Chapter 15
Party Gone Wrong
Amanda Robles took in the scene around her. She was in somebody's fairly large back yard, large for the ghetto, anyway, and while there were plenty of people dancing to the DJ's music, there were plenty of negative aspects present as well. The girls were all standing in little cliques when they weren't dancing. They were eying their rivals with contempt and gossip, and if their nemesis happened to walk by with a man by her side, their faces glared with outright jealousy and hatred.
The young men weren't much better. There had already been two small fights that had threatened to shut the party down. A growing contingent of gang members was hanging out in a corner of the yard, getting drunker and rowdier by the minute. Even at the tender age of eighteen, Amanda was already wise enough to know that these ruffians were going to end up instigating some sort of disaster later.
Amanda sighed. The pretty teen had gotten dressed up for the occasion. She wore a nice blouse colored in berry with tiny, multi-hued flowers on it, and a blue denim skirt. Amanda didn't know anybody at the party. She didn't like either the guys or the girls, or their horrible attitudes. It was still early, but she was already thinking about going home.
Well, she did know one person. Her brother Junior stepped up beside her with a beer in one hand and a wine cooler in the other. He wore his usual crisp white tee shirt and jeans.
"Here you go." Junior extended the arm with the beer, before quickly taking it back. "Sike! Take your fruity-fuck wine cooler out of here!"
"It's better than that warm piss you're drinking." Amanda retorted.
"Not warm yet." Junior shook his head and took a big gulp. "I got this one from the fridge. Somebody's going to be pissed off later when they find out I took it."
Amanda noticed that her brother was getting cold stares from the hoodlums, which now numbered at about eight. "I'm not liking those guys, at all."
Junior looked over. "I know. Two of them hit me up when I went inside to use the phone. I tried to call my buddy who dropped us off here, but he didn't answer."
Amanda shook her head. "We should just go. You know those assholes are going to come over and try to pick a fight with you, as soon as they get drunk enough."
"There's only eight of them." Junior joked. "And I can take on, what, maybe one or two at a time? I guess I would get my ass handed to me, huh?"
"You think?"
"Well, what do you want to do?" Junior asked. "I don't know anything about this shitty neighborhood, other than it's far away from our house."
"Let's just go for a walk." Amanda said. "We'll find a liquor store with a pay phone. You can try calling your friend again."
"All right, let's go." Junior shrugged.
Amanda turned down the path that led past the side of the house, toward the gate they'd used when they first walked in.
"Not that way." Junior stopped her. "Those eight fuckers will follow us if they think we're heading out into the street. Let's just go through the house and make them think we're not leaving yet."
Amanda followed her brother through the home's back door. They went past a kitchen whose counter was overflowing with empty beer cans and half-empty bags of chips, and a sink full of dirty dishes and plastic bowls. "Who owns this place?"
"No idea." Junior said.
They went into the living room, where a couple of hoodlums and their girlfriends were smoking weed on the couches.
"Hey, guys." Junior nodded, but it was clear that these paired hoodlums were associated with the single ones outside. "We're going to grab our smokes from the car. We'll be right back."
As they stepped out the barred front door, Amanda noticed that one of the hoodlums got up and started off toward the backyard. She and her brother were on the residence's lawn when she revealed this.
"I saw that, too." Junior nodded. "Let's just walk a couple of houses down, then we'll get the fuck out of here, okay?"
Two yards later, the pair crossed the street. While using both cars and foliage as cover, they ran. The siblings stopped a block later, made a turn at a corner, and ran another half block before Amanda had to pause for breath.
"If I would have known we were trying out for the track team, I would have worn my sweats!" Amanda complained.
Junior considered his sister's outfit. It wasn't much, he observed in the moonlight, just a tight blouse and an even tighter skirt. "Let's just keep moving."
They walked on a few more blocks, before they came to a dark hill. Once they'd descended the hill, they found themselves on the edge of a much wider, and thanks to its lack of streetlights, equally dark and forbidding road. The venue didn't even have sidewalks on either side, but mere brush and grass.
"Where the fuck are we?" Amanda asked.
"If we walk this way, we'll end up near the highway and some businesses." Junior pointed. "But it's going to be a long walk before we get to a phone."
"Do we have a choice?"
"Not really." Junior said, and they started off.
To one side, the hill loomed up high and verdant, until a large brick wall near its crest divided its range from the fairly recently built residences sitting up top. There was nowhere for them to hide, if those gang members decided to pile into a car and came out looking for them. Since Junior didn't want to end up on some list of crime statistics, he quickly guided his sister across the street.
They found a dirt path running alongside the road, made by countless human footsteps. A few thin trees were scattered about, and a natural ditch stretched by along the path. The siblings could conceal themselves in the ditch if they had to.
Junior had been keeping tabs on the road behind them. "A car is coming up on us, from the same place we were just at."
He led his sister down into the ditch. Tensely, they waited for the car to pass them by, but it was creeping along at a very slow pace.
"It's gotta be them." Junior whispered. "Who else would drive so slow down such an empty road at night?"
"An old man."
"It's not an old man's car, though." Junior crept up, enough to be able to see where the car's tail lights were heading. "Not unless old men are into buying chrome wheels nowadays."
"Dad's been thinking about putting chrome wheels on his truck." Amanda said. "He's an old man."
"He's not that old." Junior straightened up. "Okay, it looks like those guys went up another street. Let's get going."
They did.
The brother and sister walked on for almost twenty minutes. Vehicles passed them by only half a dozen times. The travelers weren't overly concerned about them, since the cars were approaching from a contrary direction.
"This sucks." Amanda griped.
"Sorry." Junior said. "I didn't know my buddy was going to rank out on me like that. I would have never gotten off the car if I'd known he was going to take off just a few minutes later. I'm sorry I brought you out here."
"I didn't mean just tonight." Amanda elaborated. "I mean things just suck all over. Do you know how many parties I've been to where some stupid gang members start fighting and fuck it all up? They ruin everything!"
Junior kept on walking.
"And the girls at that party, they sucked, too." Amanda added. "Did you see the way they were looking at me? Like I was after every single one of their thug boyfriends. I don't think so!"
"Well, you're hotter than any of them were, that's for sure. I think you were the only girl that smiled during the entire time we were there."
Amanda considered this briefly. "Well, what about you? You should have had at least a couple of girls hanging on your arms. Why didn't you?"
"Neighborhood politics." Junior admitted. "I was an outsider at that party, just like you. They've already got their pecking order set up and their internal rivalries going on. People like us that don't belong to their little social groups. We get ignored because they're all competing among themselves. I learned a lot of this shit by listening to the older guys while I was in jail, because some of the cellblocks run the same way. It's kind of stupid, because people don't ever really look past their own noses. They miss out on everything else in the world because they're so busy with their own little corner of bullshit to worry about."
Amanda thought about her boyfriend, who was still in jail, and who kept getting time added to his sentence because he kept getting into fights with everybody. She'd chosen him because he was big and tough. Once she found out what an asshole he was, Amanda discovered that he was impossible to get rid of. He threatened everybody that made a move on her when he wasn't in jail. Now that he was incarcerated, his homeboys from the neighborhood would frequently stroll by Amanda at school. In no uncertain terms, they'd remind any possible suitors of hers of what they'd have coming to them once Amanda's boyfriend was released.
"Life sucks." She said. "Everything sucks."
"If you'd seen some of the guys I was in jail with and heard their stories, you wouldn't be saying that. You'd be saying your life was great."
They came to a small shopping center, but all of the lights were off except for some signs and a few lampposts spaced around the parking lot. A couple of abandoned cars sat around and moped in the darkness.
"It's got to be close to midnight." Junior said.
"You need to buy a watch."
"I will, as soon as somebody gives me a job." He complained. "You don't know how many times somebody takes a look at my criminal record, and shoves me out the door a second later. I wish I would have never started smoking weed."
"I just told you that life sucks."
"We've got it good, sis, compared to other people. You have to always remember that."
They came to a large and sprawling, two level white building. It had stucco walls and evenly spaced-out rows of doors and windows on both the upper and lower floors.
"I know this place." Junior said. "Dad drove me here a couple of times, to talk to a lawyer in one of those offices. There's a pay phone on the first floor."
The two walked over. While Junior busied himself with the phone, Amanda trotted up the steps to the second level. She found a spot where she could see the dark road and the quiet businesses across the street. Further down by a couple of blocks, she could see a gas station. Just past that lay the entrance to the highway. She felt relieved that they were close to a spot she more or less recognized.
Amanda heard Junior's footsteps shuffling up the steps.
"The phone's dead." He grumbled.
