He had no way of knowing that Yusef was being beaten in a vacant lot on a rural South Carolina road. Tamarvan was miles away at a football game taking pictures with the camera he had chosen for the school’s yearbook staff as the editor. Tamarvan could often be seen at school functions, blending into a wall with a camera hanging from a strap around his neck and a pad of paper that he periodically scribbled onto. He didn’t want to be a journalist, Tamarvan was only interested in listing the organization on college applications, but that did not diminish his commitment to the job. In fact, he had turned down Yusef’s invitation to meet him at Edwards library for a history study session earlier in the day, where Yusef would have been instead of the dark vacant lot on the Tuesday night when he was killed by a gang of eight boys and two men by technicality.
Tamarvan dedicated himself steadfastly to whatever thing he was doing, whether it was the yearbook, the club for future business leaders, French club, or the chess club; the last of which he had founded himself as a freshman with his two best friends. For Tamarvan there was nothing more important than success and he wanted his high school scholarship to take him to one of the impressive academic institutions he had been researching since he was a middle schooler. Since that time, he’d had admission requirements for the universities he hoped to attend on the wall in his room. He studied Latin in his free time and though he struggled in the beginning with pronunciation, he managed an impressive comprehension and translation ability. He was introduced to the language by a teacher, Jackson Smith, who believed that a child was never too young to be educated. Tamarvan learned from Mr. Smith that he could use his brain to make life easier for everyone he loved and so Tamarvan took his education very seriously.
At the football game, Tamarvan was all business, stopping people to ask questions and sometimes getting into harm’s way when he got too close for a picture. Even if Yusef had been able to call Tamarvan ‘s cell phone to ask for help, he would have gotten the teenager’s voicemail that he rarely ever checked out of ignorance that he should be expecting a phone call. Tamarvan was not especially social and only carried his boxy Nokia cell phone that his parent’s purchased for him because his father insisted that he should be able to contact him at anytime; he could never remember the number and hardly learned to check voicemails or text messages that he received. It was lucky for others that he was often with Yusef who also had a phone at his parent’s insistence because he was often with Tamarvan and their friend Roger around the Bottoms, usually at the community center. Tamarvan ‘s mother, Esther, knew to call Yusef if she was worried about her son and his friends; if by chance the sound of a gunshot ripped through the rows of houses, or if the sound of gathering aggression and the voices of people riled to violence; and Yusef would always answer, “Yes Mrs. Barnes,” because he recognized her number. Yusef’s mother was not so fortunate on that Tuesday night during the football game, where Tamarvan ‘s phone had some how slipped from his pocket, maybe when he was knocked over on the sideline when the team celebrated between plays, and a member of the other team slipped on it and fell mid slur aimed at the Ladoga Hurricanes’ offense. The player had to be carried off, the phone made him roll his ankle. Tamarvan ‘s phone was crushed and he was asked to return to the stands with the other fans.
His mother met him at the front door of their home after the game and she looked extremely relieved to see him.
“Please tell me you was with Yusef.” Tamarvan ‘s mother was a beautiful woman in her thirties, but the worry on her face that night made her look older, almost sick.
“I was at the game,” Tamarvan said, “I didn’t meet up with him earlier. He ok?”
Esther told him what she knew.
Roger was still struggling out of his costume in the band room after the game when he heard about Yusef. The second chair trombone, Nicholas, came into the room and asked if Roger had seen Yusef and told him that a police officer was waiting outside to ask him the same thing. Roger asked to borrow Nicholas’s cell phone and called Tamarvan who of course did not answer; he was getting the news from his mother. Roger rushed to finish changing and then carefully packed the trumpet that his grandfather had given him into its case. Roger was a talented player but he didn’t have much enthusiasm for the band’s boring repertoire. He looked forward to playing with his cousin’s band when his trumpet player couldn’t make it, and they were sometimes lucky enough to get paying gigs. He would have quit the school band a long time ago, but Tamarvan had convinced him that it was worthwhile to keep him sharp in between gigs. He could read music, but for band class, he would learn the pieces by ear and sit in the back while others struggled, flipping through various short story collections that his cousin sent him by mail. He forgot his book of Quiroga’s stories when he rushed out to talk to the police officer.
After school, when Tamarvan was in Mrs. Kenningson’s classroom looking for the camera, ad Roger were getting ready for his band performance, Yusef took the bus home. With Tamarvan on the bus, Yusef was usually well guarded against the surpringly innocent bigotry that can exist in enviornments occupied by a preponderance of children void of effective adult supervision. Innocent because they were children after all, still learning that there was little value in superficial hatred, and capable of learning the lesson, in the presence of a good teacher of course. Without Tamarvan that day, Yusef was roped into a fight with two boys who pinned him down in the back seat and punched him until the bus driver noticed. He was a very sturdy fifteen year old, ropey limbs that were strong with muscles, slightly taller and stronger than average, capable of defending himself against any of the boys on the bus one on one. Yusef was sitting in the back seat, intently trying to finish some homework so that he could watch cartoons once he made it home, when he noticed the two boys whispering to each other, then move to terrorize an unsuspecting girl a couple of seats ahead of them. One grabbed her over the back of her seat, and the other sat beside her, flipping her hair and clothes. Yusef screamed loud enough for the driver to hear, “hey, man, leave her alone!” The driver did notice and yelled for everyone to find their seats, reminding them of the dangers of moving around while the bus was moving. Yusef went back to his books, challenging himself to finish as fast and as accurately as he could. The two boys, meanwhile, plotted on Yusef. One was bigger than the other and knew Yusef from keyboarding class. The two never talked, they were usually on opposite ends of the room, one completing assignments, the other lost in conversations with his friends. The bigger boy started to throw things at Yusef that went unnoticed until the size of the things increased, from wads of paper to rubber erasers to pencils. And Yusef couldn’t help himself, he said, “its not like you know how to use any of this stuff anyway.” The bigger boy called Yusef every curse word he had ever heard his father say and then he called him a terrorist. He called him Osama Bin Laden and then he said fuck Muslims. So Yusef called his mother a whore and then both of the boys jumped on him because the bigger boy’s mother was the smaller’s aunt, and Yusef barely got any punches in at all before the bus driver stepped in.
He was mad by the time he got home. He didn’t watch cartoons and he stormed into his house to the bathroom where he cleaned blood from his face. His father found him there, fuming, but Yusef didn’t want to talk to his father who only told him that things would get better as he got older if he was strong and if he persevered. Yusef wasn’t interested in the lesson that he had a firm grasp on by that point. He wanted to do something about it, to push back. Or just be distracted with something. He had a test approaching and he tried Tamarvan , hoping that he would only be at school for a club meeting so they could meet to study, but when he told him about the football game, Yusef decided to go to Edwards library by himself. He walked the sidewalk in front of his house toward M street until the sidewalk ended. He must have looked right, across an empty lot of weeds, toward the V, where two streets came together into a sharp turn that drivers avoided at all costs, and where one could find drugs at all times of the day. Yusef saw the drug dealers as the boys on the bus, who did and said disgusting things because they were ignorant and selfish, and he wanted to do something.
He and Tamarvan had many conversations about drugs in Ladoga and it was Yusef’s opinion that the mostly black dealers who sold to their mostly black customers who were hooked on weed, crack, and an array of prescription pills that rendered effects similar to opium, were propagating the very problems in their own community that resulted in many dead young people, low graduation rates, and persistent poverty. Tamarvan thought that the problem was with the hypocritical law that essentially criminalized capitalism. “If it was a nine to five, they’d have a salary and benefits, and be able to send their kids to college,” Tamarvan said on many occasions. “If people can get rich by getting people addicted to food with weird food additives, if people can present unrealistic standards of beauty and create medical industry that exploits the insecurities of people who want to conform to the ridiculous standard, if people can ethically create a product for some amount of money and charge ten times the production cost per unit for the product and pocket 90% of the profit, then why can’t I become a millionaire on the backs of crack and potheads? Big tobacco does it. Big beer. Is it big beer?” Yusef believed that it was capitalism itself that was the problem. “The need to get rich in America easily trumps the moral obligation to our neighbors to abstain from the things that make us less capable of contributing to a greater good.” The conversations would come off their hinges around that part, when their friend Roger would call Yusef a communist.
“That stuff only sounds good, the greater good. What is that? I mean, I know that there are forces of good and evil at play in the world, but how do we contribute to them? Don’t they seize us?” Roger, which was short for Rogelio, idolized the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga and couldn’t help but be morose. Sometimes Yusef would get upset at Roger because he hated nihilism and thought that Roger had a way of insulting his religious conviction with those crazy stories his cousin, who majored in Latin American studies at a college in California, had introduced him to when his family visited the state. Tamarvan would always kill the argument by changing the subject to the boarded up homes in the vicinity of the community center where they usually spent their time talking like they were years older. Tamarvan would describe his suggestions for improvements to the homes that had once housed families but had since become nothing more than shells for the boy’s dreams. Or he would remove the houses from his imagination altogether and replace them instead with public art pieces like the ones he admired from other cities. “East Ladoga should have something to remind us of how far we’ve come, a monument to the slaves or the natives.” And they would all agree with that.
Absent his friends and still jumpy from his adrenaline that had spiked on the bus, Yusef had no one to talk him down that day after school when he walked to Edwards, and before maybe even he knew it, he was standing and facing a crowd of boys who were mostly older than him, but none by more than five years. Some had been arrested before, some had been shot. They listened to Yusef’s rant for longer than anyone would expect. “You should all be ashamed,” he yelled. “If you put your energy into finding a real job you wouldn’t have to be out here. And then maybe the property values in the whole area would go up. How can you be so shortsighted, don’t you want better? Don’t you and your kids and your parents deserve better?” It was almost as if they respected what he was saying long enough to let him finish. Almost.
They chased him back down the street he had walked to get there and maybe if he had screamed for help as they passed his house, a member of Yusef’s family would have been able to help, but no one saw him and he concentrated on moving faster than the boys behind him. When his street ended, Yusef figured that the boys would give up, but they didn’t, in fact, they had caught a ride and were slowly riding behind him and laughing, throwing things at him from their window. They were nearing the west and by that time, countless people had seen Yusef running like his life depended on it, but did nothing to stop it. The boys in the car actually looked the heroes who had found a terrorist and were running him out of town. A few people approached, but the boys screamed , “you helping Osama Bin Laden?” And the people were confused enough to watch Yusef continue to stumble over himself in exhaustion. When his legs finally quit on him, the boys got out and forced Yusef into the trunk of their car. They drove south, intent on teaching Yusef the lesson that he couldn’t go into other people’s houses and tell them how to live their lives.
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