CHAPTER 2
FISTS OVER THE STREETS
The two weeks of mediation passed quicker than either of them expected.
What started as a punishment turned into something closer to routine — fifteen minutes after school, Ms. Odom asking the same handful of questions, Rodney and Varnell finding less and less to argue about each time.
By the second week, they weren't hardly mediating nothing.
Just talking. About school, about the block, about whatever came up.
"You still trying to come through the gym?" Rodney asked one Thursday, kicking his feet up on the empty chair between them while Ms. Odom stepped out to grab something from the front office.
"You still asking?"
"I'm serious, man. My cousin Ellis run it. He'll work you."
Varnell hadn't forgot the offer, just hadn't found a way to make it real yet. Asking Vanessa for anything extra — time, money, a ride he didn't need but might make things easier — always came with a weight to it, like every ask cost her something she couldn't spare.
"I gotta ask my moms."
"So ask her."
That night he did, catching her in one of her better moods, plate of food between them, television low.
He explained it careful — a gym, Rodney's cousin, no cost, just something to do after school that wasn't trouble.
Vanessa listened, chewing slow, studying him the way she did when she was deciding whether to worry.
"This the boy you got in trouble with?"
"We good now."
She was quiet a second, then nodded, small. "Long as your grades don't slip. And I mean that, Varnell."
That was it. Permission granted, quiet and simple, the way most things were in their house.
She didn't ask more than that, and Varnell didn't offer more than that either — not out of secrecy, just the shape their relationship had settled into over the years.
She worked, she provided what she could, and she trusted him to fill in the rest without making her worry too much about how.
Vanessa hadn't always been like this — tired in the particular way she was tired now, careful with every ounce of energy she had left after a shift.
Varnell didn't know all of it, just pieces gathered over the years from things she let slip when she thought he wasn't paying attention, or things other people said when they thought he wasn't listening at all.
A brother he'd never met, older, from a different life she didn't talk about.
A version of her that existed before him, harder years she'd climbed out of by the time he was born, carrying scars he couldn't see but sometimes felt anyway, in the way she flinched at certain words, certain memories he wasn't allowed access to yet.
He knew better than to ask directly. Some doors in their apartment stayed closed, and he'd learned early which ones.
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Ellis's gym sat two blocks off Bergen, tucked between a check cashing spot and a laundromat, more heavy bags than actual ring space, mirrors along one wall scratched up from years of gloves getting a little too close.
The smell hit Varnell first — sweat, leather, something like rust — followed by the sound, rhythmic and constant, gloves against bags, jump ropes slapping concrete.
Ellis turned out to be a broad, quiet man who sized Varnell up with one look and didn't say much beyond "you got hands or you just got mouth?
" Varnell didn't answer with words. He answered by working the bag Ellis pointed him toward until his arms burned, Rodney beside him doing the same, the two of them falling into an easy rhythm neither had planned for.
Weeks passed that way. School, mediation until it wore itself out and stopped being required, then the gym most days after.
Rodney and Varnell's friendship built itself in the space between rounds, the walk to Bergen, the walk back after, conversations that started as nothing and turned into something neither one had a name for yet — the particular closeness of two boys who'd found, in each other, someone who didn't need explanations for the parts of their lives they couldn't explain.
"You ever meet your pops?" Rodney asked one evening, wrapping his hands slow, unhurried.
"Nah. You?"
"He around. Just ain't around, you know? Different thing."
Varnell nodded like he understood, and in some way he did, even without the details lining up exact. Everybody on the block seemed to be missing something, some piece that should've been there and wasn't, and finding somebody else missing a piece too made the missing easier to carry.
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Ellis entered them both in a local tournament come spring — nothing official, just a gathering of a few gyms from around the city, kids matched up by weight and age in a rec center gym with folding chairs set up around a taped-off square.
Rodney went first, faced off against a stocky kid from an East Ward gym, and made quick work of him, landing combinations Ellis had drilled into him for weeks, walking away with his hand raised before the second round even got going good.
Varnell went up next, and something about the noise, the crowd pressed in close, the weight of Vanessa sitting in the third row — she'd taken off work to be there, first time she'd taken off in longer than Varnell could remember — got into his head before the bell even rang.
He came out tight, overthinking punches that should've come natural, and his opponent, looser and more comfortable in front of a crowd, capitalized quick.
Varnell caught a hook he should've seen coming, stumbled, and though he fought to close the distance the rest of the round, the fight didn't turn back in his favor. Decision went against him.
He sat afterward, sweat and disappointment mixing together, Rodney beside him not saying much because there wasn't much useful to say. Ellis crouched down in front of him.
"You froze up. Everybody do it the first time. Don't mean nothing."
Varnell nodded, not really believing it yet, the loss sitting heavier than it probably should've for a kid's first tournament fight.
Vanessa found him after, pulling him into a hug he half resisted out of embarrassment before letting himself sink into it anyway.
"I'm proud of you," she said, and meant it, and Varnell let himself believe that part even if he couldn't yet believe Ellis's.
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It was the following week, at a routine school checkup — the kind every student got dragged through once a year, height, weight, vision, the whole rundown — that a nurse frowned at something on her clipboard, checked it twice, and quietly wrote a note recommending Varnell be sent for further evaluation.
Nothing urgent in her tone when she mentioned it to him, nothing that would've made a twelve year old think much of it beyond mild annoyance at one more appointment eating into his week.
He didn't think about it again until the letter came home addressed to Vanessa, official-looking in a way that made her go quiet reading it at the kitchen table, quiet in a way Varnell hadn't seen from her before — not the tired quiet of an exhausted shift, but something else entirely, something that made the apartment feel colder than the weather outside accounted for.
"Ma?"
"It's nothing," she said, folding the letter and setting it aside. "Just a follow-up. We'll go together."
But she held onto his hand a little longer than usual walking him to bed that night, and Varnell, without knowing why exactly, held on a little longer too.
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