CHAPTER 6
WRONG WAY
O'Brien led him off the porch and down the block a ways, far enough that the house — and whoever was inside it — wouldn't hear, hands jammed in his pockets, shoulders up around his ears against the cold.
"How'd you find me," he asked finally, not looking at Varnell, eyes fixed somewhere down the empty street.
"Wasn't hard. People know things if you ask right."
O'Brien let out a breath that fogged in the cold air, something like a laugh but without any humor in it. "Your mother's name is Vanessa."
It wasn't a question, but Varnell answered anyway. "Yeah."
"I knew her a long time ago." He stopped walking, turned finally to look at Varnell directly, something raw and exhausted in his face. "I didn't know about you. I want you to understand that. I didn't know you existed until three nights ago, looking at your face in that alley."
Varnell didn't know what to do with that, the words landing somewhere he wasn't prepared for, a strange mix of relief and hurt tangled together. "So what now."
"I don't know," O'Brien said, honest in a way that Varnell almost respected more than a lie would've earned.
"I've got a wife. A life I built that doesn't have room in it for this, and I know how that sounds, I know it's not fair to you, but I need time before I know what I'm supposed to do with what I found out. "
"You just gonna go back to pretending?"
O'Brien flinched at that, small but real. "No," he said. "I'm not saying that. I'm saying I don't have an answer for you tonight, standing on a street corner in the cold. Give me time. I owe you that much, at least — figuring out how to do this right instead of doing it wrong out of panic."
Varnell studied him a long moment, twelve years of absence compressed into thirty seconds of silence, before he nodded, once, and turned to walk home, O'Brien's eyes on his back the whole way until he turned the corner out of sight.
? ? ?
Nothing about that conversation solved anything, and Varnell walked back into his own life the next morning feeling like he'd traded one unresolved thing for another.
Rodney was gone, locked up pending charges serious enough that bail wasn't happening quick, if at all.
The money problem hadn't gone nowhere. And now there was a father out there, somewhere, who knew his name and still hadn't done a single thing about it.
Felt like square one, except worse, because now he knew exactly how much further there was to fall.
He took some of what he'd saved from the car money — money he'd been holding onto for Larkin's program, guilt gnawing at him even as he made the decision — and copped a pack from an older kid a few blocks over, figuring quick turnaround for quick profit, figuring he could replace what he spent and then some once it moved.
School turned into his main market. Kids with allowance money, kids trying to look a certain way in front of others, a steady stream of small transactions between classes that added up faster than the car money had, no Marcus Boone required, no need to trust nobody but himself.
It felt like control, for a minute — the first thing that had felt like control in longer than he could remember.
The trouble was, he was moving on territory that wasn't his to move on.
Word got back to the OE10's — the crew that ran the blocks from 1st through 10th Ave, marijuana and PCP and K2 on the odd blocks, cocaine and crack and heroin and pills on the even, an operation methodical enough that a twelve year old cutting into their school market got noticed faster than Varnell expected.
The first warning came secondhand, a kid pulling him aside between classes. "Yo, you know you selling on OE10 territory, right? They asking about you."
"It's a school, not a block."
"Don't matter to them. They said cut it or catch a problem."
Varnell didn't cut it. Pride, stupidity, desperation — some mix of all three kept him moving product even after the warning, and it didn't take long for the problem to find him directly.
He didn't know the boy's name at first, just his face, older than Varnell, hard-eyed in a way that made clear he wasn't there for conversation.
"Heard you been on our blocks," the boy said, cornering Varnell near the lockers, two others flanking him.
"It's a school. Everybody territory."
"Not how it work." The boy stepped closer. "You gonna cut it, or we gonna have a bigger problem."
Varnell didn't back down — hadn't backed down from Rodney that first day, wasn't about to start now — and the confrontation went physical fast, fists flying before either of them fully decided to throw the first one.
It wasn't the last time either. Over the following weeks, three more incidents, escalating each time, until the school administration ran out of patience for a kid whose file was already thick with issues that predated his enrollment.
The expulsion letter came home cold and bureaucratic, and Vanessa's reaction was worse than anything Varnell had braced for — not yelling, just a long, quiet look that carried more disappointment than any punishment could've, especially given everything else already sitting heavy in their house.
"I don't know what to do with you no more," she said, and the words sat in Varnell's chest for days after.
? ? ?
Without school to structure his time, Varnell found himself on the block more, which only put him closer to the exact territory that had gotten him in trouble in the first place.
He kept trapping anyway, moved further from caution than he'd been before, some reckless part of him deciding that if he was already out of school, already in the middle of this, he might as well see it through.
The threats escalated. A message got sent through a mutual acquaintance that if Varnell didn't fall back, they'd make him.
He didn't fall back. And on a corner three blocks from his building, it came to a head — four of them against him, a beating that would've gone worse than it did if not for the sudden arrival of somebody Varnell hadn't seen before.
He came in fast, breaking it up more through reputation than force — the OE10 boys backing off the second they recognized him, murmuring apologies, scattering without much more than a look from him.
"You good?" the newcomer asked, offering Varnell a hand up off the ground.
Varnell took it, spitting blood, nodding despite every part of him aching. "Yeah. Who are you?"
"Chucky J." He looked Varnell over, something like respect in his expression despite the state Varnell was in. "You got heart, taking on four of 'em by yourself. Stupid, but heart."
"They been on me for weeks."
"Yeah, I heard. Word travel." Chucky J glanced back down the block where the OE10 boys had retreated. "That's Rico's people. Moose's second."
"Who's Moose?"
"Man who run the whole operation. You stepped on something bigger than you realized, little man." Chucky J studied him another moment, something calculating behind his easy demeanor. "How old are you?"
"Old enough."
Chucky J laughed, genuine, shaking his head. "Alright. I ain't gonna push it. But you interesting, whatever you are. I'm around here time to time. You see me, you already know we good."
He walked off without further explanation, leaving Varnell standing there bloodied and confused and, for reasons he couldn't fully articulate, more hopeful than he'd felt in weeks.