Guardians And Angels | Chapter Five | (Part 17)

The Friday night before Halloween during my seventh-grade year is a night I won’t be able to forget for a few lifetimes, if ever. I imagine my soul will wake up three lives from now, with fleeting scenes of this bittersweet night running through my mind, and I'll hold my hand to my heart, trying to quench the pangs and stop the unbearable clenching, not remembering why.

It was the kind of Friday night in October where time is sticky and thick, where the fog makes everything feel a bit slower, and the air fills with the aroma of oak and pine from the first chimney fires flaring up across town. My best friend Kai, who I was falling for in all the quiet ways a boy falls in love, got the shit beat out of him by his father right in front of me earlier that night. A violent act which still echoes inside a chamber within my chest every year when the air turns colder in California. I was witness to a private ceremony of pain which would set forth a series of events that would reverberate publicly across our county for years to come.

We ran from his father that evening, from the assault, from the fear. We fled through the twilight toward my house on the edge of town, across cattail creeks and jackrabbit fields. Once we reached my place, Kai met my mother and father and told them what had been happening to him. Details of which I had not heard myself, highlights of how he got his scars and bruises. I assumed they were from living life as an active boy; but they weren't. They were from constant abuse, worse than I thought. So much worse.

His voice shook at times when he spoke, maybe it was more of a shiver really, but he didn’t cry. He asked us for help, the best way he could, straightforward and honestly. He was asking for sanctuary. A safe place to stay away from the trauma and the pain his father was inflicting upon him and his mother seemed unable to stop. He was seeking a place to hide and heal. Luckily for me, and probably because of me, that place was my home.

We sat around the mother's radio on my front porch and listened to Kai talk, we made some plans, we made a few promises. Ultimately, my parents both agreed Kai could stay for at least the weekend, maybe longer, it depended on what his mother agreed to. We'd find out tomorrow. Tonight he'd sleep over, in my bed, a scenario I had imagined for a couple months now, but never thought would happen.

Somehow, through all the turmoil and toil, we convinced my dad to drive us to our first school dance that night. Kai said he didn't want to miss it for the world. He wanted to "show off his moves!" My father had laughed at that, grabbed his truck keys, and drove us off into the night without a question. Said he'd pick us up on the way back too, all we had to do was call, call twice if it's after midnight, he'd probably be asleep and might not get to the phone in time.

We showed up together to the school dance, Kai and I, but we danced apart. We both knew our slow dance in his bedroom was the only one we would get together for quite some time. It had caused enough trouble already, we didn't need anyone else attacking us tonight. We never lost sight of each other that night during the school dance. We both knew where the other one was at all times--tracking each other’s movements under the disco balls, catching each other’s motion under the spinning rainbow lights. We watched one another through quick glances that rode upon hip-hop beats and we snuck sly smiles at each other that swirled upon slow R&B jams; two bruised boys ripening in front of each other the best way we knew how.

Sometime that night during the dance, on the mountainside overlooking the valley above our school, an extreme act of violence occurred that would make the punches I saw in Kai's bedroom dim into the background of our everyday lives and become secondary. Maybe it was still Friday, maybe the clock had crept past midnight and made it to Saturday already--but sometime while we were wrapped in slow songs and the static electricity of girls flirting with us at our first dance, Brendan Bragg, the star quarterback of Rancho Cotate High School, Number 9, the prince of the Redwood Empire, was violently murdered upon Gravity Hill.

Brendan Bragg was an All-American California boy. Brown hair, tan skin, blue eyes, dark eyebrows. Every male from Petaluma to Healdsburg, all the way up to Ukiah, had his name falling off their lips in corner stores and car washes, locker rooms and grocery lines. Coaches and dads talked about him like he was a secret weapon forged from the local farm dust and molded with weight room sweat they each had collected themselves.

Brendan was the kind of boy who made the town believe in itself. When he threw perfect spirals for touchdowns on October nights people pounded their chest. When he took off his helmet and smiled at the crowd, people who didn't know each other gave high fives to one another, and genuinely smiled and laughed with each other. When Brendan Bragg played football he gave everyone a reason to be proud of where they lived.

Brendan wasn’t fully grown yet, he stood just over six feet tall, weighed just under 200 pounds, but you could tell his frame was still stretching out, and his muscles were still pondering how to handle the man he was destined to become. All the other kids said he had Man Strength already, that rare kind of dense power that made him feel older than he was when he brushed against you or grasped your hands in a handshake. He could run faster, hit harder, throw further than anyone north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

And he knew it.

Brendan Bragg was having a record-breaking season his senior year. He had been an absolute terror. A eighteen-year-old phenomenon, sparkling in the spotlight. That night, under a fog that spilled across the football field like the dense dairy cream that spilled from the cows grazing across the Sonoma valley fields, he threw five touchdowns. Ran another one in himself, knocking the star linebacker out of the game along the way to the end zone. The Ranch, as the high school was known, blew out Cardinal Newman by over fifty points. That hadn’t happened often. Not to the Catholic boys and all the Gentile boys they snatched up from across the entire area to play for their sports program. Not to the golden-helmeted Holy Roman soldiers on the other sideline. No matter what they did, they couldn't stop Brendan Bragg.

Tempers had run hot. Fights had broken out. A few cheap shots from the Catholic boys' side riled up the farm boys from The Ranch and both sides began playing dirty. A few parents were ejected. The air was tense as red and blue lights flickered in the distance, police lights without the sirens to remind everyone to keep the peace as the game ended. Homecoming was over.

Time to go home.

The stands erupted louder than ever that night when we won Homecoming in a blowout. Dads screamed. Moms sobbed. Cheerleaders waved pom-poms frantically and demanded for everyone to "Be Aggressive! Be... be... Aggressive!" throughout the game. The cheers from the high school football crowd could be heard in the distance as Kai and I arrived at our dance a few blocks away. The screams and yells adding a background track to our late arrival, fans cheering us onward as we headed inside.

Once the football game ended, the crowd of parents and students surged toward the parking lot like the tide going out in Bodega Bay, slow but steady. Floodlights from above cut through the thickening fog, blinding white stadium beams filled with mosquitoes and mayflies crashing down from above as the car headlights crisscrossed in the distance and bass lines boomed from the stereo systems of everyone heading home. The other football players meandered back to the locker room in groups, shoulder pads off, abs showing through like slabs, their tee shirts cut short into crop tops, steam rising from their bodies into the night.

But Brendan Bragg stayed on the field that night, glowing in that strange glow that only football gods know. That Friday night filter that looks like flashbulbs that never stop flashing was surrounded him. Lightning lighting... but not the lightning light from the first strike, no... this was the fuzzy crispness of a lightning stroke a few moments afterward. That was the glow Brendan Bragg walked in. He smiled for pictures, hugged his linemen, tossed his helmet to a ball boy and gave a two-minute interview to the KSRO radio guy. And then he leaned in close to Laura DeAngelo, who stood just past the end zone, wrapped in her cotton candy aroma, stuffed into her white cheerleading outfit, a tiny gold cross in her left ear catching the light with a sparkle.

“Wanna go to Gravity Hill?” he whispered, mouth close enough to taste her, the scent of burnt sugar, something sweet, something simmering, rising from her. His smirk curved like a crescent moon as he caught her blue eyes glistening and slightly widening when she heard his question. He already knew her answer.

“Just us?” she replied, a half-whisper, half-dare, lips parted. Her breath smelled like spun sugar that had caramelized around the edges, like creme brûlée... She had been waiting all night for his eyes to find hers. To melt her.

Brendan licked his lips. His stomach fluttered. His cleats dug into the turf the way he imagined he would be digging his fingers into her thighs. He looked over his shoulder--his parents walking toward the parking lot, his dad laughing, waving, soaking in the glory.

“Yeah,” he said, fingers brushing hers. “Wait by my car. I’ll be out quick.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

It was on.

He jogged off toward the far edge of the field--grass-stained thighs flexing under tight pants, glutes rippling, hamstrings snapping with each step. He ran like a young stallion freed from the pen, unbroken, unaware of what was ahead of him. Not knowing this was his last few hours alive.

Laura Deangelo watched him vanish into the shadows beyond the sideline. She could feel her heart in her throat. Her pulse in her ears. She was tingling inside as she turned to head toward his Trans Am.

Tonight would be the night.

She was ready.

So ready, ready to lie across the cracked leather seats of Brendan Bragg’s black and gold 1983 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and tilt her head back to see the stars twinkle through the T-Tops. She was ready to be touched beneath the cold glass under the autumn moonlight, their hot breath mixing and fogging up the view, blocking out the stars. She was ready to have her body wrapped tightly under his as the radio glowed green upon his roiling muscles, smelling his perspiration mixing with hers. She was ready to feel herself be claimed, maybe not loved, but taken--and held like she was meant to be loved.

She wanted his hands to grasp ahold of her, his heat to wrap around hers, his weight to press down upon her softness. She wanted his thickness and the smell that came with it as it split her open and throbbed. She wanted the smell of his victories, the scent of his toiling, his future, pressed into her skin. She wanted to become his favorite backseat memory. That night, on Gravity Hill, Laura DeAngelo wanted to make Brendan Bragg burst inside of her.

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