No Snitchin'

Blood seeped through the folds in his face, warm against my palm where I pressed hard against the wound. It cooled as it ran down the back of my hand. I could feel his chest rising and falling in shallow, desperate rhythms. He struggled to get words out. His lips trembled. The focused gaze that centered onto my eyes faded. I had no idea what to say or do.

My mom ran outside after she heard the commotion. “Rashad!” she called out.

I raised my head but couldn’t see her clearly. The cold breeze forced me to close my eyes. My mom stood on our small cement porch, stunned. One of my uncles came out to pull her back in and call the police. I looked back down at Key; his eyes flinched. They fought to stay fixed on me.

“Key, don’t trip. We gettin’ you some help now.”

His head trembled as he reached up to find somewhere to place his hand. Memories flooded in.

I was eleven, riding my bike down the cracked asphalt of Maple Street with Key right beside me. The summer sun beat down on our backs. “Watch this, Rashad,” Key had said. He pulled up on his handlebars, and his front wheel lifted clean off the ground. He held it there, grinning at me the whole time. “Your turn, man. It’s easy.” I yanked the handlebars up too hard, and the next thing I knew I was flat on my back staring at the sky. The back of my head throbbed where it had cracked against the concrete. Key stood over me, doubled over with laughter. “Yo, you looked like a turtle flipped on its shell!” Even through the pain, I started laughing too. He reached down and pulled me up, still chuckling. “Come on, man. Let’s get you some ice before your head swells up like a balloon.” That was Key—always laughing, always there to pick me up.

We were thirteen, running through the woods behind my aunt’s house. Key grabbed my shoulder and pointed—a massive ox, thirty yards away, its dark eyes locked on us. We froze. “Run,” Key whispered, and we took off. I could hear him start to laugh even as we ran. “Yo, that thing was about to charge us!” We burst into my aunt’s backyard and collapsed on the grass, chests heaving. Then we both started cracking up. “Man, we almost died,” I said. “Nah,” Key replied. “We got each other’s backs. We always gonna be good.”

We were sixteen, sneaking into Tasha and Keisha’s house. Everything was smooth until we heard the front door open two hours early. Keys jingling. Footsteps. “Oh shit,” Tasha hissed. Key and I looked at each other and scrambled out the window onto the roof. We dropped into the bushes and ran down the street in our socks. Four blocks away, we bent over gasping and laughing. “Yo, did you see your face?” Key said. “Man, you looked worse!” I shot back. We walked home under the streetlights, still laughing, still brothers, still young enough to think nothing could ever really hurt us.

All those moments—all that life, all that laughter, all that history between us—and now here we were. His hand found my shoulder, fingers pressing weakly against my jacket, and then his whole body went limp. The weight of him changed. His hand slipped from my shoulder and slapped against the cold sidewalk with a sound that would haunt me forever.

I shook him. “Key, come on, man. Come on.”

Nothing.

“Key,” I said. “Key...yo, Key!”

“K-ee-ee-eeyyy!”

The sobs came. My face twisted. I couldn’t breathe without choking on air. Key’s body grew heavier in my arms, or maybe I was the one getting weaker. My head jerked back and forth.

Sirens screamed down the street. Red and gold lights swept across the apartment buildings, then red and blue from the cop cars behind.

“Come on, Rashad. We gotta get outta these folk’s way so they can see who did Keyshawn like dat,” my uncle said.

The blood on my arm had already started to harden in the cold. My uncle pulled me off Key’s body. I flailed, kicked, screamed. He carried me inside while I reached back toward the street, toward the EMTs moving Key’s head to reveal where the bullets hit his neck. My uncle slammed me into the couch and held me tight.

“Look, I know it’s hard, but look at me,” he said.

His callous-riddled hands gripped my face, forced me to meet his eyes. When I saw the tear sliding down his cheek, I stopped fighting.

“We go get the motherfuckas who did it.”

My mouth opened wide and a wail tore out of me. I drenched my uncle’s white shirt in tears I couldn’t stop.

We never did get them. My uncle asked around, made calls, even went to the police himself. But within weeks, the detectives stopped returning calls. The witnesses who saw something suddenly couldn’t remember. The streets went quiet, like they always do.

That was eight years ago.

Eight years of watching the same thing happen over and over. Eight years of memorials and candlelight vigils and mothers screaming at the sky. Eight years of learning how to feel nothing at all.

No one was prosecuted for Keyshawn’s murder. No one was even arrested.

After Key, there was Marcus. Then Jayla. Then twin brothers whose names I can’t even remember now because I trained myself not to remember. Twelve, fifteen, nine, sixteen—the ages blur together like the faces on the murals that get painted over when the next kid dies.

I stopped crying at funerals by the third one. Stopped flinching when I heard gunshots by the fifth. Now I step over memorials on my way to school without breaking stride.

That’s what this place does to you—it doesn’t kill you all at once. It kills you slow, piece by piece, until you’re walking around with a heartbeat but nothing beating inside.

But I’m not going to let it finish the job.

Howard University. Full ride. I got the acceptance letter two months ago, and I’ve read it so many times the creases are starting to tear. My guidance counselor cried when I showed her. Said I was one of the good ones who made it out.

Part of me wants to forget. Wants to get on that bus to D.C. and never look back, never think about Key or this neighborhood or any of it ever again. Start fresh. Become someone new.

And that’s exactly what they want. For us to either die here or forget we ever lived here. For Key to become just another name on a t-shirt, another hashtag that trends for a day and disappears.

I refuse to give them that.

I’m leaving, yes. But I’m taking Key with me. Every paper I write, every class I take, every time someone asks me where I’m from—I’m going to make them see him. Not as a statistic. Not as a tragedy. As a ten-year-old boy who loved basketball and made up stupid songs and laughed so hard he’d snort.

I still have blood on my shoes from that night. I scrubbed them once, then stopped. Let the stains set in. They’re a different pair now—I’ve worn through three since then—but I know exactly where the blood would be. Right there on the toe. Right where I knelt beside him.

Some people carry photos. I carry that.

I’ve already started. Applied to every criminal justice program I could find. Signed up for the pre-law track. Put my name down for the campus newspaper. I don’t care if I have to work three jobs and sleep four hours a night—I’m going to learn how to make people listen. How to turn grief into evidence. How to make sure the next detective can’t just close a file and go home to dinner.

This place wants me dead or numb. It wants me to stay and become another casualty, or leave and become another person who forgot.

Once I leave, I plan on doing all that I can to make sure I never have to come back here. If I have to work to get an apartment next to my school, then I’ll do that. If everyone hates me for not wanting to come back, then so be it. All I know is that I can’t let this be where my life ends.

I refuse.

Criminal justice. Maybe law. Maybe journalism. I don’t know exactly what yet, but I know it’s going to be something that forces people to pay attention. Something that makes it harder for the next detective to let a case go cold. Something that makes it impossible for the next mother to scream at an empty sky with no one listening.

This place wants me dead or numb. It wants me to stay and become another casualty, or leave and become another person who forgot.

I refuse.