turning back to his circle.
    Soon they were inspecting his car. The girls crawled inside and began fidgeting with the radio station, until one slid out of the driver’s side, holding Shelly.
    “What’s this?” she said.
    “That’s our friend,” Gordon answered with a smirk and a quick glance in my direction.
    “Whatchu mean your
friend
?” The others stopped making their imaginary upgrades to Gordon’s car and began to gatheraround the girl holding the urn. The whole thing was making me increasingly uncomfortable, but Gordon didn’t seem a bit bothered. Actually, he looked amused.
    “Those are her ashes,” he said.
    “Ashes? What ashes? She dead?” Her voice rose at least an octave as she reached the end of her verbless questions, and once again Shelly was airborne. It was as if a creepy bomb were about to explode. Bodies catapulted in all directions among the sound of half-terrified, half-hysterical laughter and cries of horror, except for Gordon, who effortlessly caught Shelly before she mixed her dust with the dirt. That would have been an abomination; Shelly hated dirt. She’d been a complete slob, but that had been an organizational issue, not an elemental one.
    My spell of incredulity and Gordon’s amusement were broken when, still standing on the porch, I saw in my peripheral vision the familiar navy blue of an Ogontz Police car turn onto my street from Maple, one block west.
    “Cops,” I warned matter-of-factly. The presence of the police was certainly no oddity on my street. My neighbors’ ears had been finely conditioned to that word; it commanded their attention and put an immediate end to the levity. The Ogontz PD patrolled my end of town with near-obsessive diligence, so I had no need for unnecessary concern regarding my and Gordon’s outlaw status; although, Gordon’s face showed a small degree of unfamiliar alarm.
    It’s hard to say who’s the greater cause of the high crime rate on the east end. Are the omnipresent cops a justifiable and necessary response to criminal behavior, or is the criminalbehavior simply a spiteful and equally justifiable “fuck you” to the cops and their assumed necessity, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?
    By the cop car’s leisurely speed, I knew Gordon and I had yet to be targeted; there was no APB out on us. It was a cruising pace, not a pursuit; however, a well-dressed white kid with a BMW surrounded by neighborhood kids would most certainly raise the hackles of even the most novice of officers.
    Gordon nonchalantly dropped the joint he cupped in his hand and ground it into my scraggly lawn.
    “Marks,” T spit the name out.
    Patrolman Marks had been the bane of my neighbors’ existence since the moment they’d been born, and he would go on in his sheriff of Nottingham way until the day he finally started collecting on his patrolman’s pension, a day that couldn’t come soon enough as far as my incessantly hassled neighbors were concerned. Sadly, they also knew that another Officer Marks would be coming up the ranks to fill his racist shoes.
    Marks pulled to the curb, shifted into park, and turned on his overhead flashers just to be a dick. He leaned toward and spoke through the open passenger-side window. “There a problem here, boys? You know there’s a loitering law.”
    He referred to a law