My drug dealer hadn’t a speck of Nike on him. He had both arms slipped through his backpack, his fists tight around the straps, his thumbs hooked together. His metallic blond hair was long and dry and uncombed and had never seen a quarter-sized glob of conditioner in its life. Despite the mild warmth, he wore a black leather jacket and denim jeans, canvas Converse on his feet. The white tee beneath his jacket was ripped at the collar. He looked like a greaser and would have blended into the scenery at the D.A.R.E. Sock Hop party my school had thrown a couple weeks earlier. His affect was one of anarchy, and he made me uncomfortable for looking comfortable.

I had a strong inclination to take a hard left when I saw him and cross a few blocks north, but I was hardly the rebel and didn’t want to anger the crossing guard who I made rise from her chair or the drivers who stopped their day for me, so I went against my gut and crossed. My drug dealer did, too.

To the drivers who watched us delay their commute, we were antithetical incarnate, me in my precious shades of blue and he in his rebel slick. Screech and Chong. Cheech and Wrong. Unable to look the drivers or the drug dealer in their eyes, I turned my gaze upon the crossing guard. I couldn’t see what she was looking at through those sunglasses of hers, but I knew it wasn’t us. I know she wasn’t listening to us either, for when I crossed paths with the drug dealer and he asked me if I wanted to buy some weed, she didn’t flinch. Nor did she flinch when he asked me again, this time over his shoulder.

“Hey, I asked if you want to buy some weed.” He said it so casually both times, like he was wondering if I would trade him my Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card for two of his Jose Cansecos (a bad deal in its own right).

My mind rolling and stomach tumbling, I managed to spit out “No thanks.” No… thanks. Even then, when everything I was warned about manifested itself in the form of a boy in leather, I remembered my manners. No thanks, sir.

Then I put on the afterburners and hurried through what remained of the crosswalk. When I blasted up onto the other side, I spun around to see if he had followed me. He hadn’t, moseying to the other side of the street at a relaxed pace, caring little that he was delaying the drivers by a few more seconds. I watched him so carefully, like I did everything those days, but he never looked back. This drug dealer, this kid who’d never sprung off a diving board and tucked his legs beneath him and thundered into water sanitized with chlorine, had seen too many of me already. And, unlike me, he didn’t need to see one more.

 

Matt Muilenburg is an English instructor and writing consultant at the University of Dubuque. A graduate of the Wichita State University MFA program, his creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review and has appeared in New Plains Review, Mojave River Review, and Flyover Country Review. His fiction has also been published in several literary journals. Matt currently lives in Iowa near the Field of Dreams with his wife and two sons.